Ben A. Minteer

Multidimensional evaluation of managed relocation

Managed relocation (MR) has rapidly emerged as a potential intervention strategy in the toolbox of biodiversity management under climate change. Previous authors have suggested that MR (also referred to as assisted colonization, assisted migration, or assisted translocation) could be a last-alternative option after interrogating a linear decision tree. We argue that numerous interacting and value-laden considerations demand a more inclusive strategy for evaluating MR. The pace of modern climate change demands decision making with imperfect information, and tools that elucidate this uncertainty and integrate scientific information and social values are urgently needed. We present a heuristic tool that incorporates both ecological and social criteria in a multidimensional decision-making framework. For visualization purposes, we collapse these criteria into 4 classes that can be depicted in graphical 2-D space. This framework offers a pragmatic approach for summarizing key dimensions of MR: capturing uncertainty in the evaluation criteria, creating transparency in the evaluation process, and recognizing the inherent tradeoffs that different stakeholders bring to evaluation of MR and its alternatives.

Managed Relocation: Integrating the Scientific, Regulatory, and Ethical Challenges

Managed relocation is defined as the movement of species, populations, or genotypes to places outside the areas of their historical distributions to maintain biological diversity or ecosystem functioning with changing climate. It has been claimed that a major extinction event is under way and that climate change is increasing its severity. Projections indicating that climate change may drive substantial losses of biodiversity have compelled some scientists to suggest that traditional management strategies are insufficient. The managed relocation of species is a controversial management response to climate change. The published literature has emphasized biological concerns over difficult ethical, legal, and policy issues. Furthermore, ongoing managed relocation actions lack scientific and societal engagement. Our interdisciplinary team considered ethics, law, policy, ecology, and natural resources management in order to identify the key issues of managed relocation relevant for developing sound policies that support decisions for resource management. We recommend that government agencies develop and adopt best practices for managed relocation.

Move it or lose it? The ecological ethics of relocating species under climate change

Managed relocation (also known as assisted colonization, assisted migration) is one of the more controversial proposals to emerge in the ecological community in recent years. A conservation strategy involving the translocation of species to novel ecosystems in anticipation of range shifts forced by climate change, managed relocation (MR) has divided many ecologists and conservationists, mostly because of concerns about the potential invasion risk of the relocated species in their new environments. While this is indeed an important consideration in any evaluation of MR, moving species across the landscape in response to predicted climate shifts also raises a number of larger and important ethical and policy challenges that need to be addressed. These include evaluating the implications of a more aggressive approach to species conservation, assessing MR as a broader ecological policy and philosophy that departs from longstanding scientific and management goals focused on preserving ecological integrity, and considering MR within a more comprehensive ethical and policy response to climate change. Given the complexity and novelty of many of the issues at stake in the MR debate, a more dynamic and pragmatic approach to ethical analysis and debate is needed to help ecologists, conservationists, and environmental decision makers come to grips with MR and the emerging ethical challenges of ecological policy and management under global environmental change.

Why we need an “ecological ethics”

Research ecologists and biodiversity managers frequently have to contend with difficult ethical questions during the course of their work. Yet there is no established approach or field within professional or practical ethics devoted to helping researchers and managers identify and reason through these complex ethical and philosophical issues. Unlike biomedical scientists and clinicians, ecologists and biodiversity managers lack an explicit scholarly forum such as bioethics, that can help them to analyze the complicated ethical situations they encounter in the field, the laboratory, or the conservation facility. Here we present a series of real world cases to illustrate some of the current ethical challenges faced by research ecologists and managers. We call for a new integrated and interdisciplinary field of concrete ethical inquiry – “ecological ethics” – that will fill an important gap in the practical and professional ethics literature, as well as provide ecological researchers and managers with a crit...

From environmental to ecological ethics: toward a practical ethics for ecologists and conservationists.

Ecological research and conservation practice frequently raise difficult and varied ethical questions for scientific investigators and managers, including duties to public welfare, nonhuman individuals (i.e., animals and plants), populations, and ecosystems. The field of environmental ethics has contributed much to the understanding of general duties and values to nature, but it has not developed the resources to address the diverse and often unique practical concerns of ecological researchers and managers in the field, lab, and conservation facility. The emerging field of “ecological ethics” is a practical or scientific ethics that offers a superior approach to the ethical dilemmas of the ecologist and conservation manager. Even though ecological ethics necessarily draws from the principles and commitments of mainstream environmental ethics, it is normatively pluralistic, including as well the frameworks of animal, research, and professional ethics. It is also methodologically pragmatic, focused on the practical problems of researchers and managers and informed by these problems in turn. The ecological ethics model offers environmental scientists and practitioners a useful analytical tool for identifying, clarifying, and harmonizing values and positions in challenging ecological research and management situations. Just as bioethics provides a critical intellectual and problem-solving service to the biomedical community, ecological ethics can help inform and improve ethical decision making in the ecology and conservation communities.

Convergence in environmental values: An empirical and conceptual defense

Bryan Nortons convergence hypothesis, which predicts that nonanthropocentric and human-based philosophical positions will actually converge on long-sighted, multi-value environmental policy, has drawn a number of criticisms from within environmental philosophy. In particular, nonanthropocentric theorists like J. Baird Callicott and Laura Westra have rejected the accuracy of Nortons thesis, refusing to believe that his models contextual appeals to a plurality of human and environmental values will be able adequately to provide for the protection of ecological integrity. These theoretical criticisms of convergence, however, have made no real attempt to engage the empirical validity of the hypothesis, the dimension that Norton clearly takes to be the centerpiece of his project. Accordingly, the present paper attempts to provide an empirical analysis of the convergence argument, by means of a study of the Vermont publics environmental commitments and their attitudes toward national forest policy. Our findings support a generalized version of Nortons thesis, and lead us to suggest that environmental philosophers should try to be more inclusive and empirically minded in their discussions about public moral claims regarding nature.

An Appraisal of the Critique of Anthropocentrism and Three Lesser Known Themes in Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”

Lynn White Jr.’s essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” which first appeared in Science in 1967, has long been a cornerstone in the environmental studies literature. Yet subsequent research in the natural and social sciences, as well as in the environmental humanities, challenges many of White’s key assumptions and claims in this classic article including the uniquely dynamic presence of humans within a stable natural order, the pernicious metaphysical and moral implications of agriculture, the antiecological implications of democracy, and the direct linkage between the worldview of philosophical humanism (anthropocentrism) and environmental destruction. Although still relevant to current discussions about the cultural and historical roots of scientific and technological problems, White’s essay requires critical revision if it is to remain useful in clarifying the historical and cultural foundations of contemporary ecological attitudes and behaviors.

Ecological Ethics in Captivity: Balancing Values and Responsibilities in Zoo and Aquarium Research Under Rapid Global Change *

Ethical obligations to animals in conservation research and management are manifold and often conflicting. Animal welfare concerns often clash with the ethical imperative to understand and conserve a population or ecosystem through research and management intervention. The accelerating pace and impact of global environmental change, especially climate change, complicates our understanding of these obligations. One example is the blurring of the distinction between ex situ (zoo- and aquarium-based) conservation and in situ (field-based) approaches as zoos and aquariums become more active in field conservation work and as researchers and managers consider more intensive interventions in wild populations and ecosystems to meet key conservation goals. These shifts, in turn, have consequences for our traditional understanding of the ethics of wildlife research and management, including our relative weighting of animal welfare and conservation commitments across rapidly evolving ex situ and in situ contexts. Although this changing landscape in many ways supports the increased use of captive wildlife in conservation-relevant research, it raises significant ethical concerns about human intervention in populations and ecosystems, including the proper role of zoos and aquariums as centers for animal research and conservation in the coming decades. Working through these concerns requires a pragmatic approach to ethical analysis, one that is able to make trade-offs among the many goods at stake (e.g., animal welfare, species viability, and ecological integrity) as we strive to protect species from further decline and extinction in this century.

Economic growth, urbanization, globalization, and the risks of emerging infectious diseases in China: A review.

Three interrelated world trends may be exacerbating emerging zoonotic risks: income growth, urbanization, and globalization. Income growth is associated with rising animal protein consumption in developing countries, which increases the conversion of wild lands to livestock production, and hence the probability of zoonotic emergence. Urbanization implies the greater concentration and connectedness of people, which increases the speed at which new infections are spread. Globalization—the closer integration of the world economy—has facilitated pathogen spread among countries through the growth of trade and travel. High-risk areas for the emergence and spread of infectious disease are where these three trends intersect with predisposing socioecological conditions including the presence of wild disease reservoirs, agricultural practices that increase contact between wildlife and livestock, and cultural practices that increase contact between humans, wildlife, and livestock. Such an intersection occurs in China, which has been a “cradle” of zoonoses from the Black Death to avian influenza and SARS. Disease management in China is thus critical to the mitigation of global zoonotic risks.

Specimen collection: an essential tool--response.

The purpose of our Perspective was to raise awareness about an issue that will increase in prevalence as the global biodiversity crisis unfolds: Absent a reliable estimate of population size, is it prudent and ethical to collect a newly observed individual of a species so rare it was thought extinct