Really cool article on how we think about extinction.

Ironically, much conservationist thinking involves an implicitly mythological conception of species diversity that agrees in its essentials with the creation account offered in Genesis. In the scriptural tradition, God looked upon his work and deemed it good, and what ensued was a stable order of fixed, discrete, and well-bounded kinds, with no relations of descent among them. The best metaphor for conceptualizing biodiversity in this view is Noah’s ark, where each kind can be neatly separated from the others in its own compartment. The conservationist view generally leaves the creator out of the picture, yet the creatures are still deemed good, intrinsically good, and if they do not remain fixed and unchanging, then we may conclude that something is out of order—or “unnatural,” to use Kolbert’s term.

Darwinism, properly understood, is the opposite of this mythological outlook. It tells us that no particular arrangement of biodiversity is good in itself, and that no species has any absolute reason to exist. For a given species to be “better” than another is simply for it to have an adaptation that enhances its likelihood of surviving to reproductive age. Are humans better than fish? It is impossible to answer, without specifying whether the contest is to take place on land or under water. Should there be air-breathing animals at all? That depends on whether the planet has a breathable atmosphere. If not, it would be better to live in the ocean and to breathe through one’s gills. And so on.

The point here is not to relativize the current ecological crisis, or to call for an approach to mass extinction that simply says, que será, será. Rather, it is to suggest that conservationism might do well to acknowledge the endurance and the strength of the mythopoetical conception of nature, the one that sees our fellow creatures not only as more or less well adapted, but also as good, truly good. This would not require any overt theology, as it is already implicit in conservationist thinking, and many if not most conservationists have no patience for cosmological arguments for the existence of God. But it would require an abandonment of our piecemeal wisdom about animals and our relations with them, a wisdom thrown together out of sloppy scientism, utilitarian half-­measures, and basic ontological mistakes.

We try to convince ourselves that our commitments to animals flow from their neurophysiology alone, from a recognition of their capacities to experience pain, to have episodic memories, or to plan for the future. We blame ourselves for inconsistency when the well-being of an animal with lesser capacities concerns us more than that of one with higher capacities—a pet cat, for example, as opposed to a pig bred for food. In thinking this way, we fail to note that the boundaries of moral community have never in human history been drawn along species lines alone, nor have they been drawn in view of a theory of the complexity of other beings. Rather, moral commitments emerge out of the way creatures, human and nonhuman, enter into meaningful exchange with one another.