I think part of the issue here probably is that EAs mostly don’t think biodiversity is good in itself, and instead believe only humans and animals experiencing well-being is good, and that the impact on well-being of promoting biodiversity is complex, uncertain and probably varies a lot with how and where biodiversity is being promoted. Hard to try and direct biodiversity funding if you don’t really clearly agree with raising biodiversity as a goal.
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Easier to persuade commercial entities of the merits of making more money (by incidentally doing the right thing) than persuade a reviewer of multiple competitive funding bids scoped for habitat preservation to fund a study into lab grown meat. At the end of the day, the proposals written by biodiversity enthusiasts with biodiversity rationales and very specific biodiversity metrics are just going to be more plausible,[1] even if they turn out to be ineffective.
For similar reasons, I don’t expect EA animal welfare funds to award funding to an economic think tank proposing to research how to grow the economy, even if the economic think tank insists its true goal is animal welfare and provides a lot of evidence that investment in meat alternatives and enforcement of animal welfare legislation is linked to overall economic growth.
I agree that most EAs probably don’t think biodiversity is good in and of itself. I’m in the minority that do—I’m not just a hedonistic utilitatian. Also to reassure people
Its OK to be an EA and not just believe the only thing that matters in this universe is how much well-being there is.
I think the OP has a very good point, and with this much money moving around, biodiversity funding might well be an interesting area for some people to look into.
It’s plausible to me that biodiversity is valuable, but with AGI on the horizon it seems a lot cheaper in expectation to do more out-there interventions, like influencing AI companies to care about biodiversity (alongside wild animal welfare), recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species about to go extinct, and buying the cheapest land possible (middle of Siberia or Australian desert, not productive farmland). Then when the technology is available in a few decades and we’re better at constructing stable ecosystems de novo, we can terraform the deserts into highly biodiverse nature preserves. Another advantage of this is that we’ll know more about animal welfare—as it stands now the sign of habitat preservation is pretty unclear.
A couple more “out-there” ideas for ecological interventions:
“recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species”—yup, but it probably takes more than just DNA sequences on a USB drive to de-extinct a creature in the future. For instance, probably you need to know about all kinds of epigenetic factors active in the embryo of the creature you’re trying to revive. To preserve this epigenetic info, it might be easiest to simply freeze physical tissue samples (especially gametes and/or embryos) instead of doing DNA sequencing. You might also need to use the womb of a related species—bringing back mammoths is made a LOT easier by the fact that elephants are still around! -- and this would complicate plans to bring back species that are only distantly related to anything living. I want to better map out the tech tree here, and understand what kinds of preparation done today might aid what kinds of de-extinction projects in the future.
Normal environmentalists worry about climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and other prosaic, slow-rolling forms of mild damage to the natural environment. Not on their list: nuclear war, mirror bacteria, or even something as simple as AGI-supercharged economic growth that sees civilization’s economic footprint doubling every few years. I think there is a lot that we could do, relatively cheaply, to preserve at least some species against such catastrophes.
For example, seed banks exist. But you could possibly also save a lot of insects from extinction by maintaining some kind of “mostly-automated insect zoo in a bunker”, a sort of “generation ship” approach as oppoed to the “cryosleep” approach that seedbanks can use. (Also, are even today’s most hardcore seed banks hardened against mirror bacteria and other bio threats? Probably not! Nor do many of them even bother storing non-agricultural seeds for things like random rainforest flowers.)
Right now, land conservation is one of the cheapest ways of preventing species extinctions. But in an AGI-transformed world, even if things go very well for humanity, the economy will be growing very fast, gobbling up a lot of land, and probably putting out a lot of weird new kinds of pollution. (Of course, we could ask the ASI to try and mitigate these environmental impacts, but even in a totally utopian scenario there might be very strong incentives to go fast, eg to more quickly achieve various sublime transhumanist goods and avoid astronomical waste.) By contrast, the world will have a LOT more capital, and the cost of detailed ecological micromanagement (using sensors to gather lots of info, using AI to analyze the data, etc) will be a lot lower. So it might be worth brainstorming ahead of time what kinds of ecological interventions might make sense in such a world, where land is scarce but capital is abundant and customized micro-attention to every detail of an environment is cheap. This might include high-density zoos like described earlier, or “let the species go extinct for now, but then reliably de-extinct them from frozen embryos later”, or “all watched over by machines of loving grace”-style micromanaged forests that achieve superhumanly high levels of biodiversity in a very compact area (and minimizing wild animal suffering by both minimizing the necessary population and also micromanaging the ecology to keep most animals in the population in a high-welfare state).
A lot of today’s environmental-protection / species-extinction-avoidance programs aren’t even robust to, like, a severe recession that causes funding for the program to get cut for a few years! Mainstream environmentalism is truly designed for a very predictable, low-variance future… it is not very robust to genuinely large-scale shocks.
It’s kind of fuzzy and unclear what’s even important about avoiding species extinctions or preserving wild landscapes or etc, since these things don’t fit neatly into a total-hedonic-utilitarian framework. (In this respect, eco-value is similar to a lot of human culture and art, or values like “knowledge” or “excellence” and so forth.) But, regardless of whether or not we can make philosophical progress clarifying exactly what’s important about the natural world, maybe in a utopian future we could find crazy futuristic ways of generating lots more ecological value? (Obviously one would want to do this while avoiding creating lots of wild-animal suffering, but I think this still gives us lots of options.)
Obviously stuff like “bringing back mammoths” is in this category.
But maybe also, like, designing and creating new kinds of life? Either variants of earth life (what kinds of interesting things might dinosaurs have evolved into, if they hadn’t almost all died out 65 million years ago?), or totally new kinds of life that might be able to thrive on, eg, Titan or Europa (though obviously this sort of research might carry some notable bio-risks a la mirror bacteria, thus should perhaps only be pursued from a position of civilizational existential security).
Creating simulated, digital life-forms and ecologies? In the same way that a culture really obsessed with cool crystals, might be overjoyed to learn about mathematics and geometry, which lets them study new kinds of life.
There is probably a lot of exciting stuff you could do with advanced biotech / gene editing technologies, if the science advances and if humanity can overcome the strong taboo in environmentalism against taking active interventions in nature. (Even stuff like “take some seeds of plants threatened by global warming, drive them a few hours north, and plant them there where it’s cooler and they’ll survive better” is considered controversial by this crowd!)
Just like gene drives could help eradicate / suppress human scourges like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, we could also use gene drives to do tailored control of invasive species (which are something like the #2 cause of species extinctions, after #1 habitat destruction). Right now, the best way to control invasive species is often “biocontrol” (introducing natural predators of the species that’s causing problems) -- biocontrol actually works much better than its terrible reputation suggests, but it’s limited by the fact that there aren’t always great natural predators available, it takes a lot of study and care to get it right, etc.
Possibly you could genetically-engineer corals to be tolerant of slightly higher temperatures, and generally use genetic tech to help species adapt more quickly to a fast-changing world.
I totally agree that there are some “out there” interventions that, in a perfect world, we would be funding much more. In particular biobanking (recording the DNA of species about to go extinct) should be considered much more, I totally agree. Unfortunately, the world is full of techno-pessimists, deontologists, post-structuralists, diplomats who don’t know what any of the preceding words even mean, etc. This seems insane, but MANY conservationists are against de-extinction for (in my view) fairly straightforward technophobic reasons. Convincing THOSE people, who ALREADY have LOTs of money, that actually they should invest that money in changing the opinions of Sam Altman, will just simply never work. I DO think, however, you could get them to invest in lab grown meat. So while I agree with you in the abstract about some of that, I think that if we’re being pragmatic (our duty as EAs), then lab-grown meat is probably the best bet in terms of plausible arguments.
Also, just purely philosophically, I think that putting a lot of stock in the sign of habitat preservation can lead to some strange places. What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there? Maybe you are, which would be consistent, but that’s an extremely unintuitive ethical claim that I have yet to read anyone defend seriously or persuasively. Would be very interested in someone trying though!
What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there?
Definitely not completely replacing because biodiversity has diminishing returns to land. If we pave the whole Amazon we’ll probably extinct entire families (not to mention we probably cause ecological crises elsewhere and disrupt ecosystem services etc), whereas on the margin we’ll only extinct species endemic to the deforested regions.
If the research on WAW comes out super negative I could imagine it being OK to replace half the Amazon with higher-welfare ecosystems now, and work on replacing the rest when some crazy AI tech allows all changes to be fully reversible. But the moral parliament would probably still not be happy about this. Eg killing is probably bad, and there is no feasible way to destroy half the Amazon in the near term without killing most of the animals in it.
I don’t think this is sufficient to explain EA disinterest, because there are also neartermist EAs who are skeptical about near-term AGI, or just don’t incorporate it into their assessment of cause areas and interventions.
I agree with some of the comments below—I think most EAs support things like lab-grown meat for animal welfare reasons. If there’s a strong argument (which I think there is) for lab-grown meat ALSO being the best possible thing you could do for biodiversity, and making that argument to the right people could literally 10x the amount of money going to lab-grown meat R&D per year, then I think we should making that argument. If you’re consequentialist about it, the motives of the GBF are irrelevant. What matters is that they could massively fund lab-grown meat, and nobody is argueing to them that it’s their interest to do so.
And about huw’s point below (ie. many lobbyists make arguments that don’t align with their true motivations), I think that’s how lobbying usually works. It’s pretty easy to imagine EAs going to a COP and making the 100% true and good faith argument that lab-grown meat would be more effective for protecting biodiversity than, say, “protecting” on paper a random, 150-square km patch of water in the South Pacific. Those EAs might not care about biodiversity themselves, but if they succeeded in getting 0.1% of the budget dedicated to lab grown meat R&D, and thus DOUBLING annual investment in the sector, that would also be awesome for animal welfare.
I think part of the issue here probably is that EAs mostly don’t think biodiversity is good in itself, and instead believe only humans and animals experiencing well-being is good, and that the impact on well-being of promoting biodiversity is complex, uncertain and probably varies a lot with how and where biodiversity is being promoted. Hard to try and direct biodiversity funding if you don’t really clearly agree with raising biodiversity as a goal.
That’s not strictly true, a lot of animal orgs are farmer-facing and will speak to a motivation the farmer cares about (yield) while they secretly harbour another one (welfare of animals). I’ve heard that some orgs go to great lengths to hide their true intentions and sometimes even take money from their services just to appear as if they have a non-suspicious motivation.
I am actually curious why a similar approach hasn’t been tried in biodiversity—if it was just EAs yucking biodiversity (which I have seen, same as you), that’d be really disappointing.
Easier to persuade commercial entities of the merits of making more money (by incidentally doing the right thing) than persuade a reviewer of multiple competitive funding bids scoped for habitat preservation to fund a study into lab grown meat. At the end of the day, the proposals written by biodiversity enthusiasts with biodiversity rationales and very specific biodiversity metrics are just going to be more plausible,[1] even if they turn out to be ineffective.
For similar reasons, I don’t expect EA animal welfare funds to award funding to an economic think tank proposing to research how to grow the economy, even if the economic think tank insists its true goal is animal welfare and provides a lot of evidence that investment in meat alternatives and enforcement of animal welfare legislation is linked to overall economic growth.
Biobanks and biodiversity charity effectiveness research might stand a chance, obviously
Somewhat surprised to hear that people can successfully pull that off.
I agree that most EAs probably don’t think biodiversity is good in and of itself. I’m in the minority that do—I’m not just a hedonistic utilitatian. Also to reassure people
Its OK to be an EA and not just believe the only thing that matters in this universe is how much well-being there is.
I think the OP has a very good point, and with this much money moving around, biodiversity funding might well be an interesting area for some people to look into.
It’s plausible to me that biodiversity is valuable, but with AGI on the horizon it seems a lot cheaper in expectation to do more out-there interventions, like influencing AI companies to care about biodiversity (alongside wild animal welfare), recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species about to go extinct, and buying the cheapest land possible (middle of Siberia or Australian desert, not productive farmland). Then when the technology is available in a few decades and we’re better at constructing stable ecosystems de novo, we can terraform the deserts into highly biodiverse nature preserves. Another advantage of this is that we’ll know more about animal welfare—as it stands now the sign of habitat preservation is pretty unclear.
A couple more “out-there” ideas for ecological interventions:
“recording the DNA of undiscovered rainforest species”—yup, but it probably takes more than just DNA sequences on a USB drive to de-extinct a creature in the future. For instance, probably you need to know about all kinds of epigenetic factors active in the embryo of the creature you’re trying to revive. To preserve this epigenetic info, it might be easiest to simply freeze physical tissue samples (especially gametes and/or embryos) instead of doing DNA sequencing. You might also need to use the womb of a related species—bringing back mammoths is made a LOT easier by the fact that elephants are still around! -- and this would complicate plans to bring back species that are only distantly related to anything living. I want to better map out the tech tree here, and understand what kinds of preparation done today might aid what kinds of de-extinction projects in the future.
Normal environmentalists worry about climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, and other prosaic, slow-rolling forms of mild damage to the natural environment. Not on their list: nuclear war, mirror bacteria, or even something as simple as AGI-supercharged economic growth that sees civilization’s economic footprint doubling every few years. I think there is a lot that we could do, relatively cheaply, to preserve at least some species against such catastrophes.
For example, seed banks exist. But you could possibly also save a lot of insects from extinction by maintaining some kind of “mostly-automated insect zoo in a bunker”, a sort of “generation ship” approach as oppoed to the “cryosleep” approach that seedbanks can use. (Also, are even today’s most hardcore seed banks hardened against mirror bacteria and other bio threats? Probably not! Nor do many of them even bother storing non-agricultural seeds for things like random rainforest flowers.)
Right now, land conservation is one of the cheapest ways of preventing species extinctions. But in an AGI-transformed world, even if things go very well for humanity, the economy will be growing very fast, gobbling up a lot of land, and probably putting out a lot of weird new kinds of pollution. (Of course, we could ask the ASI to try and mitigate these environmental impacts, but even in a totally utopian scenario there might be very strong incentives to go fast, eg to more quickly achieve various sublime transhumanist goods and avoid astronomical waste.) By contrast, the world will have a LOT more capital, and the cost of detailed ecological micromanagement (using sensors to gather lots of info, using AI to analyze the data, etc) will be a lot lower. So it might be worth brainstorming ahead of time what kinds of ecological interventions might make sense in such a world, where land is scarce but capital is abundant and customized micro-attention to every detail of an environment is cheap. This might include high-density zoos like described earlier, or “let the species go extinct for now, but then reliably de-extinct them from frozen embryos later”, or “all watched over by machines of loving grace”-style micromanaged forests that achieve superhumanly high levels of biodiversity in a very compact area (and minimizing wild animal suffering by both minimizing the necessary population and also micromanaging the ecology to keep most animals in the population in a high-welfare state).
A lot of today’s environmental-protection / species-extinction-avoidance programs aren’t even robust to, like, a severe recession that causes funding for the program to get cut for a few years! Mainstream environmentalism is truly designed for a very predictable, low-variance future… it is not very robust to genuinely large-scale shocks.
It’s kind of fuzzy and unclear what’s even important about avoiding species extinctions or preserving wild landscapes or etc, since these things don’t fit neatly into a total-hedonic-utilitarian framework. (In this respect, eco-value is similar to a lot of human culture and art, or values like “knowledge” or “excellence” and so forth.) But, regardless of whether or not we can make philosophical progress clarifying exactly what’s important about the natural world, maybe in a utopian future we could find crazy futuristic ways of generating lots more ecological value? (Obviously one would want to do this while avoiding creating lots of wild-animal suffering, but I think this still gives us lots of options.)
Obviously stuff like “bringing back mammoths” is in this category.
But maybe also, like, designing and creating new kinds of life? Either variants of earth life (what kinds of interesting things might dinosaurs have evolved into, if they hadn’t almost all died out 65 million years ago?), or totally new kinds of life that might be able to thrive on, eg, Titan or Europa (though obviously this sort of research might carry some notable bio-risks a la mirror bacteria, thus should perhaps only be pursued from a position of civilizational existential security).
Creating simulated, digital life-forms and ecologies? In the same way that a culture really obsessed with cool crystals, might be overjoyed to learn about mathematics and geometry, which lets them study new kinds of life.
There is probably a lot of exciting stuff you could do with advanced biotech / gene editing technologies, if the science advances and if humanity can overcome the strong taboo in environmentalism against taking active interventions in nature. (Even stuff like “take some seeds of plants threatened by global warming, drive them a few hours north, and plant them there where it’s cooler and they’ll survive better” is considered controversial by this crowd!)
Just like gene drives could help eradicate / suppress human scourges like malaria-carrying mosquitoes, we could also use gene drives to do tailored control of invasive species (which are something like the #2 cause of species extinctions, after #1 habitat destruction). Right now, the best way to control invasive species is often “biocontrol” (introducing natural predators of the species that’s causing problems) -- biocontrol actually works much better than its terrible reputation suggests, but it’s limited by the fact that there aren’t always great natural predators available, it takes a lot of study and care to get it right, etc.
Possibly you could genetically-engineer corals to be tolerant of slightly higher temperatures, and generally use genetic tech to help species adapt more quickly to a fast-changing world.
I totally agree that there are some “out there” interventions that, in a perfect world, we would be funding much more. In particular biobanking (recording the DNA of species about to go extinct) should be considered much more, I totally agree. Unfortunately, the world is full of techno-pessimists, deontologists, post-structuralists, diplomats who don’t know what any of the preceding words even mean, etc. This seems insane, but MANY conservationists are against de-extinction for (in my view) fairly straightforward technophobic reasons. Convincing THOSE people, who ALREADY have LOTs of money, that actually they should invest that money in changing the opinions of Sam Altman, will just simply never work. I DO think, however, you could get them to invest in lab grown meat. So while I agree with you in the abstract about some of that, I think that if we’re being pragmatic (our duty as EAs), then lab-grown meat is probably the best bet in terms of plausible arguments.
Also, just purely philosophically, I think that putting a lot of stock in the sign of habitat preservation can lead to some strange places. What if we decide that the Amazon rainforest has a negative WAW sign? Would you be in favor of completely replacing it with a parking lot, if doing so could be done without undue suffering of the animals that already exist there? Maybe you are, which would be consistent, but that’s an extremely unintuitive ethical claim that I have yet to read anyone defend seriously or persuasively. Would be very interested in someone trying though!
Definitely not completely replacing because biodiversity has diminishing returns to land. If we pave the whole Amazon we’ll probably extinct entire families (not to mention we probably cause ecological crises elsewhere and disrupt ecosystem services etc), whereas on the margin we’ll only extinct species endemic to the deforested regions.
If the research on WAW comes out super negative I could imagine it being OK to replace half the Amazon with higher-welfare ecosystems now, and work on replacing the rest when some crazy AI tech allows all changes to be fully reversible. But the moral parliament would probably still not be happy about this. Eg killing is probably bad, and there is no feasible way to destroy half the Amazon in the near term without killing most of the animals in it.
My op-ed on why de-extinction of mammoths, at least, is a bad idea: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/editorial-mammoth-de-extinction-is-bad-conservation/
I don’t think this is sufficient to explain EA disinterest, because there are also neartermist EAs who are skeptical about near-term AGI, or just don’t incorporate it into their assessment of cause areas and interventions.
I agree with some of the comments below—I think most EAs support things like lab-grown meat for animal welfare reasons. If there’s a strong argument (which I think there is) for lab-grown meat ALSO being the best possible thing you could do for biodiversity, and making that argument to the right people could literally 10x the amount of money going to lab-grown meat R&D per year, then I think we should making that argument. If you’re consequentialist about it, the motives of the GBF are irrelevant. What matters is that they could massively fund lab-grown meat, and nobody is argueing to them that it’s their interest to do so.
And about huw’s point below (ie. many lobbyists make arguments that don’t align with their true motivations), I think that’s how lobbying usually works. It’s pretty easy to imagine EAs going to a COP and making the 100% true and good faith argument that lab-grown meat would be more effective for protecting biodiversity than, say, “protecting” on paper a random, 150-square km patch of water in the South Pacific. Those EAs might not care about biodiversity themselves, but if they succeeded in getting 0.1% of the budget dedicated to lab grown meat R&D, and thus DOUBLING annual investment in the sector, that would also be awesome for animal welfare.
Agreed, David.
Nitpick. I would say humans, animals, microorganisms, and digital beings.