Curious what motivated you to spend time assessing the impact of bird-safe glass on arthropods, specifically, then. Were you hoping to find out that bird effects dominated but found and shared the opposite unsatisfying results? Or maybe you think "here's another example showing how indirect effects on tiny animals may dominate" and that this will convince some people to also prioritize (i) and (ii)? (people who were not convinced by your previous largely-overlapping posts but might by this one?)

Is there any project you think may not impact arthropods and/or soil animals much more than whatever animals are targeted? I feel like exploring this would be far more insightful at this stage.

Most animals are wild animals, so the answer to this question should focus on them.

Even granting that the overwhelming majority are wild animals, this doesn't necessarily imply we should focus on them. We have to factor in the welfare difference between the two (welfare ranges and quality of life in practice).

Oh good, I have no objection then. Well played.

Are you setting aside wild animals?

this seems to me to imply a greater concern for anthropogenic harm than non-anthropogenic harm. Is that what you meant?

Oh no sorry, increased WAW welfare compared to the "natural" situation counts as impact too.

What I'm saying is: say you help 1 million wild animals out of many or 1 million farmed animals out of fewer. You can't say the former is better because there are more wild animals. It doesn't matter how many there are. What matters is how many you help and how much. And there is an asymmetry here where farmed animals are probably 100% helped if humans are disempowered---the problem is totally fixed---whereas, even in the best case scenario, empowered humans will be nowhere near totally fixing wild animal suffering. This asymmetry may compensate for the fact that there are many more wild animals to help.

Humans increasing or decreasing the number might be the largest impact

As in (D) is more plausible than (C) (in my typology)? I'd agree. Anyway, my argument holds independently of what people find more likely between (C) and (D).

For example, the regeneration of forest is actively opposed in much of Central Europe, because people have cultural ideas about what the landscape should look like. So there's a tension there between environmentalists and traditionalists, and I wouldn't say that the environmentalists are winning.

Oh I didn't know that, thanks. There, of course, is still the question of the marginal impact WAW advocates would have in such debates, but helpful example!

I wasn't thinking about promoting/opposing restoration but about influencing how it is done (without necessarily taking a stance on whether no restoration would be better). And I could very well imagine WAI wanting to advise decision-makers on how to conduct restoration.

I think present and future WAW advocates would fiercely disagree about what ecosystems might be net good/bad, and any intervention aimed at making greening more likely would be highly controversial.

Interventions aimed at, at least tentatively, holding off on restoring would be far less controversial, though. And in that case, yes, I doubt that WAW advocates "leveraging conservative valuing of traditional landscapes to oppose it" would successfully prevent any restoration project. Whatever the incentive for restoration is, it seems far stronger than the incentive to please the few detractors who do not want the landscape restored.

Interesting, thanks!

An intervention doesn't even need to be framed around WAW either - you could just fund an organization to lobby for desert greening (for example) in a particular area, and they could leverage whatever arguments they've got.

That's good only assuming WAW in the ecosystem you create is net positive tho, right? 

I was imagining more like:

• some restoration interventions are and will keep happening anyway.
• let's influence those and push for ecosystems with less suffering.

But I just find it hard to make a difference there. For social/political reasons, yes. Not necessarily because people would be against the idea, but just because there's no/little incentive for the relevant actors (in the restoration process) to do what we'd want there. Why would they bother? I also feel like WAI would have discussed this more if this were tractable? Haven't thought about this much tho. 

[On my Substack], most of my readers are not as familiar with EA discourse

This surprised me. Where do they come from?