Question: Who said, “If we are saying that the loss of species in and of itself is inherently bad – I don’t think we know enough about how the world works to say that”?

Answer: Craig Manson, Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks in the U.S. Department of the Interior. [FYI: here’s Manson’s tortured defense of his inability to think]

Extinction “in and of itself”? I just finished reading David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions (a truly magnificent book by the way), in which he looks quite intently at the causes and consequences of extinction. A prediction therein from Daniel Simberloff - “the current cataclysm of extinctions is indeed likely to stand among the worst half-dozen such events in the history of life on earth”. However, as Quammen points out:

There’s a voice that says so what?

It’s not my voice, it’s probably not yours, but it makes itself heard in the arenas of public opinion, querulous and smug and fortified by just a little knowledge, which as always is a dangerous thing. So what if a bunch of species go extinct? it says. Extinction is a natural process. Darwin himself said so, didn’t he? Extinction is the complement of evolution, making room for new species to evolve. There have always been extinctions. So why worry about these extinctions currently being caused by humanity? And there has always been a pilot light burning in your furnace. So why worry when your house is on fire.

Charles Craig Manson is looking out for our native flora and fauna in the Bush tradition, by telling them “go fuck yourself”.

For a thorough exegesis of pure evil, check out Carl Pope and Paul Rauber’s Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress. I’d quote some choice bits if it wasn’t all so terribly, terribly ugly.

Interested in ignoring another recommendation? Check out Tim Flannery’s The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples.