Ethics of preserving or extinguishing species, The

Open Access

Abstract

Presented at the Fall 2012 Center for Collaborative Conservation (https://collaborativeconservation.org/) Seminar and Discussion Series, "Power and Ethics in (Collaborative) Conservation", November 6, 2012, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado. This series focused on the work that the CCC's Collaborative Conservation Fellows have been doing across the Western U.S. and around the world. ; Philip Cafaro is professor of philosophy at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, and an affiliated faculty member with CSU's School of Global Environmental Sustainability. A former ranger with the U.S. National Park Service, his main research interests are in environmental ethics, consumption and population issues, and wild lands preservation. Cafaro is the author of Thoreau's Living Ethics and coeditor of the forthcoming anthology Life on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, both from University of Georgia Press. An active environmentalist for twenty-five years, he has lobbied Congress on behalf of the Wilderness Society and the Massachusetts and Colorado state legislatures on behalf of the Sierra Club. He is the incoming President of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. ; Includes recorded speech and PowerPoint presentation. ; Currently humanity is extinguishing Earth's species at a rate not seen in 65 million years, since a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs. Is that wrong? If so, how wrong? This talk asks how much people should be willing to give up in order to end the 6th mass extinction, and whether there is room on Earth for the flourishing of human beings and the rest of life.