An Open Letter To Tree Huggers

Cease your tree hugging

Part 1: A Brief Digression on the Octopus

I admit I had not been recycling

In fact I have been openly encouraging people to be wasteful

I often go to other people’s recycling bins

And throw them into the regular trash

I own 30 stretch limousine hummers

And I keep them running even while I am sleeping

And I always dump my unused paint

Directly into the ocean

—Wise words from Will Forte

I recently had the rather good fortune of watching the movie My Octopus Teacher. As is hinted at by the title, the movie describes a person who is taught things by an octopus. Every day, this person goes underwater to film the sea life—particularly the octopus—and over time they develop a relationship with the octopus. The octopus stops being weary of them and even lets the filmmaker pet her.

At the end of the movie, tragically, the octopus dies, as was expected to happen in relatively short order. These octopi described only live a bit over the year—at least, the ones who survive. Most of the hundred thousand offspring had don’t survive to reproduce. Only about two will survive to reproduce, so roughly 99.998% die before reproducing—usually after a few days, as a baby.

This death is rather unpleasant. Just consider, dear reader, the ways in which animals in the violent blue oceanic abyss tend to die. Their death, occurring days after their birth, comes from starvation or predation. Neither of these is a very pleasant way to die.

Imagine if at the end of your life, you could prolong it by a day, at the cost of having to experience death twice—once the way you’d ordinarily die, and another time by starvation. Surely, no one would take this deal. A few days of likely unpleasant life which culminate in starvation is not a worthwhile deal. Yet this is the life of nearly all octopi.

And yet, as the movie mostly did, let us, for a moment, ignore the fate of the baby octopi and merely focus on the life of the adult octopi. We can ask whether her life was worthwhile. The answer, it would seem, is a no, so resounding, it should ring out for miles.

The octopus is constantly on the run from sharks who have evolved to kill her efficiently. Blending in doesn’t work, for they detect their pray by sense of smell alone. They can reach their noses into very small places—leaving the octopus with no good place to hide. Imagine the constant stress and fear of the octopus, constantly on the run from assailants, desiring to tear her limb from limb.

It’s very easy to regard states of affairs as desirable when one doesn’t have to experience them. Grass does, after all, look greener in another’s backyard. Yet consider whether this life is really worth living—constantly on the run from sharks. Surely none of us would want to live on the constant run from sharks. And yet this is the fate of our invertebrate protagonist, who is propagandistically depicted as having a generally worthwhile existence.

At one point in the movie, the octopus is hiding from a shark in a narrow nook, when the shark digs its nose in and is able to get hold of one of the octopus’ tentacles. The octopus’ tentacle is ripped off and devoured.

As the Saw movie depicts accurately, having ones arm ripped off is not very pleasant. In order to assess if the octopus’ life is worthwhile, despite having her limb ripped of and devoured, consider the following question: would you take an extra year of life if it meant having your arm ripped off by a shark. For most of us the answer would be no—even if we didn’t spent that year constantly on the run from limb-ripping predators. And yet this offer is far better than the life of the octopus, who must endure far more misery and whose year is filled with many more tribulations than mere arm devouring.

And yet, we must consider not merely the life of the octopus. To survive, the octopus must devour other creatures—hundreds, if not thousands. So hundreds of creatures ended their life at the maw of the octopus. Being eaten alive is not a fun way to go—the legal system would not tolerate it as a form of capital punishment. And yet, this is plausibly the fate of most organisms ever born.

However, constant terror and arm devouring were not the only things that our octopus friend had to endure. At the end of the movie, she was devoured by a shark, who ripped her limb from limb. Once again, not a fun way to die.

However, despite having witnessed firsthand just how brutal nature could be, the filmmaker at the end of the movie, went on a little monologue about the importance of preserving nature. He described its natural beauty, as if that was a justification for preserving it.

This seems like the totally wrong answer—almost impressively wrong. It would be as if someone spent an entire movie documenting brutal conditions in U.S. prisons—prisoners starved, forced to give birth to offspring who were then eaten alive, having their arms ripped off by prison guards—and then concluded the movie with “but we need more prisons; look how pretty the prison looks.” Yet such is the backwards thinking that assails environmentalists—they just can’t seem to accept that the brutality in nature is a bad thing, whatever David Attenborough documentaries may say.

There are clearly good instrumental reasons to preserve nature in many cases; existential risks posed by climate change are a good example. Given the overwhelming importance of avoiding extinction, this plausibly dominates other considerations, in most cases. So I’m not entirely opposed to environmentalists, on practical grounds. I often agree that we should be doing more to protect the environment. There are also many cases in which environmental destruction increases wild animal suffering, by, for example, increasing the number of r strategists.

R strategists are the type of organism whose evolutionary strategy prioritizes quantity over survival. The octopi depicted in the movie are a prime example; they have oodles of offspring, very few of whom will survive to reproduce.

The reason r strategists increase wild animal suffering is obvious—most of the r strategists have short lives of intense suffering. If an organism on average lives three years, it’s much more likely that the painfulness of their death can be outweighed by other things. The same is not true if they live for an hour on average.

In many cases, environmental destruction increases the number of r strategists. The reason for this is decently intuitive: if there are more dangers, the run and gun strategy becomes more beneficial. If unexpected death rays killed lots of organisms, the average detriment to r strategist creatures would be lower, because the death rays would kill one one millionth of the litter for r strategist creatures, while one third of the litter for k strategists—the opposite of r strategists—assuming that they have three offspring.

So environmentalists and I can find lots of common ground on a variety of issues. As a longtermist, my primary considerations will always be about the long run future. And yet, there is a very fundamental difference between our views. I regard nature as intrinsically bad, yet instrumentally worth protecting often, and they regard nature as intrinsically good and instrumentally worth protecting.

This dispute can be analogized to those of two people who are both tough on crime. One person is a utilitarian, thinking that it’s intrinsically bad when people go to jail, because they suffer. However, it’s instrumentally good, because it reduces crimes rates¹. Another person is a hardline retributivist, thinking that it’s actively good to incarcerate bad people. In both cases, they often agree on who should be incarcerated, but they disagree about its intrinsic character.

So am I comparing environmentalists to retributivists? Yes, at least, in this respect.

A reasonable way of hashing out the disagreement is as follows. Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so. Most environmentalists would seem opposed to this idea. It would likely strike most people as crazy. Yet this common hesitance to embrace it seems, in my view, to be a result of a dramatic defect in our thinking about nature, which almost entirely ignores what things are actually like for nearly all of the beings in nature.

Part 2: Red In Tooth And Claw

Nature is quite a brutal place. This fact is not disputed very much by serious people. Consider the following facts about nature.

First, deaths are very painful—often by starvation or being eaten alive. Imagine the horror of starving to death or being eaten alive.

Second, most animals in nature are r strategists—having oodles of offspring—which means that the vast majority of sentient beings in nature live short lives of intense suffering. Tuna, for example, lay 10 million eggs. If two per batch survive to reproduce, that means 99.9999% die before reproducing—often after only a few days of being alive. The situation is far more dire for, for example, mola mola and their 300 million eggs. It’s plausible that a significant portion of the eggs produce sentient beings, before the beings in it are killed.

Let’s just consider this in a human context. Imagine a parent who had 10 million offspring, and then left all but two of them to starve to death. Imagine, in fact, that this happened every year. Would it be worth killing the parent to prevent this? Of course! In fact, this action would be so evil, it would go down as a significant violation of humans rights—plausibly worse than the Iraq war. Even if we think that animals matter a lot less than humans, if animals birth patterns cause enough harm to be such that in the human context, a single animal would be worse than major wars, the literally quadrillions of animals make nature truly unimaginably awful.

This conclusion follows from all plausible views. As long as one holds that intense suffering for quadrillions of beings is a bad thing, they must hold that nature is bad, all else equal. If one really appreciates how bad it is to be eaten alive—a grisly fate which no doubt many animals are enduring as I type this sentence—it becomes quite clear that ending the natural death and torture machine is quite an important priority.

The fact that the location of this grisly torture chamber has a serene appearance does not vindicate it. Factory farms wouldn’t be vindicated, even if they were in a serene setting.

Nor are they vindicated by the fact that nature is natural. If there was an all-natural torture chamber for quadrillions of sentient beings, its naturalness would not be any form of exoneration. Murder, wiping out of large tribes, brutalization, and getting smallpox and dying are all natural. They are not, however, good things. This is because what is natural in no way correlates with what is good.

When evaluating a situation, it’s best to put oneself in the position of the victim. However, if one does this, it becomes very clear how horrific nature is. Consider, for a moment, whether you’d volunteer to experience everything that is experienced by every being in nature. I would certainly not take that deal, and have my life end over and over again, an ungodly number of times, from starvation, suffocation, or being eaten alive.

Tomasik reports, estimating the number of wild animals

Collectively, wild land vertebrates probably number between 10^11 and 10^14. Wild marine vertebrates number at least 10^13 and perhaps a few orders of magnitude higher. Terrestrial and marine arthropods each probably number at least 10^18.

Tomasik additionally summarizes the relevant literature and concludes the following

Thus, it seems clear that many animals are able to suffer by the time of birth if not before.

Many environmentalists seem to look upon a torture chamber for quadrillions of beings and then assume we shouldn’t destroy any of it because it looks pretty. This is a truly grave error. If we think nearly boundless suffering is morally significant, we need to take a much harder look at environmentalist actions. We mustn’t let David Attenborough documentaries hypnotize us into signing off on more extreme, unnecessary suffering.

These ideas may seem a bit cooky. After all, everyone seems to agree that we should protect nature if we can at no cost to ourselves. Well, we tend to totally ignore wild animals in our moral deliberations. This is a mistake—a wild animal can suffer just as much as a domesticated one. As I’ve argued elsewhere, we cannot rationally arbitrarily ignore animals interests. Thus, it’s no surprise that the correct answer would strike us as bizarre—as a society, we ignore the interests of 99.9999% of sentient beings.

We shouldn’t expect the intuitively salient factors to be the ones that actually matter. The history of grievous moral error shows that society is often woefully off track about morality.

If you disagree, feel free to post a comment explaining why. I would love to hear from the dissenting tree loving hippies.

But all in all, this conclusion shouldn’t strike us as terribly surprising. When quadrillions of beings cry out in agony and terror, it’s about time we care about them as individuals, not merely as tokens for their species. Species cannot be harmed—individuals can. If every individual of a species lives a miserable life, the annihilation of that species is a blessing. Our callousness towards these sentient beings results in hideous apathy towards their plight and policies to exacerbate it—all in the name of preserving nature.

Nature is not a being. Nature cannot cry out in agony and terror. Yet animals can. And if we exacerbate their suffering, their blood—which adorns the floors of the allegedly serene natural landscape—will be on our hands.

1. Let’s assume, for the hypothetical, that this is true, or at least believed by the utilitarian