Should we really kill all the lanternflies?

13:07Julie Urban:Now, we don't have good data on this, but it doesn't seem like the individual stompers have had that much of an actual impact on lanternfly population levels. Other mitigation measures are way more effective. But Julie and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture are really focused on whether the lanternfly will spread. Like, you stomp it so it doesn't try to hitch a ride with you in your car. And if you look a little more closely, you can see that the public outreach campaigns in Pennsylvania and eventually New York do include information about this. Like, make sure to report these bugs if you see them outside of the quarantine zone.

13:44Julie Urban:In Pennsylvania, you can call the hotline at 1-884-BAD-FLY. A lot of their communication is also about scraping away egg masses, which is more efficient than stomping individual bugs. But when I started to hear about this, it seemed like some of that nuance had gotten lost. People were kind of just stomping with abandon, even with a sense of glee. And like, we were sending children off to do this. Girl Scouts love taking action. They love finding ways that they can help out in the community. And one of the ways that Girl Scouts are showing the love to parks today is through a little bit of a lanternfly squish-a-thon.

14:25Julie Urban:But there were also signs that people were conflicted about the kill orders. One friend told me that in the summer of 2021, she saw someone running after a lanternfly yelling out, The New York Times told me to kill you. I personally know a couple of people who gave up stomping. And the question even made it on Jimmy Fallon, where comedian Kate McKinnon was making an appearance.

14:50Chelsea Batavia:And I saw this baby on the street. And I was like, oh my God. This moth. What? It's like sepia-toned wing. Fishnets, basically.

15:03Julie Urban:Basically, it's gorgeous.

15:04Chelsea Batavia:Peek of red with polka dots. Like, this is a burlesque dancer.

15:08Julie Urban:But she promises that now that she knows it's invasive, she's going to kill it.

15:14Chelsea Batavia:No, we're supposed to. We're supposed to, and I will. I will kill the next lanternfly I see. But take a photo of it. Oh, my God, you're winking. No, we're supposed to. I will. I will kill the next one.

15:26Julie Urban:If you didn't catch that, Kate is saying she's going to do this, but then overtly winking at the audience, like letting us know that she's crossing her fingers behind her back. People were starting to wonder why exactly we had to kill these gorgeous burlesque dancer bugs. And actually, the science was getting a little more murky on this question, too. The initial worries about how the lanternflies might kill all these trees and crops, those did not pan out. As of now, in the U.S., the bugs are really mostly a problem for grapes, and therefore for grape growers. Though Julie told me, in her mind, there is still urgency around making sure that the lanternflies don't expand to new places.

16:09Chelsea Batavia:So if heat makes them develop, they're going to develop earlier as they move south.

16:14Julie Urban:That could mean more time to feed on Georgia peaches, or maybe on the many grapes in my home state of California. So even though things haven't been as bad in the Northeast as they initially feared, it is still possible that in other places, it could be worse. These past couple of summers, I have shared Kate McKinnon's ambivalence about stomping lanternflies. And I have felt especially ambivalent about the kill orders and how happy we all seem to be to comply. But this year, I don't know. I wanted to face my ambivalence head on. It is really not the biggest deal in the world. So I was like, I should actually just decide once and for all what I'm going to do here.

16:58Julie Urban:Make a moral choice that I can live by. Do you think it's morally right for me to kill lanternflies? Yes.

17:08Chelsea Batavia:Because I think if anything, it can only help.

17:16Julie Urban:Julie doesn't like the idea of killing living things. And she knows better than anyone what cool creatures lanternflies are. But she was like, we just got to do it.

17:25Chelsea Batavia:I mean, this is, it's kind of like, as humans, we've manipulated our environment so much, you know. And ethically, it's our responsibility to try to fix that or keep it from getting worse as much as we can. You know, we have to do our chores environmentally, right? And a lot of times they're distasteful. And this is one that's very distasteful.

17:50Julie Urban:I totally see how Julie landed here. And yet, even with what I had now learned about the science, I felt like there were still ethical questions here that I wanted to think through more deeply. Ideally with the help of a moral philosopher. And when I did, I learned more than I had bargained for about the ethics of conservation and of decision-making in general. That is after the break.

18:30Julie Urban:I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now.

18:34Chelsea Batavia:But Home Projects, I second guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? And who should I even call? That's where Thumbtack comes in.

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19:07Chelsea Batavia:Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other. Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

20:12Chelsea Batavia:It's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing.

20:29Julie Urban:I read several different papers and articles as I was trying to think through my decision about whether or not to kill lanternflies this summer if they should be so unlucky as to cross my path. And there was one that I kept thinking about by an author named Chelsea Batavia. She lives in Washington state. The lanternflies have not made it there yet, but I told her the whole story. Oh boy, what a mess. Chelsea now works in government. She is representing her own views here, not the state of Washington. But back when she was a PhD student studying ecosystem management and environmental ethics, she got interested in moral dilemmas in conservation.

21:08Because,

21:09Julie Urban:you know, mostly people who care about conservation are trying to do the right thing. But sometimes they face conflicting moral demands.

21:18Chelsea Batavia:You know, it's challenging. Should we be killing barred owls to save spotted owls?

21:22Julie Urban:This is something that happened in the Pacific Northwest starting in 2013. And the images of the bodies of invasive barred owls that had been killed in the name of conservation, they made people uncomfortable. And Chelsea gets that.

21:37Chelsea Batavia:You know, like I have a kind of a strong intuitive response to like, no, we shouldn't be killing anything. Don't we say that we care about nature? Don't we say we care about wildlife? Right, and killing is bad.

21:46Julie Urban:Like, that's the first thing you learn.

21:47Chelsea Batavia:Exactly. It's like, thou shall not kill. But then when you dig into like the details, because that's the thing, ethics, we can think about it at an abstract, but at the end of the day, we are making decisions. We're acting in the context of particulars, right? And once you get into those particulars, these like high level, yes, we should kill or no, we should not kill, that just doesn't, there's too much nuance.

22:09Julie Urban:So Chelsea started thinking deeply about the ethics of this kind of situation. And she agreed to help me think through my version of that, the lanternflies.

22:18Chelsea Batavia:I guess a first response is that I think it is grossly inappropriate for anybody to be killing gleefully.

22:25Julie Urban:This seemed like a very reasonable place to start. Like, a lot of my discomfort is about how the killing sometimes feels like this big collective game. But if you put gleeful killing aside, there is still the question of killing at all. And Chelsea was like, okay, we could get into the world of normative ethics, which is about helping us choose what to do. It's got three big branches, three big frameworks we could consider. Number one is consequentialism.

23:00Chelsea Batavia:Consequentialism says the right action, very, very coarsely put, the right action is the one that produces the best outcomes. So the focus is on what happens.

23:09Julie Urban:In the case of lanternflies, there is one big obvious outcome.

23:14Chelsea Batavia:We're killing life. We're killing insects. We're killing bugs. These are little lives, right? Yeah.

23:19Julie Urban:Many smart people do think that insects are conscious and feel pain. So that is in the don't kill them column. But of course, on the flip side, humans are conscious and feel pain. And humans are harmed by lantern flies, especially humans who grow grapes. So that is in the kill them column. Chelsea also pointed out a whole world I hadn't thought of also in the kill them column that is like if I stomp on lanternflies now then I may be preventing people in California or other states from having to make this decision and I'm also preventing the lanternflies future children from also being killed

23:57Chelsea Batavia:but then it's like do it how do we weigh the value of a potential life that never was against the life that is here right now so like to me that's I'm just I think that consequentialism is a useful tool for thinking through things, but I'm very rarely going to put a flag and be like, yes, this is the way we should be thinking about things. And you're pointing out there's just a lot of uncertainty about outcomes here. There's a lot of uncertainty. And there's a lot of types of outcomes that can't be quantified. And even if they could, they would not be comparable. So, you know, I think that that's not helpful for you making your decision to try to make a calculation based on the best outcomes.

24:33Julie Urban:I gotta say, I was relieved. I think part of me thought I had to have all the information in order to responsibly make this decision. Like, read the appendix of all the studies or something. But actually, that is not necessarily required in order for me to make an ethical choice. Might even be a way for me to avoid the decision because it's hard. Though Chelsea did say it is, of course, very important that scientists keep learning more about the outcomes. Like, if it turns out that the lanternflies making it to California is definitely going to cause mass famine, And that could really change my moral calculation.

25:08Julie Urban:But for the moment, we left consequentialism aside.

25:14Julie Urban:The second frame Chelsea told me about is deontology, which means the science of moral duty. It focuses on the intention behind my action. Why am I doing it?

25:26Chelsea Batavia:When you talk about feeling like you're, you know, participating with your community and doing something to support your hometown, Now, that to me sounds a lot like more of a deontological claim. You're thinking about, you know, your intention. Your motivation is not to be cruel and kill lanternflies. Your motivation is to be a good neighbor, to make that connection with your neighbor. So, you know, to me, that's not irrelevant. That is something to pay attention to. All right.

25:52Julie Urban:So we put those issues into the mix. And then framework number three is called virtue ethics. It is a really old branch of normative ethics, which essentially says that virtues should guide your actions.

26:05Chelsea Batavia:So Aristotle talked about virtues being things like, you know, courage and temperance. And so the idea is then as you are moving through your life and you have to make moral decisions, you do what a virtuous person would do. So like the reason why this was not very popular for, you know, as we got into the Enlightenment, we were looking for rules. It's like that's not a rule.

26:27Julie Urban:There's definitely something to be said for rules, but this flexible framework seems useful to me, too. Because there actually are multiple reasonable ways to think about this. Like, maybe a virtuous person would take on the task of killing bugs on behalf of their community. Or maybe a virtuous person would decide the principle of protecting life is the most important thing here. Gleeful killing of creatures could be a slippery slope. The important thing is to think about what is actually good and then try to take action to get there. I also realized I had been assuming that I needed to make like an ironcloth decision here that I can never violate.

27:11Julie Urban:I think because I wanted to make sure that I wasn't letting myself off the hook. But it's also true that there's no law that I always kill lanternflies or that I never do. Maybe I'd been looking for something overly simple.

27:26Chelsea Batavia:I think that when I see work in conservation ethics and a lot of ethics in general, it tends to be quite definitive. It says like, you know, this is right, this is wrong. And I just, I really like language that gives us a way to say that it's not that simple.

27:42Julie Urban:When Chelsea was doing her PhD, she felt like she really needed some language like that to describe these conservation moral dilemmas like the one with the invasive owls.

27:52Chelsea Batavia:So I started snooping through some really gnarly moral philosophy stuff. Looking for like a word to describe that feeling? Looking for if there's any scholarship that acknowledges that like this is a thing that, you know, ethics is not a matter of righteous. Like, yeah, I got that. Like gold star for me that there's this gray zone. And that's how I found this language around moral residue.

28:16Julie Urban:Moral residue. do. It describes the feeling that's left behind when you make what you think is the best ethical choice, and it still just feels bad.

28:28Chelsea Batavia:It's an emotional response, actually, which is super interesting because moral philosophy puts a high premium on the mind, on rationality, on logic, on thinking and deliberation. So it was really interesting to me that something that is recognized as an emotional signal is given language.

28:47Julie Urban:Allowing my emotions into the room, that was actually really clarifying to me. Because I'd kind of been feeling like if I still felt bad about my decision, maybe I just hadn't yet arrived at the right decision. But actually, maybe I'm just going to feel bad about both options. And I still have to choose.

29:05Chelsea Batavia:One thing moral residue is not meant to do is let anybody off the hook. You're going to have to kind of sit in your own moral responsibility and decide what you're going to do. There is no no action option. You either kill them or you don't. And I think you're going to probably going to have to sit with some sort of discomfort either way. But I think that wading into the complexity is the right way to do things. That's like a responsible way to be as a free, willing, moral agent in the world. Like, if that's not what we're doing here as people, then I guess I'm not sure what we're doing.

29:39Julie Urban:By the end of our conversation, I had enough of a sense of Chelsea to know that she was not going to tell me what to do here. But I did ask her, what would you do if they do get to Washington?

29:50Chelsea Batavia:Yeah, if they get to Washington, I'm definitely going to learn more and try to use my best critical brain to understand kind of how the research was done and what it means. But I think that my, this is where I would acknowledge my unwillingness to accept that personal burden of taking a life, I wouldn't do that.

30:13Julie Urban:Well, yeah, like you're feeling like I wouldn't stop them.

30:16Chelsea Batavia:Yeah, and that would be a loss, you know, because I would recognize that I do have an obligation for all the reasons that we've already talked about. But yeah, I think my reverence for life is probably a little bit too strong of a signal for me at this point.

30:34All right.

30:35Julie Urban:I'm back on this block near my house with this tree that had a lanternfly scuttling up it last summer that I tried to kill. And I've made my decision. When the lanternflies come out this summer, I am going to stomp them. That is not where Chelsea landed for herself, but I think she modeled a way of making the decision that accepts the moral residue, makes the choice based on what feels important to her. And for me, I think the communitarian value of helping people in my region is just really important to me. But I also accept that means I'm going to be taking insect lives and that my individual actions actually don't have that much of an impact.

31:16Julie Urban:Like, I don't think I should kid myself about that. But there is also one big thing that I'm going to force myself to do differently from last year, which is that this time, if someone comes up to me and is like, yeah, get him, I think I'm really going to make myself be like, I kind of hate doing this. Like, I've decided to do it, but it's a rough trade-off that we're being asked to make, right? Like, killing bugs does not feel good. Because I do think that maybe having a weird, honest conversation with a stranger about something that matters is also a good in itself.

32:02Julie Urban:This episode was produced by me, Sally Helm. It was edited by Lissa Sowett. Christian Ayala did the mixing and sound design. Meredith Hodnott runs the show. Melissa Hirsch checks the facts. Noam Hassenfeld, Valerie Schenkman, and Joanna Solitaroff are wondering what it is really like to be a bird. And Bird Pinkerton immediately pulled out the broken guitar when Flapton hissed, Shh, not here. They have ears everywhere. And he led down a narrow passageway, away from the outside passageway deeper into the station.

32:41Julie Urban:Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show along with Bird and Noam. If you have thoughts about the show please send us an email. We love reading them. We are at unexplainable at vox.com. You can also leave us a review or a rating wherever you listen. That really helps us out. And if you are into supporting the show and all of Vox in general join our membership program. You can go to Vox.com slash members to sign up. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and we'll see you next time.

33:32Chelsea Batavia:Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

34:03Chelsea Batavia:Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com That's O-D-O-O dot com