Well fundamentally, there is no such thing as reality. There is no rational argument that can tell us that anything actually exists outside of an individuals (my own) mind; so your argument for inherent standards and preferences is already on unstable ground. Like I explained in the other thread there are obviously biological impulses, but these are so easily overturned by our minds. (Yes this is true, for example I have never intended to or managed to reproduce all my life, despite many times indulging in sex.)
The problem is that conservationist's standards could very easily be incongruent with anybodies reality; anyone can deconstruct them to reveal this.
I have to go now, but I will add some more to this later about how those standards can be easily used to mean different things to different people.
If you really wish to be pendantic enough to not simply take the existence of reality as an axiom, you could always define it as "those experiences that seem to be in common with all the specters in my head that I call 'other people', and those experience that, given an exactly identical set of conditions, are always the result of said conditions.", or something roughly along those lines.
Why? I'm a nihilist, aren't I? Error and negativity are surely the base substance of existence to me
As are happiness and whatever you'd call the opposite of error (correctness? lack of error?). Why do you, as a nihilist, seem to have a bias towards one side of the spectrum?