Environmentalists and Non-consequentialists Should be Nervous about Ecosystem Restoration

The Final version of this post, with some extra discussion of terraforming, can be found here

My previous MA program had a “practicum” requirement for graduation, something like a mini-mentorship, a little practical experience relevant to the field. After some difficulties, with an earlier idea, I decided to join in with a friend in the program and volunteer for “Billion Oyster Project”, which endeavors to grow one billion oysters in New York City’s waters by 2035. Part of the motivation for this is something like a geo-engineering project – oysters filter the water and grow together into reefs that break storm surges. Part of it though, is a restoration project. Before dredging, pollution, and general overconsumption of oysters in New York’s waters, they used to grow in huge numbers and be the center of the local marine ecosystem, their “reefs” serving a similar ecological role to coral reefs elsewhere. One hope of the project is that restoring the oyster population of New York will also restore the old New York marine ecosystem. This reworried me about the idea of restoring ecosystems, which seem like a unique problem for environmental ethics we will be increasingly faced with – first through our continuing destruction of many existing ecosystems on Earth, and eventually through the related – if somewhat different – ethics of bringing ecosystems to other planets that have never had them. What follows is edited from a section of the write-up I produced to cap off the practicum.

The positive case for environmental restoration can be relatively blunt, some of the same reasons human intervention in the ecosystem seems like a bad idea can help justify undoing the results of human intervention in the ecosystem. Eventually ecosystems are likely to adapt to blows humans serve them. However, even human interference that’s centuries old, like the introduction of kudzu and tumbleweed in the Americas, can continue to destabilize ecosystems. The timescales on which ecosystems adapt means there are massive long-term harms in the meantime, and frankly this healing doesn’t happen fast enough to keep up with the rate humans are destabilizing ecosystems at now.

However, there are several possible principles of environmental ethics that count in favor of conservation which either don’t count in favor of, or maybe even count against, humans rebuilding an ecosystem. I am not that sympathetic to many of them as they are mostly non-consequentialist, but I do worry about them somewhat, and some significantly more than others.

One such argument was put forth by Robert Elliot in “Faking Nature”. Essentially he uses the example of art to argue that the value of certain goods depends on their origins. A drawing might be of value if it is drawn by your own child, or was drawn by an eventual great artist when they were a child, even if the drawing itself is unexceptional or poorly made. Likewise, it could be that an ecosystem is in some sense “fake”, or at least hollow by comparison to others, if its existence doesn’t trace back to the spontaneous interactions of natural forces and struggles over millions of years, but instead human imitation of the processes that originally produced such an ecosystem.

This is an argument specific to deep ecology as opposed to the instrumental impacts of habitat destruction on humans and other animals, and I am not particularly sympathetic to deep ecology. However, it seems clear to me that if the ecosystem counts as intrinsically valuable, this is because it is more similar to a moral patient than an impersonal value like art and beauty. In this case I am deeply committed to the moral principle that your value is not determined by your origins. If we discovered Hitler had a child, we should not punish the child for Hitler’s crimes – if we discovered Mother Teresa had a child, we should not praise the child for Mother Teresa’s good deeds.

Origins plausibly determine the identity of a moral patient, as for instance discussed by Derek Parfit in “Reasons and Persons”, and so the subject of benefits, but I tend to find Elliot’s points unpersuasive – heavy on proof of concept, light on defense against competing accounts of value. However the idea that ecosystem identity can still be determined by origins leads into another important way the Billion Oyster Project could fail to make an important kind of environmental difference. A somewhat more interesting counter is that, if ecosystems are valuable in the way moral patients are, and deserve the same type of considerations, then perhaps one doesn’t create value by producing a new one, in just the way some person affecting population axiologies argue that producing new humans doesn’t create more value.

Valuable things can be done to a subject, but being born isn’t such a thing, because not being born can’t happen to “anyone” in the version of events where one is not born. My differences with this point are much more complicated, and somewhat less settled, but putting these together does present an interesting dilemma. It is not clear that one produces any intrinsic benefit to the environment by making a similar new ecosystem in place of the old.

This also puts some weight on the question of what makes an ecosystem the same patient over time? How much of an ecosystem’s patterns of life need to change or die out before we can consider it altogether “dead”? Does starting with a greatly diminished ecosystem and then altering it to something close to its former state work more like benefiting the old ecosystem, or of creating a hybrid, sort of “cyborg” natural ecosystem that has much of the old ecosystem as can survive, but is substantially new as well? Non-identity problems for ethics in humans are hard already, but ecosystems seem to present both more common, and entirely new types of ambiguities.

As I said though, I am not very sympathetic to deep ecology, I am a sentientist at heart. Though there might be complicated ways of viewing things like identity and flourishing through “nested minds” which allow one to consider ecosystems “conscious”, strategies like this are unpersuasive to me, and I simply don’t think the ecosystem is a patient to begin with. But there are also ways of just valuing the conscious animals themselves which draw a line between conservation and restoration.

A first one is non-interference. A common basic intuition amongst people environmentalists and vegans is that humans have a moral obligation not to violate the autonomy and independence of the broader animal kingdom. We have no right to either cause or prevent their suffering. Perhaps because humans are not normal participants in nature - we are vastly, unfairly advantaged, and perhaps more importantly, have the ability to critically reflect on and avoid violence against other animals. Due to cumulative advancement, the rest of the ecosystem can’t keep up with human change, and so we have in some sense disconnected ourselves from nature, seceded.

This vague cluster of moral observations converge on the idea that we primarily have negative duties with respect to the rest of the natural environment, and restoring ecosystems, unlike conserving them, is an exercise in positive action towards them. This might mean the activity does not carry the most basic value of conservation, but depending on how you spell out the view, it could also make this restoration actively immoral. This is, after all, a type of human interference. And even if you are not that sympathetic to a purely interference/non-interference environmental ethics, like me, it could be that animal welfare considerations make this an immoral form of active interference.

Nature is filled with animals undergoing horrible suffering and short lives. Predation, parasites, the elements, thirst, hunger. The reason nature is able to produce so many animals who have thousands of offspring and maintain a stable population, is that only a fraction of a percent survive to reproduce (this is also why such animals quickly become invasive when they are introduced to an environment slightly less hostile to their survival).

This is not enough to persuade me humans should interfere to shrink or to otherwise change nature in big ways, as I have said, we easily do lots of harm through our interference, and nature adjusts to it on much longer time scales. But when it comes to actively making a new ecosystem, it seems as though animal welfare considerations take on a new significance. As I’ve said, many of the reasons we normally might have to protect existing ecosystems don’t apply, and you don’t need to be an antinatalist to acknowledge that wild animals have much harder lives than humans. Their average welfare is likely below what we would normally be comfortable with when considering birthing a new person, perhaps worse even than nonexistence.

Things are further complicated by considerations of care duties. If we birth new conscious beings, this often burdens us with unusual duties to them, ones we will likely fail to fulfill in this case. For one thing, if they are other species it may be unclear whether we are capable of carrying out these care duties at all – if one normally determines what a “good parent” is based on typical reproductive circumstances and the sort of role the animal normally plays in the development of its offspring, we are in a situation of disconnect between the duties humans have to their own creations, and the relationship the animals themselves are owed. That is if we consider the conditions of creation in nature morally proper as opposed to, in an important sense, an ongoing tragedy. If it is simply the latter as I have more sympathy for, it means becoming creators in this way is all the worse.

Ultimately though, simply setting in motion events that result indirectly in a new life seems to at least leave us less responsible for caring for the life in this way. Does a wedding officiant have guardianship duties towards an eventual child of the newlyweds? Here is where the methods of environmental restoration might impact how responsible we are for the suffering that results in this environment.

The case of the Billion Oyster Project is pretty simple – the result, even desired result of our work has been the slow rebuilding of the ecosystem, but our direct work only involves providing the oysters. And here’s where concerns may start to depend a very great deal on oyster consciousness.

I’ve never developed a confident view on this, and interacting with the oysters themselves hasn’t changed my views one way or the other very much. There are things I have learned secondhand over the course of my time there that have influenced me. When asked about oyster consciousness, my supervisor seemed fairly confident that they weren’t, and she of course has significantly more experience with them than me. I also learned, however, that oyster “spats”, the oysters in their larval states, have to navigate the water at least a bit, to find a suitable surface to attach onto, and they even have an “eye” for this navigation, a rudimentary sensory organ. The use of senses for navigation is not obviously a sufficient basis for consciousness, but we don’t know what is, and it seems likely that such sensory organs at least played a key role in facilitating the eventual evolution of consciousness.

Or consciousness could be rooted in what remains of a past evolution. Bivalves have landed on a simple survival strategy. Camp out, digest water occasionally, and all the rest of the time, shield yourself. Considering this, it is strange how complex the other species related to them, other mollusks, tend to be. Oysters didn’t come out of nowhere, and it seems likely that their ancestors lived more complex lives. “More complex” could look very basic, but without the current survival strategy, they seem more likely to have been the sort of creature that would benefit from consciousness. Perhaps the most disturbing theory I have run into, and the one that gives me the most pause about simple bivalves, is that they have consciousness as a vestigial structure. I suspect oysters probably aren’t conscious, but I still don’t eat them out of uncertainty.

I can’t even rest on the standard that producing life at the usual welfare standards of their natural habitat is permissible. The Billion Oyster Project directly grows life in abnormally bad conditions, in the hopes of an eventual indirect effect of creating a habit that is more normal. The main interaction oysters have with the outside world on a day to day basis, their sufferings and joys if there is anything like consciousness in them, is through processing the surrounding water, which in this case is heavily polluted. Pollution also often leads to increases in boring sponge, which eats away at bivalves. I remember very vividly checking a cage during an ORS monitoring, and all of the oysters falling apart in my hand, just popping at a slight squeeze like bubble wrap. If we owe duties to the oysters we are creating, the fact that they are bearing the burden of the project we are using them for does not sit easy with me.

This is another factor that may generalize – the animals we have the most direct care duties for are the ones initially used to restore an ecosystem. These are also the animals we are most using as a “mere means”. Worst, these are the animals that will bear the biggest brunt of the harms that come from living in a dead or mostly dead ecosystem. If doing so is unusually harmful – in terms of suffering or flourishing or anything along these lines – we are more on the hook for this harm than usual under a couple of popular non-consequentialist theories.

Considering how much environment we are destroying, we may still have a decisive reason to work in the opposite direction a bit – lest we lose for good as much nature as we can possibly destroy along the way. I feel nervous about, but not outright regretful of my work with Billion Oyster Project, but it isn’t just downer efilists and bullet-biting utilitarians who should be increasingly nervous at this situation. I’m hoping we consider these things carefully before we start making entirely new ecosystems on new planets at the very least.