Animals do not exist for our benefit. They exist because they evolved to do a certain job within nature. But if a species does not benefit people directly, they often don’t see a reason to conserve it.
We at WWF are looking at it from an ecological point of view: All species are doing a job, even if we don’t know what that job is.
Removing a species from the ecosystem is like removing a rivet from an aeroplane without knowing its function. Nobody would want to fly in that aeroplane – but that is what we are doing to our environment. We are causing species to go extinct left right and centre without knowing what they do.
As far as we know, this is the only planet we can live on. We are stuck here and we are mucking about with our life support system. That doesn’t strike me as sensible.
As many life forms are harmful to human well-being, it is downright silly to say we should preserve the world’s biodiversity in toto.
We want to exterminate Aids viruses, bacteria that cause tuberculosis, malaria plasmodia that kill millions of children annually, and countless other harmful pathogens. So it is, too, with black rats and locusts.
Our welfare relates directly to eliminating harmful forms of life and we are unavoidably committed to modifying our environments to suit our particular needs.
Common sense calls for accepting that in many cases, this means exterminating some of its elements.
The challenge conservationists face is to keep them as few as possible, and avoiding dogmatic and palpably insupportable claims that all must be preserved.