All creatures great and small…
The question wouldn’t come up in Ecuador of whether “polar bears are more important than oil drilling” though there are similar issues facing that oil producing nation. And, when the new Constitution is submitted for referendum on 28 September Ecuadorians are expected to overwhelmingly answer — the bears!
Not only would the new constitution give nature the right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution,” but if it is approved, communities, elected officials and even individuals would have legal standing to defend the rights of nature.
The concept that nature itself can possess rights runs counter to the classical liberal theories of government that hold sway throughout much of the West, which view rights as possessed only by individual human beings. But Ecuador is not the first country to propose granting rights to nonhuman entities: Many countries, including the United States, have long held that corporations possess many of the same rights – such as the rights to free expression and to due process – that human beings have.
If MobileExxon is a person before the law, why not Galapagos Sea Turtles?
mexfiles.net 
“The question wouldn’t come up in Ecuador of whether ‘polar bears are more important than oil drilling'”.
A similar question, if you were in a coal mine, might be, “What is more important, those stupid canaries, or getting more coal out”.
The point is that if the canaries, or the polar bears are dying, there is something seriously wrong going on, which must be addrressed right now. Figure out the mining and the drilling after that.