Despite their differences, do animal advocacy and environmentalism converge in practice?

Original text Luciano Carlos Cunha · Volume V, p. 16 of the PDF edition · English translation

One might think that, despite their opposing goals, in practice animal advocacy and environmentalism always go hand in hand. For example, it is sometimes said that, since animals need the environment as a resource, and environmentalism aims to preserve the environment, animal advocates should support environmentalist measures. According to this view, the conflict is only in theory, not in practice. One problem with this view is that it fails to see that it is possible to preserve the environment in very different configurations, and that the configuration environmentalism aims at is not the best one (or even a minimally good one) for animals.

For example, suppose that modifying the natural configuration of a certain ecosystem would reduce the suffering and the number of deaths of animals from then on over time. If our concern is with the good of animals, we will support that modification. The configurations valued by environmentalism, by contrast, vary according to each environmentalist school of thought²⁴, but none of them is centered on concern for the good of animals. For example, configurations commonly valued by environmentalist perspectives are: the one the ecosystem exhibited before the first human intervention; the one that contains only animals and plants of native species; the one that contains the rarest species; the one with the greatest degree of aesthetic properties; the one with the greatest degree of biodiversity; and so on.²⁵ Environmentalists will advocate keeping ecosystems in these configurations even if this increases the suffering and deaths of animals over time.

For example, when evaluating which type of vegetation it is best to have in a given ecosystem, a sentience-based ethics would be guided by a criterion such as "which of them results in the least amount of suffering and premature death for the animals affected over time?". An environmentalist position, by contrast, would be guided by criteria such as "which of them is the native vegetation?", "which is rarer?", or "which increases biodiversity?", and so on, regardless of whether this is better or worse for the animals living there.

It is possible that in several cases the two will coincide. However, this will not be so in many other cases. For this reason, if our goal is the good of animals, we should not be

guided by environmentalist criteria, but rather by criteria that indicate directly how well or badly off the animals will be²⁶. This could be informed by the field of welfare biology. Welfare biology is a proposed field of research that would study animals in their ecosystems from the standpoint of what could affect them positively or negatively as sentient individuals who have a well-being²⁷. We will see more details about welfare biology in chapter 6.