"Saving Species"

I recently watched "Saving Species", part of the Planet Earth series. It's about conservation and the need for conservation, about species that are currently disappearing, and it totally made me cry. Mostly because everything they showed was just so beautiful (the whole series has amazing cinematography), but also because the destruction of nature is just so tragic, in the noblest sense of the word.

The episode also raised some really, really good points about conservation and nature. What gives us (rich white people) the right to tell them (extremely poor inhabitants of any third world country) what they should be doing with their wildlife and natural areas? Is conservation so important that we should give money to protect some butterfly, mouse, whatever instead of helping to feed hungry people worldwide? Is our concern for tigers more important than the people in India that tiger may kill? Why should we try to preserve every single species?

Why should we try to preserve every single species? I think this question is especially hard to answer with science; studies about the benefits of diversity have had mixed results. As a Christian, however, I find that the answer is relatively simple: God created this earth with species on it, and destroying any part of it means destroying God's creation. God created it that way for a reason, so we shouldn't mess with it.

What I took away from this episode, more than anything else, was that nature is awe-inspiringly, stunningly, fantastically beautiful, and we should be doing so much more to protect it.