Wild Souls by Emma Marris

As a conservationist, I had long been comfortable with the suffering of individual animals in "the wild." But with humans increasingly taking active management roles in "the wild," the premise that we had no ethical obligations to the animals there seemed harder to maintain. If we reintroduced the wolves and managed their numbers and whereabouts, it seemed to me that we were in some way responsible for their welfare and maybe even for the deer they preyed upon. But if that was true, then what about animals whose lives are shaped by us unintentionally by climate change, land development, and species we have moved around? Would they be our responsibility too? The thought induced a kind of intellectual vertigo. Could humans possibly have ethical obligations to all the untold millions of animals on Earth, to every sparrow and ground squirrel and city rat and white-tailed deer? I was overwhelmed.

What do we owe non-human animals? This question is at the heart of Emma Marris' Wild Souls, subtitled "Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World." Those two words, freedom and flourishing, are central to Marris' exploration of these ethical obligations, and in some ways, they are surprising. Though we think of animals as being wild--a word Marris disdains--how often do we think of them being free, not just in the sense of not being captive, but as having autonomy, agency, and free will? We consider the ways that individual animals might suffer and die, and the threats to entire species and ecosystems, but what does it mean to say an individual--or a species--is not just alive or unthreatened but flourishing? These questions are more complex than one might think, and one of the central themes of Marris' book is that the modern conservation movement, for all its best intentions, runs afoul of them.

I'm already on board with many of Marris' values, some of which might reasonably be considered countercultural. I agree with Marris that there's no real value to terms like naturalness and wilderness, which reify environments as they were at arbitrary moments in time, and which diminish millennia-old indigenous practices of reciprocity and care. I agree that thinking of species as "invasive" is insidious and counterproductive. But many of the ethical dilemmas Marris highlights really did make me uncomfortable and uncertain. How, Marris asks, do we balance the desire to conserve species with the often brutal methods required to do so? We believe by instinct that a particular species of albatross must be preserved, but how do we balance that against the killing--by excruciating methods--of hundreds of thousands of human-introduced rats, who after all, have no idea that they're in the wrong place? A species, Marris points out, is merely a category, it has no subjectivity and cannot feel pain, and cannot be said to invoke ethical obligations.  

And how does this calculus change when we observe that the albatross species is so genetically similar to a species on a neighboring island that some consider them the same species? One of the most thought-provoking details in the book, for me, was the observation that some species are surviving by hybridizing with their nearest relatives. Spotted owl conservationists in the Pacific Northwest, for example, have been killing barred owls who venture into the spotted owl's range for decades, because the two owls hybridize too easily. But if the spotted owls can flourish by mating with barred owls, why should we stop them? When we say that a "species"--a human term that is more or less meaningless to an owl--must be protected, for whom is it true? Us or them? As human impact on the natural world becomes more and more profound, especially in the era of anthropogenic climate change, these moral questions become more and more difficult to abstain from.

Many of the ethical dilemmas here involve killing in the name of conservation, but not all: was it ethical, Marris wonders, to capture the entire dwindling population of California condors to be bred in zoos? The species has made a remarkable comeback because of these methods, but do they justify the imprisonment and immiseration of the individual condors, who might otherwise have lived full lives ignorant of their species' imminent extinction? The claims made by zoos regarding the importance of their breeding and conservation programs come into especially sharp scrutiny.

I appreciated the humility Marris brings to these ethical dilemmas. She frames the book as kind of investigation that takes her across the world, chatting with conservationists from Peru to New Zealand, and who sometimes have diametrically opposed views of how conservation should be done. She talks with a trapper known for his ability to eradicate rats and other introduced species from islands, a man who has killed thousands upon thousands of animals in the name of conservationists, as well as those who think that killing any animal in the name of conservation is a moral error. Some of the most fascinating conversations are with folks who believe their obligation to these animals means they must put their thumb on the scale of animal behavior: Australians who try to breed bilbies to fear rats and stoats, and geneticists who believe they can use CRISPR to dampen the fertility of introduced species at the genetic level to the point where they will simply disappear. She also includes insights from ethical philosophers like Peter Singer and Martha C. Nussbaum, whose competing ideas about right and wrong lead to very different judgments. In each instance, Marris weighs her own moral reasoning against her intuitions, and is often comfortable saying she's not sure what the right answer is. It seems to me we would all benefit from a little more humility like that in our interactions with the animal world.