ABSTRACT
In Part One, I considered three areas of conservation not normally examined, in order to arrive at a clearer understanding of what constitutes good, coherent, conservation practice. I considered, first of all, whether human-caused extinction is different in kind to other forms of extinction in order to discover whether the conservation assumption – that the current extinction event is undesirable – is coherent. That is, I wanted to discover whether today's extinctions are different enough from extinctions of the past to warrant different appraisal. I found that the current extinction event is, in fact, unprecedented. This shows, at least, that the conservation assumption that extinction is undesirable rests upon a coherent foundation.
