The Brutish Quality of "Usefulness"

I was just listening to NPR as I ate lunch and they had on a guy who has written a book on migration, and how climate change and habitat loss have affected migratory animals. At one point, he describes how he went out at night with other volunteers to help some endangered salamanders cross a busy road. The interviewer asked a question that basically presumed that this was a crazy thing to do that reinforced stereotypes about environmentalists. The assumption is that "ordinary" people don't see any value in any creature if it isn't directly useful to us. I thought the writer's response was measured, considering I would have said, "In what reality is it morally or ethically responsible to condemn an entire species to extinction because we want to drive really fast along a road?" I mean, that's bat-shit crazy. It is *insane* to basically say, "If we're going to be at all inconvenienced, that species can go." Millions of birds killed by cell phone towers. Idiots in Florida complaining because national forest is being made off-limits to vehicles because endangered species are literally being run over into extinction. More idiots who want the manatees taken off the endangered species list basically just because we want to drive our boats a lot faster.To me, this is the insane, kooky talk. Not the guy who volunteers to help an endangered species. I'm not someone who goes out with PETA to demonstrate. I'm fairly moderate on a lot of topics, but this fixation on "usefulness" is deadly. It's deadly when applied to the ecosphere, it's deadly when applied to the arts. It's the kind of thing that at times makes me think we really are nothing more than suicidal apes.Jeff