“a forest you can hunt deer or gather a particular herb in” in is worth preserving but “the life of an arbitrary deer or a particular plant” is not. the preservation of the former, which you could science up into “the ecosystem” is more important than the latter. indeed, the point of preserving the former is as a means to hunting or harvesting the latter, which is the exact opposite of preserving it.
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that’s how it is. an organism can only value something if it knows what it is that it’s valuing. a tube worm in a hydrothermal vent under the deep Pacific can’t value a Shostakovich fugue. It also can’t value an ecosystem, or the life of a lemur in Madagascar.
there are some other mutualist relationships between other species, so in some sense i suppose eg clownfish value the preservation of anemones, but i doubt they think about it in any very abstract way.
there’s a pretty strong claim to be made that social species value the existence of some conspecifics (“some” because clearly when an ape kills another ape, ape number one clearly doesn’t value the existence of ape number two) and sometimes social animals have pets or friends from other, social, species, but I am not sure that even apes and elephants have any sort of ecological understanding though.
it would seem to be an empirical observation that only people have an ecological understanding of life, so only people value things like “the life of an animal” – certainly every other inhuman animal trying to eat the animal, or every bug trying to make it sick, or living its own life indifferently to the existence of the animal, or just hanging around until the animal becomes dead meat, these animals don’t value anything like “the life of an animal”.
What is more, the birds and bees and so on are so indifferent to their own value, a value that any half-sensitive person can see when looking at one, that in order to make any sense of life, people express a wide range of ecological myths:
to some people, forests are full of organismal spirits (very distinct from the actual organisms themselves who are seen as an expression, or sign of the spirit) who can be communicated with, and are themselves an expression of the “missing value” that a bird or a herb *should* appear to have for itself, given how “self-evidently” useful and valuable and beautiful it is.
some people believe that a particular organism is a family relation of theirs and treat them as dumb country cousins, extending the courtesy of not killing them unless they really deserve it, or if not as country cousins then of some other tribe – with the members of which one exists in a state of slight incomprehension, in peace or in war.
some people believe that there is some other place, an upper world or whatever, where organisms are living their whole lives and they act cautious when they descend to the middle world
some people believe animals *used* to be able to admire themselves in an other place that is in the deep past where they would talk and so on except something happened – they were struck by a disaster, or they made some collective decision, or the ancestors of man made some terrible mistake
some people go mad and conclude that it’s not the animals who are all lacking – it’s people who are fucked up, and use their big brains full of ecological consciousness to come up with stories about why having an ecological consciousness is evil and so you should stop having it. they never succeed in doing this, except maybe briefly when they sleep, eat or fuck, but they do succeed in causing what they really wanted, which is misery and destruction. There’s a name for these people!
all of these are evidently expressions of people, or if the magical expressions have any truth in them, then of people in collaboration with spirits, gods, whatever. clearly no actual animals are consulted about their own best interests, because the inability of animals to do so is what is being explained by the myths.