Oh wow. I'm a fan of Conservation X Labs from the biodiversity side! I only know them from their conservation work, and have a positive opinion of their priorities from what I've been able to glean. 

Fertility control is one of the 20 areas I looked into for EcoResilience Initiative while investigating techniques for enhancing biodiversity, as opposed to wild animal welfare impact. I don't expect it to be the top biodiversity intervention (mostly because I'm not sure how well it will scale). But I would still say it definitely has the potential to be highly impactful. Rodent contraceptive is one of the top fertility control targets. Australia, New Zealand, and island conservation organizations are serious about rodent fertility control for their conservation programs. It is probably being held back by concerns about negative reception than technical feasibility. A lot of conservation decisions are driven by a fear of doing a small amount of damage, overly prioritizing delay despite the large amount of damage that could be potentially prevented. Perhaps I should also mention that immunocontraception doesn't have to be super scalable to be a huge improvement over current methods. Its pretty crazy what lengths conservation programs have gone to to eradicate invasive species off of islands. 

There is also the potential for similar hormonal fertility control to be rapidly developed in other highly damaging invasive mammals like feral pigs, horses, deer, and goats if it performs well in field trials with rats. 

Seeing Conservation X Labs mentioned on the EA forum raises my opinion of them even more! They are tackling biodiversity by developing linchpin technologies, and really look for scalable impact. 

We encourage AIs, like all members of the EA community,

Someone please drop a link to the mind upload, I missed it.

I'm working on trying to describe the environmental future we want to have, so I'll have written up a better answer soon.™️

I really like the variety of cause areas you chose. Simple, appealing descriptions that draw in someone who hasn't encountered EA before. 17 hours is really short for such quality information!

I can't stop checking the EA forum now.... 

All but 3 bullet points were about AI. I know that AI is the number one catastrophic risk but I'm dyin' for variety (news on other fronts).

Here is the non-AI content:

• Allocation in the landscape seems more efficient than in the past – it’s harder to identify especially neglected interventions, causes, money, or skill-sets. That means it’s become more important to choose based on your motivations.
• Post-FTX, funding has become even more dramatically concentrated under Open Philanthropy, so finding new donors seems like a much bigger priority than in the past. (It seems plausible to me that $1bn in a foundation independent from OP could be worth several times that amount added to OP.)
• Both points mean efforts to start new foundations, fundraise and earn to give all seem more valuable compared to a couple of years ago.

(My bad if there were indications that this was going to be AI-centric from the outset, I could have easily missed some linguistic signals because I'm not the most savvy forum-goer.)

Thanks for posting this! This should really be a bigger discussion in conservation. 

Heather Browning's reflection on their being some other reason we value biodiversity resonates. 

McMahan's view is my own: that drawn out suffering from predation is wrong, but that ongoing predation is preferable to removing predation. Although I don't agree with their reasoning from uncertainty argument for keeping predation. Instead I have a jumbled mix of valuing autonomy, other lifestyles, thinking death by not-predation is worse, and valuing natural processes and complexity. This wavers against the benefits of a gardened wilderness because the potential for improvement is large and wide, but far off and requires high effort. 

I need to think about these topics more. Great post.

This is really getting at something I've been dancing around for awhile. I don't have quite the same read of green, but I'm not sure my own version is coherent or just "things I like." I have the start of an essay inspired by this, at least. 

Most of all: Thank you very very much.

I mostly agree with this - our powers and coordination are beyond impressive when we wield them. So a extinction risk would have to explain why we can't or don't use all of our resources to stop our own demise. Potential examples: feedback loops that are selfishly beneficial and prevent coordination, even if its leading to a slow death overall. Instances where the collapse is slow but locked-in ahead of time. So even if we decide to move heaven and earth to do something about it, its too late. 

I remembered incorrectly - it was not the plastics, but the rare earths that they were recycling. Tanzeena Hussain was the graduate student working on it and having success getting bacteria to survive in increasingly toxic environments. She was crushing up old electronics to feed the bacteria - pretty on the nose. 

It was in Elizabeth Skovran's lab at San Jose State University. This is the only write up I can find on it: https://blogs.sjsu.edu/newsroom/2023/taking-bio-recycling-to-the-next-level/

It looks like they are having enough success to file for a patent and investigate if this could eventually be a viable business too. But speeding this up at such early stages could be hugely beneficial to reducing mining and improving human health damaged by rare metal recovery.