This is a linkpost for Does the Animal-Rights Movement Encourage Wilderness Preservation? by Brian Tomasik. The summary, and table of contents are below.
First published: 2013 Dec 15. Last nontrivial update: 2018 Jun 13.
Summary
The animal movement is doing important work to show people the importance of reducing the suffering of dogs, chickens, and lobsters at the hands of humans. However, many animal advocates also strongly defend wilderness, in spite of the immense amounts of animal suffering it contains. Some animal supporters are environmentalists because they think ecological preservation best advances animal welfare, while others hold an additional moral view that nature is intrinsically valuable. It’s troubling that spreading the animal movement risks creating more defenders of wilderness who may cause more animal suffering than they prevent. Plausibly the animal movement is still net positive, especially if future wisdom helps to correct its present oversights, but I think it’s safest if we push explicitly on the cause of reducing wild-animal suffering—both among animal activists and others who are open-minded.
I like this article (maybe mostly because I like Tomasik), though I find it a bit dated, and the twelve years that have passed since then indicate that the thesis is somewhat off (to be fair, I think Tomasik would agree that his evidence is very anecdotal). While the popularity of wilderness preservation in the mainstream has grown since then, it seems that large fractions of the animal rights / welfare movement has been pretty distant from it. Anti-wilderness-preservation views have been endorsed by some of the main animal rights influencers: James Aspey, Die Militante Veganerin, Gary Yourofsky (to varying extents: I think Gary Yourofsky finds nature bloody and somewhat horrific, but I’m not sure that he’s explicitly anti-wilderness preservation, but the first two are clearer on it).
Meanwhile, in animal welfare (at least the EA-leaning side of it), consideration for wild animal welfare is quite common. But that slice of animal welfare is a small world.
One anecdotal observation is that among more “normal” ethical vegans, habitat destruction is commonly seen as much less important than factory farming.
However, I think there is truth in the article: vegans are probably more likely to have concerns about “the environment”, and there are pro-habitat-preservation memes that end up being tied with animal rights. So I’m not saying that animal advocacy systematically make people less favourable to wilderness preservation.