This essay manages to ignore a crucial point that torpedoes the entire premise. Since deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, the idea that preservation of tropical rainforests is somehow in opposition to fighting climate change is pretty silly. I look forward to the "never mind" from Slate.

It seems to me that the common thread -- human behavior -- is the real point. And it's the only thing we can individually or collectively change. It's a "both/and" rather than an "either/or" situation. The article's value is in challenging the changing fashions in environmentalism, which falls prey to all the weaknesses other movements experience. We get bored, we get frustrated, discouraged; we learn a new concept; new information is revealed or confirmed, or debunked.

If we can manage to keep hold of the thread of habitat destruction, weave it into the climate change threads, combine it with local foods awareness, etc., we can perhaps weave a whole cloth of effective change. Does anyone argue anymore that it's not worth the effort?

The premise of the article is that the focus on climate change has resulted in a loss of interest in habitat loss. As someone who was in grad school during the 1990s, I've shared that concern for years. The claims of future loss of species due to climate change is speculative. The losses going on right now are demonstrable fact. The topic of habitat loss has disappeared from the popular imagine, replaced with apocalyptic visions of climate change. While we worry about 100 years from now, rain forest is being cut down and plowed over. And no one cares any more.

As a biologist myself and being fascinated with the natural world for all my life I tend to arive at a the same question with regard to environmentalism and conservation: What is our real goal? When I worked briefly in a conservation lab for California Fish and Game, the goal always seemed to be to preserve diversity. It sounds nice, and I personally don't want to see organisms become extinct but is "maintaining" diversity really a good thing? Is extinction really a bad thing? There have been many mass extinctions throughout natural history and they have always opened niches for new species. For example we may not be here as a species had it not been for the extinction that ended the era of the dinosaurs and allowed mammals to gain a foothold and then take off. Diversity was very low following this extinction (For example, the diversity in mammals was very low 65 million years ago and rapidly climbed following the extinction) and but diversity soon grew out of the surviving species. It is hard for me not to look at human activity and population growth as any different than a comet hitting the earth or something similar. We are also a part of nature on earth (more so than a comet, actually) and our presence here has exerted huge selective pressure, some species like many frogs in the Amazon are more sensitive to this pressure an die out while others thrive like crows, pigeons, rats etc. Some species like amphipods and other marine invertebrates take advantage of our sea traffic and hitch rides to environments that they can more easily exploit. My point here is that what is bad for some species may be great for another species that may be more fit in terms of surviving and thriving in environments impacted by human activity.

So why is it necessarily good to prevent these extinctions? I know why it is good in a sort of anthrocentric way, that is that diversity is more aesthetically pleasing but in terms of what is best for nature, I think we are fooling ourselves if we think we know what is best. I don't mean to offend any of you, (this wasn't meant to be offensive or to criticize conservationists or environmentalists) I just wanted to offer food for thought.

The idea that humans are a part of the biosphere and that all creatures change the environment thru their existance and thus must contribute to some species benefit and others demise is part of the real science of ecology. Currently, that level of discussion is not welcome because the environment has been made a political strawman for creating a world socialist government. The idea of evolution is the idea of species replacement. if we really wanted to help the environment, we would build sewage treatment plants- but that won't rally people to world goverment like a cry that mankind is dooming the planet with Global Warming. The irony is mankind may be dooming itself- with global sewage. But The UN and Gore didn't find that played with focus groups, so they went with the Warming as their strawman.

Climatology has been around longer than the UN or Gore.

As an ecologist, I wonder where the premise of this whole article came from. To be certain, global climate change is what gets big attention in the news, but in the circles I move in, and the journal articles available, it is *certainly* true that habitat loss continues to get big attention. There was indeed a recent notable debate about the ability of secondary forests/afforestation in preserving biodiversity vs. trying to save primary forests. (The upside was that estimations of the amount and ability of afforestation to support biodiversity was, in my opinion and many others, grossly exaggerated.) I've taught several biology courses, for both science and non-science majors, and the focus of the lectures continues to be on habitat loss in regards to species loss, though global climate change is indeed mentioned both as its own problem and as a contributing factor (the effects on the ocean, as someone else in this thread pointed out, will likely have hugely negative effects on biodiversity as well, independent entirely of Dead Zones).

As far as the purpose of preventing extinctions, there are several clear rationale that have nothing to do with aesthetics. One is the growing area of ecosystem services, an area of research & advocacy I have certain reservations about, but the core of which is absolutely correct -- there is some level of biodiversity we need to maintain our own way of life, or anything near it in terms of quality, and as this level is not precisely known and may not be precisely knowable for all systems, the vastly better part of valor is to slow extinctions down to a reasonable (i.e. the "background" extinction) rate. It is an open question as to how much extinction we can tolerate while maintaining human quality of life, but it certainly shouldn't be answered through the current method of "let what dies die and God will sort them out." If we want to experiment with biodiversity loss & species turnover, all well & good -- let's do so on a controlled, limited scale. Saying there's not any necessary ulterior motive to prevent extinctions is silly and completely ungrounded in current biological/ecological literature. One famous paper, again with its own flaws but nevertheless valuable, estimated the goods & services we got from ecosystems in 1997 to be ~3X the entire size of the global human economy (I don't recall exact numbers, let's say the human economy in '97 was US$ 5 trillion, and ecosystem services were then ~US$15 trillion).

A second reason not to be blasé about the rapid rate of extinctions, which is indeed like the comet that hit the earth during the Cretaceous in terms of its scale, is that ecosystem recovery & re-diversification occurred not least in part because the comet stopped hitting. It was a point event, with lasting effects, but it was nevertheless one event (and the chain reactions from it). Human resource use is only growing and expected to continue to grow -- along with deforestation and other habitat destruction, and with global warming. The idea that diversity is going to resprout in an ecosystem/biosphere under continuous assault is ludicrous -- without resources not devoted excessively in favor of human use, re-diversification of a significant scale is, at the least, unproven, and at worst, unlikely. Not to mention the fact that re-diversification after major extinction events takes millions upon millions of years -- the question is, do we want to alter the biodiversity of the earth on a multi-million year scale, without concrete knowledge of how that will affect our own resource needs and quality of life? And considering human predictive abilities certainly don't extend to the multi-million year scale very well, such concrete knowledge is nearly impossible to obtain.

To whit, although the *popular discourse* would do well to focus on habitat loss along with global climate change, the academic literature about the former is hardly suffering (though it certainly has not expanded the way global climate change literature has, but I don't think we're suffering from a dearth of it either). Conservation organizations around the world are still very focused on habitat saving (although many talk about the Amazon in terms of "carbon sinks", I've heard at least as many ecologists continue to talk about habitat loss, if not more). And the value of biodiversity and the importance of slowing extinctions has been established far beyond aesthetics. If the complaint is that the popular conversation doesn't reflect these academic realities, then I can agree, but that's neither what the other posters nor the author said, and indeed, getting the media to pay proper attention to any issue is difficult, dicey, and has little to do with science in the first place. I for one am glad the media has caught on to climate change -- and its hardly as if it has replaced any kind of excellent and comprehensive environmental coverage of yesteryear. As someone else said, it's both/and. Stirring up dust by saying that people have irresponsibly abanonded one focus for another may make good copy, but it doesn't really reflect what's going on, imho.