8

WILD NATURE

Jackson Pollock, on being asked whether he painted from nature: “I am nature.”

LEE KRASNER: “When I brought Hofmann up to meet Pollock and see his work which was before we moved here, Hofmann’s reaction was—one of the questions he asked Jackson was, do you work from nature? There were no still lifes around or models around and Jackson’s answer was, ‘I am nature.’ And Hofmann’s reply was, ‘Ah, but if you work by heart, you will repeat yourself.’ To which Jackson did not reply at all. Now then, this is what was happening to me: as I had worked so-called, from nature, that is, I am here and Nature is out there, whether it be in the form of a woman or an apple or anything else, the concept was broken and you faced a black canvas. Well, with the knowledge that I am nature and try to make something happen on that canvas, now this is the real transition that took place.”

Nature and the Natural

The point made by Pollock and Krasner in the epigraph to this chapter is right. Human action should not be contrasted with “nature,” should not be set against it. The evolution of human action is part of the evolution of the transformation of environments by living activity. This starts out as a near-inevitable consequence of life, takes new forms in animals, then reaches the extravagances made possible by human minds, societies, and cultures.

People sometimes suspect that a rethinking of “the natural” has immediate consequences for how we should behave. I don’t think it tells us what to do, but it does make a difference. This chapter, like the last one, is about some problems we currently face, but the problems are on a different scale: climate, habitat protection, and the future of wild nature.

In many settings, we are used to the idea that the natural is good, or at least that to go against it might be bad. If we do think of ourselves and our decisions as fully part of nature, then that idea becomes empty. “Empty” is the right word, too. It’s not that seeing human action as part of nature brings an excusing or approval. Whatever we might do is part of nature in this sense; this way of thinking can’t distinguish one action from another.

Here is an example that goes back to chapter 2. That chapter looked at the burial of carbon and release into the atmosphere of the oxygen that animals need. Carbon atoms cycle through the Earth in several linked processes. In one of them, carbon is taken up into plant matter through photosynthesis, and is then either returned to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or, in smaller amounts, buried in the Earth. At particular times, such as the Carboniferous, more carbon is buried and eventually forms deposits of coal and other fossil fuels.

The carbon sits down there while animals continue to evolve, eventually developing complex societies and technology. Fossil fuels then become a useful source of energy. The oxygen and carbon, separated long ago, now reunite.

That story can make the whole sequence seem “natural,” including our actions as the fuel users. The Earth has a stage when fuel will be stored, and a stage when it will be burned. A person might say: Yes, that’s the natural sequence, and given its naturalness and our place in the process, we shouldn’t be bothered by it.

This sequence of stages does make sense. But that doesn’t mean that the fuel once stored will inevitably be burned, or that this is an especially natural (apt, good) way for things to go. Suppose we decide not to burn that coal and gas, as a result of reflection on the consequences of this action. If we decide to leave these fuels in the ground, that would be an expression of “nature,” just as much as burning it would. This, too, would be a reflection of the history of animal action, leading to human foresight.

We are deciding what to do. Whatever we decide is an expression of nature in this broad sense, an empty sense as far as the decision-making process goes. The embedding of our thoughts and actions in nature does not bring a kind of absolution. We should just work out how we want things to go.

The idea of the natural as a guide becomes empty once we think on this scale, but I see what people are aiming for when they make this appeal, and some of the actions that are advocated on behalf of “nature” are good ones. I would like to preserve some of those choices within a different framework.

What people have in mind by “natural” is often the non-human, the part of nature that human technology and intelligence have not (or not much) reworked and transformed. We can choose to align ourselves, in part and in some settings, with the nonhuman side of things. We can decide to value it. This might be poorly expressed by saying we are protecting or supporting “nature,” but that doesn’t mean it makes no sense as a choice. It is valuing the older forms, life outside of the human technological realm.

Why might we make this distinction, setting ourselves apart in this way? Because we are different in what we do, because the effects of our actions are so unusual. I am going to use the term “wild nature” for the nonhuman side. It could equally be called nonhuman nature. Much of this chapter is about why we might choose to protect and support wild nature in this sense.

Even if this idea of wild nature is meaningful, we might wonder whether such a thing is still real. Martha Nussbaum has argued that wild nature no longer exists, because human control extends even over places we call wild: “All land in our world is thoroughly under human control.” What we think of as wild lands are protected by governments, and dependent upon them.

Places like game parks and nature preserves are, as she says, set aside as deliberate acts, and in some senses we continue to control what happens there. But the Earth still contains wilder places than those, and even in reserves, our “control” tends to have a different role than usual. Much of the time, we act there to prevent other human actions, especially poaching and exploitation. That fact that we have to spend human effort to keep people from wrecking a place, to keep certain human activities out, doesn’t mean that what is inside is thereby compromised as an instance of nonhuman, wild activity. Our aim can be, and often is, to keep most human influences at bay and to let things go on as they would have without us.

This is not true, or is less true, if you provision or provide other care to the animals in a reserve. Then we have human intervention in a stronger sense. The cheetahs in the Maasai Mara that I described at the end of chapter 6 have a conservancy program that is mainly aimed at preventing human interference but can occasionally involve some veterinary care, as cheetah numbers are so low that every loss is significant. That is taking a step in a different direction, toward the active management of nonhuman species. But many cases are not like that, and follow an ideal of little or no human impact, even if human effort is needed to keep that situation in place.

Habitat Protection and Climate Change

Our time is often now described as a new geological epoch, the “Anthropocene,” a period in the history of the Earth distinguished by the impact of human activity. There are different ways of marking this epoch out, from the start of farming about 12,000 years ago to the first atomic bomb tests during World War II. I quite like James Lovelock’s way of recognizing the border. He dates the Anthropocene from the first time a reasonably efficient coal-burning steam engine was used, around the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 1712. Thomas Newcomen’s coal-burning engine ran a pump. It pumped water out of a coal mine.

The human effects recognized in the idea of the Anthropocene are a continuation of a tradition of the transformation of environments by life. The effects that have prompted the introduction of this term, though, are largely problems, not just changes.

The most-discussed problem is climate change, an ongoing overall warming of Earth due, in part, to the trapping of heat by carbon dioxide released by the burning of fossil fuels, along with effects of human agriculture (which releases methane) and other factors.

Carbon dioxide makes up a very small part of the atmosphere, a fraction of 1 percent, but it has powerful effects on temperature. As its concentration rises, more of the sun’s heat is retained by the Earth. Carbon dioxide levels rise and fall for various reasons independent of human action, and have done so for ages. Our activities are superimposed on those.

Once we have a dynamic picture of the Earth, why is climate change a problem? Temperatures have always fluctuated. The Cretaceous, the time of the formation of chapter 3’s forests, was five to ten degrees Celsius warmer than the present; those forests extended above the Arctic Circle. The amount of warming projected as a result of what’s happening now, even in more pessimistic projections, is not out of bounds if we go some distance back. The pessimistic scenarios have us fairly soon (within a century) reaching temperatures last seen about 15 million years ago, around the time when great apes began evolving from other primates.

The problem, in large part, is speed—that “fairly soon” in my previous sentence. The pace of change will probably create a great deal of disruption, both to humans, especially in developing countries that are already warm, and to other animals. This is not a situation where we are pouring a poison into the atmosphere; we are modulating, with our actions, some larger and ongoing processes of change. But the effects of our actions, especially in their speed, are a problem for us and many other species. Turning our eyes to the oceans, as carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, the sea absorbs additional carbon and becomes more acidic. This is a problem for many shell-building invertebrates.

The other planet-scale problem we face is the degradation of habitats and a great loss of numbers in many animal species. In the case of birds, a recent report covering the United States and Canada found an overall loss of about 29 percent (of birds, not of species) since 1970 levels. Over half of US bird species are in decline. In chapter 3, I looked at the steep decline in many groups of insects—butterfly numbers are down by about 50 percent in the United Kingdom since 1976, and so on. In the case of the cheetahs of chapter 6, only about 7,000 remain. Among the many species of birds drinking at the water hole described in chapter 3 were some Gouldian Finches. These are extraordinarily colorful birds, with purple or mauve chests, a sun-like yellow lower on their bellies, green wings, and face masks of several different designs (red, black, or yellow). Only about 2,500 are thought to remain in the wild. People sometimes disapprove of heightened concern for these charismatic species, but imagine how it will be if they are gone—gone as a result of our steady, complacent encroachment—or live on only in zoos and cages.

The present time is sometimes described as a “sixth mass extinction” and compared to events like the catastrophe at the close of the Cretaceous. That is an exaggeration; the mass extinctions of the past were on a different level, with over three-quarters of species lost. This might happen, but we are still a long way from it. There’s a tendency to conceive of our time using labels pulled directly from history, when what’s happening now is different. The Earth, surprisingly, is now a bit greener overall than it was in the recent past. This seems due mainly to landuse changes, and also, to some extent, to the increase in carbon dioxide itself. A “CO₂ fertilization effect” seems to have also had a role in softening recent climate change; this is another feedback loop in the system.

Our problem is not a general de-greening of the world, but a loss of forests in the tropics and a loss of other habitats such as wild grasslands—a loss of ecologies. This is bringing with it a massive loss in numbers within many wild species. A creep of greenness in developed countries sounds encouraging, but it doesn’t help animals that need particular habitats that are being steadily cleared. Species have always been lost, but there was usually scope and space for renewal. What is happening now is different, with wild ecologies destroyed and the numbers of animals steeply declining. Under our watch, everything is just being squeezed.

These problems are so multifaceted and change so quickly that commenting on them in a useful way is difficult. But I will offer some ideas. Climate change dominates nearly all current discussion, and I want to make a case for elevating the priority of habitat protection, for a partial shift in emphasis in that direction. This is partly because of what I think we can reasonably hope to do, and partly because of how I see the relations between the two problems.

A rapid global move away from carbon-based fossil fuels with present technology seems more difficult than it once did. Developing countries want portable, convenient fuels that can be used in transport and industry, as the developed world has enjoyed for over 200 years. Who can insist that they not try to make their people’s lives better sooner? Though the move away from fossil fuels may be slower than many people now hope, the move will come, probably with the aid of new technology. A technology that might truly enable a change of course may be a storage medium rather than a source of power—ideally, a synthetic fuel that is made using energy from solar and wind but that can be transported and stored at normal temperatures and pressures, like coal and diesel.

When it comes, a move away from fossil fuels will bring a host of benefits. Air pollution is discussed less now than it once was, perhaps because in developed countries it’s not as visible as it used to be. But air pollution does great harm worldwide. The hidden health costs of diesel have become clearer in recent years. And in developing countries, the problem of air pollution is often still in front of one’s eyes.

Now we reach a point that may be more contentious. The push for action on climate has dominated environmental discussion for years now. The issue has a massive presence in progressive politics. This is where nearly all the attention, the resources, and political capital are directed. Many courses of action in this area involve significant sacrifice that will be felt especially by lower-income people. The stock of goodwill is being drawn down very far. I wish that more of this effort and energy was going into habitat protection. When climate is seen as the issue, and dominates discussion, a lot of other harm can be done to the environment in the background.

While we can mitigate many effects of climate change if we have the will to do so, especially by assisting developing countries, the effects of extinction and the breakdown of ecological systems are of a different kind. Here, there is no technological fix, and not much can be done after the fact. Once a species is gone, it’s gone. The fact that the Earth is getting greener is not preventing population declines, and it doesn’t prevent loss of the habitats that wild species need. The aim should be to protect ecosystems as wholes.

When a case is made for a renewed focus on this problem, it is common to reply that climate change and habitat loss are so closely linked that the issues can’t be separated. This is used as a reason to stay with the priorities in place now. I do not think they are tied as tightly as people often say. Certainly they are connected—deforestation releases carbon, and reforestation during the growing phase stores it. Climate change pushes some species toward extinction by changing their conditions of life in adverse ways. But there is more of a choice of priorities here than people sometimes admit.

First, we could solve the problem of climate change but also wreck habitats. We might achieve a breakthrough technology and reduce emissions to near zero, while allowing land clearing, deforestation, overfishing, and the pollution of waterways. Then we have a bad outcome for habitat, even as we do as well as we possibly could on carbon and climate.

Alternatively, we could create a large network of reserves and prevent their exploitation, while continuing to use fossil fuels indefinitely. These choices are separate. In this case, a continuing warming could put more pressure on the “saved” habitats and the species within them, and that is the scenario that leads people to say that the climate problem is more fundamental or the issues are not separable. But whether that is how things would go depends on the amount of land that might be set aside for wild nature. Animals and plants can adapt to climate change by migrating to an area that’s cooler, wetter, or more suitable in some other way. Sometimes they will be unable to do this, and will go extinct, but if there is room to move, they often have a chance. This requires that there is room, and corridors linking different regions. Large populations are also more likely to make it through these crises than small ones.

On an Earth where species can freely move around, climate change will still be disruptive, especially when it’s rapid. On an Earth where habitat destruction has made it impossible for animals to migrate and numbers are reduced, the disruption will be greater.

When I say “we could create a large network of reserves while continuing to use fossil fuels indefinitely,” that is not what I think we should do. We should reduce our use of fossil fuels where we can; we should turn diesel, as soon as possible, into a rarity with a few niche uses, rather than the fuel in just about every truck. Rich countries should also be willing to give considerable aid to developing countries that have to deal with the consequences of climate change as it happens.

Temperate countries will probably have to accept a good deal of migration, too. Large-scale change is a normal feature of the Earth, but the changes we’re looking at now are unusual in their speed. One of the main reasons this is problematic is the fact that humans, through the creation of national borders and also through sheer numbers, have made movement very hard for people looking to leave deteriorating environments. In general I am not an “open borders” person; I think that nation-states with borders have been valuable inventions. But one of the most salient injustices we confront in this area is that rich, temperate countries have been responsible for most of the increased carbon in the atmosphere, while less wealthy, warmer countries will experience most of the problems, and migration has been made increasingly hard.

I understand the alarm that many feel about climate change. We should do what we can, encouraging the development of new technologies and working for international agreement when it’s feasible. But we should also press hard on habitat preservation, much harder than we have during the recent years of intense concern with climate. We should act to reverse those steady, increasingly precipitous losses in wild species.

The last point I want to make as part of this plea is a practical one. Local action is entirely meaningful in the case of habitat protection. A single country, a single state, or even a single local government can do things that are consequential. It can establish reserves and protect habitat within its bounds. This can be effective whether or not other states or other countries do anything similar. Each reserve is a genuine contribution that does not get washed out by others’ failures. In the case of climate change, local action does not have this significance. If a single state or country makes significant moves in reducing carbon emissions, this has very little effect, unless we are talking about one of the countries responsible for massive emissions: China, the United States, India. When action by one party inspires or motivates action by others, that’s admirable, and sometimes a small contribution might inspire larger ones. Every small local reduction in emissions does bring emissions a little below what they otherwise would have been, too. But in the case of habitat protection, the global problem is a collection of local ones, and that is not true of climate change.

Here is a reminder of how effective measures taken on a local scale can be. New York Harbor, and the Hudson River that runs into it, used to be as much a sewer and waste disposal pathway as anything else. Swimming there in the 1960s and 1970s was unthinkable. The Clean Water Act (as it is commonly known) became law in 1972. Fifty years later, the harbor is a completely different place. People do now swim in it, and in 2020 a humpback whale was seen cruising along the Hudson just off midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from where I used to live.

Choices

All through that previous section, I was supposing that the preservation of wild nature is a good thing. It is common to think so, but we should not take this for granted or see it as unassailable. Perhaps things only look that way through a foggy lens of romanticism. Concern about climate change is at least partly concern for the human community, and this does not raise special “Why care?” questions. Habitat protection is different.

Defending the value of wild nature is easier when we consider its instrumental value—its value for human projects. This is often the basis for good arguments, especially given the typical shortsightedness of the destruction of wild places for economic reasons. The Great Barrier Reef in Australia could easily have been completely wrecked as a result of the pro-development policies of the local state government in the late 1960s and early 1970s; much of it was slated for mining. The reef was saved by a small but energetic conservation movement. Aside from any value we might say that the reef has in itself, I doubt that anyone, soon after, thought that the reef might have been more valuable to humans if it was mined rather than protected. Here I have in mind both its economic value to the locals and its value to many more as a source of rapturous experiences—the two are linked, of course. When I first went to the reef in the 1980s, the near miss was palpable, and digging the place up seemed unthinkable.

Cases like that are powerful, but if all we recognize is the instrumental value of a wild place, then when the scales tip differently, we should act differently. The harder problem is whether there are reasons to protect wild nature that extend beyond this.

I’ll approach this question by looking at a challenge that arises even before we ask about balancing values and forgoing human projects. Is wild nature worth concern and protection at all? Is it instead a place dominated by suffering and pain? Perhaps the cruel chaos of wild nature was needed, in evolution, to get us here as humans, but now that we are here, should we just take charge? Should we either actively transform what remains of wild nature into something more benign, or perhaps just permit its disappearance as human projects expand?

When the question of wild animal experience and suffering is put on the table, people tend to think immediately of mammals as predators and as prey. Philosophical discussions keep coming back to antelope and lions. Those need to be considered, but along with all the rest, invertebrates as well as vertebrates. We have evidence that a capacity to feel something like pain is far more widespread in animals than has often been supposed. It is probably present in fish and crustaceans. Insects also seem much more likely to have experiences of this kind than had been realized before.

Fixating on the negative side of experience is misleading, though. A lot of discussions tend to do this; they focus on pain and death, and don’t give much consideration to good experiences in animals that might balance the bad. When I have discussed animal pain in public talks, someone often asks: What about the upside? Human life can contain plenty of pain, and in some cases, at least, that does not make it all worthless. I am always glad to be reminded of this, and of course the point is right. We need to think about the balance.

Might experience in some animals not have this other, positive side? Might life for some animals be either neutral or negative, at each moment, and that’s it? Special cases are always possible, but this seems unlikely in general. Learning by reinforcement is very common in animals. Actions with beneficial consequences tend to be repeated, and those with adverse consequences are not. If we think that negative reinforcements are felt, why should the positive ones not be? More generally, it makes sense that experience is a matter of contrasts, between better and worse. That encourages us to recognize the apparent moments of peace and comfort in animal lives as genuine—as felt positively rather than neutral.

The next step seems to be to think about an overall accounting of the good and bad in wild animal lives. The utilitarian approach to this problem is to think about all the good and bad experiences that wild animals have as a kind of block or sum, with positive and negative contributions. We’d ask whether the totality of pleasure in wild nature outweighs the totality of suffering. In this scheme, situations where everyone does fairly well can be treated equivalently to situations where some suffer for the greater good of others. I mostly rejected that kind of accounting in the previous chapter, when we looked at farming. The approach I took then, one that might also be applied here, is to retain the idea of tallying good and bad experiences but do this in a way that focuses on how individual lives tend to go—what a typical path looks like. This would have to be done separately for each kind of animal. How do things tend to go for an elk, an albatross, an octopus? Do each of these lives tend to be worth living?

Initially, at least, it does seem to make sense to ask about summaries of this kind. I don’t say that an exact accounting might be done in practice—tallying up the usual mix of good and bad octopus-hours or elk-hours—but we might be able to get a sense of the overall picture. We might be able to ask, for animals of some kind, whether negative experiences tend to dominate life or not. Then we might step back and see whether there’s a general pattern visible in the whole. We’d ask whether wild nature tends to be a scene of suffering for most animals or not.

However this attempt to do an inventory of experience in wild animal lives might be conceived, it runs into a complication. I’ll introduce it by thinking first about how all this looks in the case of an individual human, rather than a nonhuman, life. Here, we might initially imagine going through an accounting of a particular person’s life, hour by hour, looking for good and bad events, and then realize that we shouldn’t really think of it this way. Whether a human life is a good one depends on more than the balance between momentary experiences of different kinds. Particular events of great significance, even if they are brief, can cast what went before them into a new light. Eventual success can make early struggles meaningful, or turn suffering into a sacrifice that the person was glad to have made. Vindication might look short-lived in experience, compared to what has gone before, but if the person is asked whether the early stages were worth it, they might say, emphatically, yes. They would not change a thing.

We are encountering here a new intrusion of something that came up back in chapter 6, the role of narrative in human life and our sense of who we are. Whether the good outweighs the bad within a person’s life will depend, often, on the way those events are framed by the person’s sense of the meaning of those experiences—the meaning of the failures that led eventually to success, or the other way around. A person might also change their view of the meaning of events over time. When a person does a summing-up of this kind, sometimes they might seem to make a mistake—perhaps ignoring for no reason the good things that happened to them, letting positive events recede in a mist of depression. They might forget, and then remember, important events. They may come to rethink the whole in the light of new factual information (as in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life). But in many cases, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of sense in the idea that a person might get their personal summary wrong. Experiences differ from one another not only in basic value and raw intensity but also in kind, and in felt significance. When a person looks over the whole, they have to give a weighting to vastly different episodes—frustrations, vindications, disappointments, sublime moments—in any attempt to say whether the whole was worthwhile. Their narrative-building self imposes this weighting, to a large degree, constructing it on the basis of their views at that moment. Sometimes the balance might be obvious from the outside, being dominated by the good side or the bad. It’s when life has many complicated ups and downs that these questions of overall meaning become more indefinite, more narrative-dependent. And the survey that a person makes, looking over what has happened up to that stage, is itself another experienced episode in their life.

You might then say: This is a human peculiarity, something that only applies in our case. This dependence that the significance of one event has on other events is important for humans, but only for us. It applies in our case because of the complex projects we have, and because we have the ability to come up with narratives that thread things into a whole. Nonhuman projects are not as elaborate, and other animals can’t come up with narratives that tie them together. Given this, it seems that the accounting should be easier in their case. All we need to ask is: How much pleasure was there, and for how long? How much suffering, for how long?

But I’ve come to think that this response would be a mistake, and many wild animal lives can be similar to ours in a crucial respect. I don’t mean that they can come up with narratives that make sense of events in the way we do (though I will come back to this in a moment). I mean that in wild animal life, as with us, differences in the value of experiences are not just differences on a scale, a scale from good to bad. Some events, good or bad, can lend significance to others. Wild animal life has projects, frustrations, and culminations, not just momentary ups and downs. I don’t mean this to apply to all animals, and it’s probably best to start out thinking about mammals and birds, and consider extensions from there.

Back in earlier chapters of this book, I described the avian goings-on down behind our house, featuring several species of parrots and other birds. Two Rose-breasted Cockatoos raised a family of two chicks while I watched. They prepared a nest in a tree hollow, stripping bark around it and bringing in fresh green twigs with leaves. When the chicks emerged, both adults fed them from their mouths. I saw one of the chicks fly. The other was slower to leave. Once the first one flew, it seemed never to return—the first flight was the exit. After both chicks had gone, a week or so after I first saw them and several months since the nest was started, the adults departed, too. A month later, two Rose-breasted Cockatoos visited the empty nest briefly. I don’t know if it was the same pair, but they certainly seemed at home. I wondered if the pair came back to revisit their success, and perhaps also to see if their nest might be usable again next season. That is a life of projects, of fulfillments and frustrations, of some events giving meaning to others.

A case like this is an extreme one, but it illustrates what I am talking about. A picture of life consisting only of ups and downs that might be counted and summed is inaccurate not just for humans but probably for many other animals as well. I don’t say that all these animals can plan, that they can represent their projects as wholes, but I suggest that many events in their lives have their experienced significance tied together in a certain way. (I note, also, that a number of nonhuman animals have recently been shown to exhibit a kind of self-control, forgoing immediate rewards for later larger ones. This is the sort of thing that many philosophers used to say animals just can’t do.) In cases like the birds, and many others, the way things went for an animal during its life might, in principle, be formed into a narrative and understood as a whole, even if the animal cannot construct the narrative. The animal just lives the events, in all their diversity.

The animal may well remember some or many of these events. “Episodic” memory, the memory of particular events and experiences, has also been controversial outside of humans, but experiments suggest it is probably present in some other animals. And whether or not particular events are remembered, an animal might emerge from the sum of events over its life with an overall orientation—bold or nervous, for example. Some nonhuman animals certainly appear to reach an overall gestalt—a kind of peace, or an unease—that reflects much of what has gone before. This might be seen as a first-person distillation of the complexity of their personal history. In a few cases—and this is now going quite a bit further—a nonhuman animal might have, in the absence of language, something like a considered sense of its life so far. In dolphins and chimps, we certainly might wonder about this. But my point is not that nonhuman animals can do the narrative sense-making that we can do when we reflect on the path of our life; my point is that the diversity in experience and links between events that prompt our own narrative sensemaking is probably a part of their lives, too. And in a complicated life of this kind, one with frustrations and culminations, victories and disasters, the idea that an individual wild animal’s life was “mostly good” or “mostly bad” is often a problematic one.

Where does this twist in the path take us? What happens to the attempt to work out whether lives within wild nature are generally worth living? The place we’ve gotten to is the idea that for some animals, an hour-by-hour accounting of ups and downs, even in principle, would not answer the question well. (For other animals, it might be fine.) We might then think: If these lives are not clearly bad, we should not be tempted to eliminate wild nature, and should protect it. That thought would probably be a mistake, though; we’ve not decided that the lives are okay, just that we often can’t say. Why would that give us reason to protect them? Maybe it gives us reason not to actively wipe out wild nature for the animals’ own good, but that’s not the most relevant question. Protection is the more important issue.

Perhaps we need another idea on the table, the idea of the richness of a life as opposed to its balance of good and bad events. Richness, the pursuing of projects even if they fail, is itself something we might want to protect. We’d then have two different respects in which a life can be worth living, or two factors to weigh, one that involves positive experiences and another that involves the pursuit of projects. I arrived at this idea through difficulties in accounting the ups and downs of experience, but it can have its own importance—it does not depend on problems with the other approach. I suspect that animal life tends to have more positive experience than people sometimes suppose, but that is not the only thing worth considering. Perhaps many lives in wild nature are tough but rich, and we might choose—I would choose—to protect wild nature in part because of this richness. Thinking about the animals I’ve encountered, and putting myself in their shoes, I find that even when things don’t go well, I’d rather be in the fight.

How do these ideas relate to the arguments of the previous chapter? Back then, I said that many lives within intensive factory farming are not worth living. Do the points made in this chapter about the difficulty of summarizing the overall goodness of a life undermine what I said in the earlier one? They don’t, because the lives of animals within factory farming are so different. Especially in the cases I emphasized back then, pigs and chickens, those lives are just awful, comprising some combination of stress, monotony, and discomfort, along with episodes of acute pain. Reproduction is controlled, food is delivered, and no significant choices need to be made. The projects characteristic of wild life are absent. The question of whether some special positive experiences might outweigh difficult times, or at least balance them, does not arise, because there are no experiences of that kind.

The relationship between the ideas in this section and humane farming is more complicated. A life under close care and protection might lack complexity and projects of the kind seen in wild animal life. Then we’d have to ask how bad it is for an animal to lack a good deal of the richness I talked about a moment ago, and instead experience a “flattened” but benign life within farming. That’s a harder question to answer. These ideas about ongoing projects within animal life provide a way to make sense of the persistent (for some people, for me) but always uncertain intuition that dignity is something we should have our eye on in this area—dignity and meaningfulness, even in nonhuman lives. I see this as a reasonable source of unease about humane farming.

I won’t leave questions about suffering in wild nature behind yet. There’s more to explore, including arguments given by other philosophers. For example, we might move away from thinking about suffering in general and look at more specific policies, ones that intervene in wild nature in a targeted way. The obvious case to think about is predation, especially where the prey is likely to be sentient.

The philosopher Jeff McMahan has argued that we should take seriously the possibility of interfering with predators that cause a lot of suffering. He thinks the reticence that people usually feel about such actions doesn’t have much warrant. People say that interfering in nature is “playing God,” but as McMahan says, no actual God is having his work interfered with. If we don’t do something in a setting where we can see that some good might be done, no one else will. The spirit of McMahan’s discussion, in this respect, is reminiscent of the Pollock and Krasner passages in the epigraph to this chapter: we are part of this system, and we have as much business to be acting on it as anyone else. The fact that we have greater capacities to affect what happens should make us wary of unintended consequences stemming from our ignorance—Lori Gruen has emphasized this problem, in response to McMahan. But overstepping is not the only thing we could get wrong; we might also worry about doing nothing when we could prevent real harm.

McMahan thinks that it may soon be feasible to actually do some of the things that have been speculated about. We might work out which predators in natural systems cause the most suffering and take them in the direction of becoming herbivores though genetic manipulation, or humanely sterilize them if we can’t change them. Our intervention need not be a matter of shooting the lion to save the gazelle; we can instead push the lion’s descendants toward a different lifestyle. If we choose it, then sometime in the future, “the wolf will dwell with the lamb,” as the biblical Isaiah said. We wouldn’t eradicate wildness, but would change this side of animal behavior.

McMahan advocates this, and Martha Nussbaum seriously considers it. Nussbaum’s view of how animals should be treated is based on the importance of their “striving,” and the injustice in thwarting this striving. Her view recognizes something similar to what I discussed as animal “projects,” and for her, we should try to protect the striving of animals from harms due to other animals, not only from humans. The “predators” that McMahan and Nussbaum discuss tend to be the big-toothed African mammals. If we ask—What about sea eagles? Sharks? Octopuses?—the reply can be that we need not target all predation. Each case can be considered in turn.

Preventing an animal from dying in one way is exchanging that death for another. If we eliminate a form of predation that we think is cruel, the animals saved will still die in some way. McMahan acknowledges this; wild animal life contains death by “disease, parasites, malnutrition and starvation, dehydration, freezing.” Whether the wolf dwells with the lamb or not, both will die somehow. McMahan’s response is that we should try to prevent other forms of suffering as well. Reducing predation can cause prey populations to grow very large and face deaths from scarcity. As well as controlling carnivores, we could control fertility in herbivores.

The ideal need not be an impossible future in which no one dies at all. Instead, we might imagine lengthy herbivorous lives, without much population pressure. The fact that this is different from what life for animals of this kind used to be like does not matter. Authenticity is not the goal.

What is the goal? The outcome seems like an enormous zoo, a reminder of some of what used to exist in wild nature, now in a more benign version. For McMahan, the aim is to reduce suffering, and whenever we can do that without untoward side effects, it’s sensible to try. But once we’re following this logical path, what is the reason for keeping this quasi-wildness at all? Why not push toward a different world, one with a large human population, few nonhuman animals of any kind, and hence little animal suffering? This path would not require an aggressive eradication of wild animals. The process of human encroachment would simply be allowed to continue. Wild populations in many species would fade away over some number of generations. We would embrace our capacity for control and try to minimize suffering as the process moved along.

We might call this a “Huxleyan ecology,” in reference to Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. The world of that novel is dystopian, but in a relatively gentle way. Huxley’s world is one of drug-aided indoctrination and conformity within overtly pleasant human life. The scenario I am imagining here need not be so constrained for humans; they might still have plenty of free rein. Wild nature, though, has been nonviolently flattened out. The world (at least on land) is one of well-managed crops, forest plantations, lab-grown meat, and well-fed companion animals. This is not a cruel place, by most standards, but it’s very tightly controlled, and little is left of the unruly, scrappy side of animal life. It’s that combination of tight control and an absence of physical suffering that I think of as Huxleyan.

We can compare these two possible futures—McMahan’s managed wilderness and the more radical Huxleyan ecology—to a third one. In this alternative, we actively protect wild nature on a large scale. We do not interfere with predation or the other harms that wild animals encounter. We not only protect the wilderness that remains but also encourage some other parts of the Earth to head back toward a wilder state; we engage in “rewilding” as well as protection.

If all you care about is reducing suffering, the Huxleyan ecology might be best. If one thinks that biological diversity itself is good, then McMahan’s managed wilderness would be better than the Huxleyan ecology. So would the third option of preserving and fostering wild nature, including its darker side. The McMahan picture will look good for a person who cares a lot about both suffering and diversity. When I grappled with difficulties in assessing the goodness of a life earlier in this chapter, I recognized the richness of a life, and the pursuit of projects, as things worth valuing. In McMahan’s scenario, many animal projects will still exist; the cockatoos I watched raising a family could continue (as long as they don’t overdo it). But animal projects would in many cases be transformed; part of the point of McMahan’s scenario is reduction in the suffering that results from failed projects. McMahan’s future is a “flatter” one in this respect.

A future of protecting habitats and rewilding might be seen as the most authentic to Earth’s history. Authenticity sounds good, but in some forms, at least, this appeal would fall afoul of ideas endorsed in the first section of this chapter. We should not mark our own actions off as separate from what is natural, or deny the dynamic nature of the Earth.

Authenticity is not the right concept, but something related, less easy to summarize, guides my attitude here. When we preserve a diverse wild nature, we preserve, as far as we can, a great creative engine. This engine gave rise to us, along with other forms of life. (When I think about the Huxleyan ecology, I find myself reflecting on how precious the last uncontrolled deep-sea ecosystems would be.) We humans are a recent stem on the tree of animal evolution, one that has acquired the ability to look over the whole. There’s a kind of ingratitude in allowing the extinctions, the narrowing, the reduction of animal life. I am proposing that we take some responsibility for this creative engine, and value its continuation. This system includes a lot of suffering, along with positive experiences and fruitful lives. I would choose to preserve and strengthen it, where this includes all its contrasts. Whether we like it or not, we have ended up as custodians of this astounding system. We can choose to protect it, and that is the choice I advocate.

I’ll finish this discussion of wild nature with a few other thoughts. First, how unqualified, or pure, is the defense of preservation of wild nature that I want to give? Is there some amount of wild-nature awfulness that would change my thinking? What if we found that the inner lives of wild animals were much worse than we had thought? What if we found another inhabited planet where the natural order of things looked very grim? Is there something we might learn, in this or some other case, that would push me into accepting a suppression of wild nature for welfare reasons? I find myself saying yes, but partly just because “something we might learn” is so broad.

Second, I supported “rewilding,” not just preservation. We don’t just stop the destruction of habitats, but encourage some parts of the Earth to return to a wild state. How do we handle feral animals and invasive species that have become established in a place? For example, wild horses now roam in some large Australian national parks. They are not native, and they do a lot of damage, especially around waterways. Should we see them as bona fide parts of nonhuman nature who have made their way in and now can stay, or as an intrusion due to human action, in which case we might move, sterilize, or kill them? This is a hard question, especially as there is a gray area between ordinary movement of animals and human-related invasions. Feral cats are a disaster in Australia and New Zealand; they need to be aggressively controlled, or the cost to the ecology is too vast. But species do come into new areas and successfully compete, and it’s not always something to oppose. I see this as a case-by-case issue. In the case of the Australian national parks, I’d at least try to establish some horse-free and horse-proof areas.

Third, philosophers and others often address questions in this area using the idea of a right. They might say, “Wild animals have the right to be left on their own,” or “We don’t have the right to interfere.” In response, I think that we might sensibly decide to establish rights of some kinds for nonhumans, but rights are not given out by nature itself. If an animal has the right not to be interfered with by us, does it also have the right not to be interfered with by predators? A person might say that wild nature as a whole has the right not to have us interfere with it, but if this is a natural right, why has nature put us on one side, as interferers, and the other animals on another?

More generally, people who discuss the topic of wild nature and how we should treat it are often looking for a principle that will just resolve the matter, something we have to respond to once we recognize it. McMahan draws on a view offered by the philosopher Thomas Nagel about the special significance of suffering. Nagel and McMahan think that when we see suffering, we see something that we know should not exist. The fact that suffering should not exist, its essential badness, is “part of reality.” This is true, McMahan thinks, whether the suffering is found in human affairs or wild nature; we should prevent suffering whenever we can. On the other hand, Tom Regan, one of the most influential thinkers in environmental ethics, expressed just as much confidence about something very different. Though wild nature is full of suffering, “our ruling obligation with regard to wild animals is to let them be.” Our obligation is not to reduce suffering; our obligation is not to interfere. In an earlier version of the same discussion, Regan said that this is because of our role, our proper place in the world; humans are “neither accountants nor managers of felicity in nature.” McMahan himself quotes these passages from Regan and contrasts his own view based on the special importance of suffering.

I agree with McMahan that we can choose to focus on suffering without worrying about whether this is our job or not. We can choose to make suffering (or overall welfare) our priority. But we’re not making a mistake about reality, failing to recognize a real feature of suffering (its should-not-be-ness), if we don’t do this. We can choose the Regan role, the McMahan role, or some other. Regan and McMahan are both wrong that there’s a moral feature in this situation that we have to recognize and respect (note again that they disagree entirely about what this is), but each describes an attitude we might reasonably choose to take. When we make our choices in this area, we should try to work out how these choices fit in with other things we believe, other things we value, and so on. But if we hold out for an objective imperative, something that instructs us to intervene or not to intervene, to look after animals or to let them go their own way, then we are holding out for something that will never come. We don’t need such a thing anyway; we should just try to make our valuations as reasonable as possible, and decide what to do.

Instead of Us

As I was getting close to the end of writing this book, several people writing to me on other topics expressed, unprompted, an enthusiasm for the idea of human extinction—the end of humanity. In some ways they look forward to it.

The first two were not people I’d thought of as especially negative or misanthropic—although looking forward to human extinction must make you, technically, very much a misanthrope. The third person does have a darker outlook on the world. Three of them spontaneously saying this certainly started me thinking.

The third friend, when I followed up with him, offered a definite argument. Life for animals within factory farming is much worse than nearly any animal experience would be in our absence. Huge numbers of animals live under this regime, and we are unlikely to stop this kind of abuse in the next few hundred years, he thinks. Nature without us would certainly be “red in tooth and claw,” but the rest of animal life would still be better off without humans in charge. And for my friend, the heights of human culture (whatever you take these to be) don’t compensate for this cruel side of what we do.

The argument is reinforced when we think about numbers. In the previous chapter I looked at figures for the overall amount of biomass, or living matter, in various kinds of organisms. Most biomass today, about 80 percent, is in plants. Animals as a whole make up less than 1 percent, and most of animal life is in the form of arthropods (like insects) and fish. But when we get to mammals and birds, the skewing due to human action becomes apparent. Livestock, animals of the kinds that we confine and control, make up about ten times the biomass of wild mammals and birds.

The total number of poultry, pigs, and cattle alive on farms and in feeding operations across the world at any given time is around 30 billion. The total for farmed land animals is a couple of billion more. The majority of these animals probably live within some form of factory farming, broadly defined—one estimate is about 74 percent. That suggests that over 23 billion animals, at any time, are found within factory farms.

What proportion is this of the total number of mammals and birds on Earth? Here I’m asking about the number of individuals, not biomass. When thinking about human impact, it makes sense to ask about biomass. But when thinking about experience and suffering, it makes sense to switch to the number of individuals—one cow should not count the same as a large collection of smaller animals, just because of their sizes. Then we find a surprise. Especially in the case of mammals, although the biomass of farmed animals is much larger than that of wild animals, the relationship when we consider numbers is reversed. This is because the world still contains huge numbers of very small wild mammals, especially rodents and bats. More than half of all wild mammals are bats! That is an estimate, but a careful one. It leaves out, as non-wild, the species of mice and rats that tend to live in cities. Wild mammals, mostly very small, outnumber livestock by something like eighteen to one. If we just think about mammals with bodies larger than one kilogram (a bit over two pounds), then the wild numbers and the livestock numbers might be pretty similar (4 to 5 billion).

The relationship between the numbers of small and larger wild mammals has probably not always been this skewed. We’re seeing here another effect of human action. As humans spread across the globe, we wiped out a lot of larger wild animals, and have replaced them with livestock.

Farmed mammals include a fair number of sheep, goats, and others that have been able to stay outdoors and not too confined (though sheep are often subjected to other cruel practices, especially live export, crammed into sweltering ships). The lives of cattle are a mixture, as I said earlier, and the situation of pigs is the real disaster. The proportion of farmed mammals living within intensive factory farming is growing, but probably not yet a majority.

In the case of birds, farmed birds make up much more biomass than wild birds, but the numbers of individuals are again reversed, because there are, at least in estimates, so many small wild birds. If fish farms are counted as factory farming, then fish are the most numerous of all factory farmed animals, but still a small proportion of wild fish.

We’re still a fair way from a situation where most vertebrate animals on Earth are stuck within factory farming. But the numbers themselves are huge—many billions—and growing. (These wild-versus-farmed comparisons are affected also by the fact that animals in industrialized farming have such short lives; the population of chickens alive at any time is much smaller than the number killed each year.)

I found myself thinking that my main disagreement with my pro-extinction friend was over the prospects for change. I expect us to be able to start doing better in this area within a few decades. If I thought we could not, especially if I thought things would keep getting worse, I might find myself saying similar things to him.

Another of the friends who commented on this topic, a biologist, thinks about the desirability of our extinction in conjunction with the fact that it is probably going to happen at some stage anyway. It’s not that our extinction’s being likely makes it good, but if we are going to leave the scene, there’s a question about how much damage we do before we go. If biological diversity is shredded as a result of the actions we’re taking now, then when we eventually depart, we will have already closed off the Earth’s future to a significant extent. My friend wrote: “If we keep going on our current path, I picture our post-human world covered in a thin skin of archaea, nematodes, tardigrades, viruses, and some algae. But if we checked out now, before we’ve done too much damage, the Earth could go on without us and recover itself.” Her picture of how the Earth might end up when we finally leave it is indeed troubling. Archaea are similar to bacteria. Tardigrades (microscopic “water bears”) have both charm and tenacity, but they are a long way from the thrumming muscle of the cheetahs and the flower-like giraffes. It’s hard to summon any enthusiasm at all for nematodes. “Life on Earth now is astonishingly beautiful and a bottomless well of surprises,” my friend continued. “It feels morally inexcusable to wreck it when there are alternatives.”

As with my other friend, part of my disagreement here concerns what we might expect in the near or medium-term future—in this case, whether human extinction is likely. Eventually it becomes likely, as the sun heads toward swallowing us and other large-scale changes take their toll. But humans are so adaptable that I don’t think arguments from the general rates at which animal species tend to go extinct have much purchase on our case. We may live on for a long time. If I thought that we were likely to leave the scene fairly soon, after rapidly doing a lot more damage, then I might think more like she does. My friend’s reasoning is certainly consonant with things I’ve said in this chapter about the tragedy inherent in the destruction of so much of the creative engine we find around us on Earth.

With these questions on the table, this is also the right point to think for a moment about the distant future. I said back in chapter 2 that life is a long-term tenant, not just in relation to the age of the Earth but also in relation to the age of the universe. More accurately, we’ve been long-term tenants so far. Matters will eventually look different.

As we peer forward from our current vantage point, on a 100-million-year timescale, we see some endings that are unavoidable, or at least very hard to avoid, and imposed by factors that we don’t much control. Something like four of these might be looming. First, one of the carbon cycles that I’ve discussed several times in this book, the slow, or “geological,” carbon cycle, is expected to eventually become unfriendly to life on Earth. This is the cycle in which rocks are weathered, carbon is laid down in sediments at the bottom of the sea, and volcanoes return that carbon to the atmosphere. Eventually, the carbon-returning part of the cycle will fail to keep up (for reasons involving the slowing of plate tectonics, as well as the warming sun), and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will fade to levels unable to support photosynthesis and plant life. When plants go, animals should follow. This will include us, or any form of life like us, unless we can devise a new way of using the sun to build living material. All this is projected to happen half a billion to a billion years from now.

The next imposed ending is the loss of the oceans, through evaporation, followed by the engulfing of the Earth by an expanding sun. The loss of oceans is expected in about a billion years, the engulfing around 7 billion years on—though that engulfing is apparently a little uncertain, as the planet has some chance of drifting away first. To escape this further round of disasters, we’ll need to travel to a new solar system. Finally, stars and planets themselves will probably be lost, as the universe expands into a gray entropic fuzz. There’s probably no way of avoiding that one.

All this does bear on my friend’s reasoning. Suppose humanity does wreck much of the Earth fairly soon, and also goes extinct. Then the amount of time the Earth would have to rebuild, before the demise of plants, would be roughly similar to the period from the origin of animals until now. We might think of this as enough time for one more run, one more long opera, though it would take place in increasingly challenging circumstances. This would be a bit like one of those global crashes-and-restarts that we encountered at the end of chapter 2, except that this time, it would be us, and the malign side of our place in the history of living action, that brought it about.