Chelsea Batavia

Heroes or thieves? The ethical grounds for lingering concerns about new conservation

After several years of intense debate surrounding so-called new conservation, there has been a general trend toward reconciliation among previously dissenting voices in the conservation community, a “more is more” mentality premised upon the belief that a greater diversity of conservation approaches will yield greater conservation benefits. However, there seems good reason to remain uneasy about the new conservation platform. We seek to clarify the reasons behind this lingering unease, which we suspect is shared by others in the conservation community, by re-examining new conservation through an ethical lens. The debates around new conservation have focused predominantly on the outcomes it promises to produce, reasoning by way of a consequentialist ethical framework. We introduce an alternative ethical framework, deontology, suggesting it provides novel insights that an exclusively consequentialist perspective fails to appreciate. A deontological ethic is concerned not with effects and outcomes, but with intentions, and whether those intentions align with moral principles and duties. From a deontological perspective, a strategy such as new conservation, which is exclusively focused on outcomes, appears highly suspect, especially when it endorses what is arguably an indefensible ethical orientation, anthropocentrism. We therefore suggest lingering concerns over new conservation are well-founded, and that, at least from a deontological perspective, the conservation community has a moral obligation to act on the express principle that non-human species possess intrinsic value, which should be protected.

Summoning compassion to address the challenges of conservation: Compassionate Conservation

Conservation practice is informed by science, but it also reflects ethical beliefs about how humanity ought to value and interact with Earths biota. As human activities continue to drive extinctions and diminish critical life-sustaining ecosystem processes, achieving conservation goals becomes increasingly urgent. However, the determination to react decisively can drive conservationists to handle complex challenges without due deliberation, particularly when wildlife individuals are sacrificed for the so-called greater good of wildlife collectives (populations, species, ecosystems). With growing recognition of the widespread sentience and sapience of many nonhuman animals, standard conservation practices that categorically prioritize collectives without due consideration for the well-being of individuals are ethically untenable. Here we highlight 3 overarching ethical orientations characterizing current and historical practices in conservation that suppress compassion: instrumentalism, collectivism, and nativism. We examine how establishing a commitment to compassion could reorient conservation in more ethically expansive directions that incorporate recognition of the intrinsic value of wildlife, the sentience of nonhuman animals, and the values of novel ecosystems, introduced species, and their members. A compassionate conservation approach allays practices that intentionally and unnecessarily harm wildlife individuals, while aligning with critical conservation goals. Although the urgency of achieving effective outcomes for solving major conservation problems may enhance the appeal of quick and harsh measures, the costs are too high. Continuing to justify moral indifference when causing the suffering of wildlife individuals, particularly those who possess sophisticated capacities for emotion, consciousness, and sociality, risks estranging conservation practice from prevailing, and appropriate, social values. As conservationists and compassionate beings, we must demonstrate concern for both the long-term persistence of collectives and the well-being of individuals by prioritizing strategies that do both.

Ethical Foundations for the Lethal Management of Double-Crested Cormorants (Phalocrocorax auritus) in the Eastern United States: An Argument Analysis

Abstract. Lethal management of Double-crested Cormorants (Phalocrocorax auritus) has been implemented in many areas of the United States. In this paper, the philosophical method of argument analysis is used to assess ethical premises underlying the proposition that Double-crested Cormorant populations should be culled to reduce pressures on wild fisheries in the Great Lakes region of the eastern USA. This influential argument has been used to justify the destruction of more than half a million Double-crested Cormorants and hundreds of thousands of their nests and eggs. Three versions of the argument are formulated and assessed. It is shown that each of the arguments presupposes some form of anthropocentrism, an ethical stance considered by many in the scholarly community to be philosophically untenable and ethically inappropriate. It is suggested, consequently, that the arguments analyzed do not constitute an ethically sound basis for lethal management of Double-crested Cormorants in the Great Lakes region of the eastern USA.

Translating climate change policy into forest management practice in a multiple-use context: the role of ethics

Managers of public multiple-use landscapes are charged to balance a spectrum of interests and objectives, a task that has become increasingly challenging in light of global climate change. Forests supply a diverse array of social, economic, and environmental goods and benefits, but also stand to contribute to climate change mitigation by sequestering and storing carbon. The scientific dimensions of management decisions made against this backdrop are well appreciated, but their ethical complexity tends to be, at best, understated. Focusing on the issue of carbon storage for climate change mitigation in federal forests of the United States Pacific Northwest, we employ the method of argument analysis to highlight the role of normative or ethical judgments in multiple-use forest management. We demonstrate that such decisions are logically predicated on normative judgments about which public interests merit recognition and prioritization in the decision context. We show that a generalized commitment to multiple-use is insufficient as a normative basis for management decisions, and that more ethically explicit judgments are required to reach actionable conclusions about appropriate management objectives.

Enhancing Public Trust in Federal Forest Management

The connections between social and biophysical sciences are being forged in new ways as researchers and practitioners of natural resources seek to understand how lands can be managed for the benefit of human societies and the broader biotic community. Increasingly, we recognize that social and physical systems are tightly integrated, with human actions and decisions both shaping and shaped by the ecological systems in which they are embedded (e.g., Carpenter et al. 2009). In this context, a variety of social actors, including scientists, managers, policy makers, and the public, are collectively playing a larger role in decisions about environmental governance (e.g., collaboratives, chap. 9), drawing upon an accumulating body of knowledge describing the dynamics of complex socioecological systems. Learning-based approaches using adaptive-management experiments (chap. 8) represent one particular type of formal tool that can be appropriated to this process of adaptive environmental governance.