[nimrod0]

No one person is making the choice, that's the problem. The decision is distributed over many people and each step is only a tiny bit "rapacious" on average (meaning some steps may even be conserving), but over all, the collective decision is to kill 100k orangutans for tastier Nütella.

Secondly, it's not about difficulty in valuing something that's hard to see; our markets do plenty of that and are very good at it. It's that there is no value placed on orangutans. Even if you get to see one every day, that may affect your personal decisions but it has no effect collectively because orangutans, like anything else that exists freely in nature such as unclaimed resources, are priced close to $0 in the markets. Only if someone "owned" all the orangutans, for example, then you can talk about value.