It would be difficult to imagine that human kind had entirely supplanted a natural law of species extinction with a social one, at the best social laws modify natural laws. They do not replace them. But the point here is that you assume what you ought to explain, that bio-diversity is threatened by extinction, when plainly, extinction is how bio-diversity comes about.
>The
>rainforests, which contain probably the most biodiversity per square meter
>on the planet, are being trashed because of market forces run amok, which
>force countries like Brazil into slash-and-burn extractivism to make the
>payments on their unpayable foreign debt.
Well, that's one way of looking at it. I'm not sure that repaying foreign debt is foremost in the minds of those indigenous rain forest people when they engage in slash-and-burn agriculture, which they have done since time-immemorial. Slash-and-burn is a very primitive form of land clearance (quite effective in saving labour, but less so in economy of acreage), that most developed capitalist agriculture eschews.
>Preserving species isn't an
>absolute, of course; noone would want to preserve the smallpox virus, a
>horrid life-form. But we're talking about the unnecessary destruction of
>countless natural histories, of life-forms we don't know very much about,
>who haven't done us any harm, and are the contingent, irreplaceable
>product of millions of years of evolution. By preserving them, we're doing
>more than just preserving ourselves; we're also allowing those life-forms
>to have a future, to evolve into other, perhaps more interesting species.
Perhaps smallpox, too, was on the way to being a 'more interesting species'. But this is just sentimentalism. Why not deplore the waste of species under natural selection? You miss out of account the excellent species that man has brought into being, like domesticated animals, high grain yields etc.
-- James Heartfield