While I do indeed feel sympathy, mother nature does not. The animal kingdom is brutal at best. To think we are the only ones inflicting suffering and death is kind of ignoring the larger picture. Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.
Our capacity for empathy is one of the things that supposedly separates us from those we dominate over. I think there's some worth in cultivating the thing that makes us different, and it shouldn't necessarily stop at human-human interaction.
In some ways, empathy's extension to non-humans is the only social tool we have to start caring and prioritizing the maintenance of the living systems around us. Because it's sure as heck not going to be a pragmatic decision like "we need to keep these animals/plants around because they keep us alive" :) People don't respond to that shit.
imho we must create a societal narrative that /cares/ about other living things, or else we're honestly kinda fucked. If nothing else, think of cultivating our ability to empathize with animals as socially hacking our own brains so as not to succumb to the the J-curve crash that is expected of every other species on our trajectory.
Nature itself inflicts immeasurable amounts of suffering and death.
There's a view that says that there's a balance and grand scheme in nature -- the Gaia hypothesis. I don't subscribe to this, and have been seeing a few fairly persuasive arguments that it's fairly wishful thinking.
Which isn't to say that the biosphere won't exact its own vengeance on humans if we continue down our present path.
What distinguishes humans from other life forms, that we're aware of, is, well, that we're aware. We can form models of understanding about the world and Universe we inhabit, and we've done a fairly impressive job of this over the past 300 years or so: Newton, Darwin, Mengel, Einstein, et al.
And one of the things we've been aware of ... for a fairly long time ... is that the very things which have given us an advanced industrial civilization cannot continue unabated forever. William Stanley Jevons wrote of this in The Coal Question in 1865, and referenced works back to 1789 (John Williams, "The Limited Quantity of Coal in Britain"). The alarm's been pulled repeatedly since (CO2 induced global warming: 1932, peak oil: 1945, 1956, 1972, 1998, ..., pollution and environmental impacts: 1962, 1972, ..., population: 1798, 1972, ...).
While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.
Life exists to find and exploit entropic gradients in stocks and flows. Humans have done a bang-up job of finding and exploiting one particularly copious class of stocks (fossil fuels). The end of that stock is well within sight, and with our job done, we may well find ourselves unemployed, biologically speaking.
I'd prefer to avoid that unemployment if possible. And I think that's the question at hand.
