Amid the sixth mass extinction, frogs, salamanders, and caecilians remain the most threatened group of vertebrates on Earth. Over 40 percent of amphibian species are now threatened, the latest global assessment has found.
“Amphibians are disappearing faster than we can study them, but the list of reasons to protect them is long, including their role in medicine, pest control, alerting us to environmental conditions, and making the planet more beautiful,” explains Re:wild ecologist Kelsey Neam.
Another reason to protect them…
The suffering climate change is causing is immense. To all life. Not just humans. And animals value living.
In other words, animal life is valuable in its own right. It doesn’t need to be equated to how their lives benefit us.
In fact, I think doing so can kill compassion. Animals are not a commodity here to benefit people and this sort of reduction of life to commodities for people to enjoy or exploit, stems largely from the same colonial capitalist mindset that is causing mass extinction in the first place.
I had an econ textbook and on the cover was an image of a cow and a brown bear on scales with the cow being lower. Cows can weigh more than brown bears but it was talking about economic value. It’s unfortunate but animals that are economically value are typically socially more valuable. I agree with you and I hope that can change in the near future.
username checks out
I was wondering if anyone might catch that
Apparently no one caught mine lmao
I hang my head and somberly walk into oblivion.
I feel like the reason these equations exist is because you’re trying to justify their existence to sociopaths. Most people don’t need any such convincing. Just hearing the idea of extinction is itself reason enough to worry.
Yeah, my hope is that the researcher feels like I (and apparently you) do. And that her intent was exactly as you said.
But I wanted to point it out. Because it’s easy to commidify life when we swim in an environment that reduces everything to a commodity. And I felt it fair to remind people of compassion.
Are… are you talking to humans?!
We actively refuse to care for one another. We actively fuck one another over if we can get away with it if it makes us another nickel at our own species’ expense. Go to one of your local tent cities where we literally throw people away to die of exposure for being bad capital batteries, while angrily condemning them for lowering local property values for selfishly continuing to breath and having to exist somewhere, and then tell me how interested humans are in actually demonstrating empathy or selflessness.
Pitching empathy to humans is like pitching salt to a snail. Sure, we love crowing rhetorically about how benevolent, compassionate, and intrinsically good we believe we are, but we have 10,000 years of recorded human history into literally today refuting that.
We’re a garbage species. The best thing for all other life on Earth long term is for us to do exactly what we’re doing, burning ourselves out like the diseased macro-cancer of a species we are, so Earth’s biome can once again heal from yet another mass extinction event.
Otherwise, the flora and fauna we haven’t yet driven to extinction to build strip malls or put in cages because we find them Instagrammably cute aren’t going to have existence worth existing for, only running from one destroyed ecosystem to the next until they run out of road, or being a tiny population of effectively extinct species we breed and put behind glass to gawk at.
Name checks out.