"It’s a painful, exhausting thing to try to argue logically for the preservation of all the world’s species—like trying to debate spirituality with your accountant. Causing extinctions, especially at such a staggering rate, feels dangerous and wrong, but proving scientifically that it’s wrong is ultimately very much like proving the existence of God. Commonly environmentalists fall back upon the “pharmacopeia” argument, and it’s true enough—any one of these small fallen soldiers might have held some magic bullet to save humanity, like the antirejection drug cyclosporine, derived from a peat-bog fungus, that has made organ transplants a matter of course, or the powerful new anticancer agents extracted from a yew tree. But this seems a pale, selfish reason to care about preserving biodiversity, and near sacrilege in the face of a power so howling and brilliant as life on earth. To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them. "

    -Passage from Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson, Infernal Paradise essay.