This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Quantifying animals to figure out what's worth saving is calculating and shitty, but hey! Life's shitty. We can't dedicate 100% of our resources to preserving every single threatened species, and sometimes that means picking our battles.

This, I don't disagree with, as much as it sucks that it's true.
Picking battles based on taxonomy makes sense to me. Picking battles based on whether or not tourists have a fair chance of gawking at the pretty birdies only makes sense to the extent that the tourism money can then be put back into extending conservation efforts, so I hope that's what the logic is there.

I really don't think, with our current technology, let alone mindset, that the Earth can support 7 billion people living a first-world middle class lifestyle, and we need to address that issue before telling subsistence farmers in the Congo to stop destroying the gorilla's habitat.

What I was basically trying to get at was that we're going to need to address that issue whether those subsistence farmers in the Congo destroy the gorilla's habitat or not, and I'm not convinced that letting them destroy it is going to be much help to anything.
But I do think this is a fair point:

You can't expect people to care about preserving wild lands or not contributing to climate change when they don't have access to nutrition and medical care.

It's a complicated issue, to be sure. Looking back, "conservation efforts are, if anything, more important than social efforts" is a pretty simplistic point of view when you take into account how much the latter impact the former. (I did say it was off-the-cuff.)
So I guess, basically I don't disagree.

On the other hand, in response to TickTickTockTock, I'm not so sure it's reasonable to say we need to get humans sorted out before we turn our attention to other species. I'm not sure that's a luxury we have. Yes, we need to address the root cause, certainly, but conservation efforts are still super-important.

we can't just stop or millions of people will die

...is true, but meanwhile, how many animals are dying? How many species are going extinct? That's important, too. Why should we expect them to make sacrifices for humanity's sake because civilization screwed up, either?

Prioritizing the needs of humanity because that's important for making conservation efforts work, sure, I get that. But I'm not willing to put humanity's needs above those of other animals as a general principle. Sentience is a vague and fuzzy concept, and to the extent that it means anything at all, there's no reason to think it's binary - that either a species has it or they don't. And I don't think it's reasonable to say that it's significantly less certain that other animals can feel suffering and despair than it is that humans can feel suffering and despair.
So I think it's morally necessary that maybe yes, billions of people with a lower standard of living SHOULD make sacrifices for the environment's sake. Just as people in developed nations should make sacrifices, for the environment and the lower-standard-of-living people both.