Against Nature

What are environmentalists even trying to conserve?

1 Intervening in nature

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive; others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear; others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites; thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst and disease.

—Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden

Probably the most frustrating subject to argue with people about is veganism. When you note that the conditions most animals endure on factory farms are indistinguishable from something out of the Saw movie and make the radical suggestion that it’s wrong to torture others for slight personal pleasure, you come across such a fantastic assembly of excuses and rationalizations that it’s hard to not lose a little bit of faith in humanity. You come out thinking worse of people—they either recognize that they’re doing something evil and keep doing it or seem utterly incapable of grasping very basic philosophical arguments.

But after veganism, the next most frustrating subject to argue about is the inherent value of nature. There are lots of people who seem to think that humanity should leave nature untouched even if interventions in nature could make things better for animals. They prioritize biodiversity and abundant animal populations, seemingly indifferent to the welfare of individual animals.

Now, there are of course difficult questions surrounding how and under what conditions we should intervene in nature.

Glenn

has recently made the case that climate change causes huge amounts of wild animal suffering by changing animal reproduction strategies in the long-term towards giving birth to more offspring who will live shorter lives with more suffering. While I think this effect is likely outweighed by the reduction in wild animal suffering from humans reducing wild animal populations through environmental destruction, Glenn’s view isn’t completely unreasonable. Environmentalism itself isn’t necessarily crazy.

What is crazy is the way most environmentalists seem to assess interventions!

In my view, the way to determine whether impacting the environment is good or not is pretty simple: you look at the impact it has on conscious beings—both humans and other animals. I don’t care intrinsically about biodiversity—I care about making lives better for individuals. Species do not have experiences, only individuals do. It is thus individuals that matter. If species A has wretched lives and gets replaced by species B who have much better lives, I think that’s an improvement.

For example, there’s an organism called the new world screwworm that that lays magots in the flesh of their victims, causing almost incomprehensible amounts of agony as the maggots eat their way out from the inside. These worms also tend to live pretty short lives of intense suffering. So when we got rid of the new world screwworm in north America—ridding the continent of a miserable animal that reproduces by torturing other animals—I think that was a great thing! It’s possible it will turn out bad because of some weird ripple effects, but if things are as I’ve supposed, then it seems pretty great. In case you doubt my position, as you can see below, I’ve depicted it as the Chad and the alternative view as the crying angry person, so it’s very likely true.

Lots of people don’t share this view. They think we should not intervene in nature even if intervening in nature would reduce suffering and increase well-being of animals in nature. They don’t care about how much individual animals suffer, so long as there is biodiversity—many different species—and a lush and productive environment.

This has always struck me as an extremely strange view. Even if nature is a torment chamber for almost every being who ever lives, so long as there are many different types of beings, the view holds that all is well. I can at least sort of understand holding that biodiversity is one value among many to be preserved, but it seems completely bizarre to think that it’s the primary thing that matters about an ecosystem. If an ecosystem is “functioning” in the sense that energy is efficiently flowing across trophic layers, but this situation is very bad for almost every conscious being, why would this be a good thing? Why do we care about ecosystem health if it comes at the expense of almost everyone in the ecosystem? This would be like taking a measure of societal health that doesn’t include, even as a partial input, how well off the members of society are—but instead only cares about how diverse they are in their torment.

There are two somewhat different versions of the view. The first holds that what matters is ecosystem health and biodiversity—how robust the ecosystem is. The second holds that humans just shouldn’t intervene in nature—that the ideal state of nature is one that we haven’t influenced. I think these are both extremely crazy.

2 Biodiversity and abundance

"People who accuse us of putting in too much violence, [should see] what we leave on the cutting-room floor. My conscience troubles me more about reducing the pain and savagery that there is in the natural world than the reverse.”

—David Attenborough, speaking about his nature documentaries

Probably the most common view about the environment holds that we should promote certain environmental features: biodiversity, energy abundance, and net primary productivity. In short, these people think that we should promote a lush diverse ecosystem with beautiful forests full of many diverse kinds of animals. They think that you can tell a good environmental policy by its tendency to generate good David Attenborough movies—about the many awesome kinds of animals.

But why should we care about that? If there are many diverse organisms who spend their time starving, being eaten alive, and running for their lives, why is that a good thing? It only makes sense to promote biodiversity and rich ecosystems if such things are good for the organisms in them.

The problem is that there’s likely an inverse correlation between ecosystem health and how good life is for the animals in an ecosystem. Life is hell for almost every conscious creature who has ever lived. As Brian Tomasik cogently argues “Habitat Loss, Not Preservation, Generally Reduces Wild-Animal Suffering.” Nearly all animals are R-strategists, meaning they give birth to huge numbers of offspring very few of whom will survive. Tuna lay 10 million eggs a year—even if most of those never become conscious organisms, a nontrivial portion of them will eventually be conscious. Other animals, like the ocean sunfish, are even more prolific.

Organisms’ populations can’t just keep increasing indefinitely—eventually they hit a limit. Thus, the equilibrium number of offspring who pass on their genes is 2; this means the overwhelming majority of creatures who have ever lived will not reproduce. Most of these animals die an extremely painful death after a few days or weeks; they starve to death, are eaten alive, die of thirst, or die of a horrifying disease.

The sheer number of these animals is utterly staggering. There are probably around 10^18 arthropods—and these are very likely conscious. If we make the fairly conservative assumption that this is 10% of the number of arthropods that die in a year, then that means that about 300 billion arthropods die each second.

Each human reduces insect life-years by ~14 million annually. This means that if we assume insects live a week on average then if you live 70 years, you’ll reduce the number of insects who live by about 54 billion!!!! You personally could affect a number of insects on the order of the number of people who have ever lived.

I think this is a very good thing. Most insects have short and terrible lives. Reducing the number of insects that are born into a brief and hellish nightmare of an existence before being painfully killed is a very good thing. This consideration has, in fact, made me think that charities saving human lives might be some of the highest impact charities.

Now, people often reply that we cannot know if these organisms really live bad lives. Is it not anthropomorphizing to try to guess how good an animal’s life is? But my argument for animals having bad lives is not that they lack access to poetry and the finer things in life—it’s that they are constantly exposed to sources of horrendous suffering which cause them to suffer for the same reasons they cause us to suffer. We can be pretty damn confident that when an animal starves or drowns, this is unpleasant—evolution would select for that and their behavior seems to indicate that.

So now the only question is: is living for a week and then being eaten alive or starving to death a life worth living? Obviously not. If a human baby lived for about a week and then was eaten alive, no one would think their happiness during the week could offset the harm of being eaten alive. This is especially so if that week of existence was filled with hunger, thirst, and fleeing from predators. I don’t know exactly how many months or years of happy life I’d have to be guaranteed to be willing to endure the experience of being eaten alive, but it’s sure as hell more than a week.

The most common position seems to be that we should preserve the abundance of wild animal life, but not for the sake of individual wild animals. Even if trillions of them have to painfully die for us to be able to look out over a sublime patch of nature, well, agony is sometimes the cost of beauty. Ever heard of high heels? What matters is the health of the non-sentient abstraction known as the environment.

Here’s how I see this. Imagine if there was an orchestra that made music by torturing animals. Lots of the people viewing the orchestra wanted to pave over the bit of the torture orchestra to make a power plant that would provide them and others with clean energy, as well as reduce the extent of the animal torture.

Others, called orchestraists, reply “no, we shouldn’t destroy the orchestra! Even though the orchestra is bad for the animals being tortured, and the humans watching the orchestra could benefit more from paving over the orchestra, the orchestra has intrinsic value and must be preserved.”

This would be insane. But it would be equally insane if the animal torture orchestra was natural, and if the aesthetic value it produced was visual rather than auditory. Thus, the view that holds we should preserve nature even if doing so is bad for living animals is similarly crazy.

One plausible constraint on evaluating the value of worlds is called the Pareto principle. It says that if something is good for everyone, then it’s good overall. For instance, if you gave medicine to everyone that made each person better off, that would be a good thing to do. This view violates the pareto principle; if a world was better for every animal and person but had less robust net primary productivity, it might still be worse overall.

I think this view is also an obvious product of bias. Because nature is pretty and we’ve been indoctrinated by David Attenborough movies to like it, we’re all psychologically biased to value it. Each of the following biases play a role:

1. Status quo bias: Humans have been shown to have a bias in favor of preserving the status quo. That explains the opposition to interfering in nature.

2. Similarly, we have a bias in favor of thinking the world is just—when bad things are happening that people can’t prevent, studies have shown people have a tendency to stop thinking the things are bad.

3. Humans have a bias towards thinking that anything natural must be good—even though malaria, flesh-eating parasites, and cancer are all natural. Thus, the view likely stems from bias rather than correctness.

4. Humans display a bias called scope neglect. Because humans can’t intuitively grasp big numbers, our moral intuitions aren’t sensitive to the presence of larger numbers of victims. This is why people in studies support paying similar amounts to protect 2,000 birds, 20,000 birds, and 200,000 birds—in fact, they’ll pay more to protect 20,000 birds than 200,000 birds, which is a weird view to have unless you just have a weird hatred of the extra 180,000 birds. Because the wild animals are similar and homogenous, we don’t internalize the true horror of their suffering.

In addition, the view cares about stuff that seems obviously irrelevant. Why in the world would anyone care about how productive an ecosystem is? How much energy there is in plants seems like the paradigm case of an intrinsically morally irrelevant feature. Similarly, how many species there are seems morally irrelevant. If a species of beetles live in a cave, the value of the beetles in the cave doesn’t depend on what’s happening in causally isolated places outside the cave. But this view implies that it would, because if the beetles are only in the cave, then the cave beetles boost biodiversity more. But this is plainly ridiculous.

Lastly, the view might have really counterintuitive implications regarding destroying nature. After mass extinctions, sometimes biodiversity and environmental productivity increase. So this view might imply that a mass extinction was a really good thing, provided it increases long run biodiversity. On this view, therefore, we should be relatively ambivalent about the present mass extinction—maybe it’ll turn out bad, but it could very well turn out for the best.

Thus, the view is clearly false. It’s the byproduct of bias, sharply conflicts with other obvious moral intuitions, and implies results that most of its adopters wouldn’t accept.

3 No interference view

In the middle of the floor lay a dead swallow, with his lovely wings folded at his sides and his head tucked under his feathers. The poor bird must certainly have died of the cold. Thumbelina felt so sorry for him. She loved all the little birds who had sung and sweetly twittered to her all through the summer. But the mole gave the body a kick with his short stumps, and said, "Now he won't be chirping any more. What a wretched thing it is to be born a little bird. Thank goodness none of my children can be a bird, who has nothing but his 'chirp, chirp', and must starve to death when winter comes along."
"Yes, you are so right, you sensible man," the field mouse agreed. "What good is all his chirp-chirping to a bird in the winter time, when he starves and freezes?"

—Hans Christian Andersen, Thumbelina

Other people seem to have the view that we just shouldn’t intervene in nature. The idea is not merely that we should refrain from intervening for the pursuit of the welfare of individual animals but instead that there’s something inherently wrong with intervening in nature. We should leave nature alone even if interfering in nature would bring about certain goals. It’s not our place to meddle in pursuit of any promoting any valuable features of nature, except perhaps to undo previous meddling. Thus, some people might support rewilding some patch of nature that we’ve destroyed but they think that we shouldn’t approach nature with some goal in mind to be promoted. They’d oppose, for instance, adding new species to an ecosystem to boost biodiveristy.

Now, this view has all the same problems as the last view and more.

First of all, it’s very unclear what the justification is supposed to be for this position. Certainly its proponents wouldn’t hold that there’s anything terrible about lions and tigers intervening in nature. So why are humans different? We are part of nature in a broad sense.

If it’s not bad for any other species to majorly impact nature, why is it automatically bad when we do it? Why is interference in nature bad in the first place? The view has no plausible account of this.

Second this view has extremely counterintuitive implications. Suppose that some environmental conditions are going to majorly change nature. You’re in a position where you can stop them. Assume that these climatic conditions would increase the well-being of animals in the aggregate.

On this view, in order to know whether to prevent those climatic changes, you need to know if they were caused by humans. So if, for instance, mild warming would occur that would make life easier for animals (note: I do not think this is the actual likely effect of global warming) whether it would be worth preventing would depend on whether it was caused by human activities. But this is very counterintuitive. Why should the cause of it be relevant to whether it’s worth preventing.

We can make this even more counterintuitive. Imagine that there were humans 100,000 years ago. Now suppose that happenings from 100,000 years ago are affecting current climatic conditions in ways that will reduce animal suffering. On this view, to know if the happenings 100,000 years ago are worth reversing, you’d have to know if they were carried by humans. But that seems completely ridiculous and arbitrary—why should that matter?

Third, the view that it’s intrinsically wrong to intervene in nature seems to conflict with obvious judgments. If you came across a wounded deer, would it be wrong to save its life? Obviously not! But saving it would, of course, interfere with nature. Similarly, if a lion is coming to attack a deer and you can scare it off by firing your gun into the air, would it be wrong to fire it off? Of course not! Certainly it would be weird to hold that it would be wrong to save the deer from the lion but fine to heal the deer after its attack from the lion.

If it’s okay to defend an animal from predation of starvation, why is it wrong to preemptively intervene to prevent predation and starvation?

4 Conclusion

At any given moment, trillions of animals are crying out in pain. At least tens of billions, and perhaps even trillions, of animals die painfully every single second. Nearly every creature who ever lived had a short hellish life. Preserving the natural mechanism that keeps bringing animals into existence, only to kill them shortly thereafter, isn’t compassionate.

Species do not have interests. The environment does not have interests. It is only individuals who have interests. For this core reason, our environmental policy should be focused on caring for the interests of the beings in nature, rather than preserving some higher-order feature of the environment like its biodiversity. The alternative views are wildly counterintuitive and just fundamentally don’t make any sense. They value things that obviously don’t matter, ignore the interests of sentient beings who are suffering, and imply utterly absurd results.

If you came across a natural factory farm, perhaps run by a particularly resourceful duck, the fitting action would be burning it to the ground. Even if the factory farm looked pretty—provided you ignore the blood and cries of terror, of course—that wouldn’t merit its continued existence. For a similar reason, I think that we should seek to reduce the extent of nature and the horrifying suffering it causes. If we in the future have the ability to reduce or mostly eliminate natural suffering, we should not hesitate to do so.