pterantula:
Not always: what about the efforts to protect the habitats and populations of cougars, venemous snakes, the New Zealand Katipo spider, etc? Protecting these animals presents a real danger to human life & habitat, and slowing development into these habitats means severe economic consequences for humans as a result. Are taipans and scorpions really all that cuddly?
Yes and no - you have to be more specific; "appealing" also means "philosophically appealing", i.e., if we KNOW we're killing indiscriminately, and that this indiscriminate killing inevitably leads to MASSIVE species deaths across the board, then yes - that does in fact "ruin the Earth"... I can think of no other animal with the power to DECIDE to simply kill everything in sight, on such a massive scale. This goes beyond humans and that which with we're comfortable.
No, I say **** the humans; no other animal indiscriminately kills anything it can - especially as a collateral consequence, as we humans seem to love to do - without making use of the kill in some way. We kill just to kill. Let nature take some back. (Humans breed far too much, too often. I mean it. Ours is not a competition with the environment for survival anymore, and further viral infestations of humans brings the quality of ALL life, everywhere, down.)
Yikes!
As far as breeding, humans produce one to two offspring at a time, with a generational time of 20 years. Compare that to the fly, which may produce millions of offspring with a dozen generations per year. In terms of raw numbers and weight, humans, in fact vertebrates in general, are a rather insignificant part of the ecosystem. No animal "breeds too much".
As far as indiscriminant killing, the bubonic plague took out over half of the population in Europe and Asia, and HIV and malaria kill millions of humans each year. HIV doesn't have to kill us to survive, it just does. Chimpanzees kill and eat their young, while pack animals often fight to the point of lethality just to establish a mating order. A black widow and a praying mantis female eat the male after copulation. Is this all 'necessary"? Perhaps. Nature gets a pass, because nothing in Nature is evil --- evil seems to be the domain of humans alone for some reason. Nothing we do, right or wrong, can be natural I suppose.
I'm amazed when people decry humanity, yet judge everything in human terms. Concepts such as "caring" or 'ruining" are human concepts. As are "beauty", "natural", "appealing". Suppose, for example, we did wipe out everything on earth, including ourselves. So what? The only entities that "care" about anything are humans. If there are no humans around to mourn the loss of the earth, would it matter?
Of course, you could go Buddhist on me and say the world has some sort of consciousness that does not want to cease to exist, independent of human cognition. In which case, the ecosystem has been responsible for some atrocities of its own, irrespective of us. If we endow the ecosystem with a conscious, caring property, then perhaps it should share in the evil as well. If the ecosystem has no consciousness, wrecking it has no consequences for anything except us. And since you say nuts to us, then you must say nuts to the natural world as well.
As for saving all the non-cuddly creatures, I again reiterate: should we save HIV, or smallpox, or rabies? Should every insect species (and there are hundreds of thousands) be inventoried and protected? How about every plant, every fungus, every bacterial species? How much of human wealth and effort should be invested in this foolhardy Noah's Ark project?
Or could it be that, if we look deeper into many of these efforts to save the bumfoozle ant or the georgejetson beetle, we might, just might, find some political or economic squabble over the supposed habitat, a squabble that has nothing to do with enviromentalism.