Just a short reminder on how undeniably screwed we are. Extinction of species is sad, I know, but not all that unnatural. Human exploitation of the biosphere is accelerating this process greatly and naturally that produces some sectors of our population who want to save this or that...but mostly its the wrong thing they want to save.
As Lord May says in this article:
Most conservation effort goes into birds and mammals - creatures like the panda, a dim, dead-end animal that was probably on the way out anyway...Yet arguably it's the little things that run the world, things like soil microbes. They're the least-known species of all.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3667300.stm
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Microbes might be more important (microbes ARE in fact more important) than higher vertebrates, but the author of the article seems to fail to realize that general public will NOT donate money to save the habitat of Pseudomonas or Bacillus spp.
So what really? Well, nothing. We don't necessarily NEED that one quarter of mammalian species put on the red list. In fact, we don't really need 99% of the species. We'd be fine with cows, pigs and maybe dogs. But we could skip these guys too.
Such articles make all my future work seem pointless. Because extinctions are natural - we won't have, say, tigers soon, but new ones will evolve in a few hundred KY. No big deal really. Oh well. At least I'm gonna have fun for the next 60 years messing around with animals.
I should have studied law/business administration/biotechnology and earned heaps of money. I'm such a Don Kichote...
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