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.
Saying that protecting species is unnatural is quite silly, at least without further nuance: the reason these species require protection in the first place is human activity, not mere nature; eg the spotted owls are being invaded by the barred owls due to the huge amount of logging that has occurred in their native range which the barred owls are less sensitive to; so yes, it's indeed a further artificial intervention to cull the barred owls but it's to undo a major negative effect of a first intervention, so overall I like most people still see this as a form of nature preservation.
Thank you for the comment, Nathan. I have several responses to this:
First, the Endangered Species Act doesn't make any distinction between human-caused endangerment and "natural" endangerment. For example, the single largest listing in the history of the act for the Northern Long Eared Bat in 2015 was made due to a fungal disease spreading through the population, not human caused habtitat loss.
Second, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a standard which separates human's impact on the environment from animal ones without referring to the species difference. What I mean is that humans are not at all unique in having huge effects on the natural environment at the expense of many other species. The Ordovician mass extinction, for example, was caused by oxygen producing plants literally building skyscrapers (trees) across the whole earth, poisoning the atmosphere with gasses, and causing climate change. Similarly, there's this great video How Wolves Change Rivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws
Finally, if you do want to say "human impact is different because we're humans and we know better" or some such, then I can use that same distinction between the human world and the natural world to justify my human-centered environmentalism. Humans are wholly separate from nature, so we should focus our environmentalism on human value rather than any inherent value of endangered species or whatever.
Ok sure, that makes sense, but it does indeed require some further clarification. And thanks for responding.
Actually even infectious diseases are often suspected to be caused by humans in some manner, eg chitrydomycosis for amphibians, even though the mechanism is unclear which makes the human cause uncertain, but it stands to reason that humans help pathogens spread as with invasive macro-organisms, even if these diseases mostly occur in remote wilderness.
And yes of course biological organisms affect others and can do so enough to cause their extinction, another famous example being the immigration of more competitive taxa from North America when it joined with South America a few million years ago.
And yes if we want we can consider humans as just another instance of this phenomenon no matter how advanced we become, it's all just part of the processes of the universe. But I still object to calling it hypocritical for conservationists to remediate some of the effects of human activity through more activity.
As for your last point, I agree that conservationism should be pretty much entirely for the benefit of humans, since humans are the only organisms that can properly appreciate the esthetic of wilderness, and though others can to a limited extent I reckon that's more than negatively compensated by the suffering they have to endure by living in it. But since humans can appreciate wildnerness that is in fact a reason to preserve it including down to particular species from a human-centric perspective. You mention that extinctions lead to explosions of speciation, which is true, but it does still take quite a while for this to happen, much longer than our current lifespans, and more so at deeper taxonomic levels which are also being wiped out by humans, so overall I don't consider that a sufficiently compelling argument.
This principle of preserving nature for the benefit of humans had been my viewpoint for a very long time; however recently I have moved to a different one as a result of coming across opinions that the suffering of wild animals could actually be addressed and eventually eliminated (the leading voice in this seems to be Brian Tomasik https://reducing-suffering.org/), which hadn't really occurred to me as a possibility until then, though the issue of suffering in the wild is something that was vaguely nagging me somewhere in the back of my mind, and having had my eyes opened to the extent of the suffering and the possibility of putting an end to it I can't close them again, and thus instead I now hold the radically different position that all conscious existence in the wild should be eliminated, though existence in pseudo-wild conditions that minimize suffering would still be acceptable and I would again support it for the benefit of human esthetic enjoyment.
I found this post thought-provoking, because ultimately you are correct; a considerable fraction of the environmentalist movement has always been unwilling to commit to internal logical consistency, unwilling to admit the secondary and tertiary impacts of certain decisions may be worse than the consequence of what they are trying to prevent.
Nevertheless, it is entirely possible to claim that none of this is core to environmentalism; a rational agent, someone capable of calculating and considering tradeoffs, even if they were a passionate environmentalist, should be able to acknowledge the value of denser cities and nuclear power. I count myself in that boat.
That having been said, I consider myself to be a conservationist as well as an environmentalist, because the most salient meaning of “environmental conservation” to me is the protection of public lands. I would fight tooth and nail to defend wilderness designation where it exists and to expand it where it is currently rare. I, too, am inspired by the ideas of EO Wilson, or Ed Abbey, w.r.t. the proportion of the planet that could be set aside as protected.
It strikes me that if you could snap your fingers and add 25 IQ points to every self-proclaimed environmental activist (without affecting their core values whatsoever!) you would immediately see these self-defeating actions (shutting down nuclear, NIMBY protesting, NEPA) wind down or cease. Therefore it’s not a problem with the core values of this group — it’s a simple lack of logical/rational understanding.
Anti-nuclear activity has been primarily driven by fears other than conservation fears. NIMBYism is primarily about milieu (social) conservation, and occasionally public health conservation, not ecosystem conservation.
Do self-proclaimed environmental activists also sometimes act against nuclear, and in favor of NIMBY? Yes, but like everyone else they have a variety of competing motivations.
And to be fair to the anti-nuclear pro-environment people, many of them are self-consistent in also being in favor of energy use reduction and conservation. If they had their way on this later topic as well the closure of nuclear plants wouldn't be a problem. The fact that nuclear plants were shut down and yet energy use kept on increasing demonstrates that these people, and their two-fold motivations, were highly unlikely to be the major driver of nuclear plant closures.
In truth, the professional activist class is remarkably consistent in providing examples wherein they have failed to hew to their own stated methods or goals. It is far more rare to encounter someone who is extremely passionate about a given topic and who also has a rigorous foundational model for how they perceive the world, or how they interact with politics. NIMBYs are a central example, but they are certainly not alone.
I agree with Thomas Hutcheson: you are conflating two different things, conservationism and "green" virtue signalling from the likes of Greenpeace.
Yesterday my wife and I spent six hours clearing and re-baiting rat and stoat traps in a small patch of our local national park, and we'll be out again next weekend, and the next. Our conservation groups cooperate with hunters and like pesticides. We value what they do.
You are railing against middle-class urban housewives who are against guns and pesticides, who would never touch a rat trap and who object to the killing of feral cats. And who make a big deal of the post-consumer recycling they do, while flying off yearly for a high-consumption overseas holiday, wilfully oblivious to its environmental costs.
Your problem is with status-seeking narcissists who jump on anything that sounds virtuous to bolster their self esteem. They are immune to facts.
Whatever these new motivations may be, they will have to appeal to this group's vanity, while costing it nothing.
Or we could just ignore them and do what is right.
Nice piece Maxwell. As a pro-environmentalist, I can honestly say that I am baffled by the actions of “environmentalists” who claim to care about the planet.
Good post, but you're conflating a lot of purposes under one umbrella, to call the umbrella hypocritical. And then you're naming the umbrella after one of the many purposes under it in order to cast the hypocrisy and counter-productive aspersion on this purpose.
I can point to your own Anopheles genocidal post as being anti-conservationist. Does this make you a counter-productive hypocrit?
“Conservationism” and “Environmentalism” have little logical overlap. The first values “natural” system for their own sake. The later seeks to modify “unnatural” systems to increase human good.
There can be, of course, some pragmatic overlap. The human system of emitting quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere is damaging to human welfare AND vastly disruptive of many “natural” systems (and this disruption may have damaging consequences we are not yet aware of). But so, too, may activities to reduce the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere be disruptive of “natural” systems.
To the major points of this post, they are about environmentalism failing on its own terms. Restriction of the development of nuclear power over the last decades has led to greater emission of CO2 int the atmosphere. Policies that are "too costly" per unit of CO2 reduced mean less reduction in CO2 than if more efficient policies are chosen.
Saying that protecting species is unnatural is quite silly, at least without further nuance: the reason these species require protection in the first place is human activity, not mere nature; eg the spotted owls are being invaded by the barred owls due to the huge amount of logging that has occurred in their native range which the barred owls are less sensitive to; so yes, it's indeed a further artificial intervention to cull the barred owls but it's to undo a major negative effect of a first intervention, so overall I like most people still see this as a form of nature preservation.
Thank you for the comment, Nathan. I have several responses to this:
First, the Endangered Species Act doesn't make any distinction between human-caused endangerment and "natural" endangerment. For example, the single largest listing in the history of the act for the Northern Long Eared Bat in 2015 was made due to a fungal disease spreading through the population, not human caused habtitat loss.
Second, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a standard which separates human's impact on the environment from animal ones without referring to the species difference. What I mean is that humans are not at all unique in having huge effects on the natural environment at the expense of many other species. The Ordovician mass extinction, for example, was caused by oxygen producing plants literally building skyscrapers (trees) across the whole earth, poisoning the atmosphere with gasses, and causing climate change. Similarly, there's this great video How Wolves Change Rivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W88Sact1kws
Finally, if you do want to say "human impact is different because we're humans and we know better" or some such, then I can use that same distinction between the human world and the natural world to justify my human-centered environmentalism. Humans are wholly separate from nature, so we should focus our environmentalism on human value rather than any inherent value of endangered species or whatever.
Ok sure, that makes sense, but it does indeed require some further clarification. And thanks for responding.
Actually even infectious diseases are often suspected to be caused by humans in some manner, eg chitrydomycosis for amphibians, even though the mechanism is unclear which makes the human cause uncertain, but it stands to reason that humans help pathogens spread as with invasive macro-organisms, even if these diseases mostly occur in remote wilderness.
And yes of course biological organisms affect others and can do so enough to cause their extinction, another famous example being the immigration of more competitive taxa from North America when it joined with South America a few million years ago.
And yes if we want we can consider humans as just another instance of this phenomenon no matter how advanced we become, it's all just part of the processes of the universe. But I still object to calling it hypocritical for conservationists to remediate some of the effects of human activity through more activity.
As for your last point, I agree that conservationism should be pretty much entirely for the benefit of humans, since humans are the only organisms that can properly appreciate the esthetic of wilderness, and though others can to a limited extent I reckon that's more than negatively compensated by the suffering they have to endure by living in it. But since humans can appreciate wildnerness that is in fact a reason to preserve it including down to particular species from a human-centric perspective. You mention that extinctions lead to explosions of speciation, which is true, but it does still take quite a while for this to happen, much longer than our current lifespans, and more so at deeper taxonomic levels which are also being wiped out by humans, so overall I don't consider that a sufficiently compelling argument.
This principle of preserving nature for the benefit of humans had been my viewpoint for a very long time; however recently I have moved to a different one as a result of coming across opinions that the suffering of wild animals could actually be addressed and eventually eliminated (the leading voice in this seems to be Brian Tomasik https://reducing-suffering.org/), which hadn't really occurred to me as a possibility until then, though the issue of suffering in the wild is something that was vaguely nagging me somewhere in the back of my mind, and having had my eyes opened to the extent of the suffering and the possibility of putting an end to it I can't close them again, and thus instead I now hold the radically different position that all conscious existence in the wild should be eliminated, though existence in pseudo-wild conditions that minimize suffering would still be acceptable and I would again support it for the benefit of human esthetic enjoyment.
I found this post thought-provoking, because ultimately you are correct; a considerable fraction of the environmentalist movement has always been unwilling to commit to internal logical consistency, unwilling to admit the secondary and tertiary impacts of certain decisions may be worse than the consequence of what they are trying to prevent.
Nevertheless, it is entirely possible to claim that none of this is core to environmentalism; a rational agent, someone capable of calculating and considering tradeoffs, even if they were a passionate environmentalist, should be able to acknowledge the value of denser cities and nuclear power. I count myself in that boat.
That having been said, I consider myself to be a conservationist as well as an environmentalist, because the most salient meaning of “environmental conservation” to me is the protection of public lands. I would fight tooth and nail to defend wilderness designation where it exists and to expand it where it is currently rare. I, too, am inspired by the ideas of EO Wilson, or Ed Abbey, w.r.t. the proportion of the planet that could be set aside as protected.
It strikes me that if you could snap your fingers and add 25 IQ points to every self-proclaimed environmental activist (without affecting their core values whatsoever!) you would immediately see these self-defeating actions (shutting down nuclear, NIMBY protesting, NEPA) wind down or cease. Therefore it’s not a problem with the core values of this group — it’s a simple lack of logical/rational understanding.
Anti-nuclear activity has been primarily driven by fears other than conservation fears. NIMBYism is primarily about milieu (social) conservation, and occasionally public health conservation, not ecosystem conservation.
Do self-proclaimed environmental activists also sometimes act against nuclear, and in favor of NIMBY? Yes, but like everyone else they have a variety of competing motivations.
And to be fair to the anti-nuclear pro-environment people, many of them are self-consistent in also being in favor of energy use reduction and conservation. If they had their way on this later topic as well the closure of nuclear plants wouldn't be a problem. The fact that nuclear plants were shut down and yet energy use kept on increasing demonstrates that these people, and their two-fold motivations, were highly unlikely to be the major driver of nuclear plant closures.
In truth, the professional activist class is remarkably consistent in providing examples wherein they have failed to hew to their own stated methods or goals. It is far more rare to encounter someone who is extremely passionate about a given topic and who also has a rigorous foundational model for how they perceive the world, or how they interact with politics. NIMBYs are a central example, but they are certainly not alone.
I agree with Thomas Hutcheson: you are conflating two different things, conservationism and "green" virtue signalling from the likes of Greenpeace.
Yesterday my wife and I spent six hours clearing and re-baiting rat and stoat traps in a small patch of our local national park, and we'll be out again next weekend, and the next. Our conservation groups cooperate with hunters and like pesticides. We value what they do.
You are railing against middle-class urban housewives who are against guns and pesticides, who would never touch a rat trap and who object to the killing of feral cats. And who make a big deal of the post-consumer recycling they do, while flying off yearly for a high-consumption overseas holiday, wilfully oblivious to its environmental costs.
Your problem is with status-seeking narcissists who jump on anything that sounds virtuous to bolster their self esteem. They are immune to facts.
Whatever these new motivations may be, they will have to appeal to this group's vanity, while costing it nothing.
Or we could just ignore them and do what is right.
Nice piece Maxwell. As a pro-environmentalist, I can honestly say that I am baffled by the actions of “environmentalists” who claim to care about the planet.
George Carlin comically made a lot of these points decades ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4
Good post, but you're conflating a lot of purposes under one umbrella, to call the umbrella hypocritical. And then you're naming the umbrella after one of the many purposes under it in order to cast the hypocrisy and counter-productive aspersion on this purpose.
I can point to your own Anopheles genocidal post as being anti-conservationist. Does this make you a counter-productive hypocrit?
“Conservationism” and “Environmentalism” have little logical overlap. The first values “natural” system for their own sake. The later seeks to modify “unnatural” systems to increase human good.
There can be, of course, some pragmatic overlap. The human system of emitting quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere is damaging to human welfare AND vastly disruptive of many “natural” systems (and this disruption may have damaging consequences we are not yet aware of). But so, too, may activities to reduce the emission of CO2 into the atmosphere be disruptive of “natural” systems.
To the major points of this post, they are about environmentalism failing on its own terms. Restriction of the development of nuclear power over the last decades has led to greater emission of CO2 int the atmosphere. Policies that are "too costly" per unit of CO2 reduced mean less reduction in CO2 than if more efficient policies are chosen.