I agree with you, and this is the plight of conservation, biology, ecology. Aldo Leopold wrote about his conservation/land ethic and prioritizing systems and organisms as having an inherent value and many, many folks in the natural sciences hold that view.

The challenge arises due to the fact that those folks in the natural sciences do not hold the purse strings for work and research. Many are pressured or outright required to justify their work through the lens of human services. In fact, many of the most well meaning corners of the field are kind of stuck in a “deal with the devil” so to speak.

I did habitat surveying and restoration plans in Eastern US coal country. You go out, do your surveys, sample water, map streams, collect invertebrates, gather fish tissue, do plant species analysis, etc. but who is that report for? A coal mine. Who is paying for that report? A coal mine. The mine might be required to do an impact study, or long term monitoring, but they are not required to go with you. So you can tell the how much lead and mercury is accumulating in fish tissue in their downstream. You can tell them that running a “restoration” mountain stream uphill is the most blitheringly stupid and lazy thing that you have ever seen. You can tell them doing a company “tree planting” in the bedrock gravel of a strip mine the day before a survey might get them a “pass” on a technicality, but that they are simply killing saplings every year. You can say all of that, but it doesn’t matter. If they get mad at you they will just go to Jimbo’s Ecosystem Surveyors LLC the brother-in-law of the mine manager who will magically find nothing wrong in his surveys.

So you get it in writing, hope the Army Corps of Engineers comes across it at some point, you shake hands with the site manager and say “Maaaaybe let’s see if you can get the excavator out here and run that stream down hill.” “It loooooks like the waste water pond is leaking into this stream, and I’m getting some pretty high heavy metals readings. Let’s see if you can figure out where that leak is”.

Ah, anyhow. It goes on and on. Every living thing categorized like another plastic trinket. All of the natural world viewed through the lens of profit and endless production. It’s either marketable or a hurdle to the market. The very natural systems that birthed humanity. It’s like we are selling our mother.

Prairie restoration for better burgers, reef recovery for tourism, alpine revegetations for ski resorts. A fracking operation donated all but the oil/mineral rights to wildlands restoration 10 years prior to their operation. And you know what sucks? You do it. You do it because the funding isn’t going to come from anywhere else. You do it because you can’t bear to see the endless devastation, and if it’s some hedge fund fucking greenwashing, at least a little slice of the earth is greener again.

You walk through that corner of the property where things are really taking off, and you listen to the meadowlarks, you get misty eyed at a whole sweep of milkweed covered in monarch larva, you stop in your tracks because a sandhill crane just swooped overhead. You savor every little growing, crawling, slithering, flying, singing thing that has returned. You smile and shake hands with suits while they get their self-congratulatory press coverage, then you curse them under your breath, go back out in the field and break your heart over all the little living things of the world.

Edit: I did not expect to get so much attention on my little vent session, but let me take the opportunity to say all is not lost. There are a lot of wonderful people out there doing their part, and the public awareness of the biological world is growing rapidly. Crisis is teaching us some hard lessons. There are a lot of things one can do to help, and let me tell you, taking some kind of action does wonders for your mind and body of you are suffering from “eco-dread”.

If you are in the US look up a local branch of the Nature Conservancy or just search “local restoration volunteer” operation. Go help plant willow stakes to stabilize a stream, help collect native seed, do bird banding, do a post-wildfire tree planting, do a clean up. There are tons of operations that need hands, and I promise you will meet such an excellent host of people. Despite my sulking, there’s enormous good to be done. That must be done. And I wouldn’t be at it myself if I thought the beautiful things of the world were hopelessly lost!