In terms of global warming we also know that there is a direct link between taking a patch of forest, cutting it and burning it, and when you do that you’re releasing gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect, which is essentially just the warming up of the world’s climate. And not only tropical forests contribute to that, but when your (students’) parents drive you (them) to school, when you see an industry spewing out smoke, most of those gases are also contributing to this greenhouse effect, and to the whole global warming of the planet.

PTK: What’s the value of preserving a frog?

There’s value to every living being, really. And a frog, in ecological terms, is important because it transfers energy from the aquatic system to the terrestrial system, which not many living beings do. I would argue that the value of any given frog is the same as the value of any given mosquito or any bacteria. It’s a repository of millions of years of evolution and therefore is something that intrinsically has some value.

We as human beings do not, I believe, have the right to just go out and destroy such a rich repository of biological, genetic and ecological information. It would be a shame to do that. It would be the equivalent of buying books and burning them before we even open the cover. We can see them but we won’t even know what’s in them, and most books contain very important information. And more so with living beings. They do contain a lot of important information, which, in many cases, can help us understand our own presence on this earth.