Moral responsibility for every endangered species

"The stability of species. Take the number of species that we now consider extinct . For a long time scientists took the number of such species as that implied from an analysis of the extant fossils. But this number ignores the silent cemetery of species that came and left without leaving traces in the form of fossils; the fossils that we have managed to find correspond to a smaller proportion of all species that came and disappeared. This implies that our biodiversity was far greater than it seemed at first examination. A more worrisome consequence is that the rate of extinction of species maybe far greater than we think—close to 99.5 percent of species that transited through earth are now extinct , a number that scientists have kept raising through time. Life is a great deal more fragile than we have allowed for. But this does not mean we (humans) should feel guilty for extinctions around us; nor does it mean that we should act to stop them—species were coming and going before we started messing up the environment . There is no need to feel moral responsibility for every endangered species."