I believe we're live, and so although I can't see you well, I gather there are many of you watching us at the moment, so welcome.
Also, my understanding, which is limited of the technology,
is that you can see the first of professor usage slides and you can see both himself and myself with tiny vignettes in the corner.
It seems appropriate. So it falls to me.
My name is David MacDonald and I'm the director of the Wildlife Conservation Research
Unit and also one of the leaders of the Martin School Natural Governance Programme,
which is hosting us today. It's false to me.
It's a great pleasure to introduce Jon Stewart.
But before I do so, I've been given some technical instructions.
I think even I am capable of following them.
One is that somewhere towards the bottom right hand side of your screen, there's a little button that says something like Ask a question.
And this is exactly what you should do if if you would like to as we go along.
And after we've heard from John, I'll try and choose some of those questions.
I've really looked at enough because they're accumulating already to realise my task will be easier.
If your question can be reasonably brief, says I have some chance to absorb it while thinking on my feet.
But please do, please do ask a question so I could quite easily spend most of the next hour talking about the remarkable accomplishments of John, who.
But I'll try and confine it instead to just a few seconds.
But he is an extremely unusual person as a scholar because he has had to at least two really successful careers.
He started out as an ecologist studying the wolves of Isle Royale,
very quantitative ecologist who brought many, many insights to wolf population dynamics.
And that led him into a career which was buffeted by interaction with the officials who were making policy about wolves,
their hunting and their conservation in North America, and finding himself in that maelstrom of the interface between evidence and policy.
He progressively realised he was thinking about ethical questions, so he trained himself in a second career that is a conservation ethicist.
It's a rare breed, and John is without doubt paramount amongst them.
So the talk he's going to bring to us today and I've been privileged to know a little bit about what's in it is going to give you a flavour
of really very great expertise in animal ecology and equally great expertise in scholarly ethics and the bringing together of the two.
So I think that's enough of an introduction.
I'm now going to try and turn my camera off, says that I'm not in anybody's way.
And I think next you will hear from John, and that will continue for the better part of 40 minutes.
Whereupon they'll move to a discussion or questions. So John, welcome, were this a different medium?
We would at this moment be enjoying riotous applause. And if you could just imagine that and Lloyd Schwartz, thank you.
Very good. Thank you so much, David, for the great introduction.
And and it's such a pleasure to be here and share some thoughts and ideas with you today.
We'll get straight into things.
I want to make three points today, and the first of the three points is aided by being reminded a little bit of my background.
David touched on that a bit and I'll see just a tiny bit more about it now again, mainly in service of the first point that I want to make today.
My original training is in ecology and a great deal of the field work that I still do to this day takes place at a field site in Lake Superior,
more precisely with an Isle Royale National Park.
This island is inhabited by a population of wolves and moose,
and they are also the subject of the longest continuous study of any predator prey system in the world,
and I've been leading this research now for about two decades.
One of the things that's been appreciated all along the way is how relevant it is that the system takes place on an island and for our interest today,
what that means is that the population of wolves that live there have restricted gene flow with the population of wolves that are on the mainland.
And what we've learnt a few things about the nature of that gene flow and its implications.
One of the things that we learnt is that 1997 was the last time that a wolf immigrated from the mainland.
Who the island population, due to some advances in events,
is at the time that the late 20th century did genetic techniques were used to identify the individual wolf is pictured here right in the middle.
One of the effects that he had is to basically provide a genetic rescue for the population it allowed for
the population to for a brief period of time do better than it had been after those effects wore off.
And then the population sank to near extinction. Now this was interesting for a number of ecological reasons.
We published on those ideas, but one of the other things that happened as a result of these dynamics is that by about 2016,
the population was reduced to just two wolves. And it led to the question should wolf predation be restored on the island?
It was a question that the National Park Service took on.
That's the agency that's responsible for managing this piece of land. And before we think a little bit about this particular question,
should wolves predation be restored in a case like what I'm about to describe or happened describing a bit so far?
It pays to know just a little bit more of the details around it.
First thing to appreciate is how it is that Wolves can possibly get to Isle Royale is basically only by all means.
It's by crossing an ice bridge that forms in some winters,
but not others on the lake's pure waters are too cold and too vast for a wolf to be able to swim.
So ice bridges is it? The other thing that we know is that ice bridges have up over time become much less common over the last several decades.
They occur at a frequency about once every five years or less, whereas previously they used to occur in most years.
For a little bit of context and reference here, that red arrow is pointing to the last time that it wolf immigrated to the island.
So clearly, this is a circumstance that has to do with climate warming, which is the reason ice bridges are less common.
And so what might have seemed like a kind of parochial question about whether wolf predation should be restored on some remote island?
It was understood to be a surrogate for a much broader question, which is should we protect national parks from climate change and to these questions?
There were basically two answers to the question restore wolves or not.
And the first was to say yes, wolves should be restored.
And the reason to do so is to protect the ecosystem health of that national park.
And for that to be a sensible answer, one would have to probe just a little bit deeper and ask, Well, what exactly does one mean by ecosystem health?
And upon inspecting that question, and if one reads the scholarly literature on the topic, they will first find out.
There is many definitions of ecosystem health is there are authors who have written about it,
but rather remarkably, almost all definitions of ecosystem health sit pretty neatly into one or two categories.
One category is that ecosystems are healthy to the extent that they serve our needs.
The other is that they're healthy to the degree that they've been unaffected by humans.
Now the concern here is that the first answer is pretty deeply anthropocentric,
and Anspaugh centrism has a reputation for sometimes causing environmental troubles as opposed to solving them.
And then the other answer being unaffected by humans is essentially misanthropic basically makes humans the bad guys.
If there's an effect, it must be bad.
And so the answer yes has some role, has some challenges and troubles at it, at the basis of what would give rise to that answer.
The other answer that was raised during the discourse surrounding this question about restoring wolves is that the answer should be no,
they shouldn't be restored. And the reason being is to allow nature to take its course.
The reasoning here has to do with the fact that people recognise that Isle Royale is
an island and it's quite natural and normal for populations to go extinct on islands.
And so that led rise to this answer. Now, of course, the challenge with this answer is that it has to kind of shaky foundations.
One is a logical fallacy that's known as appeal to nature, which essentially is that if it's natural, it must be good.
And of course, we know that that's not always the case. And and the other footing for this answer is that it rests on a false dichotomy.
Basically, the question about whether humans in nature are fundamentally separate or whether they are one in the same.
And that dichotomy, really, it's great for cocktail conversations, but it is not especially useful for making real world decisions.
And so if we can just let this argument just be represented by just these blue bits of boxes here so I can make some computation commentary about it.
Basically, I think we have an unanswered question or an inadequately answered question which is based.
What is ecosystem health? And it's sufficiently not well understood such that, you know,
it's a hindrance to answering practical questions like whether we should protect national parks from climate change.
And if one appreciates that conservation is largely about maintaining and restoring ecosystem health,
one would recognise you'd want to have a pretty robust definition of it, and we might be lacking that.
We'll come back to the significance of not being able to answer this question adequately twist the end of the talk.
But now what I want to do is start to shift in to the second point that I would like to make,
and I can make it by referring to some of my experiences with efforts to recover Mexican wolves in North America.
Wolves perhaps come in five different subspecies, and one of the subspecies would be Canis Lupus, be the I, the Mexican wolf.
They're protected by the United States Endangered Species Act, and when a species is protected by the Endangered Species Act,
one of the actions that takes place is the formation of a recovery team.
In one of the recovery team's main jobs is to develop recovery criteria.
These would be conditions under which when they're met, it would be determined that the species is no longer endangered and then therefore
no longer require the special protections of the Endangered Species Act.
Now, recovery teams are usually comprised of species experts and also people with expertise in population biology.
And so a lot of the conversation kind of gravitates around how many of these organisms do there need to be 50 or 500 or 5000?
And a lot of the conversation is about the population biology. Now, when I was first invited to participate on this recovery team in the late 90s,
I had not at that point in my career ever taken the time to read the Endangered Species Act to 60 page long document,
so it takes a little effort to do so.
Upon doing so, one of the things that really struck me is that there's there's a legal definition of an endangered species,
and I've got it presented here. It's it's a species that's at risk of extinction throughout all or any significant portion of its range.
So, so when I had a chance to contribute to this group and I know the maths quite well, but it wasn't the first thing that came to my mind.
My first question is what is an endangered species? I kind of had my own understanding what those words might meant.
But this is a law that at the time was more than 25, five years old, and we figured there was a fair bit of legal interpretation about what it meant.
I quickly learnt that even asking the question What is an endangered species in this kind of an environment was fairly charged sort of circumstance.
I was advised pretty robustly to stop asking the question.
And of course, I didn't understand how we could do our job without asking the question.
And when I'm told to stop talking about something, I usually get my pen out and start writing about it.
And so I wrote a paper in 2006 and several papers since then on on this topic.
And here's here's what's at the heart of the matter.
When ecologists and population biologists think about extinction risk, they usually think about it in probabilistic terms with time horizons.
It can be represented by a graph like this and you can study a population.
It's vital raids and the threats to the population.
And after doing so, you can situated somewhere on this graph so a population might have a 40 percent chance of going extinct over a,
say, a 50 year period of time. And so science can quite readily describe extinction risk.
That's a straightforward thing to do. It's difficult, but it can be done.
But questions about endangerment go considerably further.
What's also being asked is for someone to draw a line on this graph and after drawing a line on the graph,
anything on the left hand side is declared as endangered. Anything on the right hand side is declared, not endangered.
So whether the population is endangered or not depends greatly on where we put that line.
And so this business about what represents an acceptable level of risk, it can be very importantly informed by science.
But it is fundamentally not a science question.
And for some of you that know conservation well, as I'm describing these things, you might be thinking about that IUCN Red List criteria,
and it would seem like they might do what I'm asking for because what they are are sets of criteria, objective, measurable ideas about a population.
And then that allows one to categorise a population as either endangered or critically endangered.
And there are other categories as well. What's really important to appreciate about these criteria, however, though,
is that they were developed to be a tool for assisting in developing priorities.
They really are there just to say this group of species is more endangered, and this group of species over here is less endangered.
That that's really all they weren't intended to be normative judgements about when a species does or does not deserve special protections.
Now if we go back to this graph here and we think.
About, man, what would be involved with placing a red line on this graph?
The first thing is that you have to be fairly mathematically competent because that graph is a kind
of a challenging space to to understand and for a question for which so many people have a stake in.
It would be unfortunate to restrict conversations about it to only those with the kind of proper mathematical initiation.
And this allows us to go back to what we think about wolves.
Grey wolves this time, which involves several different subspecies. This map shows where they used to live.
It shows where they currently live, which is about 15 percent of their historic range.
You can know that the United States government recently declared on the basis of the Endangered Species Act that wolves should be recovered.
They believe that the federal government believes that wolves no longer fit this definition about significant portion of range.
Now, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal government in the United States has been sued about a dozen times in the
last 15 or so years on issues exactly like this they've lost on every occasion.
And what I would say is that the Endangered Species Act doesn't actually answer the question about what is an endangered species.
But it does frame the question in an exceedingly useful way,
because looking at maps like this is a way in which quite a few people can kind of come to understand what's going on,
and we can collectively come to answer the question what is an endangered species?
Of course, this is not an issue. There's just about wolves.
It turns out that the average mammal species has lost about 68 percent of its historic range.
And of course, this loss of geographic range is what precedes extinction.
These losses of individual species of individual portions of the range they pile up in individual parts of the planet.
And that means as a result, most regions have lost significant portions of their native mammals.
This is a key connexion between the loss of species and ecosystem health and and so
a lot of it is got to be answered by really kind of confronting a simple question,
which is, you know, over what portion of a former range should a species be allowed to live?
So this is second question what is an endangered species?
To kind of contextualise this, I think we understand that panda bears are endangered and we understand that grey squirrels are in their heart.
But there's an increasing number of cases, and I illustrated one of them with Mexican wolves,
where the boundary between endangered and endangered is is sufficiently fuzzy that
it's an obstacle to knowing how to conduct ourselves with respect to conservation.
Of course, before this, we had this question about ecosystem health.
And to really know how basic these questions are, one only needs to remind themselves that conservation is basically about its entire endeavour,
really is about maintaining a restoring ecosystem health and preventing a recovering
species endangerment and the degree to which we can't answer these questions. If this is the degree to which we don't even know what conservation is.
We'll come back to some of those ideas to kind of wrap them up and tie them up tight towards the end of the presentation.
But now I want to move on to the third point that I would like to make.
It has to do with nature's intrinsic value.
Now my experience conversations about nature's intrinsic value are often confused and often rife with disagreement,
because there's not a common understanding of some vocabulary. And I think the vocabulary is basically deceptively simple.
We all think we know what the words mean, but then we end up using them in slightly different ways and it creates confusion.
And so what I want to do is just be real precise about how am I going to use these three particular terms right now?
First, anthropocentric ideas are those that suppose that only humans possess intrinsic value and that not humans do not.
Not anthropocentric ideas are those that suppose that humans and at least some non-humans possess intrinsic value.
This is a really broad and generic category. It involves different kinds of beliefs depending on what kinds of non-humans we're talking about.
So there's bias in and Zuo Centrism and Egocentrism are speaking to the different kinds of non-humans that may or may not possess intrinsic value.
Now, these two ideas both make reference to intrinsic value,
and this is one of the potentially most confusing, or we should say, deceptively simple kinds of ideas.
Some of the confusion arises because even ethicists, which is the domain in the discipline from which this jargon comes from,
even they don't always use it in the same way, and they're not always clear about how they're using it.
And rather than just give the definition, I don't want to work through the idea.
I think it will help us out here a little bit, and we'll start by referencing a really basic object, a hammer.
Hammers are generally appreciated because of their function, they pound emails, and if we lose a hammer or break one, we just go get another one.
They're replaceable. Hammers are useful for what they do,
and the jargon that's tied to all of this is that it's said that a hammer and objects like it have instrumental value or use.
Value in intrinsic value is usefully contrasted with this kind of a value, and we can think of a young child, young child.
Young children can certainly have use value, but there's more to it.
We say that they're valuable for their own sake. We say they're valuable for who they are and not what they do necessarily, and just what they do,
and it leads us to want to be treating them with concern for their interest. So what I'm using the phrase intrinsic value,
what I mean is the things that are entitled to fair treatment by humans and with at least some concern for their interests and well-being.
If you want to know more about how to dissect that interpretation and definition, you can refer to the paper that's described at the bottom here.
With this idea in mind, we can now ask ourselves, does nature or more properly what parts of nature possess intrinsic value?
And there have been a variety of answers to this question is actually one of the centrepieces of what it is that environmental ethicists
do for much of the kind of 30 or 40 50 years that that field is in existence in its modern form is to try to answer this question.
And one of the most influential lines of reasoning goes something like this.
It starts by asking a question, which is just to say, What is it about humans that imbues us with intrinsic value?
What trait or traits give us that? And one of the answers not the only answer, but one of the answers is that we possess certain interests,
one of which in particular is that we have an interest to avoid pain and suffering.
And so the reasoning goes, anything else that possesses that tree would also possess intrinsic value.
One of the things that's so important here is without this kind of reasoning,
there's a risk that the reason that humans have intrinsic value is merely for some kind of arbitrary
reasons where to find something that's not quite so arbitrary and this is starting to set up for that.
Well, one of the answers one of the next steps in this is to appreciate that homey Gotham's birds and
mammals almost certainly possess these interest and therefore would possess intrinsic value.
What about things like fish and here I intend to be provocative.
Let's imagine that we are back in the year 1980.
I think most fish biologists, based on their understanding of fish physiology, would say that fisheries sufficiently different understanding of.
I'm sorry. Fish have a substantially different excuse me, I'm having a little cracking problem with my voice, your hold on one second.
Back in 1980, most fish biologists would have understood that the physiology of the fish is different enough so that they
don't have the same kind of pain or suffering that we're talking about when we think about a human's.
Now the knowledge has changed since then, and probably most fish physiologists,
or at least an increasing number of them would think differently and they would answer this question.
Yes. But my point from dwelling on fish is to appreciate that this is a flexible argument.
It's one that changes with knowledge. Over time, we can think about other creatures like insects.
Again, we might provocatively answer the question no on the grounds that if they experience pain and suffering,
it's in a way that's quite different than what we're talking about when we think about humans.
And this also makes us realise if we want to think about fish or about insects that we can,
well, maybe think of a different interest that humans have.
But also insects have my whole point.
And kind of working through all this, which is partly heuristic, is to appreciate the flexibility and dynamic nature of this argument.
One of the things that we did we want to keep in mind is we're going in again just to not lose sight of it.
Is it when we talk about intrinsic value, we are talking about this entitlement to fair treatment?
Now let's take this argument and put it up into the corner and so that we can make a few comments about it.
And the first thing that I'd like to comment about is this ending spot right here in this business about birds and mammals.
We might refer to this as minimally anthropocentric.
It would be minimally anthropocentric in roughly three ways.
One is that if you were trying to think about what's the smallest,
most narrow group of non-humans that are most likely to possess intrinsic value, it's unlikely home your thumbs.
The second would be is that the argument for homeostasis possessing intrinsic value is probably one of
the most robust from the perspective of academic ethics and arguments analysis and that sort of thing.
And third, if you were to consult social science literature, we'd find that there's really widespread agreement for this idea.
It's not really a terribly extreme sort of perspective, so it's minimally non-health centric and these kinds of ways.
Now, if you're with me so far or even if you're not with me,
but if you could even just merely accept these things provisionally, what comes next is probably more important.
Which is to say, now what? We have some understanding that some kinds of non-humans are liable to merit intrinsic value.
I think the answer to the question what now is what we need is to have a much better
understanding than is currently the case about minimally non anthropocentric decision making,
especially public decisions.
And this is why I want to turn my attention to now and in doing so and recognising there's many ways to make public decisions.
I want to I think about, you know, one of the most influential, which is economic decision making.
And as we start thinking about economic decision making,
where to start and what might seem to be a really basic and maybe not even an especially expected place.
And that's the think about the different kinds of capital, the taxonomy of capital.
If we inspect this, I think we can get some traction.
The first thing to appreciate is that quite a few economic frameworks involve three and really only three kinds of capital human capital,
natural capital and produce capital. This is not just kind of old fashioned anti-environmental kinds of economics.
This is really progressive. Kinds of economics still have this sort of taxonomy.
Strong sustainability don't add economics the natural capital framework.
The recent review called The Economics of Biodiversity, from which this diagram was taken.
They all suppose a taxonomy of capital like this.
What I'll show you in the next couple of minutes is that it is a fundamentally anthropocentric taxonomy, and in being so it's, I think, wrong, wrong.
Both morally, I think it's wrong logically, and it very likely contributes to the biodiversity crisis.
And to understand how this is the case, what I want to do is focus just a little bit more on the natural capital framework,
just as a way of kind of an entry point into the ideas that I want to think about.
And we can refer to a relatively recent paper published by Ian Bateman and George Mason.
And this diagram represents their kind of representation of the flow of ideas that represents the natural capital framework.
One of the reasons to draw attention to this particular paper is that in Bateman and
Georgina Mayes presented on this topic to this very audience a couple of years ago,
and there will be a point that we can make about that. If you would allow me to kind of redraw this really just kind of artistically redraw
this so that I can suppress some of the details of just how pertinent to us now,
but also kind of emphasise. A few things that are a little bit more pertinent, we end up with this diagram.
Structurally, it's the same thing. It just appears different with different kinds of capital on the left.
They get used in different ways to provide goods and services for well being understood to be human while.
That's followed by different kinds of economic evaluations and various appraisals
of decisions that feed into subsequent uses of those different kinds of capital.
What's missing from this diagram in the previous are something that's kind of understood, I think, but it's good to make it explicit.
And so let's make it explicit right here, which is that there are constraints on the use of all of these capital and in the
constraints precede any kind of economic thinking and their constraints that are in place,
mainly because humans possess intrinsic value. So you can use human capital in lots of ways, but there are limits allowed for slavery,
no matter what any kind of economic evaluation might say, even manufactured capital.
We don't allow for theft. We don't allow for the production of deceptively dangerous products.
And so again, the motivations for these include, pretty importantly, these are wrong ways to treat humans.
And in in more progressive forms of economic thinking, natural capital is also constrained in its use, usually in the context of for sustainable use.
Again, for the well-being of humans. Now right here is where the taxonomic mistake occurs.
The logical error and the basic idea is that this one category is actually comprised of two
categories in the two categories of capital would be natural capital without intrinsic value.
I suppose this would be things like rocks and air and the natural capital with intrinsic value.
At the very least, this would be the whole mealworms and quite possibly quite a bit more.
And the thing to appreciate is that the minute that you admit a different kind of capital that also has intrinsic value,
one has to ask Are there constraints on its use that arise not because of economic interest,
not because of interest of humans, but because of interest to those things themselves?
In principle, this is not foreign to us. We have prohibitions on the cruelty to of animals.
So when cockfighting is abolished in a place, it's not because of some kind of economic analysis.
It's because we believe that's a wrong way to treat those kind of creatures.
And so this is not to suppose that we have all of the necessary or appropriate constraints on capital that has intrinsic value.
But this is just intended to illustrate the idea that in principle, it's not entirely foreign to us.
And in fact, what I would say is that if what we need is more non anthropocentric decision making.
One of the things that will be important is to recognise it when we see it in.
One of the things that struck me have been instances in the published literature
where kind of key bits of 19th centrism have actually been overlooked.
And I'll give you two examples of this. The first has to do with an analysis of the economics of land use in Great Britain.
So we're also published by Ian Bateman in 2013, along with some of his colleagues.
It's a long, complicated and wonderful paper. I want to draw attention to just a part of it.
Basically, land uses were modelled in a particular way in various particular ways.
From that was an estimate of the monetary value of those different kinds of land uses,
and then various hypothetical objectives were set just, for example, you know, to maximise monetary values and then find out on land use.
Wood wood yields that are amongst the scenarios that were considered was basically an external
constraint so that there would be no increase to the endangerment of any bird species,
regardless of the opportunity cost.
Now, the focus on birds was not because birds are more or less important than other creatures have basically had to do with the availability of data.
People involves some really sophisticated and very wonderful modelling of both economics and ecology,
and so too is limited by which data that's available.
But what's important about all this is that the basis for protecting the bird species had nothing to do with human well-being.
It was basically just because what's especially important about this example is that,
as I've mentioned a few minutes ago in Bateman and Georgina Mayes presented on this exact work to this audience a couple of years ago.
And at the end of their talk, there was a fair bit of criticism by the audience about how it's very nice work.
But one of the things that it really fell short on is that it was all anthropocentric,
and we're really not going to do well by the planet by being soft on it or by being so anthropocentric.
And in Bateman's response, as I remember, it was essentially, look, we're doing the best we can.
We're being is progressively we're being as progressive as we possibly think we can get away with with real world decision makers.
And that doesn't include. Being not in the present. And so what happened is that a room full of people, including the people presenting on the work,
didn't recognise something as being fundamentally non anthropocentric when it was second example.
Also about land use this fuzzy images about land use in the Willamette Valley and what the authors of this
paper did is they also modelled different kinds of land use and with those different kinds of modelling.
This is situated on this graph. The first thing to appreciate is that the Willamette Valley, as the land is currently used,
has this kind of economic value across the x axis and in that area with that kind
of land use is expected to be able to support this number of the native species.
Well, with modelling different kinds of land use, it would do faster.
Second, the, you know, found that there could be different kinds of different combinations of land use that would lead to different
combinations of economic value and and different numbers of species that could live on the landscape.
These are just three examples that actually ran many, many scenarios. And this is what economists refer to as an efficiency frontier.
First thing to appreciate is that actually the current situation with the star is actually pretty far from the frontier.
And yet you could do better on both fronts. You can move both up and to the right.
What I want to do is expand this idea to just kind of appreciate its ethical value.
This is a ready-made tool for non anthropocentric decision making.
The one thing that I would say we would want to do is generalise slightly the x axis.
Let's maybe not be so concerned with how many billions of dollars are being made.
But instead, think about how land use decisions affect the capacity for those humans that are affected to live, healthy, meaningful lives.
And you know, this is a sounds like kind of a qualitative idea.
In many ways it is, but there is a science about subjective well-being, and so you can measure important aspects of that x axis.
And what we realised is something that's very simple, which is that there's a trade-off involved.
You can have more of one,
but it's likely to come at the cost of the other in decisions that lie down here are likely to be considered anthropocentric decisions,
decisions that lie up here where there's maybe not enough attention on human well-being and perhaps undue attention on non-human interests.
This we would maybe consider misanthropic somewhere in the in the middle would be non anthropocentric economies.
It's not my interest to pinpoint where the colours would change,
but to point out that there is a trade-off and if not anthropocentric, think is is what's required.
We're going to need a framework, something like this, to work through the decisions.
More precisely, what we're going to have to do is going to have to figure out what would count as a fair trade off in a situation like this.
First thing to do is let's just make sure that that's actually the right question is fairness.
What we're talking about in a situation like this,
I think it is because we're just reviewing things that we've spoken about already, which is number one.
This y axis is expected number of species. It represents animals that have intrinsic value.
And we've already talked about how animals that have intrinsic value. They're entitled to fair treatment.
And so I think fairness is exactly right.
The next thing to appreciate is to work with something that's familiar because humans have conflicts all the time
amongst themselves that involve trade-offs and they need to be a you get adjudicated fairly when that's the case,
what do we do when it's just between humans?
One of the things that we do is that if we're aspiring for a fair adjudication as we appeal to the values of social justice,
according to social justice theory and also supported by social psychology, there's four values that are especially important.
And so if there's a dispute about how to use a particular resource, we appeal to some combination of these values to sort it out.
There is a small group of scholars.
It's really kind of a niche discipline that basically is wondering do those ideas also apply to the relationship between humans and animals?
That field of enquiry is referred to as interspecies distributive justice.
It really isn't a narrow field that many people working in it.
They are a field that finds themselves, I think, mostly making the case that yes, in some way, shape or form.
Those ideas also apply to the relationship between humans and non-humans.
I do think that if we're going to do good by biodiversity,
we probably have to get past the question does it apply and really get quite serious about how does it
apply because it's not likely to apply exactly as it does when it's just between humans or amongst humans?
You know who's going to be? Some differences, and it's going to be pretty important to figure that out sooner rather than later.
And of course, we can't leave it to the what is currently just a small number of scholars working on that.
It's too important of a problem is too many different interests at stake. And so, you know, it's my view that ecologists and economists,
other kinds of decision makers who normally wouldn't be thinking about this sort of stuff,
they do not need to kind of expand their horizons and start to work through these problems.
And almost finally, you know, this approach may be necessary, vitally necessary for lessening biodiversity crisis.
Here's my last slide. You know, these are three unresolved ethical issues that are increasingly an obstacle for the conservation of biodiversity.
How do we make non anthropocentric decisions? What is ecosystem health?
And if you remember to the beginning of the talk, we basically have only two versions of the answer to this question.
One is misanthropic and the other is anthropocentric, and we going to do better than that.
And then what is an endangered species? There's two flanking questions. They're very basic.
Nature is illustrated by just reminding ourselves the very definition of conservation, which is all about ecosystem health and endangerment.
And very finally, the ideas that I've shared with you today are the result of collaboration over a number of years with quite a few different people.
Some of the most important of them are listed here on the screen. And that's what I have to share with us today.
So thank you so much for your time and attention. Very much appreciated.
John, that was marvellous, thank you. Thank you. So I think what's going to happen next is you're going to get rid of your screen.
Oh, that's wonderful. And then we have the opportunity because I'm in the privileged position of chairing this to
have a wee chat about just a couple of things before we try and master the question part of it.
And listening to you speak,
I do have a couple of questions and I choose them because I think they might have arisen in the minds of some, some of the audience.
We've discussed them before you introduced us with tremendous clarity to the argument and idea about intrinsic value.
Could I ask you just to say a few words about whether there can be more or less intrinsic value to?
Some organisms have quite a lot of it, and some of it a bit less of it.
And what might the consequences of your answer be? Yeah.
You know, I think the answer to the question turns out not to be an ethical question, but a logical question.
And the answer to your question is there's such a thing as more or less has to do with the definition.
Let me remind you of the definition of intrinsic value. I'll give you a short one short definition because it helps.
In this particular case, if you have intrinsic value,
it means you are entitled to some consideration for your interest to be entitled to some consideration for your interest.
I think is a yes or no question. You are either not entitled to any consideration or you are entitled to.
Some in some could be a little or a lot.
But the point is is that the moment that you have intrinsic value, there's this business of some consideration.
So I think the there needs to be flexibility and degrees, but the degrees and flexibility does not come into do you have intrinsic value or not?
And it's largely because of the structure of the definition.
Instead, the flexibility comes in with how much consideration do we do we have and into that answer?
You know, that is it's not made by the definition and it's in it's got to be up to the people who are making the decisions to work through that.
Pretty good, and then my second and last one is rather different,
it's about making practical decisions in policy and government, and you began with a fascinating case of the royal moves.
By the way, I have secret ways of knowing you've just written the rather wonderful book about that.
So very soon everybody should be scampering off to Blackwell's or equivalent to hear the real answers.
But you said climate change, of course, was the complicating factor,
complicating because it isn't at the moment just a natural phenomenon like good old geological time.
It's something that has been brought about by humans.
So should it be, or should it not be park policy with respect to the wolves to do something about it?
You said a little bit about the wolves, but is there for the audience some sort of general guidance about the appropriateness
of dealing with climate change in a way brought about by its anthropocentric,
its anthropogenic nature? Well, yeah, my goodness.
I mean, quite a few aspects of environmental ethics and conservation ethics are challenging,
deeply challenging, even when one doesn't have to think about climate change at all.
And when you throw climate change into that, it really makes things that were previously very difficult, even more so.
So I mean, I mean, this is why a reason this is kind of one of the great unanswered questions.
We have to roll our sleeves up collectively, not just me, but the whole community of us to try to figure these things out.
I think a few very basic guidelines are what one is to determine and just appreciate that
there clearly are some cases where you can't protect a protected area from climate change.
It's just so take, for example, glaciers in Glacier National Park in the western part of the United States.
Climate change is going to take those glaciers where I don't think there's much that we can do about it.
I think what becomes challenging would be situations like this thing about the Everglades National Park in southern Florida.
I mean, globally unique ecosystems, and there's a huge effort to restore the hydrology and all that comes with that hydrology.
It's, by some accounts, humanity's most expensive, elaborate kind of restoration project.
It's expected to be finished and the restoration right at about the time that rising oceans are expected to completely consume the Everglades.
And so I think those are the questions that are considerably more challenging because we can do something, but it might not be worth it, I don't know.
And and to that end, I maybe just had one very tiny thing.
There are different schools of thoughts and ethics that help guide these things.
One is to be quite consequentialist about it, which is to say, OK, well, what benefits would come about from two,
usually two humans from trying to do some sort of restoration,
even if it might shortly afterwards be snatched away from us and make decisions that way?
There are also the thoughts that, you know some ways are just the wrong or right way to treat a thing.
I mean, the decisions can be can be guided that way.
So I just point out that there are tools and ethics that can that can help guide some of those thoughts.
But I mean, really difficult stuff that you're raising, of course. So, John, look, now is the moment for us to turn to the questions.
People have radios, some please continue asking them and the system for those who can't see which maybe nobody is that the questions attract votes.
So I'm going to follow the democratic process by going to the most popular question to begin.
It comes from Maggie Knowles and John. I think several of the questions I've been able to see show the general enthusiasm for your talk
that it's caused people to think to the side as well as directly about your talk this week.
So Maggie is concerned about the impact of some wildlife conservation projects on indigenous people, and she mentioned this as an example.
The WWF forcibly driving forest people from their ancestral lands to conserve tigers.
And yet, as she puts it, these people live in harmony with nature, only hunting wildlife for their own needs.
So the question is how can we persuade powerful conservation organisations to recognise the values
of indigenous peoples contributions as guardians of the forests in nature and to work with them?
Yeah. I mean, this is a hugely important concern, and it's one that gets more difficult and worse as time goes on.
I think that, you know, there are a number of scholars and professionals that it indentify themselves as as conservation professionals,
and they're a little sometimes uninformed and sometimes insensitive to the needs of present day humans.
I think also there are some people who would who self-identify with the social justice movements and social justice theories and
and and they sometimes are a little uninformed and maybe a little insensitive about the welfare and well-being of not humans.
And so I think there needs to be a lot more awareness on both sides.
Of course there are. There are groups of people who are well aware of both the concert at the same time.
The next thing that I would say is that when we have these conflicts,
if you don't mind, I'll just make a real simple conflicts between humans and nature.
I think the first thing that has to be figured out is, are we talking about a situation that is possibly a win lose situation like,
you know, either the humans are going to get what they need or nature is going to get what it's need and it can't be both.
Where is it possible to find some kind of a win win situation?
I don't think we're real good at discerning the difference between those two, and there's reason to believe that both cases exist in the world.
Imagine if you misidentify a win win situation as a win lose situation or vice versa.
You know, you can go about it. You're really poor way, I would say.
And so, you know, identifying those things is tough.
And I mean, on these issues, I think my main message is is to is to point out that these are issues that require discourse
by a much broader group of scholars than it is than has previously been in the case.
Yeah. Thank you.
And then the next most popular question is one that that I know that you have written about and have a lot of really very, very important thoughts on.
I'm not going to read all of this. I'm just going to trigger you. It's in and it comes from John Shields, by the way.
So John says in pure conservation terms, well-regulated hunting helps conserve habitats, notable populations.
And yet John points out that societal attitudes to hunting are hardening.
So is the conservation world being honest with itself about the relationship between habitats and wildlife and real world trade offs and that sort?
I don't mean to cut you on this question, sure, but there's a whole cascade of things that I know, you know, for follow from that.
So there's a door open for you to walk through. Yeah. You know,
I think the the first thing to appreciate is to formulate the relationship between hunting
and conservation because there's more in the world than just hunting and conservation. But we can start with just those two things.
Just imagine that the only two things in the world. The first thing is just situate the relationship between the two of them properly, I'd say.
And the way to situate the two of them properly against one another is to ask
the question Do we really think that hunting is necessary for conservation?
Or do we think that hunting can be useful for conservation, which means there's some cases where it isn't useful,
or there's some cases where it can be useful, but it's not necessary. You can achieve conservation in some other way.
And in quite truthfully, I mean, just in my experience, I wouldn't have the time here to to demonstrate it.
But it's really hard to think that hunting is like necessary for conservation.
And it's also, I think, pretty plain to see that there have been many instances where hunting has been bad for conservation,
and there's been many instances where hunting has has been a benefit to conservation.
So all of those things exist.
And then I think the next thing to understand is that hunting and conservation are not the only two values that are important in the world.
And and so a number of people, it has been a large portion of people,
I think for quite some time have believe that it's not right to kill things without an adequate reason.
And I think it's fine for people to just press the question Is this an OK reason to kill something?
And there's a fair bit known about the social psychology of that.
They're a bit known about that, about the ethics of it. And so so I don't I'm not ideological about the role of hunting.
I just think it needs to be considered along with other values that are around and just and just kind of
have a really kind of a keen view about is it really necessary or is it just it can be used for too long?
There are other tools as well. Yeah. So so obviously behind all that, there's there's a part which is about evidence,
the evidence for what actually is the impact of hunting in different circumstances.
And then what do you do? What judgements do you make about that evidence?
And actually with those thoughts in mind, just building on what you've said?
I will stick with John John Shields question for one last minute because it.
It runs up by creating a sort of juxtaposition you might like to to comment on.
John finishes by saying Is this a diplomatic funding battle abroad to impose
moral standards or is it a PR battle at home to educate a sentimental public?
Any thoughts on that juxtaposition? Oh my gosh. Undoubtedly, those.
I mean, I think what I heard are two characterisations about how if I can use the word politics
and kind of a loose way to characterisations of how politics work in the real world.
And I, I would agree those things go on, and I think that there are actors that see it exactly that way.
And I would also imagine that that's a little bit human nature, but it doesn't mean that we're limited to that kind of thinking or behaviour.
And it doesn't mean at present, you know, everyone is thinking about it that way.
And if we want to lift ourselves out of that kind of thinking, you know, we're going to have to answer hard questions about ecosystem health,
an endangered species, how that sometimes conflicts, when it does, if it does with with human interest.
And so I think one can be aware of those kind of brutish kind of political endeavours.
But at this, at the same time, you can also say, all right,
we got to be a little bit more sincere and honest here and kind of get to the bottom of some of these unanswered questions.
Very good. And to broaden out, though, with the help of Jacqueline Hill, this is a very general one.
John, I say to alert both you and me to the fact that we've got about five minutes for this,
this one, and I suspect this question requires a textbook that you can manage it in five minutes.
All right. In your talk, the nub of the question is, whose ethics are we talking about or other in this business?
Any absolutes? Or are ethics simply the common beliefs of a particular group of people which may differ from those of some different groups of people?
Sure. Yeah. I mean, there are there are certainly ethical norms that are particular to individual cultures,
and they include all kinds of things about, you know, what we consider to be proper dress and all kinds of conduct.
And so there's it's unquestionable that there is that kind of cultural variation.
At the same time,
we all live on one planet and there are interests that we all have in common and we need to find ways to sort through those questions.
And so I think that if one focuses on.
Is there one ethic? I don't think it's an especially useful question,
I think the more useful question is that we are all in this together and and we have to find answers.
That are the most sensible for all of us, it's it's really probably better to be thought of in those terms.
I think also that you can, by probing deep enough, find values that are common to really disparate groups of people.
They include things like we've kind of touched on some of them already so far.
They include things like when there's a conflict between over a resource that there's there's a for values that are useful for adjudicating them.
Equality, equity need entitlement. Those are not especially narrow.
Cultural views and different cultures might mean that those different virtues differently.
But that, you know, that's that's fairly universal stuff. The other thing is, it's really kind of a simple thing,
so we shouldn't disregard other things that have interests without having good reason for doing so.
You know, that's a pretty common ethic. I think that exists throughout the world.
And so I think the first thing to appreciate is that if you're having conversations that are quite cross-cultural,
you do have to go to where you're reasonably sure there's common ground and those are a couple of places where there's liable to be common ground.
And then you work, you work upwards to the problem from there.
And after that, what becomes, I would say, more important is not which ethic does one use.
I think what becomes more important is just making sure that the the power dynamics are are appropriately
equitable so that some groups aren't able to impose their will on others more than it is proper.
So know John, I can't resist because suddenly the votes poured in for this last question.
And just over 20 years thinking about it. So you've got just under two minutes to give the answer.
It is using the criteria you discussed at the end. What would you say about introducing more wolves to the island to save their population?
That's a question from somebody whose nom de plume is comment. Sure.
You know, I have two answers.
You know, if if the role that I'm serving to do is to be that of an ethicist and to share what it is that academic ethics can provide.
And you, I hope you appreciate this from the theme that was to my answers to most of the questions.
My job is not to tell you what is right or wrong, or even to tell you what I think is right or wrong.
My much higher calling thing is to draw attention to the fact that there are a class of questions that are fundamentally ethical in nature.
And for a society that is so technology driven and so empirically oriented that these questions that are of an ethical nature,
they are no less important than the other questions were going to ruin stuff in a pretty big way.
If we don't confront the ethical questions and it doesn't matter what I think is the answer to them,
what matters is what we think is the answer to them. And in order to even come close to having a sensible answer to what we think of them,
it actually requires that we become aware of the questions in the first place and their general importance.
And so if you want to know what I think about Wolves on Isle Royale, you can read a book called Restoring the Balance.
It'll be out on bookshelves in October. And you'll find a good long answer to it there, but but really,
today's message is much more basic than that, which is to emphasise the importance of ethical questions.
Very good. With the choreography in your answer is most of all, we I think we get amputated in about a minute and a half in a moment.
John, don't despair in coming back to you.
But yes, before I do so, let me draw everybody's attention to the fact that this afternoon has been wonderful.
And there's another wonderful afternoon lying ahead on the 10th of March, when also from the Wild Crew Mountain School,
an actual governance programme, stable Mohammed Farhadi is going to be telling us about leopards and mountains and politics.
Both John and I know that he's got an amazing story, so please sign up.
And I believe somewhere on your screen there is a button to allow you to join that club straight away.
So do it while the island's hot. Anyway, to conclude, John, that was just marvellous.
Of course, some of us knew it would be new members. Your fans will be looking forward to the next time.
At the moment, you're sitting in Michigan.
One day, the world will turn back to a condition where you can be just sitting in Oxford with us again and in the Martin School.
But for the time being, that was simply super.
There was a time when both you and I were younger, when conservation was about ecology and about biology.
Many people in the audience appreciate that those things are still necessary.
But my goodness me, they're not sufficient.
We have to think more broadly, and we have to think not only more broadly about the things that we can do, but the things that we ought to be doing.
That's been your lesson. So thank you very much and I think greater forces than either you or I or about to turn us off.
Yes. Thank you so much. Is great to have been able to share things.
Thank you, David, for hosting this and thinks that Oxford Art School. Very good.
Bye bye, everybody. Bye.