[mdavidn]

> I don’t understand why people are obsessed with extinction as some great evil

It's because we care about our children and their children. Each extinction eliminates a species that our ancestors lived among or depended upon. Eventually, an extinction may fundamentally break a food chain that keeps our descendants alive.

[ramraj07]

Each extinction eliminates a species yes, but long term it opens up a niche for a new species to evolve into. As a biologist I don’t see any fundamental problem with this ebb and flow. We as a species haven’t exactly put down our foot on actual individual suffering so it just seems hypocritical to ascertain extra value to extinction, which outside of some vague concepts we have made up have no real ecological relevance anyway.