What is exciting about the natural world is precisely that it is autonomous. It presents us with excitement and unpredictability, chaos and disaster, and alternative solutions. I was very unpopular during the great storm of 1987 because I had the temerity to say that the storm was not an unmitigated disaster but intrinsically an exciting natural event. It had opened up some of the terrible monoculture woodlands that had been planted over the past years. And what would result from the storm would be a natural process of regeneration, the likes of which we hadn't seen for centuries.
Natural processes are as important as species.
It is as enthralling for me to see a bit of devastated hillside that has been blown apart by a gale and watch the great process of healing as it becomes reinvaded by something as common as an ash tree, as to find an individual specimen of rare wild flower. The scientific establishment of conservation makes gestures towards the public. They talk about involving the community, but often don't start talking to people before they've reached their own conclusions. Having reached their conclusions, they then go about persuading people to agree with them. To that extent I would agree with you, that the scientists have hijacked the conservation agenda, making in the process a very gross philosophical error.