See, this is something I don't get about most people. Does nobody else feel sympathy for individual animals? We're inflicting immeasurable amounts of suffering and death and nothing will ever make that less of a tragedy.
Perhaps we like to imagine that animal populations are, on average, as healthy as we are when left to their own devices... but we have society, and medicine. Life as a wild animal sucks.
If you want to imagine a utopia, first imagine a world where both the lion and the gazelle somehow survive, without one dying to feed the other. This will probably take you a long time to picture, unless you've really given thought to problems like Friendly AI before.
Plus, we're humans, we have the power to manipulate and control (to a certain extent) nature, so saying "we're doing no worse than nature" is not good enough, IMHO. It's within our power to do less damage, and we should do what we can.
Here's an analogous situation: residential garbage accounts for about 1% of total garbage. The real way to "reduce, reuse, recycle" is to lobby industry to do those things. But instead, we see constant attempts to get people to put things in blue bins instead of green bins. Why? Because residential recycling is a mechanism for signalling pro-social values, and people can do it conspicuously to prove they're "better than you." So it gets emphasized, and the real problem--industrial waste--gets de-emphasized.
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you, but all your replies seem to be about the big picture, while that is exactly what I was saying I "don't get about most people".
Right, and that's exactly what I'm responding to: "following your happiness" in helping animals is, on the whole, actually pretty shitty for the average, randomly-selected animal (where any randomly-selected animal will tend to live in the wild, not near any humans) compared to other things you could do, like introducing invasive plants with known anti-parasitic properties to foraging ranges.
If you actually care about animals suffering less, rather than the fuzzy feeling you get by seeing an animal near you suffering less, then you should do things that maximize global animal welfare, not urban animal welfare.
Read http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa....
Let me rephrase my original post: People often say "the planet will recover once we're gone", which to me sounds like something intended to make us feel better about the direction the world is heading in because the human race can't "truly destroy the planet". I disagree because in the process we'll be destroying billions of individual animals, which I think will be a tragedy in itself.
This is all I've been talking about since the beginning.
Completely off-topic now, but what about suffering of parasites themselves in presence of those plants? Why do people care about cute animals and not about and often at the expense of less cute ones? (that's a rhetorical question, because they are cute duh)
We can't make things better for some living organisms without destroying others. Since there is no objective way to weight outcome of an intervention, we can't "maximize global animal welfare". Most of the time it will benefit one fluffy thing at the expense of another, usually less fluffy.
Undoing results of our own actions is a defensible thing though. As is maximizing some kind of utility to us, for example working to increase or maintain biodiversity to avoid being next extinct species on the list. But biodiversity just means shitty life for more kinds of animals as far as maximizing animal welfare goes.
You do.
In some ways, empathy's extension to non-humans is the only social tool we have to start caring and prioritizing the maintenance of the living systems around us. Because it's sure as heck not going to be a pragmatic decision like "we need to keep these animals/plants around because they keep us alive" :) People don't respond to that shit.
imho we must create a societal narrative that /cares/ about other living things, or else we're honestly kinda fucked. If nothing else, think of cultivating our ability to empathize with animals as socially hacking our own brains so as not to succumb to the the J-curve crash that is expected of every other species on our trajectory.
There's a view that says that there's a balance and grand scheme in nature -- the Gaia hypothesis. I don't subscribe to this, and have been seeing a few fairly persuasive arguments that it's fairly wishful thinking.
Which isn't to say that the biosphere won't exact its own vengeance on humans if we continue down our present path.
What distinguishes humans from other life forms, that we're aware of, is, well, that we're aware. We can form models of understanding about the world and Universe we inhabit, and we've done a fairly impressive job of this over the past 300 years or so: Newton, Darwin, Mengel, Einstein, et al.
And one of the things we've been aware of ... for a fairly long time ... is that the very things which have given us an advanced industrial civilization cannot continue unabated forever. William Stanley Jevons wrote of this in The Coal Question in 1865, and referenced works back to 1789 (John Williams, "The Limited Quantity of Coal in Britain"). The alarm's been pulled repeatedly since (CO2 induced global warming: 1932, peak oil: 1945, 1956, 1972, 1998, ..., pollution and environmental impacts: 1962, 1972, ..., population: 1798, 1972, ...).
While moral arguments do get invoked quite a bit, I prefer a more empirical basis for argument. Joshua Greene (http://www.merrimack.edu/live/news/1124-joshua-greene-phd-re...) has some very interesting things to say on moral decisionmaking with which I find myself in generally strong agreement.
Life exists to find and exploit entropic gradients in stocks and flows. Humans have done a bang-up job of finding and exploiting one particularly copious class of stocks (fossil fuels). The end of that stock is well within sight, and with our job done, we may well find ourselves unemployed, biologically speaking.
I'd prefer to avoid that unemployment if possible. And I think that's the question at hand.