Is zero extinctions achievable, or is that hubris?

The list nobody wants to make

I allocate a conservation budget. That sentence already casts me as the villain. But the money is finite and the species are not, so someone draws the line — and pretending we don't just lets it get drawn by accident.

Global conservation spending runs in the low tens of billions a year. The bill to actually stem extinctions is several times that. The gap isn't rhetoric; it is the daily reality of choosing. Pour a fortune into one telegenic, near-hopeless megafauna and you have quietly sacrificed a dozen unglamorous frogs and beetles you could have saved outright. New Zealand picked: an explicit predator-free target with ranked priorities. That is not callousness. It is honesty about scarcity.

The conservationists hear "triage" and hear surrender. It is the opposite — triage is how you save the most savable instead of spreading money so thin nothing makes it. The technologists at least stretch the budget's reach, and I will fund a biobank over a doomed captive-breeding vanity any day.

What I won't do is promise zero. Zero is a number you give a donor, not one you manage to. Promise it and you spend against the cases that photograph well, not the ones that recover.

Where we concede ground: Triage can curdle into cover for cheapness — "we chose" becomes an alibi for never fighting to grow the budget.

What would change our mind: If funding rose until the binding constraint stopped being money and became something we couldn't buy.