Exhausted alluded to this
in another thread and it's a subject that's important to me.
It's sometimes inconvenient to take care of wildlife habitat, particularly when that wildlife has made its home in and around our own homes, but almost any kind of construction and development, land management, and farming has the potential to impact negatively on biodiversity.
Biodiversity is obviously important if you value wildlife, but even if you have no interest whatsoever in the natural world biodiversity is important because, like it or not, we live in the natural world and our well-being is inextricably linked to the health of our ecosystem, though the essential problem here is that it's not immediately obvious why.
Take neonicotinoid pesticides: it's virtually impossible to farm intensively without some kind of pesticide, and neonicotinoids are relatively benign to non-pest species so it's incredibly frustrating to farmers not to be able to use neonicotinoids. The problem is that neonicotinoids are implicated in the decline of the honey bee so the European Commission has placed an interim ban on their use. That angers the powerful farming and agri-chemical industry, but it's a reasonable and proportionate measure because, without the honey bee, a significant amount of the food we eat would not grow. The causal link between honey bee decline and neonicotinoids is not unassailably strong and it's easy for the farming lobby to cast the environmental concern as the wishy-washy meddling of tree-hugging reactionaries.
The issue for me then is one of responsibility. Biodiversity and a healthy balanced ecosystem is important to all of us because we can't escape the fact that we live in and depend on the natural world, and we all need to take responsibility for maintaining that biodiversity, even when it's personally inconvenient.