Either way, Alan and all. I don't call your view blind or short sighted, but I'll go back to the car analogy. In the long run, there will always be cars (I'm being facetious here, but we're in metaphor land, where ecosystems look a lot like cars). Therefore, the long-termer doesn't worry so much about his car. That's fine. Someone who lives day to day, and has to have a car to get to work, that person worries about their car.
I'm like a mechanic. I'll say "change the oil, get a tune-up, drive carefully, and your car will last longer." And if the car breaks down, I won't focus on fixing or replacing the car (too expensive!), but rather I'll focus on finding the part that's broken and replacing that. That's the cheap way of getting the car working again, and that's what we want.
Inevitably, the long-termers call me shortsighted, because I happen to care about keeping cars working, and that means knowing about the parts and how they interact. That's fine. They don't have to worry about the details, since there will always be cars of some sort.
I would point out that the people for whom cars will always be around are those who take the worst care of them. Wealth has its privileges. People whose livelihood depends on their cars usually learn the hard way that they have to take care of their cars, and so they do so.
This also applies to ecosystems. One reason traditional peoples often (not always!) had sustainable livelihoods was that their choices were stark: be sustainable or starve (and usually, they got to watch their kids starve before they died). Personally, I keep hoping we'll learn to be sustainable before we start starving, but I don't hold out much hope on the matter. Still, ehough people will learn to be sustainable that I'm quite sure our species will survive. Our culture probably won't, but hey, there will always be cultures, right?
Getting back to ecosystems...
Anyway, elephants do have a massive effect on the forests and savannas they live in, and if they disappear, habitat for a number of other species will also disappear. That's why they are valuable. Alan's patagonian cockroach (thanks for the lovely image!) probably has much less impact on other species, and thus it is metaphorically more like a cupholder in the car of life.
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