MemeMachineGo!

Good Christian Science Monitor article on Edward O. Wilson, who literally wrote the book on biodiversity.

Preserving species and ecosystems] makes economic sense. Wilson points to a group of biologists and economists who in 1997 estimated that the services the natural world provides — things like clean air, clean water, and arable soil — amounted to about $33 trillion a year.

[...] Saving species and ecosystems is a moral issue. Not to do so, in his opinion, would be a supreme ethical failure in terms of our debt to the world, to future generations, to the very sanctity of creation.

[...] People are in denial... When someone comes along and says — whether it's Rush Limbaugh, or [author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist"] Bjorn Lomborg, or a petroleum industry spokesman — and says, 'Well, you know, we just don't believe these figures ...," that's a denial.

The other denial is to say, 'Wait, aren't human beings just part of nature? Aren't they just another extinction element?... The answer is really very simple: Before humanity came along, species were dying at a rate of about 1 per million, per year, and they were being born 1 per million per year. So, through time immemorial, things have been pretty much in balance.

Now we're speeding up the death rate of the species 1,000 times and we're lowering the birthrate. The cradles are being destroyed.

When you say humanity is a part of nature, so we're just an extinction agent... it's like saying the giant meteorite is part of nature. We don't want to be a force of mass destruction.

Regarding the economic point, see also Ecological Economics on how economists have to learn to subtract.

The "science" of economics has us under its spell. We sway to its mystical incantations: Gross National Product, interest rates, the monetary supply. We revel in its traditions, in its formalism, in its abstract and irrelevant models of the world; where air and water are free and forests grow forever; where the worth of vanishing resources are disregarded because they cannot easily be quantified; where the wealth of a nation goes up with every automobile accident, with every oil spill, with every newly diagnosed cancer patient.

And Economics for 4-year-olds:

My four-year-old daughter spent the afternoon at a local science museum the other day, exploring an exhibit on biodiversity. She returned home full of determination, found a pencil and paper, and composed a letter. Now she distributes copies to friends and strangers alike. The letter begins:

From Jenna to the world: Please stop making all this pollution. It's making all the animals sick and die. The fish can't live if the coral can't live and the polar bears can't live if the fish can't live.

Approaching the problems of polar bears and coral reefs by writing a letter to the world makes sense if you think like a four-year-old. Surely, people would not knowingly live in ways that threaten polar bears or coral reefs. If people understood the consequences of their behavior, the world would change.

My grown-up mind wishes my daughter's theory worked.

(The last link via Eclectica, my new favorite blog of this synaptic decay time constant)