A funny thought, for conservationists mainly.

I am a deep conservationist whose views were hurt recently. The issue is that the environment is necessary for us. We need it to live in it, it cleanses our polluted atmosphere and so on. But, what is the purpose of conservation if we are the alleged superior species. All species have done some damage to the environment (of course, not to the same scale as Homo sapiens) and yet the ecosystem's functioning was efficient. Now consider a mass extinction is likely to take place in the near future, which means it is extremely futile to spend resources on species which are eventually going to die anyways. Moreover, there exist more species now than ever before in the geological past, most of which are redundant, fulfilling no ecological purpose like the panda bear!

Now, leaving these issues aside, consider the human species. The variation between humans is very little indeed, and speciation (the process by which we become better/evolve/you name it) is difficult in our species. I am not an evolutionist, but this means we are amongst the most useless of species!

I do not know if what I wrote makes sense, but you get the idea. If one were to select the most important species to conserve, we would not be in the "list." We are actually, in scientific terms, useless!!! This is when you start to wonder about the limits of science.

What are your thoughts on conservation, the value of humankind, etc. either from a scientific or economic or moral perspective?

Ismail, do not worry. This post was too long, and I apologise.

Now, you said conservation methods are flawed. Yes, we conserve selectively rather than holistically. Why do we save ecologically useless species like pandas and not the Ebola virus, for instance. Conservation is fully anthropocentric, cynical as it is.

"We do nothing but kill and pollute every habitat we encounter." Reminds me a lot about sensationalist media classifying humans as "the terminator species"!

Propaganda has played an important role in raising awareness in the issue.