I don’t believe biodiversity is an important cause area, for basically two reasons:
Species themselves are not inherently valuable. The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable, and the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell—even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect, and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
You could perhaps argue that loss of biodiversity poses an existential threat to humanity, which matters more for the long-run future than wild animal welfare. But it seems like a very weak x-risk compared to things like AGI or nuclear war.
Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters, and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t—the unit of value is an individual’s conscious experience. If you wanted to ague that biodiversity should be a high priority, you’d have to claim either that (1) increasing biodiversity is a particularly effective way of improving wild animal welfare or (2) loss of biodiversity constitutes a meaningful existential risk. I’ve never seen a good argument for either of those positions, but an argument might exist.
(Or you could argue that biodiversity is very important for some third reason, but it seems unlikely to me that there could be any third reason that’s important enough to be worth spending EA resources on.)
Even if the only point that matters at the end of the line is an individual’s conscious experience (which I think is highly debatable), species themselves are inherently valuable in that the complex interplay of species, which we do not fully understand, is a huge part of the whole system that allows any individual consciousness to exist.
We know bees are critical and valuable because of their role in pollinating plants we eat. We know whales are critical and valuable because of their role in fertilizing the ocean so that phytoplankton (who produce most of the world’s oxygen) can flourish. As Ray pointed out, we have a direct example of what happened when we removed a predator from an ecosystem, trying to do good, and actually totally messed things up—and then reintroduced them and helped things get back into balance (wolves in Yellowstone).
Piggybacking off Naryan, we generally have no idea which nodes of this system of species would cause the whole thing to collapse if they went extinct, and as more and more biodiversity is lost, we are eliminating redundancies and robustness in the system.
I’m reminded of Chesterton’s fence:
‘There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”’
There are hundreds of bee species and most of them contribute very little to crop pollination, see here. So pollination is not a good argument to support bee diversity conservation.
threatened wild bees are not observed on crops because those wild species are threatened, and so are less common and less likely to appear on crops.
choice to conserve the more common wild species will be cheaper because those wild species are not threatened and do well in agricultural environments.
the authors of the paper believe:
protecting common wild species that pollinate crops is cheaper than protecting threatened wild species that no longer pollinate crops.
other arguments than protecting pollinators should be made to protect biodiversity because threatened pollinator species don’t do much for crops.
if no ecosystem service can be clearly identified for most threatened species, the only argument available to protect biodiversity is a moral one.
It’s a clean argument but I it presumes that we can ignore the impacts on our ecosystems of species extinction in general (biodiversity loss).
The function of pollinators is to pollinate plants. Some pollinators have exclusive relationships with plants, for example, the few species of chocolate midge. Unfortunately, pollinator habitats require biodiversity. Without the health of the habitat, which biodiversity ensures, the function of the wild species that provide the known ecosystem service will halt. The end result will be the loss of the pollinator and its plants from the planet. This is the fundamental problem with relying on wild species in the first place. How many threats to chocolate midges exist because of biodiversity loss within their habitat? If we lose the wrong rainforest species, we would then lose chocolate midges, and then we will lose chocolate.
Returning to the bees, though..., the articles’s authors seem to think that biodiversity declines are irrelevant to food crop pollinators. They have theories about how to protect the few wild species that still pollinate food crops, though it’s important to recognize that those species populations are still large.
What threats to those species do the authors identify that they have special defenses against, particularly once biodiversity declines reach new levels of species losses and habitat destruction? I didn’t read any. I think ecosystem services remain a valid frame within which to argue for biodiversity maintenance.
To be clear, I expect multiple pressures to threaten all agricultural crops over the next few decades, and to the extent that agricultural areas serve wild bee populations, those bees will suffer anything that threatens the crops themselves.
“Ecosystem services” is not a useful frame and does not support biodiversity maintenance (read my summary or the relevant section in Maier’s book). Biodiversity comes with many disservices (think of pollinators of noxious weeds, crop pests, diseases...) and its conservation can stand in the way of services. Any unbiased assessment of the question whether biodiversity is valuable on ecosystem grounds must include those disservices and the context of non-ecosystem services. More importantly, it is not diversity (of species, functions or other categories) that performs valuable services, but particular species or populations. It is a category mistake to confuse biodiversity with individual species.
To let you know, I don’t believe ecosystem services matter beyond the fact that we depend on those services, directly or indirectly, and don’t have readily available substitutes. Nature can be inconvenient and messy, but I think humanity has to protect it in order to get any good from it. Biodiversity supports provision of services through protection of habitats of known service providers and through additional services from unidentified (or poorly known) service providers.
The acknowledgement of services that ecosystems provide is an act of intellectual honesty or of using the scout mindset. We don’t have a way to replace services if we judge them imperfect or even inadequate, thus the inconvenience of having to accommodate demands to protect biodiversity. For example, once bees stop pollinating crops because of heat waves destroying crops and the rest of bee habitats, we will suffer lackluster service from those few wild bee species that we acknowledge as direct ecosystem service providers. I could then criticize the lack of value of wild bees in general (for example, accuse bee species of being costly to maintain and fickle providers of pollinator services) or wish humanity had protected them better.
Rainforests are another inconvenient part of Earth’s biosphere. I could make appeals to protect the habitat of the Chocolate Midge or discuss the benefits of moisture provided by rainforest local climate or the carbon sink service provided by rainforest biomass or the undiscovered rainforest plants that could have medicinal value but the truth is I don’t eat chocolate and I don’t live near a rainforest and I’m not sick with any dread disease and I believe that climate change is self-amplifying now. Plus the only thing that would happen to me in a rainforest is a bite from some poisonous animal. I’d like to stay as far away from rainforests as I can. But do I think rainforest biodiversity provides services and has obvious value? Yes I do.
Option value does not inherently favor biodiversity conservation. Conservation without apparent or rationally expected benefits is a costly gamble that can be won but also lost (if it turns out that conserving had less value than not conserving). Imagine you spend resources on conserving a species that will never turn out to be beneficial, or at least less beneficial than having spent the resources on other, more valuable things.
To the extent that moral uncertainty pushes you to give more credence to common sense ethical views, it does point towards prioritizing biodiversity more than a consequentialist view would otherwise imply, as “let’s preserve species” and “let’s preserve option value” are common sense ethical views. Probably not enough to affect prioritization in practice though.
Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
> The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable
Are you saying it’s the ONLY thing that has value, and that everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong? (For example, I imagine this doesn’t hold in preference utilitarianism, and maybe not in longtermist thinking.)
> the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell
What’s your scientific evidence to support that, and is it refutable? Or can the opposite be asserted with the same data?
I think most ecologists/environmentalists would strongly dispute that, and I have certainly heard them making that case. They would contend, with evidence, that a biodiverse ecosystem is essential for resilience, health and maintaining a variety of ecological niches, and is essential for almost all species to thrive and adapt and evolve.
I’ve observed a group of gardens over several decades as gardeners stopped using pesticides, and seen a flourishing of bird species, some of whom spend hours apparently flying as a group just for fun. (I presume this is teleologically a preparation for migration, but they wouldn’t do it without some form of pleasure feedback, which we can presume they value.)
>even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect,
Did you steel man on this, or search for good arguments? How are you defining wild animal welfare?
Please allow me some what-aboutism:
What about the whole science of ecology, and evidence from degraded ecosystems (including consequences for individual species and animals?)
What about changes in the rate of animal and plant pathology where keystone and maintenance species are lost? (Wolves in Yellowstone and cleaner wrass in coral reefs are easy examples, also snails in ponds.
What about pollinators?
Taking your argument to it’s logical extreme, we would eliminate almost all wild species. Would that really be a good planet for most people and most animals to live in? You would also be closing off many evolutionary pathways, with innumerable potential positive outcomes. As far as I can tell, this only makes sense if you place a massive priority on suffering cf pleasure in the very short term, and consider most wild animal lives as net negative in suffering vs pleasure. If you do. on your scale of suffering vs pleasure, where is the zero on the X-axis, and how do you justify that as being the balance point?
Wild animals themselves seem to want to live strongly enough to make great effort to stay alive—why should you (or any human) be deciding FOR them that they are better off not existing at all? Does this not apply even more, given that we can’t even prove that you and other humans have free will?
>and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
At the moment I think we’re just talking about reducing the rate of biodiversity loss, so if your original contention is correct, wild animal suffering is already reducing fast, at least in absolute terms, maybe not per individual.
But in many ecosystems maintaining or protecting it may indeed be the best way. Yellowstone wolves and coral bleaching provide great examples.
You’d also have to presume that as the proportion of domestic animals to wild animals increased, as you terminated the wild species, the domestic species were, from their own experience and with their ‘animal’ consciousness, happier than the lost wild species. Assuming you are very conscientious, that may be true for any pets that you yourself look after, but can we be sure that many generations of bears, stags, foxes etc would not miss vast pleasure from many lifetimes of behaviour.
You could perhaps argue that loss of biodiversity poses an existential threat to humanity
Yes, both medium and long term, perhaps through a reduced portfolio of anti-virals, and probably most of all in the far future, in ways we can probably not imagine, no more than early humanoids could understand the importance of sand/silicon for AI.
, which matters more for the long-run future than wild animal welfare. But it seems like a very weak x-risk compared to things like AGI or nuclear war.
AGI and nuclear war are both risks, whereas biodiversity loss is certain: it has been happening and will continue to happen. Whether it becomes an obvious X-risk in future centuries is very hard for us to assess right now, but again it’s probably through reduced capacity to deal with pathogens that we would experience it most.
At the very least, could we consider the distress to those who love many of these species, and loss of a popular phenomena which has been much observed lately: cross-species friendship?
>Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters,
Really?! That’s very pejorative, don’t you think?
Your evidence? And your sample size?
> and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t
On what grounds are you dismissing that contention, for those with slightly or very different philsophical and ethical positions to yourself?
—the unit of value is an individual’s conscious experience.
Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
I don’t think it depends on those things, what they meant by species not being inherently valuable is that each individual of a species is inherently valuable. It’s a claim that the species’ value comes from the value of the individuals (not taking into account value from stuff like possibly making ecological collapse less likely etc).
(I only read the beginning of your comment, sorry for not responding to the rest!)
How is value is derived from conscious experience? Don’t you mean capacity to suffer is determined by degree of conscious experience , which in turn makes individual animals important/having value. This does not mean that species are valueless which then begs the question of, how are species valuable.
I am no ecologist or environmental scientist but I see biodiversity loss as a process not an outcome. The outcome is increased vulnerability of ecosystems to collapse.
You say you haven’t seen a good argument for (2). What argument’s have you read? I think the link between this and Civilizational Resilience is clear. For example, if important pollinator species go extinct this would have consequences for global food security and this would also likely be a risk multiplier for multiple X-Risks. The Future of Life Institute has a decent article. There is also likely a very high degree of error in our assessment of this area, so the implications could be a lot worse (or better) than we think given that natural systems (of which animals play essential roles in) I would be conservative here.
We also don’t have to spent all of EA resources on this. We can spend some. It doesn’t have to be a binary, prioritisation is just a best evidenced-based guest after all with significant uncertainty.
I also think from a moralistic point of view, conservation of nature and biodiversity, is important for the well-being of humans, for spiritual reasons, given how exposure to nature has deep implications for our well-being (connectedness to nature is positive correlated to altruism for example—though there is the question of cause and effect). We shouldn’t only be concerned about reducing X-Risks but also maximising human well-being and self-actualisation. Its the reason S-Risks are now a thing.
I don’t believe biodiversity is an important cause area, for basically two reasons:
Species themselves are not inherently valuable. The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable, and the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell—even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect, and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
You could perhaps argue that loss of biodiversity poses an existential threat to humanity, which matters more for the long-run future than wild animal welfare. But it seems like a very weak x-risk compared to things like AGI or nuclear war.
Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters, and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t—the unit of value is an individual’s conscious experience. If you wanted to ague that biodiversity should be a high priority, you’d have to claim either that (1) increasing biodiversity is a particularly effective way of improving wild animal welfare or (2) loss of biodiversity constitutes a meaningful existential risk. I’ve never seen a good argument for either of those positions, but an argument might exist.
(Or you could argue that biodiversity is very important for some third reason, but it seems unlikely to me that there could be any third reason that’s important enough to be worth spending EA resources on.)
Even if the only point that matters at the end of the line is an individual’s conscious experience (which I think is highly debatable), species themselves are inherently valuable in that the complex interplay of species, which we do not fully understand, is a huge part of the whole system that allows any individual consciousness to exist.
We know bees are critical and valuable because of their role in pollinating plants we eat. We know whales are critical and valuable because of their role in fertilizing the ocean so that phytoplankton (who produce most of the world’s oxygen) can flourish. As Ray pointed out, we have a direct example of what happened when we removed a predator from an ecosystem, trying to do good, and actually totally messed things up—and then reintroduced them and helped things get back into balance (wolves in Yellowstone).
Piggybacking off Naryan, we generally have no idea which nodes of this system of species would cause the whole thing to collapse if they went extinct, and as more and more biodiversity is lost, we are eliminating redundancies and robustness in the system.
I’m reminded of Chesterton’s fence:
‘There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”’
There are hundreds of bee species and most of them contribute very little to crop pollination, see here. So pollination is not a good argument to support bee diversity conservation.
Interpreting the paper’s claims:
threatened wild bees are not observed on crops because those wild species are threatened, and so are less common and less likely to appear on crops.
choice to conserve the more common wild species will be cheaper because those wild species are not threatened and do well in agricultural environments.
the authors of the paper believe:
protecting common wild species that pollinate crops is cheaper than protecting threatened wild species that no longer pollinate crops.
other arguments than protecting pollinators should be made to protect biodiversity because threatened pollinator species don’t do much for crops.
if no ecosystem service can be clearly identified for most threatened species, the only argument available to protect biodiversity is a moral one.
It’s a clean argument but I it presumes that we can ignore the impacts on our ecosystems of species extinction in general (biodiversity loss).
The function of pollinators is to pollinate plants. Some pollinators have exclusive relationships with plants, for example, the few species of chocolate midge. Unfortunately, pollinator habitats require biodiversity. Without the health of the habitat, which biodiversity ensures, the function of the wild species that provide the known ecosystem service will halt. The end result will be the loss of the pollinator and its plants from the planet. This is the fundamental problem with relying on wild species in the first place. How many threats to chocolate midges exist because of biodiversity loss within their habitat? If we lose the wrong rainforest species, we would then lose chocolate midges, and then we will lose chocolate.
Returning to the bees, though..., the articles’s authors seem to think that biodiversity declines are irrelevant to food crop pollinators. They have theories about how to protect the few wild species that still pollinate food crops, though it’s important to recognize that those species populations are still large.
What threats to those species do the authors identify that they have special defenses against, particularly once biodiversity declines reach new levels of species losses and habitat destruction? I didn’t read any. I think ecosystem services remain a valid frame within which to argue for biodiversity maintenance.
To be clear, I expect multiple pressures to threaten all agricultural crops over the next few decades, and to the extent that agricultural areas serve wild bee populations, those bees will suffer anything that threatens the crops themselves.
“Ecosystem services” is not a useful frame and does not support biodiversity maintenance (read my summary or the relevant section in Maier’s book). Biodiversity comes with many disservices (think of pollinators of noxious weeds, crop pests, diseases...) and its conservation can stand in the way of services. Any unbiased assessment of the question whether biodiversity is valuable on ecosystem grounds must include those disservices and the context of non-ecosystem services. More importantly, it is not diversity (of species, functions or other categories) that performs valuable services, but particular species or populations. It is a category mistake to confuse biodiversity with individual species.
To let you know, I don’t believe ecosystem services matter beyond the fact that we depend on those services, directly or indirectly, and don’t have readily available substitutes. Nature can be inconvenient and messy, but I think humanity has to protect it in order to get any good from it. Biodiversity supports provision of services through protection of habitats of known service providers and through additional services from unidentified (or poorly known) service providers.
The acknowledgement of services that ecosystems provide is an act of intellectual honesty or of using the scout mindset. We don’t have a way to replace services if we judge them imperfect or even inadequate, thus the inconvenience of having to accommodate demands to protect biodiversity. For example, once bees stop pollinating crops because of heat waves destroying crops and the rest of bee habitats, we will suffer lackluster service from those few wild bee species that we acknowledge as direct ecosystem service providers. I could then criticize the lack of value of wild bees in general (for example, accuse bee species of being costly to maintain and fickle providers of pollinator services) or wish humanity had protected them better.
Rainforests are another inconvenient part of Earth’s biosphere. I could make appeals to protect the habitat of the Chocolate Midge or discuss the benefits of moisture provided by rainforest local climate or the carbon sink service provided by rainforest biomass or the undiscovered rainforest plants that could have medicinal value but the truth is I don’t eat chocolate and I don’t live near a rainforest and I’m not sick with any dread disease and I believe that climate change is self-amplifying now. Plus the only thing that would happen to me in a rainforest is a bite from some poisonous animal. I’d like to stay as far away from rainforests as I can. But do I think rainforest biodiversity provides services and has obvious value? Yes I do.
.
Option value does not inherently favor biodiversity conservation. Conservation without apparent or rationally expected benefits is a costly gamble that can be won but also lost (if it turns out that conserving had less value than not conserving). Imagine you spend resources on conserving a species that will never turn out to be beneficial, or at least less beneficial than having spent the resources on other, more valuable things.
To the extent that moral uncertainty pushes you to give more credence to common sense ethical views, it does point towards prioritizing biodiversity more than a consequentialist view would otherwise imply, as “let’s preserve species” and “let’s preserve option value” are common sense ethical views. Probably not enough to affect prioritization in practice though.
Doesn’t this depend on assuming negative utilitarianism, and suffering-focused ethic, or a particular set of assumptions about the net pleasure vs pain in the life of an ‘average’ animal?
> The experiences of individual conscious animals are what’s valuable
Are you saying it’s the ONLY thing that has value, and that everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong? (For example, I imagine this doesn’t hold in preference utilitarianism, and maybe not in longtermist thinking.)
> the welfare of wild animals is basically orthogonal to biodiversity, at least as far as anyone can tell
What’s your scientific evidence to support that, and is it refutable?
Or can the opposite be asserted with the same data?
I think most ecologists/environmentalists would strongly dispute that, and I have certainly heard them making that case. They would contend, with evidence, that a biodiverse ecosystem is essential for resilience, health and maintaining a variety of ecological niches, and is essential for almost all species to thrive and adapt and evolve.
I’ve observed a group of gardens over several decades as gardeners stopped using pesticides, and seen a flourishing of bird species, some of whom spend hours apparently flying as a group just for fun. (I presume this is teleologically a preparation for migration, but they wouldn’t do it without some form of pleasure feedback, which we can presume they value.)
>even if biodiversity and wild animal welfare are positively correlated, I’ve never seen a good argument to that effect,
Did you steel man on this, or search for good arguments? How are you defining wild animal welfare?
Please allow me some what-aboutism:
What about the whole science of ecology, and evidence from degraded ecosystems (including consequences for individual species and animals?)
What about changes in the rate of animal and plant pathology where keystone and maintenance species are lost? (Wolves in Yellowstone and cleaner wrass in coral reefs are easy examples, also snails in ponds.
What about pollinators?
Taking your argument to it’s logical extreme, we would eliminate almost all wild species. Would that really be a good planet for most people and most animals to live in? You would also be closing off many evolutionary pathways, with innumerable potential positive outcomes. As far as I can tell, this only makes sense if you place a massive priority on suffering cf pleasure in the very short term, and consider most wild animal lives as net negative in suffering vs pleasure. If you do. on your scale of suffering vs pleasure, where is the zero on the X-axis, and how do you justify that as being the balance point?
Wild animals themselves seem to want to live strongly enough to make great effort to stay alive—why should you (or any human) be deciding FOR them that they are better off not existing at all? Does this not apply even more, given that we can’t even prove that you and other humans have free will?
>and surely increasing biodiversity isn’t the best way to improve wild animal welfare.
At the moment I think we’re just talking about reducing the rate of biodiversity loss, so if your original contention is correct, wild animal suffering is already reducing fast, at least in absolute terms, maybe not per individual.
But in many ecosystems maintaining or protecting it may indeed be the best way. Yellowstone wolves and coral bleaching provide great examples.
You’d also have to presume that as the proportion of domestic animals to wild animals increased, as you terminated the wild species, the domestic species were, from their own experience and with their ‘animal’ consciousness, happier than the lost wild species. Assuming you are very conscientious, that may be true for any pets that you yourself look after, but can we be sure that many generations of bears, stags, foxes etc would not miss vast pleasure from many lifetimes of behaviour.
Yes, both medium and long term, perhaps through a reduced portfolio of anti-virals, and probably most of all in the far future, in ways we can probably not imagine, no more than early humanoids could understand the importance of sand/silicon for AI.
AGI and nuclear war are both risks, whereas biodiversity loss is certain: it has been happening and will continue to happen. Whether it becomes an obvious X-risk in future centuries is very hard for us to assess right now, but again it’s probably through reduced capacity to deal with pathogens that we would experience it most.
At the very least, could we consider the distress to those who love many of these species, and loss of a popular phenomena which has been much observed lately: cross-species friendship?
>Most people who prioritize biodiversity (IMO) don’t seem to understand what actually matters,
Really?! That’s very pejorative, don’t you think?
Your evidence? And your sample size?
> and they act as if a species is a unit of inherent value, when it isn’t
On what grounds are you dismissing that contention, for those with slightly or very different philsophical and ethical positions to yourself?
Measured and compared how?
I don’t think it depends on those things, what they meant by species not being inherently valuable is that each individual of a species is inherently valuable. It’s a claim that the species’ value comes from the value of the individuals (not taking into account value from stuff like possibly making ecological collapse less likely etc).
(I only read the beginning of your comment, sorry for not responding to the rest!)
How is value is derived from conscious experience? Don’t you mean capacity to suffer is determined by degree of conscious experience , which in turn makes individual animals important/having value. This does not mean that species are valueless which then begs the question of, how are species valuable.
I am no ecologist or environmental scientist but I see biodiversity loss as a process not an outcome. The outcome is increased vulnerability of ecosystems to collapse.
You say you haven’t seen a good argument for (2). What argument’s have you read? I think the link between this and Civilizational Resilience is clear. For example, if important pollinator species go extinct this would have consequences for global food security and this would also likely be a risk multiplier for multiple X-Risks. The Future of Life Institute has a decent article. There is also likely a very high degree of error in our assessment of this area, so the implications could be a lot worse (or better) than we think given that natural systems (of which animals play essential roles in) I would be conservative here.
We also don’t have to spent all of EA resources on this. We can spend some. It doesn’t have to be a binary, prioritisation is just a best evidenced-based guest after all with significant uncertainty.
I also think from a moralistic point of view, conservation of nature and biodiversity, is important for the well-being of humans, for spiritual reasons, given how exposure to nature has deep implications for our well-being (connectedness to nature is positive correlated to altruism for example—though there is the question of cause and effect). We shouldn’t only be concerned about reducing X-Risks but also maximising human well-being and self-actualisation. Its the reason S-Risks are now a thing.