That's not my interpretation. In any event, species have been going extinct for almost as long as there have been species. It's unclear that we've appreciably changed the extinction.
And, while one may be scared by species extinction, it's how things work. (I'm scared of height, but that doesn't imply that someone should do something about height.)
BTW - we've probably preserved and enabled species, especially at the low-end, that would have otherwise gone extinct or never come into being.
Why should we feel bad if a species comes and goes without we ever knowing about it? Isn't that expected and natural? Doesn't that happen all the time in the universe?
The fact that there are species that we don't even know about means there is still a lot to learn about life on Earth. It is generally a bad idea to aggressively mess around with a system that is not well-understood, that is what we're doing and this news items demonstrates how little we actually know about our ecosystem.
For example, I am appalled at how we still farm outdoors, where we have little control over pests and weather, especially given that our main methods of pest control tend to hurt us, such as through chemicals or through Monsanto-style genetic modification and patenting. We could begin to move in a completely new direction, and that is to create something like the Ultima Tower, as envisioned by Eugene Tsui.
It's clear that if we don't take grand steps towards engineering a sustainable future, we won't be able to survive a variety of calamities to which we are now exposed, and in that grand scheme, untold numbers of species dying, whether at our hands or due to our carelessness, is irrelevant.
http://www.tdrinc.com/ultima.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Tsui
This was first attempted in the Sargasso Sea which had been thought to be relatively sparse in microbial diversity. Instead, it was found to have a shocking number of entirely new microbial species.
The scary thing is not simply that species are going extinct, but that species which we may never know of may go extinct in the near future.