There’s a lot of desert. If a few lizards and cacti get their habitat fucked so that humans belch less CO2 in the air affecting every species on Earth it’s a tradeoff I support.
See? There it is! Try to bulldoze one meadow for a development and you're killed in the press. But the desert doesn't get that respect. People seem almost proud of their disrespect for desert ecosystems.
Well that’s just humancentrism. The meadow delivers value to me while the desert does not. And most environmental policy is about preserving the environment for humans — after all, if we stumble into population collapse the rest of the world’s species will celebrate.
I mean, it's not like the Saharan Desert does anything useful, like feed nutrients (via dust storms that blow across the Atlantic) to the Amazon Rainforest that is the lungs of the world.
Not to nitpick, just to inform, but oceanic plankton produces more oxygen than all tropical rainforests combined. In fact, Prochlorococcus alone does more for our biosphere than rainforests.
