I read a report
that says humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970, and that
humankind has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of
civilisation. Now this immediately sounds like bad news, and it may well be bad
news, but it may not be. The information in the article is insufficient to tell
us one way or the other.
Perhaps the entirety of
human progress and all that created value and happiness has been worth the price of eradicated life forms. I think it probably has
been worth it, but perhaps not. One thing is sure though; if you want to defend
a particular view, you ought to have a good argument about the pros and cons of
human progression, and devise a proficient metric for establishing which has
greater precedence. In other words, you mustn’t (as many people do) just read a
headline like “humanity has wiped out 60% of animal populations since 1970” and
assume it’s a bad thing, because it may not be.
It doesn’t help, of
course, that the language they use is set up to make you feel like it’s a bad
thing - where terms like ‘wiped out’ connote some kind of allusion to genocide
or bacterial eradication. A much more sensible analysis might conclude
something like “During the unprecedented
explosion of human progression in the past few hundred years, compared with the
hundreds of thousands of years of human plight and suffering that preceded it,
many species have been unable to co-exist alongside that progression, sometimes
due to human activity and sometimes not”. That’s a much better way to
phrase it.
This is especially
relevant given that palaeontologists estimate that 99% of every species that
has ever lived has now become extinct, and that the vast majority of those
extinctions occurred long before humanity came on the scene. Most species died
out in the natural fight against nature’s oppressive forces - severe weather,
biological competition for survival, natural disasters, and so forth - so the narrative that
the animal kingdom was a safe, stable place before rotten humans came along to
spoil everything is, at best, hugely exaggerated, and at worst, a very unfair
reflection.
Here's a novel way you could think about it. You could note
that endangering the existence of things for human benefit is a dominant
part of our existence. Measles, mumps, rubella, smallpox and polio have been
prominent in human history, and thanks to medical advances, their existence has
been endangered for the benefit of humanity. We are glad these diseases have
been eradicated because they bring about impediments to human progression.
It isn’t, therefore, a
huge category leap to say that we could ascribe overall positive benefits to
humanity’s progression, even though many species have been unable to co-exist
alongside that progression. In other words, if we can be reasonably glad that
diseases have been eradicated because their survival brings about impediments
to human progression, it’s not self-evident that we shouldn’t be able to put up with other living things being eradicated because their survival brings about
impediments to human progression, as long as the benefits outweigh the costs.
To do a proper
cost-benefit analysis, you would have to assess how much humans value the gains
against the losses of extinct species. An argument can be made that as part of
the analysis we must include the cost of life to the species themselves, but
that’s hard to measure, and it’s not obvious that the way we may attempt to
assess it is in any way meaningful to human minds.
All we can do is have a
stab at measuring the costs to humans of other species’ extinction, and even
that is difficult. What price would it be worth to humans, for example, to
preserve lions on the planet? If every human had to pay out 25% of their annual
income as a one-off payment to guarantee the survival of lions, is that too
much? It sounds like a lot too much. What about 25% of their annual income to
save lions, tigers and elephants? It still sounds like too much. What about 0.01%
of our annual income to save all mammals? That doesn't sound like too much at
all. What about if the cost of saving lions fell to one individual, and he
wasn’t allowed to receive any financial help? Would a one-off fee of £50,000 be
worth it to save all lions? Maybe it would for Bill Gates, but wouldn‘t for a
minimum wage worker.
The upshot is, there isn’t an easy way to
measure whether the sum of human progression has been worth it for the cost of the
extinctions of other life forms - but given how much humans value their own
lives, it is at least reasonable to consider that it might have been a net
benefit to the world to bring about such a huge sum of human happiness. When
thousands of tiny creatures die in order for a single house to be built, almost
nobody doubts that the value for the inhabitants outweighs the cost to all the
living things in the soil. It’s possible that that truth could be equally well
extended to the sum of human happiness.
And if you think it’s
difficult to measure the value of a human life, you only need to look at how
humans behave to see how much we do value it. According to Steven Landsburg’s
research on this matter:
“A standard ballpark figure for the value of a life is
about ten million dollars. What this means is that empirically, people are
willing to pay about $1 to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance of death, about $2
to avoid a one-in-five-million chance of death, about $10 to avoid a
one-in-one-million chance of death, and so on for various other small
probabilities. (Theory tells us that willingness-to-pay to avoid a probability
of death should be some constant times that probability, as long as the
probabilities are small. Data tell us that the constant is somewhere around ten
million dollars.”
If every life is worth 10
million dollars (by the way, it’s not self-evident under this metric that every
life is worth the same in economic value, but let’s assume it is for the sake
of argument), and there are 7.5 billion people in the world, then humanity
being alive compromises an aggregated value of at least $75,000,000,000,000,000.
That is 75 quadrillion dollars!
So while it isn't
factually accurate to say that "humankind
has destroyed 83% of all mammals and half of plants since the dawn of
civilisation" - because it involves many false attributions of
causality - perhaps an aggregated value of 75 quadrillion dollars has been
worth the price of some species being unable to co-exist alongside us, or
perhaps it hasn't: but it's the epitome of lazy thinking to just assume it
hasn't and not bother to consider the situation with a proper cost-benefit
analysis, as so many do.
