He comes close to saying it, but something stops him. People too, and the peoples they are a part of, are also a part of nature in the positive sense of things. Are they not also worth preserving, or is it only the proles and animals that are free with those who promote the ideology of Multi-Culturalism?

Natural aesthetes

Forget about usefulness, beauty alone is reason enough to justify conservation

George Monbiot

Tuesday January 13, 2004

The Guardian

Last week, the journal Nature published a report suggesting that, by 2050, around a quarter of the world’s animal and plant species could die out as a result of global warming. To these we must add the millions threatened by farming, logging, hunting, fishing and introduced species. The future is beginning to look a little lonely.

Does it matter? To most of those who govern us, plainly not. To most of the rest of us, the answer seems to be yes, but we are not quite sure why. We have little difficulty in recognising the importance of other environmental issues. Climate change causes droughts and floods, ozone depletion gives us skin cancer, diesel pollution damages our lungs. But, while most people feel that purging the world of its diversity of animals and plants is somehow wrong, the feeling precedes a rational explanation. For the past 30 years, the conservation movement has been trying to provide one. Its efforts have, for the most part, failed…

Biodiversity, in other words, matters because it matters. If we are to protect wildlife, we must do it for ourselves. We need not pretend that anything else is bidding us to do so. We need not pretend that anyone depends upon the king protea or the golden toad or the silky sifaka for their survival. But we can say that, as far as we are concerned, the world would be a poorer place without them.