Core Idea
When the NSW Environment Minister announced a “zero extinction target” for national parks in 2021, conservationists cheered. Finally, a government is taking biodiversity loss seriously.
The policy sounds bold, decisive, and scientific. It promises to prevent any native species from disappearing from the state’s 880 parks and reserves covering over 7 million hectares.
This even feels like progress.
After decades of species decline and environmental degradation, here’s a government drawing a line in the sand. No more losses on our watch. Zero extinction is the kind of clear, measurable target that policy wonks love and voters can understand.
But strip away the political theatre, and you’re left with something more troubling than inspiring.
This isn’t evidence-based conservation. It’s biological absurdity dressed up as environmental leadership.
Counterpoint
Zero extinction targets ignore a fundamental truth about life on Earth… extinction is how evolution works. Loss makes space for new diversity.
The fossil record shows us five mass extinction events over the past 450 million years. Each time, 60-95% of species vanished. Yet diversity recovered and increased.
More species exist today than at any point in evolutionary history, and that is only because of constant extinction pressure.
Evolution doesn’t preserve. It experiments, discards, and builds anew. The koala exists because dozens of other marsupial species didn’t make it. Every “success story” in nature stands on a graveyard of evolutionary dead ends.
To promise zero extinction is to promise to halt the engine of natural selection itself.
Then there are the practicalities. NSW’s parks don’t have comprehensive species inventories. We don’t know what’s there, let alone whether it’s thriving or declining. The state can’t confirm or deny extinctions because the baseline data doesn’t exist. You might as well promise to prevent unicorn extinctions.
And even if we could catalogue every species, the parks exist in a matrix of agricultural and urban land. Species don’t respect boundary fences. The surrounding 80 million hectares of NSW directly impact what survives in the parks. Climate change, drought, fire, disease, and invasive species don’t care about park boundaries or ministerial declarations.
The target also reveals a dangerous delusion of human omnipotence. It assumes we can engineer nature to our preferences, freezing biological communities in some idealised state. This is command-and-control environmentalism at its most arrogant.
We’re not gods. We’re barely competent as park managers.
Thought Challenges
Next time you hear a politician announce an environmental target, ask them to show their working. What baseline data supports this goal? What mechanisms will achieve it? How will success be measured? Most importantly, ask them who is accountable when the target is inevitably missed?
Research the extinction debt in your local area. Species don’t vanish immediately when their habitat is cleared or degraded. They decline slowly, sometimes taking decades to reach zero. Many species currently counted as “present” in protected areas are already functionally extinct; they just haven’t realised it yet. This creates a lag effect that makes zero extinction targets even more meaningless.
Closing Reflection
Obviously, the zero extinction target isn’t really about saving species. It’s political theatre designed to signal environmental virtue while avoiding the hard choices that actual conservation requires.
Real conservation means accepting losses while working to minimise them. It means acknowledging that we can’t save everything and focusing resources where they’ll do the most good. It means respecting the limits of our knowledge and control.
Zero extinction targets offer the comforting illusion that we can have our cake and eat it too. We can enjoy endless development with no biological consequences.
This kind of magical thinking doesn’t save species. It wastes resources on impossible goals while the real work of conservation goes undone.
Nature deserves better than empty promises from politicians who confuse wishful thinking with policy.
Evidence Support
Butchart, S. H. M., Stattersfield, A. J., Bennun, L. A., Shutes, S. M., Akçakaya, H. R., Baillie, J. E. M., ... & Mace, G. M. (2004). Measuring global trends in the status of biodiversity: Red List Indices for birds. PLoS biology, 2(12), e383.
TL;DR… authors develop Red List Indices to measure the global status of bird species, explaining the limitations and uncertainties in absolute extinction rates and the regulatory challenges for tracking actual extinctions in real time. Their work highlights how reported conservation targets, such as “zero extinctions,” often obscure genuine knowledge gaps and reinforce normative frameworks over empirical evidence.
Relevance to insight… exemplifies how zero extinction targets become rhetorical devices that measure intent and optimism, not ecological reality. The paper demonstrates that extinction trends are difficult to quantify and control, fueling the illusion that political commitment alone can prevent species loss.
Sutherland, W. J., Pullin, A. S., Dolman, P. M., & Knight, T. M. (2004). The need for evidence-based conservation. Trends in ecology & evolution, 19(6), 305-308.
TL;DR… advocates for rigorous, evidence-based conservation, detailing how political targets often outpace available scientific evidence, leading to policies with limited capacity for critical evaluation or adaptive management. The authors argue for robust scientific standards rather than emotive or aspirational goal-setting.
Relevance to insight… demonstrating the gap between policy rhetoric and genuine scientific knowledge, Sutherland et al. highlight the risk of zero extinction targets becoming empty gestures—political theatre dressed as technical solutions rather than commitments to effective action.
Lindenmayer, D. B., & Likens, G. E. (2010). The science and application of ecological monitoring. Biological conservation, 143(6), 1317-1328.
TL;DR… unpacks the complexities and difficulties of ecological monitoring, exposing how conservation policies with extreme targets (e.g. zero extinction) are almost impossible to audit given poor species inventories, uneven monitoring, and natural ecological dynamics. They highlight the disconnect between political promises and ecological reality.
Relevance to insight… shows why zero extinction commitments are not just scientifically unreliable, but actively mislead the public about what can be achieved and measured.