In a forthcoming series of posts for Ethics from the Outside, I will critically reassess my past musings on the idea that conservationists should be guided by respect for evolution as an autonomous process, focusing on the April 2023 essay “Evolution is Good; Autonomous Evolution is Better” (and, at times, its precursor “Ecocentrism is Underspecified: Toward a Sentimentalist Ethic of Respect for Evolution”).
This introductory post will function as a “chapter overview” for the upcoming series.
JK! That had been my intention when I began writing. By the time I finished the draft of the “summaries,” however, I realised I’d written enough to satisfy myself for now.
I want to move beyond my earlier associations with rewilding and ecocentrism (like many activist and special-interest communities, they were arenas for groupthink) and I am as yet uncertain whether I will continue to pursue issues in environmental ethics at all. But none of that hasn’t stopped me from pondering these issues, and I feel an urge to state for the public record that my thoughts have continued to evolve, and last year’s essays no longer represent my latest views.
In short, I would no longer adopt my earlier framing of the thesis, including the identification of evolution as “moral bedrock” (see Chapter 3). Furthermore, I was not always clear enough in my intent in past writing. As a low-key moral expressivist, I frequently enacted the title of my PhD dissertation – Feigning Objectivity – but without alerting the audience. I was not direct enough, for one, in stating that the invocation of autonomy was meant only as a provocative metaphor (see Chapter 4). Most regrettably, some of my arguments just didn’t work. For example, I greatly overstated the conclusions in the final section of “Evolution is Good,” influenced by my status in the rewilding movement (see Chapter 2). I also sidestepped some potential objections and dealt with others inadequately (see Chapter 5).
That said, I still believe that even the original formulation of the thesis was sufficiently novel and provocative to have been worth airing. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to defend a philosophical thesis merely to offer a new perspective for analysis, discussion, and damning objections. I don’t think the aforementioned essays are complete BS; I would simply take them offline if I did. More importantly, I still adhere to the basic position: my ideal world would be one in which humans voluntarily agree to set aside large areas of Earth so that natural processes are allowed to take their own course, and where they are motivated to do so not for practical reasons (“ecosystem services”) but merely out of respect, deference, and curiosity directed at the creative powers of naturally unfolding evolution.
Chapter 1: An Intellectual Autobiography
Chapter 3: “Spontaneous Activity of Nature,” or “Surtsification”
Chapter 4: A Defence of Autonomy-Talk
Chapter 5: Objections and Concessions
1: An Intellectual Autobiography
In the first chapter, I will describe the personal history of thought that led me to broach the “autonomous evolution” thesis in the first place.
In the years leading up to my writing of “Ecocentrism is Underspecified” and “Evolution is Good,” I had two motivations: first, to provide a rational reconstruction of my own implicit intuitions about the moral status of wild nature; second, to develop a novel position in environmental ethics that would fill a vacant niche in logical space. (It might be worth underscoring the personal and recreational nature of these motivations. I approach any philosophical topic as a game, a puzzle. Anyone who reads such essays hoping for new information or practical advice has misunderstood the nature of the game being played.)
As this chapter begins, I am already intuitively attracted to ecocentrism. I had no intuitive attraction to anthropocentrism, nor to “sentio-centrism” (e.g. animal rights), and so never had to reason myself away from these positions. (Note that then I talk about ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, etc., I use these terms to refer to theoretical positions. Sometimes I describe rhetoric as being “ecocentric” or “anthropocentric,” referring to the implicit theoretical presuppositions of the statements made by activists. I never use these terms to refer to, e.g., actions, behaviours, or lifestyles.)
For a time, I was attracted to the claim that biodiversity just is valuable in its own right, but I figured out that biodiversity cannot be moral bedrock, since intuitively some types of biodiversity are more valuable than others, and there must be some underlying factor that explains these discrepancies. For example, biodiversity that results from natural selection seems more valuable than biodiversity created by genetic engineering; the diversity of communities of naturally-occurring native species seems more valuable than that of communities of introduced species; biodiversity in the wild seems more valuable than biodiversity in zoos. In fact, an increase in biodiversity can seem to be a disvalue, such as the introduction of a non-native species to formerly untouched landscape (this strikes me as a form of “pollution” even if the introduced species doesn’t displace native ones) or the use of biotechnology to artificially augment the genetic diversity that exists in wild nature. In addition to these concerns, I reflected on the fact that bioregions naturally vary in their biodiversity. For example, greater species diversity exists in equatorial habitats than polar ones (the latitudinal diversity gradient). That is just how the world is, and there is no reason to think that it should affect the moral worth of these bioregions.
A different type of concern arose from the observation that the biodiversity nearly everyone cares about is observable variation in “medium-sized dry goods,” especially charismatic fauna, not diversity of (say) unicellular organisms, even though the latter is arguably as or more important ecologically and evolutionarily. No one, for example, speaks approvingly of diversity in strains of COVID-19 or antibiotic-resistant bacteria. I posit that few people really believe that increases in biodiversity are always good. Again, this suggests that there is some further factor(s) underlying our assessments; biodiversity is not bedrock. So what do we care about?
Well, most people probably have implicitly anthropocentric views: they like the biodiversity that they like. As for me, though, I had postulated a different type of ecocentric theory that seemed to explain many of the aforementioned discrepancies in my intuitions about biodiversity: it’s the process, not (only) the product, that matters morally for conservation [*]; it’s nature’s creative processes that we ought to protect.
Thinking analogically to aesthetics, I recognised that it’s hardly a new idea in value theory that the process of creation is relevant to our assessments of value. Famously, Robert Elliot drew an artworld analogy in comparing ecological restoration to forgery. To my mind, an even more telling (and timely) analogy is that of AI-generated versus human-created art and music (and term papers, etc). Although AI might astound us in its own right, we intuitively value (or disvalue) such “artificial” compositions much differently than the “authentic” products of the “natural” creativity of flesh-and-blood human beings. And what is the engine of wild nature’s creative production? Well, evolution, of course (but see Chapter 3). And so it was that I came to the idea that conservationists should strive to allow evolution the freedom to continue to create new forms of biodiversity, without deliberate human meddling or obstruction.
Now, I might never have bothered to write about this idea if others had done so before me. As it happened, however, I couldn’t find my newly-hatched idea – respect for the autonomy of evolutionary processes – in the literature. Holism, as opposed to individualism, is already rare in environmental ethics, but process-centred holism was something I had not encountered at all. Before I wrote and posted my essays, I tried to do a bit of digging to see if anything had already been written by philosophers about both autonomy and evolution. It turned up very little.
Some philosophers, such as Eric Katz and Ned Hettinger, had published on the idea of respecting nature’s autonomy as a moral ideal (see, e.g., the edited volume Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature). Meanwhile, some conservation biologists had written about the idea of protecting “evolutionary potential” as a goal of conservation (see, e.g., the useful Milot et al article that I discuss at length in “Evolution is Good”). However, there were gaping holes in logical space on both sides. Katz, Hettinger, and other philosophers invoked some concept of nature’s autonomy; from what I could find, however, it seemed that they never pinpointed exactly what in nature is autonomous, and they said little if anything about evolution specifically. Meanwhile, conservation biology seemed to have an almost wholly consequentialist bent; I did not find anyone in the field thinking about obligations to nature from a quasi-Kantian perspective. Rewilding’s Dave Foreman came close to my own thinking at times, but he was not a philosopher, and he did not articulate his ideas about the moral status of evolution with the clarity and precision that a good philosopher would (see Chapter 2).
Now, if you’re a philosopher and you hit upon a prima facie attractive thesis that has not yet been defended in the literature, then it’s settled: you had better damn well get on that thesis and defend it. You don’t even have to be convinced that it’s correct; you just have to believe that it would contribute to the debate in an interesting and provocative way (IMO). Such was my motivation in pursuing the project of “Ecocentrism is Underspecified” and “Evolution is Good.”
[*] New COVID strains and the like might seem to provide counterexample to this new thesis too, but IMO that is only evidence that these considerations apply only to the/a moral basis for conservation of wild nature; “respect for natural evolution” was never meant to offer moral guidance to the construction of human societies, nor should it.
2: Rewilding Baggage
As described in Chapter 1, my initial interest in developing the “respect for the autonomy evolution” thesis was that it not only resonated with me personally but also seemed to fill a void in the environmental ethics literature. It was a hobby, not a vocation; I never set about to change the world, influence how conservation is actually practised, or even revitalise a single 501c3 corporation. However, I unexpectedly and rapidly became known within the rewilding movement after I wrote a piece in which I argued that the rewilding community failed to acknowledge “transatlantic semantic ambiguity” in the use of the word ‘rewilding’. Starting out, I was a flexible and curious independent thinker, who happened to have a pet philosophical idea that had its closest antecedents in the rewilding movement. But then I found myself in a situation in which defence of “traditional rewilding” was effectively a contractual obligation.
In Chapter 2, I will describe how “Evolution is Good” was shaped by my involvement with the North American rewilding movement, in which I had been handed a high-status role out of the blue. At the time I wrote the essay, I was still employed as the Deputy Director of The Rewilding Institute (TRI) and my “captive audience” consisted primarily of members of the North American rewilding movement. It was hard to separate the philosophical games I still wanted to pursue for pleasure from my public role as a spokeswoman for the organisation and the old-school rewilding movement.
Some of this influence was benign. There was nothing wrong, surely, with developing my ideas in the context of relevant publications by some of rewilding’s greats. The title itself alluded to Michael Soulé’s much cited 1985 article “What is Conservation Biology?” in which he offers “Evolution is good” as one of four normative postulates of conservation biology. And my essay as a whole was framed as a critique of Dave Foreman’s essay “Wild Things for Their Own Sake,” which was prominently quoted on TRI’s website. In the quote, Foreman declares that the “most needed and holy work of conservation is to keep whole the building blocks of evolution,” but I argued that his “Wild Things” essay conflates this idea of protecting the “building blocks of evolution” with a second and very different goal: respecting the autonomy of evolutionary processes. I further argued that Foreman was simply wrong in his characterization of evolution’s building blocks, but I simultaneously maintained that the second goal was the more interesting and important one for rewilding.
In criticising Foreman’s elision of distinct concepts, I did a bit to distance myself from blind adherence to rewilding rhetoric. I was willing – indeed a bit desperate – to demonstrate that I personally understand enough about natural selection to recognise that evolution per se doesn’t require wilderness, native species, or so on; on the contrary, evolution by natural selection can happen in a city, in a landscape overrun by invasive species, inside a hospital, and so on. At the end of “Evolution is Good,” I was also willing to criticise the non sequitur in Connie Barlow’s argument (in an essay for Wild Earth) that an evolution-centred approach to rewilding somehow justifies Pleistocene rewilding and the use of translocated proxy species for extinct megafauna.
Where I fell short, however, was in my reluctance to prod at potential inconsistencies in the positions and rhetoric of the more mainstream North American rewilding movement. Instead, in the final section of “Evolution is Good,” I effectively tried to reverse-engineer an evolution-based moral theory that would lead to the conclusions that TRI and the movement would want: (1) large areas of wilderness should be protected without any ongoing human intervention, but also (2) certain interventions can be justified or even required, especially to restore elements of ecosystems that humans previously extirpated (e.g. reintroduction of apex predators or other keystone species, or planting trees or other native flora) or to remove anthropogenic features such as dams or roads, but also (3) deliberately creating novel ecosystems (as opposed to restoring past ecosystems) is wrong, even if these novel ecosystems are subsequently left to evolve naturally in the absence of further human intervention.
As a work of philosophical engineering, my proposed solution was perhaps clever – but it’s a damn good thing I’m not a structural engineer, because the argument collapses (see more in Chapter 4). Retrospectively, I believe that the “autonomous evolution is better” thesis can at most be used to argue for (1) and (3), while intellectual integrity requires that (2) to be left open for debate. The philosopher Eric Katz, for example, would deny (2) and argue that respecting nature’s autonomy as a moral subject is not compatible with any human-led restoration. I can’t say I agree with his arguments, but they deserve serious scrutiny. Quite likely, it will turn out impossible to “prove” either (2) or its negation from the premise that we should respect the autonomy of evolution, and questions of restoration are simply matters of taste or issues to be adjudicated on independent grounds, possibly anthropocentric ones.
In fact, one of my disagreements with Katz simply points to a different type of argument against alleged non-anthropocentric justifications of restoration. He claims that restoration is always done out of human interest, but this seems wrong. I would submit, rather, that conservationists can sincerely believe that restoration is necessary “for nature’s sake” but – and here’s the rub – if they’re not self-deceived and covertly anthropocentric (e.g. fooling themselves by thinking in terms of human timescales instead of Earth’s) then they’re either naïve or paternalistic. To my knowledge, neither Katz nor any other philosopher has raised the paternalism objection against claims to “restore nature for nature’s sake,” but I think it’s neat (see Chapter 4). So why did I barely mention it in “Evolution is Good”? Well, I’d put it on the back burner because I recognised that rewilders themselves are often guilty as charged (again see Chapter 4).
At the end of the day, I still think that “Evolution is Good” could be a useful contribution to rewilding discourse. For those with the patience, it stands as a provocation to reassess the moral foundations for rewilding. Yes, it was a patent attempt to reverse-engineer a moral theory with both premises (e.g. “respect for evolution”) and conclusions (e.g. “Cores and Carnivores”) that TRI would have wanted. Like any philosophical essay, “Evolution is Good” exists not to be accepted but to be criticised. Perhaps other rewilders can do better at engineering a coherent argument. Or perhaps readers will conclude that the project to reverse-engineer rewilding’s moral foundations is hopeless, but that the attempt to do so illustratively showcases its moral incoherence. I have no skin in the game anymore, so I’d be happy if my essay turned out to be something as powerful as a modus tollens of the whole enterprise.
Looking back, I had come much closer to the truth at the end of “Ecocentrism is Underspecified,” where I admitted that the proffered moral theory was “subjective twice over,” consisting of little more than an (almost certainly false) empirical conjecture about the attitudes people would adopt towards wild nature after they have acquired sufficient knowledge and experience to instil them with wonder, curiosity, and awe directed toward the natural evolution of life. I was also pretty blunt in that essay about the role of institutional autonomy in allowing me to follow the argument where it leads: “Is this subjectivity a problem? I would say, rather, that it is what it is. I am not under contract to produce an absolute or objective moral theory that will provide clear and decisive answers on all questions of conservation.” Where honesty and transparency are concerned, “Evolution is Good” now looks like a few steps backward. That said, I still consider the latter to be a more mature piece in several ways. Most importantly, I stopped gesturing to Foreman’s invocation of evolution with uncritical admiration, and I rightly critiqued his conflation of protecting “evolution’s building blocks” and respecting the wildness (autonomy) of evolution, as well as his demonstrably false implicatures that evolution per se somehow requires wilderness (and specifically “native” species, “natural” processes, and so on).
3: “Spontaneous Activity of Nature”
Chapter 3 will provide an overview of the latest phase in the development of my ideas on protecting the autonomy of wild nature. In future writing on this topic, I wouldn’t begin with Dave Foreman or Michael Soulé. In a more radical departure, I wouldn’t even begin with evolution. Instead, I might very well begin with J.S. Mill, writing a year before the publication of Origin of the Species:
… Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.
I believe that, to date, there has been no better statement of the problem of human overpopulation than Mill’s paragraph on the topic in Principles of Political Economy: it is not desirable to increase the human population as much as the planet’s space and resources allow. The passage above forms a large part of his justification for this claim. It also neatly and precisely captures my own core intuition behind the need for wilderness preservation — yet without mentioning evolution specifically, or even having the scientific resources to do so.
I have come to believe that Mill’s description of the key issue is better than my post-Darwinian attempts: it’s simply the need to preserve the “spontaneous activity of nature” that offers our best bet so far for a moral basis for wilderness preservation. “Autonomy” might have been on the right track, but “evolution” now seems not only superfluous but also problematic: it imposes an arbitrary distinction between biological processes and the chemical and physical processes that preceded them. The origin of life was an outcome of the “spontaneous activity of nature,” but it was not evolution. Evolution presupposes life. Yet, to me, it would still seem perverse if an alien race were to intentionally meddle with the waters and minerals of the Hadean Earth, altering the course of future biogenesis or preventing it entirely. Or, if you prefer thought experiments about future sci-fi scenarios instead of bizarre alternate pasts, imagine future space-travelling humans who do likewise to a newly discovered planet, one that harbours the ingredients that could permit life to arise spontaneously. It would be wrong, I think, to drop down and impose our own structure and order on such a planet. It seems to me more virtuous to keep our distance and grant the universe an opportunity for another distinct origin of life. My intuitions are weaker about such cases than those that led me to reject biodiversity in favour of evolution (see Chapter 1), but they are compelling enough to make me withdraw the conjecture that “autonomous evolution” is the bedrock beneath my pro-wilderness intuitions.
I propose, therefore, that we move evolution to the sidelines and begin with the intuition that it’s good to protect areas of Earth where natural processes are left alone to unfold free from deliberate human influence. That’s all. To this end, another intuition pump is the island of Surtsey, a volcanic island that formed near Iceland in the 1960s. In the case of Surtsey, humanity has agreed to a rare pact: no human development, exploitation, or tourism was ever permitted on the island; only a few researchers are permitted to visit and seasonally inhabit Surtsey under strictly controlled conditions. As the UNESCO page describes:
Surtsey is a highly controlled, isolated environment and so threats are very limited. The purpose of strictly prohibiting visits to Surtsey is to ensure that colonisation by plants and animals, biotic succession and the shaping of geological formations will be as natural as possible and that human disruption will be minimised. It is prohibited to go ashore or dive by the island, to disturb the natural features, introduce organisms, minerals and soils or leave waste on the island.
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If readers share the intuition that it was a virtuous decision to leave this island alone, then the question I want to raise for consideration is this: how much of the Earth, ideally, should be left as Surtsey? I believe that it is within this context that we can again invoke evolution or, even better, speciation. Nothing exemplifies nature’s creativity like the origin of biodiversity, so one might suggest that our “Surtsey(s)” should be large enough that their wildlife may eventually undergo speciation. I personally remain intrigued by this criterion for minimum size for protected wilderness areas, following Michael Soulé, who in 1980 posed the question of whether nature reserves “will be large enough to permit speciation in higher vertebrates and plants” and posited that this question could be solved empirically: “All that is necessary is to determine the size of the smallest island on which a particular taxon has speciated autochthonously (in situ)” (or, as we commoners might say, “...has speciated on the island”) (p. 164).
More recently, other scientists have taken up Soulé’s project, such as Heaney et al’s 2018 research paper “How small an island?” published in Journal of Biogeography. In a contribution to Rewilding Earth, “Rewilding for Evolution: A Revitalized Approach,” Mark Fisher and I cited Soulé 1980 and Heaney et al 2018, taking for granted that their strategy provided the solution to figuring out how large a protected area must be to ensure room for “unfettered evolution.” But here is another way in which my thoughts have developed since 2023: I have questions about how much the Soulé / Heaney approach can tell us. I’m no biologist, but surely the availability of surface area does not cause speciation, even if is necessary to permit it. It would be interesting to examine what geographical or ecological factors might have actually contributed to the speciation of the vertebrate taxa examined on the islands in the studies.
Surely size isn’t all that matters. Here one speculative idea: scientists can examine the trajectories of tectonic plates to figure out where future mountain ranges are likely to form (here is one such study) so perhaps we ought to place our bets on protecting areas where future orogenic activity (a.k.a. mountain formation) is predicted. New mountains, presumably, would cause populations of organisms to fragment and create possibilities for new alpine habitats; these are the types of changes and disruptions that should create opportunities for speciation. Or, for something even more speculative but in the much shorter term, suppose that rising sea levels will fragment coastal habitats, making islands out of the relatively high ground, and causing populations to become isolated… The point is just this: if we decide that our “Surtsey” should be large enough to provide room for the speciation of terrestrial vertebrates, I can’t help but wonder if the task ahead of us is not in fact more complicated – and interesting – than merely looking at the size of islands where speciation has occurred.
Of course, if we are to begin with Surtsey, significant disanalogies will arise due to the fact that the vast majority of Earth’s land does not consist of newly formed islands (FYI) and, in nearly all cases, comes with a history of colonisation and use by Homo sapiens. In practice, any “Surtsification” of large areas of Earth’s surface would presuppose abandonment of previously managed land. Given this, additional questions arise. Should such areas be restored to some previous state before they are left to the spontaneous activity of nature? Or should they simply be abandoned, like the Chernobyl nuclear exclusion zone or Ohio’s Geauga Lake theme park? Should buildings, roads, and dams be removed or left to decay? Should humans intervene to stack the decks in favour of colonisation by native species, or should we make peace with the possibility that nature’s spontaneous activity might include a proliferation of non-native species? Should humans intervene if it’s necessary to ensure the survival of endangered species, or should we make peace with the possibility that “the spontaneous activity of nature” might result in their extinction? As Mark Fisher shows through three case studies in his recent article “An intolerable logic – trading the life of one species for another,” conservationists sometimes intervene lethally — persecuting one native species for the sake of another that is more threatened. Would we be willing to stand back and let natural selection make these choices instead?
We might be able to gain some mileage in thinking about the above questions through a critical scrutiny of the work of philosophical critics of restoration, such as Elliot and Katz, and their numerous opponents. We might benefit even more from studies of past and present “real world” examples of places that have been abandoned and reclaimed by nature (like these or these or – from my home state – these, or historical case studies like afforestation following abandonment of farmland in New England).
Finally, it’s worth acknowledging that there’s nothing preventing speciation from happening within anthropogenic landscapes. It’s not hard to imagine situations in which populations of organisms are divided because of anthropogenic factors (e.g. a road or dam) and subsequently evolve in response to different manmade selection pressures (e.g. different types of pollution). The “spontaneous activity of nature” might very well lead to speciation in such situations. Suppose, say, that urban populations of white-crowned sparrows alter their songs in response to noise pollution, and that this ultimately creates a barrier that prevents urban and rural populations of song sparrows from interbreeding… But we simply needn’t concern ourselves with speciation on urban islands in Chapter 3, since we begin with the assumption that others will agree that the “laissez faire” policy of Surtsey is good, and raise the question of how far we should extend that policy in an ideal world. The topic of speciation as a byproduct of human development – as interesting as it is in its own right – simply doesn’t arise, unless someone argues that it would undercut the need to protect wild land for speciation… but let’s cross that bridge when someone argues that.
4: A Defence of Autonomy-Talk
In future work, I doubt that I’ll make much more of the concept of autonomy (with the possible exception, broached in Chapter 2, of anti-paternalism). Although I seldom said so explicitly, I always perceived autonomy as little more than a suggestive metaphor and a guide to analogical thinking. That’s not to express regret in invoking it: metaphor and analogy can be powerful tools to help us “think outside the box.” However, I was not as clear as I could have been in conveying the work that I’d hoped the concept to accomplish, and merely using it without explanation did not have the intended effect. This chapter will describe what I’d actually wanted to achieve.
First, to make things explicit, the Kantian conception of autonomy only f—king pertains to g—d— rational agents (yes, sometimes I make puns). Obviously, then, any transposition of this philosophical idea to natural processes can only be metaphorical. Natural selection, for example, cannot literally “choose” or “decide” what types of organisms should exist; nature does not “reason its way” to figuring out the fittest types of organisms for their environments. At the same time, however, there is a robust folk conception of autonomy according to which natural processes – including evolutionary processes – can surely be considered autonomous. One definition of ‘autonomy’ in Oxford Languages, for example, is simply “freedom from external control or influence; independence.” Evolution is obviously capable of unfolding without management or control by a rational agent. It can proceed on its own without human intervention. It did so for billions of years before the origin of Homo sapiens. And we can still choose to let natural processes unfold without our control and with minimal influence, as in the case of Surtsey (see Chapter 3).
My proposal to “respect the autonomy of evolution” thus resulted from the confluence of two observations: first, moral philosophers commonly speak of “autonomy” as something that ought to be respected; second, ordinary language users commonly speak of “autonomy” as a concept that can apply to entities other than humans or animals, including natural processes. My idea was simply that we should start with the broader folk concept of autonomy, ask what it would look like if we transferred ideas from moral theory to this broader domain (thinking analogically), and see if anything probative or provocative would result. There were four things in particular that I’d hoped this little exercise might offer to conservation discourse:
1. First, and most basically, conservation ethics is dominated by consequentialist thinking, to the extent that it struck me as intellectually sterile and inert. I’m not a Kantian either, but I’m willing to playact a Kantian for the sake of trying to stir the pot and provoke people to try out different paradigms of thought. (I make a similar gambit when I like to say that I’m an antinatalist because children are unable to give informed consent to being born.)
2. Second, and more substantively, I saw the appeal to “autonomy” as a way to circumvent the trite criticism that wilderness preservation has no purpose in the modern world because nowhere on Earth is “pristine” or unaffected by human influence, due to anthropogenic climate change, microplastics, the proliferation of introduced species, and so on. This is the first of three applications of analogical thinking, and it’s the most straightforward.
When we think about humans, we don’t consider personal autonomy – or, in turn, our responsibility to respect it – to be undermined by the fact that “no man is an island.” Indeed, we might equally say of humans, “No one is truly independent of all people, since even a lone tribesman in the depths of the Amazon might suffer from the effects of anthropogenic climate change…” Such trivial admissions are never assumed to be at odds with a moral duty to respect others’ autonomy. Why, then, should they prevent us from regarding wild nature as something that should be given a right to freedom from control and coercion? Incidentally, I did make this analogy explicit in “Evolution is Good,” although it never seemed to gain traction:
One anticipated reaction, which seems presently en vogue, will be something like this: ‘Give it up! Humans control the entire planet – our influence is everywhere and unavoidable – so there’s no sense in speaking of protecting evolution’s autonomy.’ I have never understood this line of objection, given that it’s entirely out of kilter with how we already think about respect for autonomy in more familiar domains, viz., that of human interaction. As I write this, I am in many ways acting of my own volition. I’m freely writing on a topic of my choosing [...] At the same time, it’s obviously false that I am completely free from the influence of – even dependence on – other people. I rely on the work of others for my WiFi connection and the beloved 2016 MacBook on which I continue to type. The coffee I sip is the result of a long supply chain involving very many other humans [...] I’m not fully autonomous. Nobody is. But that doesn’t mean that it’s unimportant to respect our capacity for freely chosen actions in the many ways we are able to execute it. [...]
3. A second possible use for the analogy was supposed to derive from the fact that, in the case of humans, respect for personal autonomy is taken for granted to be compatible with helping others (driving them to an appointment, checking their mail while they’re on holiday, proofreading their journal submission, and sundry other acts of being a good friend or colleague). This is especially true – and here is a key disanalogy – if that person has requested help or consented to your kind offer thereof. Despite the latter disanalogy, I relied on this analogy when attempting to reverse-engineer a thesis that was restoration-friendly instead of strictly non-interventionist. Although I made some reasonably clever moves, it’s actually much harder to develop this analogy than I made it out to be in “Evolution is Good.” We have billions of years of empirical evidence to suggest that wild nature never needs our help. Thus, to fend off my own paternalism objection (see below), we would need some way to make sense of the claim that nature would want or consent to our help.
In “Evolution is Good,” I claimed that restoration is the morally best option when it consists in giving back what nature had previously chosen for itself. Of course, it is only metaphorical to speak of “what nature has chosen,” but notice that it is extremely close to the dead metaphor of natural selection. Where the life that exists is the product of natural selection, it is only a small grammatical step to say that it is “what nature has selected” or, equivalently, “what nature has chosen.” In many cases, of course, humans have knowingly and intentionally stamped out the organisms, species, and ecosystems that nature had previously selected. But here is one problem: we can’t literally give those things back; often we can’t even come close. We run into problems when we try to extend the analogy so far as to claim that nature would “want” some half-baked approximation of a past ecosystem. I have raised this objection myself when talking about proxy species, and Eric Katz makes it forcefully (and more generally) in “Replacement and Irreversibility: The Problem with Ecological Restoration as Moral Repair.” As I said in Chapter 2, my own argument collapses.
At most, perhaps this analogy could be wielded to cast doubt on the claim that respecting nature’s autonomy requires non-intervention (a la Katz), but I no longer believe that it can do the work for which I tried to employ it in “Evolution is Good.” I now believe that the best way to argue in favour of restoration is simply to allow (as Katz also does) that respecting nature’s autonomy isn’t always the decisive criterion.
4. The third application of the autonomy metaphor that I’ll consider is my favourite: it provides a putative basis to accuse some conservation discourse of paternalism.
Paternalism is often understood as a violation of personal autonomy. Someone behaves paternalistically when they impose limitations on a person’s freedom for their own good. Note that whether or not a given intervention is paternalistic depends on its intention. For example, seat belt laws are paternalistic if their only motivation is to protect the driver (as is usually assumed) but not necessarily if their purpose is to protect innocent bystanders from flying bodies that are ejected through windshields. COVID vaccine mandates would have been paternalistic if their only rationale had been to help the vaccinated individuals themselves avoid illness, but of course these mandates were instated with the goal of eradicating the pandemic for the public good.
As a woman who travels alone and walks alone (yes, mom, even at night), paternalism is often on my mind, and it’s something that I very much loathe. As I recently wrote in my other blog, “In ordinary conversation, it’s not even necessary to mention swimming alone or walking at night on unlit streets; to trigger paternalistic fear in the eyes of the world, it’s only necessary to mention travelling alone while female.” Women are often told that we should stay indoors or only walk with a buddy for our own safety. No, no, no. And don’t get me started on coercive retirement savings either... It is perhaps not surprising, then, that I am keen to lambaste conservationists for paternalism when the opportunity presents itself. You might say that, for me, feminist environmental ethics is not about care and nurturing, but about respecting Mother Nature’s right to say, “F—k off, I can do it on my own without Man.” What’s more surprising is that I barely alluded to paternalism in “Evolution is Good,” even though I had introduced it in “Ecocentrism is Underspecified.” This was because, as noted in Chapter 2, it wasn’t obviously amenable to the goal of reverse-engineering the type of argument that the North American rewilding movement would want.
How can rewilding discourse be paternalistic? Well, consider a type of statement that I came to find particularly repugnant: “nature can heal itself if we put all the pieces back in place” (alluding, e.g., to the reinstatement of keystone species). I find such sentiments to be extraordinarily disrespectful to the autonomous creative power of nature. Nature can heal itself, period. Nature is not helpless or impotent. The lesson of at least 2.4 billion years of evolutionary history is that life is resilient in the face of catastrophe; it has never required the assistance of an intentional agent to invent ways to carry on. To pretend that nature needs our help is hubristic and arrogant, just as it is to believe that we’re the first unsurmountable threat to the continuation of all life on Earth – greater than the Alvarez impact event, Siberian traps, Snowball Earth episodes, Great Oxidation Event, and other causes of mass extinction. Moreover, past mass extinction events not only failed to end life; they also created ecological opportunity that led to subsequent evolution and diversification (I mean, hell, we might not be here ourselves without the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs).
It’s an empirical question, but for now I am happy to put the burden of proof on others to persuade me the present ecological crises will spell the end of evolution in the absence of our intervention. Until then, my conjecture is that — like all the rest — it will instead simply create openings for future evolutionary innovation (and wouldn’t it be totally cool if birds evolved to fill the niches left vacant from the extinctions of mammalian megafauana? #TeamDino). Not in our lifetimes, of course, but then we’re not proposing an anthropocentric moral theory, so that shouldn’t be relevant.
Of course, rewilders are far from the only potential recipients of the paternalism accusation; they are simply among the attractive targets, since the objection reveals an inconsistency in their self-professed non-anthropocentric defence of self-willed land: wouldn’t a truly non-anthropocentric stance adopt geological time scales, not piddly human ones, when assessing nature’s capacity to regenerate? Even more obvious targets include the management-obsessed conservation industries that I often encountered in Europe — which seem to accept it as a truism that biology will stop working without a steady schedule of human intervention — or certain highly interventionist strategies alleged to help nature cope with climate change, such as the assisted migration of plant species or gene-editing of corals.
It’s possible that I will develop the anti-paternalism line in further work, but it would be in a different and more explicitly theoretical context (e.g. contrasting this line of anti-restoration argument with that of Katz). It’s also probable that I’ll let it drop.
Although I like the anti-paternalism line as provocation to thought — about both ecocentric ethics and the deep-time history of extinction and evolution — it’s another situation in which I’m ultimately not too sad if some readers interpret it as a modus tollens (“If a truly ecocentric ethic would entail that we shouldn’t care about the extinction crisis because biodiversity will recover in 10 million years, then so much the worse for ecocentric ethics!”). Indeed, when rewilders want to justify species reinstatement, my advice is just to suck it up and give the anthropocentric justification that you meant all along: nature’s rate of recovery is too slow for human timescales, and we want biodiversity and thriving ecosystems that we can experience. It might be anthropocentric, but it’s honest, it’s reasonable, and it doesn’t denigrate the capabilities of self-willed nature.
5: Objections and Concessions
It should be easy to find fault with “Evolution is Good,” because it has many weaknesses. I have already denounced a few, and there are still more. I might remember more later, but here are three additional ones to start off Chapter 5. Oddly, no one else raised them against me (at least not to my face) so I am left to do so myself.
Objection: The position is irreducibly subjective (i.e. “That’s just your opinion, man”).
Response: Well, yes, I said this explicitly myself. But as I discussed in Chapter 1, one of my major purposes had always been to provide a rational reconstruction of my own firmly held intuitions. We always need to start with intuitions about things that just are right and wrong for moral theorising to get off the ground. One of mine (to take one example) was that it would just be wrong if humans were to manage every acre of the Earth’s surface until the planet is no longer habitable. That prospect sickens me to the core. I just don’t know how to argue with someone who sees no problem with a future of omnipresent human management of Earth — and yet some don’t. *shrug*
Both “Evolution is Good” and “Ecocentrism is Underspecified” raised the empirical conjecture that people will share my wonder, awe, and reverence toward evolution and the deep-time history of life when they gather enough information from scientists and take time really to meditate on it, plus the further empirical conjecture that anyone who has such sentiments will desire the existence of protected areas in which we humans leave nature alone. These empirical conjectures, however, are almost certainly false (although I would love to test them by ensuring that the public is informed about evolution, actually believes it, has opportunities to experience wild nature, and has enough leisure time and assurance that their basic needs will be met that they can afford the luxury of pondering philosophical topics).
So, yes, it’s almost certainly just my opinion, man. A point that I can’t stress enough is that environmental ethics is boring, because people will always have irreconcilably divergent intuitions. Choose whichever intuitions you like as your premises, but remember that you’re just doing a formal exercise; you’re just doing mathematics with your idiosyncratic tastes as the axioms. It can be fun until it’s not.
Objection: We all agree that human societies should not be subject to unrestrained evolutionary processes, because we accept that allowing natural selection to take its course would result in much human suffering that is preventable given our current technologies. For example, we agree that it’s good to develop vaccines for communicable diseases rather than waiting for humanity to build defences through the process of natural selection. But sentient creatures suffer in wild nature as well, and we commit the sin of human exceptionalism when we refuse to intervene on their behalf, choosing to allow individuals to suffer and die so that the often brutal process of natural selection can take its course. Sentient creatures are not objects to be sacrificed to appease our scientific curiosity or aesthetic taste for wilderness. Most likely, pain and suffering would be minimised in a future scenario in which we have domesticated and sterilised the entire planet, as we’ve already done for ourselves. If so, that is the future that we are morally obligated to pursue.
Response: Yeah, this seems like a situation where human exceptionalism is the way to go, actually. Hu-man! Hu-man! Hu-man!
Seriously, though, this objection (the argument for herbivorising carnivores is one variant) poses a much bigger challenge than has been acknowledged in ecocentric communities. Essentially, it presents us with a trilemma: reject civilisation, accept the legitimacy of obstructing natural selection for the welfare of other sentient animals, or accept human exceptionalism. In “Evolution is Good,” I presented it as the strongest objection to the thesis, and I did not provide an adequate response. (In fairness, at least I didn’t try cop-out response of saying “we’d just f–k things up more if we tried to intervene,” which does nothing but betray a staggering ignorance of how hypothetical reasoning and thought experiments work.) I now believe that the most promising route is to bite the bullet and treat humans as exceptional in some contexts.
If I were to write more about this objection, my tack would almost certainly be to play devil’s advocate and mount my strongest argument in favour of herbivorising carnivores, and then leave it for other wilderness defenders to argue against. So far I haven’t seen any truly incisive counterargument from the rewilding camp, and that’s frankly embarrassing. But I have better things to do these days than troll rewilders.
Objection: I am compelled by awe and wonder just like you, but I believe that it’s appropriate to direct these sentiments to the human mind and its achievements. I have a deep-time perspective just like you, but to me that only underscores the incredibility of the human brain, the likes of which has only emerged once (as far as we know) in over 3 billion years of the evolution of life on Earth. Furthermore, if humanity were to perish, there might never again be any creature with comparable cognitive capacities. You say that human societies should not hamper natural evolution, but I believe that human societies should not hamper cultural production and scientific progress. We are latecomers on an old planet, and we can’t be sure how much time we have left — and that’s precisely why we must make the most of our unique abilities while we can. It is our species’ prerogative, if not our duty, to push our creative and intellectual abilities to their limits while we still exist.
Response: I have considerable empathy for this alternative take. Sure, I don’t like people and have no hope for humanity, but I am wonderstruck by science and the technology that facilitates it. One reason I could never get on board with anti-civ / anti-tech positions is that they would preempt our ability to learn about the universe and its history (and that I enjoy the perks for the civilisation – from coffee to contact lenses to Cookie Monster / Tom Waits mash-ups). It has always been central to my position that we should protect nature for the right reasons, where the “right reasons” include sentiments of awe and wonder (etc) toward wild nature, and where these sentiments are ones that are honed through a scientific understanding of the world — like the deep-time perspective that has so greatly influenced my thinking. We couldn’t have that perspective without modern science (indeed, we might not have knowledge of natural selection if our ancestors hadn’t domesticated animals…). Modern science teaches us how small we are, and how ill-equipped we are to understand this old, vast, and weird universe; let’s keep trying to understand so we can keep being humbled.
Following Mill, however, I would propose that we aspire to shrink our population so that, in time, we have our cake and eat it: innovative civilisation and innovative wilderness. True, Mill himself lacked the point of view of 21st century science and technology, and he wasn’t anticipating making space for data centres, the Thirty Meter Telescope, or the Large Hadron Collider, but, well, all the more reason for humanity to start making fewer babies (and better educate the ones we do make).
This is also a rare context in which I’m willing to lean into anthropocentrism: I might suggest that future cultural production and scientific advancement would be facilitated on a planet with large areas of wild nature that could serve as a muse and inspiration and research subject. That’s an empirical question, I suppose, but anyhow the point on which I want to end is this: the reason I’m willing to lean into anthropocentrism in this context is that the hypothetical adversary is motivated by wonder, curiosity, and love for knowledge and beauty for its own sake. Indeed, they are not my real adversary – and not just in the sense that they are hypothetical. I’m sure I have more in common with transhumanists than conservationists who try to claim that we need wilderness because it provides ecosystem services that enable an ever-growing human population to uncritically waste their adulthoods in 9-to-5 bullshit jobs. I’d rather exchange ideas with someone who fantasizes about uploading brains to computers or whatever than someone who bangs the table and demands that we stay focused on what is practically and politically feasible. My greatest adversaries aren’t the anthropocentrists, but the anti-intellectuals, the anti-dreamers, the down-to-earth realists, and all those people who are seemingly allergic to hypothetical and counterfactual reasoning.
6: Where Next?
Well, I’m never exactly sure myself… so why not subscribe to find out?
Throughout the above, I have noted points that I might revisit in future work. But of course my reason in writing this piece was never really to outline a future research agenda, but to declare my intellectual independence even from the “real” rewilding movement, once and for all. Insofar as I am a philosopher, my raison d'être is to attack people’s reasoning whether or not I agree with their conclusions. I can’t be a public figure within an advocacy movement: either I can’t be myself, or I’ll be too much of an instinctual contrarian for anyone’s good. (Incidentally, I haven’t commented here on why I resigned from my unpaid post at the The Ecological Citizen earlier in 2023, but it was because I wanted the freedom to criticise the publication’s editorial decisions.)
Looking forward, one of my next projects will be to write about intrinsic value, in the ethics of nature conservation and otherwise. Even though it requires reading ethicsy things, it will be more in the spirit of Ordinary Language philosophy than ethics.
Otherwise, I’m not yet certain whether I will abandon environmental ethics entirely or continue to engage with it, but strictly as a critic of philosophers (e.g. Katz and Elliot). I’m done with criticising practitioners: they don’t understand the appeal of mental gymnastics, and I don’t understand the appeal of doing sh!t; we’re playing different games, and we’re bound always to appear at loggerheads if we pretend otherwise. It’s also not out of the question that I’ll take a sort of middle course and shift from environmental ethics to environmental aesthetics. After all, my take on environment ethics has always been quasi-aesthetic...
...and quasi-religious. And that leads to my last point about a new and different context in which it’s likely that I will write again about the “respect for evolution” idea: I believe that reverence for nature – informed by a scientific understanding of nature – can subserve many of the functions traditionally reserved for reverence for the supernatural. That is, it’s not only that evolution provides an explanation of the diversity of life that doesn’t require postulating a god (an intellectual benefit of the theory of evolution) but also that scientifically-based wonder and awe for the natural universe is (quasi-)spiritual benefit that actually goes beyond what religion can provide.
This would/will be a partly autobiographical essay. As a young child, I was absolutely fascinated by dinosaurs, evolution, the origin of life on Earth, the Big Bang, the immensity of deep-time and all the quirky critters that once dwelt within it. However, when I was around 10 years old, my parents very suddenly joined a Christian fundamentalist church that adhered very strongly to the dogma of a literal six-day creation and 6,000-year-old Earth. God created dinosaurs on the sixth day, but most perished in Noah’s flood, and the descendents of the ones aboard the ark struggled in the post-flood climate; by the time of Job, at least sauropods still existed (“Behold now behemoth…”) but must have been on their last iron-rod-like legs. I was no longer able to read or believe the things that brought me the most enchantment, because I was told that the price of doing so was an eternity of hellfire. Religion took away something of immense importance to me, and it gave me nothing to replace it – only dogmatism, fear, and bigotry. Adulthood did not deprive me of my childhood sense of wonder in nature; religion did. On the contrary, adulthood enabled me to reclaim my sense of wonder, by giving me the independence to become a freethinking apostate.
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I never really thought about sharing that story until recently, when I learnt that Ayaan Hirsi Ali had converted to Christianity and couldn’t resist watching her conversation with Richard Dawkins, filmed in May 2024. Now, I’ve not read Ali’s books, but I was familiar with her honorary title as the “plus one horsewoman” (in addition to the “four horsemen” of Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens). I’m aware that it’s popular to accuse Dawkins of failing to understand or appreciate religion, but his criticisms of Christianity sure as hell (so to speak) resonated with my own experiences, so I was interested to hear if a conversation between him and Ali would draw out any new insight on why some intelligent and critically-thinking people decide to adopt religion. It didn’t really. But what lingered with me were Ali’s protestations that “you [atheists] offer us nothing.” I wanted to interject, “She doesn’t speak for everyone! For me, atheism gave back the wonder, curiosity, enchantment, and joy in learning and discovery that Christianity had taken away – praise be to atheism!” I also find myself thinking, “Are there any plausible ‘horsewomen’ out there these days? Where are the strong female secular humanists? It’s not great optics.”
Now, it might very well be that I’ve spent too much time in red-state America, and as soon as I leave Ohio and return to Europe, this will all lose its sense of importance. For now, in any case, I am intrigued by the idea of “respect for autonomous evolution” as a secular alternative to deference to an alleged creative deity, and awe for reality as a secular alternative to awe for an alleged supernatural realm. Reverence and awe were never part of my religious upbringing as a young-earth creationist – only pseudoscience and threats of hell – and I have only experienced such feelings in secular, naturalistic contexts. I’m convinced that nature is more than sufficient to provide a lifetime of opportunities to experience these sentiments, without the need to imagine the existence of a “super-nature” beyond it. In fact, it seems insulting to nature (or else ignorant) to suggest that it’s not adequately awe-inspiring on its own.
Correspondingly, I must always stress that scientific knowledge can enhance the wonder of nature; it never detracts (as Richard Feynman said about the beauty of a flower). Even within the ecocentric community, there were many would dismiss or downplay the potential for science to be a source of wonder in nature and, in turn, a feasible route to an ecocentric worldview (as fascination with deep time was for me). I loathe the trope that science somehow obstructs our aesthetic and spiritual connection to nature because it has “demystified” it. Huh?? Science has exposed that the universe is more mind-boggling than we could ever have known from our unaided senses and our ancient myths. It’s pseudoscience like “Intelligent Design” that aspires to demystify the universe by making up an explanation that feels comfortably familiar: it was crafted by an intentional agent, just like a watchmaker crafts a watch. If folks think it’s bad to try to demystify nature, then they should rebuke the belief that an anthropomorphic deity is necessary and sufficient to explain it, not scientific curiosity.
There is one final possible type of follow-up to this post that is worth mentioning: at some point, almost certainly, I will revise my thoughts about something I have said herein; retrospectively criticising this post itself is fair game for a future post.
K.M.
4 July 2024