Hello David et al.,
I’m a conservation scientist and ecologist with an interest in making conservation more about the quality of animal (including all human, not just elites) life.
I broadly agree with your theory of change: ruminants (and actually animal-sourced foods broadly) provide an area of shared interests between the conservation and effective altruism communities. My organization (Conservation X Labs, or CXL) is trying to do work very much along the lines of what you’ve described. We are partnering with several conservation NGOs and the Good Food Institute (whose new CEO, Nigel Sizer, is a biodiversity guy) to elevate alternative proteins as a biodiversity tool. CXL’s specialty is open innovation, prizes and challenges for conservation. We’ve just been awarded a grant to develop criteria for The Perfect Protein Prize, which—if funded—could incentivize innovators across relevant sectors to develop protein ingredients that can help achieve taste and cost parity. It would also involve a major media campaign placing alternative proteins at the heart of conservation. And we’re starting a brand new (and currently unfunded) effort to get a major institution that moves lots of resources for sustainable development to see the alternative proteins industry as an actionable investment. If any of this interests you or others on this forum, I’m happy to chat! nitin@conservationxlabs.org.
That said, I do think moving a big chunk of the $121B going into conservation at present (as proposed in the post) involves complexities that aren’t immediately apparent. (Disclaimer: I haven’t dug deep into where that stat comes from: the following is based mostly on my experience, ~20 years in the conservation world). First, conservation institutions are already aware of alternative proteins. WWF has a report on plant-based meats, and the IUCN included cultivated meat/fermentation as a potential biodiversity-benefiting technology in their documents on synthetic biology. The lack of support so far is about politics and culture, not lack of awareness. There is also generally quite a bit of inertia in conservation, in part because it’s a pretty decentralized field built on diverse objectives. My understanding is that a lot of the $121B going to conservation is actually government budgets going to support national parks and related wildlife management work; these protected areas were established through decades of lobbying of various governments that don’t adhere to a central mandate, and PAs are now popular with middle class citizens and the tourism industry worldwide. I assume getting broad support for alternative proteins would similarly require more than a few EAs at a few conservation conferences—it will require a lot of folks in lots of capitol buildings over a long period. Finally, I (and CXL) believe conservationists are not really trained to think about technology and major transformations as a force for good. Conservationists are trained to value that which is “natural” (minimal/selective human interference), and we spend a lot of our time around local/indigenous peoples whose traditional, historically sustainable ways of life are under siege by modernity. It makes sense to be skeptical that food being produced in a sterile factory in some big city is going to make life better for the people and animals that have historically been left behind by centralized development models.
So—I think there should absolutely be an alliance between EAs and conservationists on animal-sourced foods and alternative proteins. But I think the conservation sector may not embrace APs as quickly as we would like, for what I think are both good and bad reasons.
Hello David, I think we’re on the same page! I especially agree about the reluctance to give up field work (which is gratifying day-to-day) for bureaucratic/policy/maybe-this-will-change-the-world-in-fifteen-years work. I suffered from that reluctance for some time. Really hard to give up working with elephants.