I couldn't agree more with rick...
...and mostly with John, who concludes that substituting cloning for conservation is a terrible idea, even though it might be a prudent thing to do as long as it doesn't decrease the effectiveness of our conservation efforts. To even think that it would be a substitute for the real thing would be a grave mistake, but if genetic materials can help reconstruct a species from the unthinkable, it might be worth pursuing, just as we do with germplasm and seed banks for plant diversity. There will never be an economic justification for destruction of the Amazonian rainforest basin--our entire planet benefits from its continued existence in ways we know and don't know, and the costs of trying to replace it would probably be paid by our own extinction, so there is no reason to even go there. Much more worrisome is our inability to control our destructive habits even though we are fully aware of the consequences. We wouldn't be the first civilization to fall under that description, but we could very well be the last if we decided to go ahead and try!
