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 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!
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/
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.