[neikos]

The issue is usually less what species gets endangered or faces extinction, but the fact that this is not done for progress but for greed (be it humanity or corporations).

Destructively changing anything should be approached with extreme care, since you cannot un-extinct a species.

I'd illustrate it like what happens on Linux when you are approaching OOM situations. You can either kill other processes, not knowing what they did or if they were vital, or just stop doing what you were doing. And so far societies have usually decided that mines are not as important as raw materials at some point.