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?

I like the idea of "Promoting High-Welfare Ecosystem States"! I'm surprised you put it in the "promising near-term intervention" box, though. Did you get the chance to talk to WAW scientists about this?

Collaborations between ecological restoration actors and WAW scientists seem acutely scarce at the moment.^[1] If someone, in a position similar to you and I, wanted to non-trivially influence restoration projects, even assuming they 100% knew what to recommend, this unfortunately feels a bit intractable to me. Do you see reasons for optimism? Is there any relevant work I'm missing? :)

1. ^{^}

   All I'm aware of is:

   • Capozzelli et al. (2020) arguing that restoration ecology and welfare science “could enjoy a productive union” and a few discussions of colab that emerged after that.
   • This 2025 grant from WAI that may “inform freshwater systems restoration strategies with a welfare perspective”.
   • Animal Ethics (2026) asking fow WAW to be accounted for when decidicing whether/how to do rewilding.

I think there are plenty of crucial sign-flipping considerations pointing both ways (sec. 1 of my post), and that our takes certainly fail to account for some of them, in ways that likely make these takes irrelevant. 

And even if someone's evaluation somehow does not omit a single crucial consideration, they have to make opaque judgment calls on how to weigh up the conflicting pieces of (theoretical and empirical) evidence. I see little reason to believe such judgment calls would do better than chance.

Clarification on what my "0% Agree" means: I confidently disagree that we should believe it'd go well for animals (sec. 1 of my post), but I don't think we should believe the opposite either. I think our cause prio should not rely on any assumption on this question (sec. 2 of my post).

If farmed animals matter more, the upside could be that AGI enables us to substitute farmed animals completely (cultivated meat, etc.).

Nitpick, but it seems unfair to consider this an upside rather than the mere absence of a downside, since the relevant counterfactual scenario, in expectation (if no AI safety work) is a misaligned AI that takes over and probably ends animal farming as it kills or disempowers humans. 

AI safety cannot take the credit for a potential future reduction or end of farmed animal suffering if it preserves humanity, without which animal farming would not exist to begin with.