[specialist]

As an actual tree hugger, your #3 is my primary reason:

Protecting the environment protects the economy.

My secondary would be the precautionary principle:

Don't muck with things we don't understand.

Which will be mightily tested as we wrestle to mitigate climate change. Which feels like double-or-nothing to me.

[quotemstr]

I've never understood why the precautionary principle gets so much circulation. Followed to its logical conclusion, it prohibits experimentation and technological progress, since nothing can really be proven safe before it's tried.

The idea that we should not "muck with things we don't understand" is anti-technology, anti-progress, and anti-human.

[ethbro]

It might be apt to rephrase that into "Don't muck with things we can't fix."

When faced with ecosystem change, our ability to fix ills is extremely limited. Cane toads, kudzu, pythons in the Everglades, Asian carp, Emerald Ash Borers, and wolf depopulation have permanently changed habitats for the worse.

[ajmurmann]

It probably matters if we can unmuck something. Once whales are extinct we cannot bring them back.

Edit: typo

[specialist]

Maybe because it's ignored so routinely?

I'm fully aware of the tradeoffs in making hard choices, the sacrifices made for progress.

Any person who is unable (or unwilling) to do an honest accounting (pros vs cons, ROI) is unqualified to participate in any decision making process, especially on behalf of the rest of us.

Engineering and product design comes down to balancing needs, constraints. These shouldn't be foreign concepts for us geeks. And yet...