From a discussion around a couple of dinner tables.

Whereas somewhere between 1000 and 10 000 species are estimated go extinct every year (or something like that);

and whereas most species in the world are undocumented to science and are presumably things like little brown bugs and protists and planktonic whatsits and so forth;

and whereas we have no a priori reason to assume that any one of those species is any more or less important to ecosystem stability or functioning than any big obvious species which is well cataloged and visible from a distance and shows up in your local zoo;

be it resolved that I am irritated that we reserve our alarm about extinction and extinction threats to big fancy species like passenger pigeons and polar bears and so on when it seems safe to assume that there is a ongoing silent extinction crisis of all those undocumented species.

So what we were thinking is: we should start a line of clothes and pencil cases and plush toys for extinct amoeba and other critically endangered microfauna.

(Note that if you Google Image “cute amoeba” you get no hits.)