People care about the environment for many reasons, some emotional and some practical.
Many people like the way it looks and enjoy spending recreation time in relatively unspoilt places. Life on Earth is both beautiful and valuable, and we should do more to preserve habitats, species and ways of life that are being destroyed by the over exploitation of natural resources and wilderness areas. We need these for materials, food, fuel, and as source of genetic diversity for artificial breeding programmes. Many of our medicines have been developed from natural materials and there may be many more we have not yet discovered. It is difficult or impossible to protect or reintroduce species once their habitat has been destroyed, and thousands of species become extinct every year.