Many people here have dismissed the value of biodiversity because 

• it's not an x-risk

• an "ecosystem" does not experience qualia

• preserving large natural areas often conflicts with both economic growth and with boosting wild animals' welfare

However, if humanity survives to build a flourishing future, it's reasonable to think that the inhabitants of this far-future civilization will greatly value Earth's heritage of biodiversity,^[1] similar to how they will likely appreciate cultural & historical artifacts.

(The value derived from biodiversity could be a tiny 0.000001% percentage of total future value, yet at the same time be immense absolute amounts of enjoyment / appreciation / etc, more than we can even comprehend today.)

Previously, I've examined other common justifications for ecological value (ecosystem services + x-risk from ecological collapse) and found that they don't hold much water. I now think that, by relatively standard longtermist arguments, preserving earth's biological richness into the far-future is probably the most important aspect of environmental conservation actions we could take today.

Why would a super-civilization at technological maturity have any use for the highly imperfect products of five billion years' blind evolution? People today intrinsically value biodiversity for many reasons, but two of those reasons: variety and historicity are increasing in importance from a long-term perspective. This is because of irreplaceability and the ensuing cost-disease-like dynamics.

Variety

Humans care about variety. Both variety that we personally get to experience, and knowledge that variety exists out there in the world. We don’t want everything to look, react, and behave identically. (See this 2024 paper arguing for it as an intrinsic value and the saturation view.) Admittedly “variety” is a high-on-maslov’s pyramid of needs. Far behind health and happiness.^[2] Presumably the future has as much variety as we can dream of,^[3] so how does this translate to building a flourishing future?

Irreplaceability

The value of nature is durable across long-term future timelines because it is irreplaceable by definition.

“Nature” is partially defined by being non-human. Nature is specifically non-human-guided processes and beings. (For example: There is something admirable when a tree grows that is missing when humans manufacture artificial christmas trees.)

Nature is not able to keep pace with the growth of human civilization now, let alone in the future. Even if we tried to help it along, it takes millions of years for new species to occur naturally. Humans will be unrecognizable before more species evolve naturally.

To be clear, artificial-biodiversity will be commonplace in the future, should we choose it. We can engineer many species and live in a biodiverse future, but these will be human-designed (or AI-designed) species. They will not be natural.

If natural processes are valuable, couldn’t we simulate random happenstance? We could possibly create naturalistic time-accelerated evolution sims. This might circumvent the scarcity of naturally evolved species. Or it might be contaminated by being originally guided by human design. I will abstain from having an opinion on this for now.

Either way, irreplaceability would still apply to the authentic pedigree of current earth life, which is explored in the next section.

Historicity

Historicity refers to being the original and its “pedigree,” the connection to its predecessors. In the classic example, a perfect identical copy of Starry Night is not as valuable as the original, even if it is impossible to detect which is which by any means. This ineffable value is recognized as authenticity, naturalness, or historicity.

People in the future will be particularly interested in how our specific planet came to be, how our specific tree of life came to be, how our specific species came to be even after we have hundreds of thousands of better artificially generated ones. Each species has millions of years of historicity: genetic codes, biochemistry, adaptations, behaviors, mental experiences. Many non-obvious things will provide information value we cannot conceive of right now.^[4] 

However, these sources of information will not be valuable forever. The information will eventually be mined out. Only the “provenance” value will remain. Some people will continue to want to touch/confront/own a piece^[5] of “living history,” even after the information has been collected, understood, and archived. 

Historicity is thus durable to long-term timescales, durable to technological progress, and increasingly valuable from cost-disease as our future population swells.

Cost-Disease

"What gift can we give the super-civilization that already has everything?"

Like historical artifacts, natural biodiversity is a limited resource that can only be destroyed, not created.^[6] So it is subject to something akin to Baumol's cost disease as the world otherwise becomes incredibly wealthy and full of abundance.  There is a limited seedstock for all future value from nature, and it is incredibly important to protect it for the massive future benefit it holds.

There will be a lot more things made by humans in the future, and increasing relative scarcity of natural things. Nature can’t speed up or keep up with humans. Thus, products from nature will be increasingly valuable to the future. This points not just toward future value, but permanently increasing future value. In a future where we can generate almost everything else with a snap of the fingers, the difficulty in producing natural creatures and the rarity is part of the appeal.

Not everyone has to care; even a small fraction of a huge future is a lot of demand against very little supply.

Conclusion

Biodiversity/nature/nonhuman-ness is a reliable way to improve the flourishing of our far future. Variety and historicity are the foundations of the value of biodiversity, both of which are of increasing importance from the long-term perspective thanks to irreplaceability and cost-disease.

Does this actually affect real-world conservation decisions?

In my next post I will go into how these values would change how conservation is practiced. Things like,

• We should preserve across a broad swath of the tree of life, prioritizing by evolutionary distinctiveness. Ancient lineages are worth more than recently diverged species.
• Tissue samples should be preserved with urgency, in anticipation of eventual de-extinction.
• Precision fermentation and keystone species are some efficient ways to keep biodiversity intact.
• Current spending (around $121B in total) is mostly towards land area conservation initiatives such as Half-Earth. I'm worried most of the good these initiatives do is not properly accounting for the negative costs of conservation, and will be undone from mounting pressure from civilizational demand and AI development.

This is part of a sequence on where the value of biodiversity comes from:

• People really care about something they call nature
• Nature's value mostly doesn't come from present-day benefits to humanity
• And ecological collapse is not an existential risk
• > Much of biodiversity's value actually comes from long-term flourishing.
• Conservation in the next century is going to look a lot different than environmentalists think

Other Potential Sources of Value

Animal Preference Utilitarianism

Individual animals would never know that their species is being eradicated from existence, and thus would never care. But we don’t just think about what the animals experience! We also think about what they would want, if they were smart enough to know better.

• We don’t feed ducks bread, because they will get ill from it.
  • They don’t know that, they just want to eat the bread!
  • But we know what they would want, if they had the prescience to see the whole picture, and we should act upon that framing.

Similarly, we should imagine an “uplifted version” of each animal, and what they would value, and try to satisfy our best approximation of that. We should attempt to respect their coherent extrapolated volition. This would lead us to prevent the extinction of species (and not plan extinctions). Because if given the choice, they would prefer that their kind continue to exist.

Right now, animals have bigger problems, but this desire becomes important to consider in a more prosperous future where the object level problems have been resolved.

Uncertainty about the true system of morality?

It’s possible that in highly developed forms of morality we will discover that we have some other kinds of moral obligation, not only towards moral subjects, but to care for systems and processes. Many people have such intuitions.

Of course to us now, such goals are far less important. Our greater problems are survival and co-existence. But once our greater problems have been solved, more subtle values may arise.  In the future we’ll be way richer, and the future will be way bigger, and we’ll have way better tools to appreciate new forms of environmental values. This is an argument for cluelessness and option value.

As an illustration: advanced AI minds may be able to directly appreciate the beauty of a bacterial genome with the directness that we today appreciate music.^[7] 

We just like trees?

On the other hand, taking a moral anti-realist perspective, maybe we don’t need ethical frameworks, definitions, and  justifications. Maybe humans just value nature, and want more of it, and that’s it. Humankind gets to decide its values. All value is ultimately determined by us. That doesn’t make it any less meaningful than it has always been. Of course, values evolve with the world we live in. But valuing nature seems pretty durable and universal.

How much do these values dominate our decisions versus other values?

I don’t know. Maybe this is a tiny value that only comes into play “all else equal” or maybe it is a deeply meaningful value that we create variety and do not destroy it. Maybe we would sacrifice much comfort and power to pursue a more diverse world.

So how many rats would I massacre to preserve a seabird species? How much torture would I endure to keep a species existing? All I can say is not none and not infinite: I would kill some species to reduce suffering and I would cause suffering to preserve some species.

It is important that the value of preserving biodiversity does not exceed the cost of preserving biodiversity. We should not claim it’s worth it to preserve every inch of nature regardless of economic value, forever. Only when the benefits of development are worse than the value of conserving nature.

Some people probably don’t find any intrinsic value in non-humanness nor variety. Some of you would prefer to live in a world with identically perfect beings. Some people would be happy to live in a world that is entirely orchestrated and artificially designed. But a lot of people don’t desire that world shape, and some also place value on non-humaness.

1. ^{^}

   Throughout this essay I use the term “biodiversity” to refer to global total biodiversity: the variety of lifeforms measured by evolutionary distinctiveness (the total existing branches of the tree of life). This is not to be confused with maximizing local species density, also called “biodiversity.” Another example of how fundamentally confused environmentalist messaging is a lot of the time: we rarely differentiate between these two very different objectives.

2. ^{^}

   Variety is still fundamental - lots of animals and people go crazy without “enrichment” even if all their bodily needs are provided in abundance. It is a mental need, at least in low doses.

3. ^{^}

   Worse, “variety” doesn’t matter if the value of variety caps out at a few species.

   • On the one hand, yes, we get overwhelmed and can only appreciate the nuances between blades of grass for so long.
   • On the other hand, no, we celebrate distinct flavors of tea. Appreciating fine differences is one of the few things that stands a chance of surviving into deep utopia. (Bostrom, 207-217, on interestingness, the yellow of ducks beak, and 162,329 table legs).
^{^}

Fun example facts: the color blue is an indicator of the historical GDP, pollen in clothing indicates the historical climate, and teeth indicate diseases. All of the original owners did not know the objects contained that information, nor could they know the future would be interested in those topics as most of these concepts didn’t exist at the time! We should extrapolate forward, and expect more of the same.

^{^}

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep might not have been that far off??

^{^}

Assuming the naturalistic time-accelerated evolution sims can’t actually create natural species.

^{^}

Also keep in mind that this still relies on specific historical interest, since the future would be capable of synthesizing artificial evolved bacterial genomes, or maximally-beautiful genomes.

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