Summary: Many environmentalists warn that human activity is causing a sixth mass extinction, and advocate economic stagnation or degrowth to slow or reverse the damage. Contrary to their assumptions, the long-term survival of Earth’s wildlife likely depends not on shrinking humanity’s footprint, but on expanding its technological reach. Rather than retreating from nature, advancing human civilization is probably the surest way to protect and even proliferate life of all kinds—on Earth and beyond.
Rising ocean temperatures, deforestation, replacement of grassland with agricultural land, and many other environmental effects of human activity have been taking an enormous toll on wildlife. Around one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction according to a 2019 United Nations (UN) report, which states, “The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900.” The most heavily affected are insect species, among which the extinction rate is about eight times faster than among mammals, reptiles, or birds.
But despite this, the popular idea that Earth is seeing a “sixth mass extinction” is premature. According to conservation biologist Chris D. Thomas, we will only reach mass extinction after about 10,000 years if current trends continue. In response to the UN report, National Geographic explains that only “if all species currently designated as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable go extinct in the next century, and if that rate of extinction continues without slowing down” will we experience a mass extinction within the next few centuries. It is extremely unlikely that all the “critically endangered” species will go extinct so soon, to say nothing of the “endangered” and “vulnerable” species. And even National Geographic’s projection is probably overly pessimistic. As science journalist Ronald Bailey has shown, reports of mass extinction, including the UN’s, tend to assume worst-case instead of most-likely scenarios and therefore probably overestimate extinction rates.
But even if “mass extinction” fears are overblown, the increased rate of species extinctions is worth taking seriously. That is why it’s important to clear up some widespread confusion about the interests of Earth’s wildlife.
One particularly dangerous misconception is that the interests of human beings are fundamentally at odds with those of wildlife. According to this belief, continued economic growth and industrialisation may benefit humans, but only at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of nonhuman life.
The truth is quite different. In the long run, the dangers of disordered nature are so pervasive, and humanity’s potential solutions so indispensable, that advancing human wealth and economic flourishing is necessary, not detrimental, if we want to protect wildlife and maintain or even increase biodiversity.
The Zero-Sum “Man Versus Nature” Premise
The zero-sum view of the relationship between humanity and wildlife often leads humanists and environmentalists to think of each other as enemies. On the environmentalist side, perhaps the most explicit statement of this binary thinking comes from the late David M. Graber (1948–2022). In 1989, before taking up his post as the Chief Scientist for the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service, where he served for over three decades, he elucidated his priorities in the Los Angeles Times:
We are not interested in the utility of a particular species, or free-flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion years ago, maybe half that—we quit the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. … Until such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
Dave Foreman, founder of the environmental group “Earth First!” and “a leading figure among a generation of activists,” according to the New York Times, likewise advocated what the Times describes as “aggressive protection of the environment for its own sake”: “a … philosophy, known as deep ecology, which holds that nature has inherent value, not just in its utility to people” and whose proposals include “returning vast swaths of land to nature, ripping out any trace of human intervention.”
In his bestselling 2022 book Regenesis: Feeding the World Without Devouring the Planet George Monbiot writes:
The more land that farming occupies, the less is available for forests and wetlands, savannas and wild grasslands, and the greater is the loss of wildlife and the rate of extinction. All farming, however kind and careful and complex, involves a radical simplification of natural ecosystems. This simplification is required to extract something that humans can eat. In other words, farming inflicts an ecological opportunity cost. Minimizing our impact means minimizing our use of land.
I have come to see land use as the most important of all environmental questions. I now believe it is the issue that makes the greatest difference to whether terrestrial ecosystems and Earth systems survive or perish. The more land we require, the less is available for other species and the habitats they need, and for sustaining the planetary equilibrium states on which our lives might depend.
Unlike Graber and Foreman, Monbiot pays lip service to the necessity of taking human needs into account in any efforts to protect wildlife by scaling back food production. But the clear implication of the “counter-agricultural revolution” he advocates is the mass impoverishment and undernourishment of vast swaths of humanity to lessen human impact on wildlife.
Even the United Nations, in the “Summary for Policymakers” of its biodiversity report, suggests reducing economic activity and human population growth as strategies for protecting biodiversity: “The negative trends in biodiversity and ecosystem functions are projected to continue or worsen in many future scenarios in response to indirect drivers such as rapid human population growth, unsustainable production and consumption and associated technological development.” Therefore, the summary claims that, “Transformations towards sustainability are more likely when efforts are directed at … lowering total consumption and waste, including by addressing both population growth and per capita consumption.”
Among those on the pro-human side of the zero-sum premise is Alex Epstein, founder of the Center for Industrial Progress. “I hold human life as the standard of value,” Epstein writes in his 2014 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels: “This is the essence of the conflict: the humanist, which is the term I will use to describe someone on a human standard of value, treats the rest of nature as something to use for his benefit; the nonhumanist treats the rest of nature as something that must be served.”
Epstein is generally careful to propose positive-sum policies, but he is so focused on the case for humanism that even he often speaks in zero-sum terms about the relationship between human and non-human animals. In his 2022 book Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas—Not Less, Epstein writes: “To the extent one’s primary goal is animal equality one will be morally driven to eliminate all human impacts on animals, including human-benefitting impacts such as the use of animals for medical research.”
Graber, Foreman, Monbiot, and Epstein don’t all agree on whether to prioritise humanity or wildlife, but not one of them questions the assumption that wildlife’s flourishing depends on human retreat and non-intervention.
Mother Nature Is a Grim Reaper
While human activity has accelerated the rate of species extinction in recent history, extinction has been the rule, not the exception, since the dawn of life on Earth. Over 99.9 percent of species that have existed on this planet are now extinct—a story overwhelmingly written prior to the ascension of humankind. Most species have perished in so-called “background extinctions,” but at least five mass extinction events have also occurred, each wiping out over 75 percent of species on Earth at the time. And the rest of non-human life is nearly certain to follow if left to its own devices. Countless threats exist, each of which may be highly unlikely to manifest in any given century, but let the clock tick long enough and the odds eventually become high.
Take asteroids, for example. The New York Times reported in 2023 that, “The world’s family of asteroid-hunting telescopic surveys have so far found more than 32,000 near-Earth asteroids.” They added, reassuringly, that “[m]ost of those capable of inflicting planet-scale devastation have been found because it’s easier to spot bigger rocks glinting in sunlight.”
Still, there are likely to be many Earth-threatening asteroids out there that have not been found. A 2022 National Geographic article reporting on new asteroid research explains that life on Earth is at risk of extinction by “a largely unseen population of space rocks—one that could threaten life as we know it.” Summarising discoveries published in the journal Science, the article explains that, “A group of space rocks stays mostly inside the orbit of Earth, making them difficult to pick out in the glare of the sun—and potentially a threat to our planet.”
As I write this, reports of an asteroid designated “2024 YR4” are all over the news. “The object, first detected in December, is 130 to 300 feet long and expected to make a very close pass of the planet in 2032,” the New York Times reported on 18 February. “Its odds of impacting Earth on Dec. 22 of that year currently stand at 3.1 percent.” (The risk has since been downgraded to a more reassuring 0.004 percent.) This particular asteroid is not large enough to destroy more than a city, but it illustrates the fact that a planetary threat could be discovered at any moment.
Asteroids are just one of many known threat categories that we Earthlings are counting on future technological advances to avert. Marian L. Tupy, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, has surveyed these natural existential threats in his article “Degrowth Means Certain Death for Humanity.” The list includes asteroid and comet impacts, the weakening or reversal of the magnetosphere, supervolcano eruptions, plate tectonics and continental drift, ice ages, ocean current disruption, methane hydrate release, supernova explosions, nearby hypernovas, gamma-ray bursts, solar flares, coronal mass ejections, rogue planets or stars, black holes, solar evolution, and Milky Way collisions.
That list may be just the beginning. In his book The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity, philosopher Toby Ord notes:
It is striking how recently many of these risks were discovered. Magnetic field reversal was discovered in 1906. Proof that Earth had been hit by a large asteroid or comet first emerged in 1960. And we had no idea gamma ray bursts even existed until 1969. For almost our entire history we have been subject to risks to which we were completely oblivious.
And there is no reason to think that the flurry of discovery has finished—that we are the first generation to have discovered all the natural risks we face. Indeed, it would surely be premature to conclude that we have discovered all of the possible mechanisms of natural extinction while major mass-extinction events remain unexplained.
In any one century, the odds of a catastrophe threatening all life on Earth may be tiny. But there are 10,000,000 centuries in a billion years. And if no existential catastrophe occurs by then, complex life will be long gone a billion years from now when the planet’s oxygen levels will have greatly diminished. That is, unless some technologically advanced species changes the odds in time.
Expanding the Scope of Human and Non-Human Life
In the future, humans may develop the technological capacity to affordably travel to outer space and terraform previously uninhabited worlds. Since many known extinction-level threats are restricted to a single planet, creating self-sustaining habitats outside Earth’s biosphere would significantly reduce the chance of some catastrophe ending all known life. Therefore, if life could become multiplanetary, species-level extinctions need not be the inevitable, almost universal rule.
This is among Elon Musk’s long-term goals at SpaceX. “If we’re a multi-planet species, it’s like life insurance for life itself. Not just for humans, but for all the creatures on Earth, because we would bring them with us. And they can’t build spaceships, so we are in effect the steward of life,” Musk has explained.
Perhaps in addition to or instead of terraforming other planets, humans will engineer giant artificial worlds, which physicist Gerard K. O’Neill first conceptualised in detail, to circumvent the many technical challenges of interplanetary travel. Progress toward the development of O’Neill cylinders, which would contain entire ecosystems and fine-tuned environments for the flourishing of life, is Jeff Bezos’s long-term goal for his aerospace company Blue Origin. These “O’Neill colonies,” as Bezos calls them, which would rotate to create artificial gravity using centrifugal force, would be large enough to comfortably hold at least a million people each and would provide attractive environments that people would want to live in, according to Bezos’s vision. He doesn’t believe that he’ll live to see O’Neill colonies himself, but he believes that future generations will.
By these or other means, humans could offer a long-term future to Earth’s lifeforms and increase the number and well-being of animal and plant species, unconstrained by the resources of Earth or of any other single planet. Once space travel and terraformation become cheap enough, entire planets or artificial worlds could be fine-tuned to benefit specific species. Perhaps this process could even be automated and expanded exponentially with the help of AI, which could provide the necessary research and manage the construction many magnitudes faster and more accurately than human beings.
Scientists are already conducting preliminary research on terraforming space habitats. In 2022, a team of University of Rochester scientists laid out a theoretical plan to terraform asteroids into Manhattan-scale space habitats. In 2023, researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center discovered how to turn moon dust into breathable oxygen. And several recent papers have offered strategies for heating up Mars for eventual habitation. Those are just a few of many recent examples.
Even sceptics tend to question only the timeline—not the possibility—of space colonisation. Jonathan McDowell, physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, recently commented that Musk is “not at all” close to building “a human civilization on Mars that is self-sustaining,” but added that “towards the end of this century” we might have Mars settlements whose inhabitants could even bring their pets with them from Earth. I have not been able to find any experts who seriously doubt that we will be able to build Earth-like habitats outside Earth’s atmosphere sometime this millennium, which is a short period in evolutionary terms—short enough to prevent the next mass extinction.
A Positive-Sum Environmental Strategy
As philosopher William MacAskill has asked, “if it really is of value to have greater diversity of species, why do we not actively try and promote a greater amount of biodiversity above merely preventing loss of biodiversity?” The opportunity to terraform extraterrestrial environments is just one reason why environmentalists should set their sights far higher than mere conservation.
Areas of Earth that are currently of limited habitability such as deserts and tundra could be transformed into comparatively biodiverse paradises. We could create countless new species through practices like hybridisation and genetic modification—as has already been done with the Italian sparrow (Passer italiae), the apple fly (Rhagoletis pomonella), the yellow-flowered Yorkwort (Senecio eboracensis), and scores of others—as biologist Chris D. Thomas describes in his book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction. We could also resurrect extinct species, which is the goal of the ten billion USD-valued Dallas-based startup Colossal Biosciences, which is currently working to bring back the woolly mammoth, the dodo bird, and the Tasmanian tiger.
Attempts to conserve Earth’s current ecosystems through non-intervention are doomed because change is a constant of nature and environmental change is a constant of Earth’s geology. Plus, in addition to being futile, it is pessimistic to think that mere conservation should be the highest hope of a forward-looking environmentalist movement. Human non-intervention may benefit non-human life in an unsustainable, short-term way. But acting in the long-term interest of Earth’s wildlife means protecting species from exogenous existential threats and investing in technological and scientific advances that will enable them to thrive at unprecedented levels.
As Tupy explains, “In the long run, the only way to ensure the future of our (hopefully interplanetary) species is through exponential increase in wealth and technological sophistication.” Such a wealthy and innovative economy as humans must continue to build cannot be sustained without significant environmental change. But there is no reason to assume that the damage to wildlife caused by human industry outweighs the benefits—especially possible salvation from extinction—that could accrue to wildlife through the advancement of human knowledge.
If people had not been growing the world economy by using fossil fuels, agriculture, and other ecologically disruptive industries since at least the Industrial Revolution, humans would not be much closer than chimpanzees to colonising space and securing the future of life on Earth and beyond. And as MacAskill argues in his book What We Owe the Future, “if society stagnates technologically, it could remain stuck in a period of high catastrophic risk for such a long time that extinction or collapse would be all but inevitable.” Since we can only guess when and how existential threats will manifest, every extra dollar of research, development, or education might be the dollar that gets Earth’s humanity and wildlife through the technological bottleneck and into the next phase of consciousness in the universe.
The UN’s projections suggest that population growth and economic activity have negative effects on biodiversity because their statistical models can only estimate the destructive aspects of these phenomena. Due to the intrinsic unpredictability of future knowledge, creative transformations such as terraforming other planets and reviving extinct species are outside the scope of UN projections. But this means that their suggestions about reducing production, consumption, and population growth are biased against positive-sum solutions to the point of probably being counterproductive to the advancement of human and wildlife interests alike.
It is true that technological progress is itself a source of existential risks, but unlike the alternative (stagnation in ignorance), it has salvational potential as well, and thus the demise of life on Earth is more likely without technological progress than it is with it. Plus, a positive-sum (technological accelerationist) environmentalism is more politically achievable than a zero-sum (degrowth) environmentalism. The former merely requires that technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs are left to their own devices within a market economy, while the latter requires everyone to make major sacrifices of their own comfort and prosperity.
As Elon Musk commented in 2022, “I think it’s important that we become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilization, because eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on earth. So if one is a true environmentalist or cares about the future of life, it is obviously important that life become multiplanetary and ultimately multi-stellar.” That is a positive-sum environmentalist agenda with a decent shot at benefiting both human and non-human life. Conversely, when Dave Foreman advocates “ripping out any trace of human intervention” for nature’s sake, or Alex Epstein implies that achieving animal equality would require eliminating “all human impacts on animals,” or David M. Graber hopes “for the right virus to come along” to wipe out humans, they are falsely assuming a zero-sum relationship between humans and other lifeforms. They are missing the larger point that on a long enough timeline the interests of all living beings are aligned and are best served by technological and scientific progress.
This article was originally published at Quillette on 3/13/2025.
