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Why we shouldn't rewild land
Rewilding is the process of converting fairly substantial tracts of industrial land back into nature. What once was farmland or a logging area returns to its natural state. The consensus among most people tends to be that it’s a pretty uncontroversially good idea. This consensus, I think, is badly wrong. Rewilding is extremely immoral worse than almost any other thing we do and we should refrain from it barring exceptional circumstances.
What’s so bad about rewilding? The basic case against is that it majorly increases wild animal suffering. If we assume wild animals are spread uniformly across Earth’s land, then each square mile of land contains 1,754-17,540 mammals, 1,754-1,754,000 reptiles, and 1,754-1,754,000 amphibians.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/rewilding-is-extremely-bad?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Where things get really extreme is with insects.
On average, a square foot of land contains about 750 insects. https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering/ This means that if you rewild a square mile of land, over the course of a year, 20.9 billion additional insect life-years will be lived. If we assume that each insect lives two weeks a fairly reasonable https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search estimate then a mile of rewilded land produces about 585,480,000,000 (five-hundred-eighty-five-billion-four-hundred-eighty-million) extra insect lives and deaths annually.
Rewilding is the process of converting fairly substantial tracts of industrial land back into nature. What once was farmland or a logging area returns to its natural state. The consensus among most people tends to be that it’s a pretty uncontroversially good idea. This consensus, I think, is badly wrong. Rewilding is extremely immoral worse than almost any other thing we do and we should refrain from it barring exceptional circumstances.
What’s so bad about rewilding? The basic case against is that it majorly increases wild animal suffering. If we assume wild animals are spread uniformly across Earth’s land, then each square mile of land contains 1,754-17,540 mammals, 1,754-1,754,000 reptiles, and 1,754-1,754,000 amphibians.
https://benthams.substack.com/p/rewilding-is-extremely-bad?utm_source=post-banner&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Where things get really extreme is with insects.
On average, a square foot of land contains about 750 insects. https://reducing-suffering.org/the-importance-of-insect-suffering/ This means that if you rewild a square mile of land, over the course of a year, 20.9 billion additional insect life-years will be lived. If we assume that each insect lives two weeks a fairly reasonable https://benthams.substack.com/p/there-should-be-less-nature?utm_source=publication-search estimate then a mile of rewilded land produces about 585,480,000,000 (five-hundred-eighty-five-billion-four-hundred-eighty-million) extra insect lives and deaths annually.
