Arctic seals and coral reefs: every little bit helps

“Without extinction, there would likely be insufficient ecological ‘space’ available for new species.”

What? Is this person saying that extinction is a good thing? But what about the scarlet-throated goat-botherer? There’s only 23 of them left in the wild, and half of them live on the slopes of an active volcano. We must do something.

Not necessarily. I was idly leafing through the pages of a textbook on Historical Geology, and I chanced on this passage:

“The pattern we see...