Proposals to reduce wild-animal suffering often center around changes to animal ecosystem dynamics: eliminating predators (e.g., housecats, lions, wolves), sterilizing prey (e.g., deer, gazelles, mosquitoes), or otherwise tweaking with particular species.

There's definitely room for improvement here: For example, shifting from r-selected to K-selected ecosystems means a bigger fraction of the energy consumed in that ecosystem goes toward fewer, longer-lived animals that have lower infant mortality.

However, I wonder if animal-focused interventions don't strike at the root of the problem enough. In particular, as a general principle, it seems like where there's food, there's life. So wouldn't a natural idea be to reduce the amount of food, i.e., prevent plants from converting sunlight into edible energy? If the food is produced, eventually someone will eat it, unless it's burned or decomposed by bacteria.

One simple way to reduce plant mass is through land-use changes: e.g., paving hell and putting up a parking lot. This prevents plants from photosynthesizing on that land for decades into the future. There are other activities humans do that have bigger effects in this direction. Preventing climate change might be important to avoid the increases in biomass production that are expected to result therefrom.

Plants seem like an obvious growth-limiting factor for animal populations in the long run. Are there others that could be tweaked? Maybe water availability, nutrients, climate? But it seems like these should mostly matter through their effects on plant growth.

In aquatic ecosystems, dissolved oxygen may be a limiting factor, and eutrophication may actually make deep lakes anoxic. So it's possible that in this case, more biomass doesn't mean more life, unless there are massive numbers of very tiny but possibly sentient creatures that can survive anoxic conditions? At least on land, though, it seems pretty clear that more plants imply more animals.

If earth were a closed system (ie. ignoring colonization), my money would be on (human) population growth, technological innovation and economic growth. Basically anything that makes human civilization less dependent on animal use and traditional ecosystem services, and anything that makes the opportunity cost of leaving resources bound in traditional ecosystems higher. Basically with an endgame like this.

Of course, there could be more human (or posthuman) suffering created this way, but on average, they are more likey to have rights or to be granted access to medical services and other palliative techniques (e.g. ems might not feel physical pain at all, while wild animals don't even have dentists).

Thanks, HT! It's not obvious to me whether more human development on balance causes or prevents more wild-animal suffering. I incline toward "prevents," but it's really not clear. For example:

• 40% of Earth's land is used for agriculture. Agricultural crops are probably efficient converters of sunlight to energy, which seems bad in light of the discussion in the opening post. However, agricultural land also displaces grassland/forest. Moreover, a decent fraction of farmed crops are fed to large mammals, which are efficient ways to release energy from plants without supporting lots of tiny organisms.
• Climate change may increase insect populations on balance.

"Nature is doomed" may mean that pristine nature is doomed, but as long as we keep growing lots of energy-dense plants, it seems like animal populations will stick around. (Think cockroaches in cities, etc.)

Brian Tomasik wrote:Think cockroaches in cities, etc.

With the exception of those animals that people want to keep around on purpose, these are indicators of waste in the system.

If innovation increases the ability a) to prevent waste and b) to extract higher economic value from the same resource units, incentives to prevent waste go up. In the long run, "cities" could consist of large structures housing digitally connected brains in vats or simply ems living in computer clusters. If you can either afford a small garden or run ten additional copies of yourself earning money and feeling pleasure, there will be fewer gardens. Mostly cockroaches and spiders aren't wanted in buildings, they exist because human control of the artificial environment is lower than it could be.