Two Hypocrisies of Conservation

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.
- The Wilderness Act

Environmentalism is the defining political movement of the past century. The laws it passed (the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Air and Water Acts, Wilderness and Wetland protection Acts, the Endangered Species Act and more) influence every government action, touch almost every aspect of private economic activity, and have spread across the world in similar form. Conservation is a particular form of environmentalism that specifically aims to protect natural systems from the influence of mankind and was the most important motivation for environmentalism during its legislative victories in the 20th century.

The legislative and cultural influence of conservation has both large costs and large benefits. This post is not an exhaustive quantification of the net benefits of the environmental conservation movement. Still, I claim that the conservation movement has consistently worked against two of its central goals. Conservation is both unnatural and polluting. 

A stated goal of many environmental philosophies and laws is to allow nature to operate free from the influence of human kind. This goal is appealing to me. Leaving much of the Earth open to foster diverse examples of the miracle of life is a magnanimous gesture that humanity can and should rise to meet. Something like E.O Wilson’s Half Earth is exciting and possible as we get more efficient with our living space, energy production, and farming.

Despite this worldview, conservationists frequently support schemes that shape the natural world to their preferred image. Conservationists and the US Fish and Wildlife Service plan to hunt and kill more than four hundred thousand owls in the Pacific Northwest to protect their preferred owl species from competition, they work with the Florida government to capture and euthanize tens of thousands of pythons in the Everglades, or help the USDA kill 26,000 beavers to the benefit of some fish.

The point here is not that these efforts fail a cost benefit test, or even that they are morally wrong in a broad sense. Invasive species can cause negative externalities so governments are well placed to deal with them. The scale of these programs sounds big, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the impact of factory farming on animal welfare. There are other arguments that could support actions like these.

The point is that this is not leaving the natural world to its own devices. Capturing and killing four hundred thousand barred owls to insulate a few thousand spotted ones is slashing and burning to create a zoo with the rarest and most fragile species protected from nature’s selection. Nature is constant competition, roil, and change. Every species that conservationists want to preserve was once an invasive species that replaced something before it. Preserving all of the species that were around in 1972 would be far more unnatural than allowing a higher rate of extinction as a side effect of human civilization. It’s not even clear that a higher extinction rate leads to lower biodiversity, since faster extinction can be balanced by, and often creates, higher speciation rates. Freezing an environment in time would be the ultimate capitulation of nature to humanity’s whims. Far more strange and unprecedented than rapid extinctions as ecosystems adapt to a new dominant species on earth.

The second hypocrisy is more practical: conservation is polluting. Whether from an unfortunate series of mistakes or a deliberate bias against clean energy, environmentally friendly infrastructure, and dense housing, the environmental conservation movement has caused massive pollution and carbon emissions.

Anti-nuclear protests following the Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island meltdowns handicapped the nuclear energy industry, leading to more reliance on fossil fuels for the next several decades.

The extra air pollution released by the power generation that replaced nuclear plants probably cost upwards of 300 million life-years globally. Note that this does not account for the additional carbon emissions from the fossil fuel sources that replaced nuclear energy. More recently, nuclear plant shutdowns in Germany meant more use of coal and natural gas.

Beyond nuclear energy, environmental permitting delays on fracking and natural gas pipelines meant a slower transition away from West Virginia coal. The National Environmental Policy Act slows down and cancels more clean energy projects than fossil fuel plants.

Environmental regulations on building make cities less dense and more sprawling. They make intercity transport like high speed rail prohibitively expensive to build, both of which lead to more driving and more emissions.

Organic farming uses more land. Brown paper bags and straws take much more energy to produce and recycle than plastic ones, causing more carbon emissions and environmental damage. Bans on sulfur in cargo ship fuel have accelerated global temperature rise.

The track record of environmentalist policies improving the environment is worse than random.

These hypocrisies are specific to the conservationist motivation for environmentalism. This motivation is a green-washed aversion to change of all kinds. Conservationists are willing to invade and intervene in the natural world to preserve their preferred image of nature. They are willing to induce millions of tons of carbon emissions and millions of lives worth of air pollution to prevent the construction of a solar farm or power plant that they don’t like.

There are many views which avoid these problems while maintaining a concern for the environment. Supply side progressivism, for example, cares a lot about climate change and ecosystem stability, but for more anthropocentric reasons which allows interventions in nature without inconsistency. And it acknowledges the massive barriers that environmental permitting has put up to environmentally friendly development.

Conservationist environmentalism has had massive influence in the US and across the entire world for the past several decades. It has had some important successes, but also several unconscionable failures. New motivations for environmentalism are needed to avoid these problems.