Disenangling “nature.”
It is my favorite thing, but I want to know its actual value.
Is it replaceable. Is it useful. Is it morally repugnant. Is it our responsibility. Is it valuable.
“I asked my questions. And then I discovered a whole world I never knew. That’s my trouble with questions. I still don’t know how to take them back.”
Tandena Wagner
Karma: 525
and I refuse to elaborate further
This was well written and informative. I’m interested in improving government performance to allow coordination and combat the problems that come with corruption, so thank you for linking away to those solutions as well.
Besides being a local node, I think the incidental translation of EA concepts to Estonian is potentially quite valuable.
Thank you for writing this post—I like to keep a mental list of ways conservation and wild animal welfare can work together. Somehow I forgot this fit the criteria.
This is interesting to me as well. It seems like more of a philosophical question to me, but I have not given it though consideration to say. If you don’t mind sharing, how would empirical anchors inform this?
I found the linked Case for Insect Consciousness really compelling. This is the sort of mindset I want conducting this kind of research. Reading the honest skepticism combined with careful self examination greatly boosted my respect for the project. I’m keen to learn more.
We’re working on it! A quick synopsis of the more fleshed-out argument I’m hoping to post soon on the foundational philosophy: It seems oddly universal that people to care about nature. For another it seems like the sort of scarce resource (like historical artifacts) that future humans will value. I think we will place great value on it after we reach takeoff, post-scarcity, etc. Furthermore I think that a variety of experiences existing is better than a world full of similar experiences.
A portion of the philosophical basis you are looking for was recently posted on the EA forum (it was one of the winners of the Essays on Longtermism competition!). The essay illustrates the value of “now-or-never” preservation and explores to what degree information is valuable to future generations. The essay suggests that preservation of species themselves is valuable but not practical compared to documentation. I think there are practical actions we can take to preserve species, but our second recommended intervention was biobanking for the reasoning given in the essay. The essay also touches on the concern of arbitrariness.For context, we’ve never said that extinction is an x-risk or otherwise a top-priority cause area. But I’m a believer in big-tent EA. In my view lots of things like improving housing policy or etc are good, even if not maximally good compared to the most-important cause. I certainly don’t want to take people off of x-risk work, but I think this still falls under the Effective Altruism umbrella.
There’s lots of environmental conservation money being spent. People value something they label “nature”, and it seems good for people to get more of what they want without being confused, counterproductive, economically destructive, etc, as so much of the environmental movement is. I also think its important to work on clarifying what exactly they/we are valuing. I hope to contribute on that front as well.
So, yes, very important, and we’re working on it!
High-impact projects fighting biodiversity loss
Hi Ben, thank you very much for the comment!
Excellent link, I need to carefully consider it.
-- My main thought is that alt-proteins need to be “normal” before we will know if people are willing to adopt them. My assumption is that once they are “just another foodstuff” it will depend on PTC. But right now they are new (aka scary and weird) - which would dominate the survey results. (This somewhat contradicts the increase in taste preference from informed tasting...) I like the example in the dining hall the best because it is in an environment where the alt-protein option was “out in the open” and eating it was a community activity. I think this would normalize the meal faster than most other situations. I’m not sure how long would be long enough for me to agree that adoption had stabilized at its total reach. I’d probably say 3-10 years, but two generations to really know...Food (including taste) is very cultural.
I also think that once the PTC factors are equivalent and alt protein is normal, that “not harming animals” will be a huge factor in people’s choices. And it would spill over into pushing other people to adopt alt proteins. This is just my feeling, not verified or researched in any way. I am new to the domain of alt-proteins, and need to ground myself more!
So taking a step back. Yes, I very much agree it is not at all certain that alt proteins will be widely adopted and I do not think it is wise to assume that once alt proteins reach PTC, “they will come.” I felt comfortable reaching the conclusion that it is a top biodiversity intervention based on 20% of total meat consumption. This feels within reason, and would still make a very large difference for global biodiversity extinction risk. The dining hall example had 26% adoption in 10 weeks, woo!
To be honest, I’m not familiar with other meat reduction strategies. Please catch me up to speed?
With encouraging vegetarianism: My impression is that changing beliefs (done gradually with intermediate steps) is making headway, but more slowly than “purchase options.”
Thanks for mentioning the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, I hadn’t heard of it!
On first glance I am skeptical of the perpetual endowments. Its not that perpetual endowments aren’t great setups. Most broadly, I’m concerned that legal structures without willful populations of people behind them will eventually fall to the active desires of the time. That’s important because, even if that were a temporary reversal, it might negate the benefits to biodiversity (habitat, extinction etc). I don’t have a particular scenario in mind for how this would play out, and I need to game it out more completely to have confidence in my position.More specifically, a lot of the areas most desirable to protect exist with poor government coordination and high levels of corruption. Perpetual endowments I don’t think can withstand those conditions. So I consider perpetual endowments to be “a useful tool when implemented in places with durable government structure, given that they are initiated with care.”
edit: Oops I forgot your last paragraph.
Thanks for giving us some grace that it’s unwieldy to write out an ethical framework lol. I’m painfully aware that its a huge gap, and it’s been weighing on me ever since it was pointed out here. I fully intend to write down a more thorough “philosophy of biodiversity.” It needs some clarity and delimitation, and all the flaws to be opened up to discussion.
Quantifying the cost-effectiveness of the top biodiversity interventions
The research process of EcoResilience Initiative
Hi Dave,
I just posted a list of biodiversity interventions today (working on that rigorous dive!). I’ll add the ones you’ve listed here and would like your suggestions for further additions to the list. I care about biodiversity for some of the reasons you stated, and wonder if you can elaborate on why you think these are promising interventions for biodiversity conservation?
For example: I’m not sure how to think about using resources from wilderness for livelihoods. I would assume that this would both increase people’s desire for protection of wilderness, and also increase people’s desire to convert wilderness to farming of those natural resources. Do you know anything about the rate that livelihoods based on wild-sourced products have/do not have adverse outcomes for biodiversity?
Local health clinics: I am not sure if I know what you mean by this. How are they increasing appreciation for indigenous populations/wildlife? Can you describe it further?
Do you have any comments on the IUCN GreenList of “ongoing successful conservation for people and nature in a fair and effective way”?
Big List of Biodiversity Interventions
Oh wow. I’m a fan of Conservation X Labs from the biodiversity side! I only know them from their conservation work, and have a positive opinion of their priorities from what I’ve been able to glean.
Fertility control is one of the 20 areas I looked into for EcoResilience Initiative while investigating techniques for enhancing biodiversity, as opposed to wild animal welfare impact. I don’t expect it to be the top biodiversity intervention (mostly because I’m not sure how well it will scale). But I would still say it definitely has the potential to be highly impactful. Rodent contraceptive is one of the top fertility control targets. Australia, New Zealand, and island conservation organizations are serious about rodent fertility control for their conservation programs. It is probably being held back by concerns about negative reception than technical feasibility. A lot of conservation decisions are driven by a fear of doing a small amount of damage, overly prioritizing delay despite the large amount of damage that could be potentially prevented. Perhaps I should also mention that immunocontraception doesn’t have to be super scalable to be a huge improvement over current methods. Its pretty crazy what lengths conservation programs have gone to to eradicate invasive species off of islands.
There is also the potential for similar hormonal fertility control to be rapidly developed in other highly damaging invasive mammals like feral pigs, horses, deer, and goats if it performs well in field trials with rats.
Seeing Conservation X Labs mentioned on the EA forum raises my opinion of them even more! They are tackling biodiversity by developing linchpin technologies, and really look for scalable impact.
New Cause Area: Low-Hanging Fruit
We encourage AIs, like all members of the EA community,
Someone please drop a link to the mind upload, I missed it.
I’m working on trying to describe the environmental future we want to have, so I’ll have written up a better answer soon.™️
I really like the variety of cause areas you chose. Simple, appealing descriptions that draw in someone who hasn’t encountered EA before. 17 hours is really short for such quality information!
Hi, thank you for voicing this concern. I read your recent post, “Rewilding Is Extremely Bad.”
Personally, I doubt that most wild animals have negative lives. (informed by analogy to most of our own history of subsistence-level survival, and my doubt that they would consider their lives to have not been worth living). I also don’t believe that total hedonic utilitarianism is a complete frame for thinking about this. I think it is important to factor in people’s and animals’ preferences for continued existence. Mostly I think we just don’t know much about this question overall. I do think we should care about this fundamental question and certainly do what is in our power to improve the lives of other beings.
I think you may have gotten the wrong impression from my use of “biodiversity.” It would be understandable to assume that I want to maximize Earth’s total biomass / total natural land area / number of wild animals, or something like that. I’m actually mostly interested in preserving the diversity of life that has evolved on Earth, such as by avoiding species extinctions. I think there are several good reasons to do this, such as to provide the far future with valuable information that would otherwise be lost, potentially fulfill uplift-style moral obligations we may have towards nonhuman animals, and generally keep our options open.
Preserving natural land tends to be a tractable, robust, large scale way to prevent species extinctions. But there are other biodiversity interventions that work with very small numbers of individuals, like seed banks or analogous “insect zoo”, or even zero individuals, like biobanking tissue samples with the aim of de-extinction in a utopian future world.
Perhaps we could both celebrate something like a well-designed insect zoo—where we care for many small populations of insects, work toward better understanding their many different desires, elevate the value of their lives for more to see, and preserve a wide variety of life forms into the future. There are probably also a variety of biodiversity-enhancing measures that would simultaneously boost animal welfare. Unfortunately which interventions are good depend a lot on figuring out the proper value of complex vs simple animals and how far into positive or net-negative territory different animals are. I hope to write up a list of these types of mutually beneficial interventions.