A survey of about 600 scientists published this week found that a majority think it's time to consider conservation triage - focusing resources on animals that can realistically be saved, and giving up on the rest.

Those that fall into the too-expensive-to-save category, it has been suggested, might include the panda and the tiger.

So, should we give up on one endangered species to save another? Here, two experts argue for and against triage.

FOR - Paul Goldstein, wildlife guide
I can't say which species we need to lose to save another. But if the only hope of survival for an animal - like the panda - is to be maintained in a holding facility or be born in a zoo, then I can understand the point of giving up on saving that species.

They cost too much to keep up and have little chance of ever living a natural life.

It's no good having a love affair with wildlife - that will not save endangered species. Anthropomorphic feelings, although understandable, don't always help. Animals don't have our emotions.

Many people would not back saving baby seals if they didn't look the way they did. People would not be as up in arms about that butchery if they looked ugly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15691450

This has been the fight I had with some scientists in the late 1970s in Australia, about their abandonment of some species — mostly "sub-species" — which was outrageous. Much of this decided extinction was allowed to happen due to human commercial ventures in sensitive habitats and the "lack of funds" to protect these species...

One has to strongly suspect that what is happening to the Tasmanian Devil is due to human activities that have changed environmental factors around and in the primary habitats of the Devil... In China, the destruction of the Bamboo forests and the encroachment of human habitations has sent the survival ability of the Panda species below the necessary minimum threshold...

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111112135744718390.html

Freedom in our times has been sold as "free market democracy". "Free markets" mean freedom for corporations to exploit whom and what they want, where they want, how they want. It means the end of freedom for people and nature everywhere. "Free market democracy" is in fact an oxymoron which has deluded us into believing that deregulation of corporations means freedom for us.

Just as the illusion of growth and the fiction of finance has made the economy volatile and unpredictable, the fiction of the corporation as a legal person has replaced citizens and made society unstable and non-sustainable. Humans as earth citizens, with duties and rights, have been replaced by corporations, with no duties to either the earth or society, only limitless rights to exploit both the earth and people. Corporations have been assigned legal personhood, and corporate rights, premised on maximisation of profits, are now extinguishing the rights of the earth, and the rights of people to the earth's gifts and resources.

The new movements understand this. And that is why they are indignant and are occupying the political and economic spaces to create a living democracy with people and the earth at the centre instead of corporations and greed.

Dr Vandana Shiva is a physicist, ecofeminist, philosopher, activist, and author of more than 20 books and 500 papers. She is the founder of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, and has campaigned for biodiversity, conservation and farmers' rights - winning the Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) in 1993.

Dr Nancy Knowlton is a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Her research has focused on the impact of climate change on coral reefs around the world, specifically how increasing warming and acidification from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have affected oceans.

While she is unable to say if oceans have crossed a tipping point, Dr Knowlton offered this discouraging assessment, "We know it's bad and we know it's getting worse, and if we care about having coral reefs, there's no question we have to do something about CO2 emissions or we won't have coral reefs, as we do now, sometime between 2050-2100."

Since at least one quarter of all species of life in the oceans are associated with coral reefs, losing them could prove catastrophic.

"Coral reefs are like giant apartment complexes for all these species, and there is intimacy," Dr Knowlton explained. "If that starts breaking down, these organisms, which include millions of species around the world, lose their homes. Even if they aren't eating coral, they depend on it."

CO2 is the main greenhouse gas resulting from human activities in terms of its warming potential and longevity in the atmosphere, and scientists continually monitor its concentration.

In March 1958, when high-precision monitoring began, atmospheric CO2 was 315.71 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is approaching 390 ppm.

350 ppm is the level many scientists, climate experts, and progressive national governments say is the safe upper limit for CO2 in the atmosphere.

"You see evidence of the impact of climate change on the oceans everywhere now," Dr Nichols said. "The collapsing fisheries, the changes in the Arctic and the hardship communities that live there are having to face, the frequency and intensity of storms, everything we imagined 30 to 40 years ago when the environmental movement was born, we're dealing with those now … the toxins in our bodies, food web, and in the marine mammals, it's all there."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/11/2011111653856937268.html