A New Definition of Conservation
The Society for Conservation Biology North America makes it official.
“What’s it about?” asked ecologist Stuart Pimm when, more than forty years ago, his colleague Michael Soulé called with an invitation to a meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
“Conservation,” said Soulé.
“What’s that?” Pimm asked slyly.
“Well, whatever it is, you’re doing it!” answered Soulé.
With the support of Pimm and other prominent ecologists, the Society for Conservation Biology was founded on a May afternoon in 1985. Soulé, who had recently returned to academia after five years at a Buddhist monastery, was elected the society’s first president, and a few months later he published the now-classic paper “What Is Conservation Biology?”
That paper offers a working definition of conservation biology as a “crisis discipline” whose goal is “to provide principles and tools for preserving biological diversity.” Conservation biologists have been wrestling with that definition, mostly productively, ever since. They’ve paid less attention to Pimm’s tongue-in-cheek question: what is conservation, anyway?
Like most worthwhile jokes, Pimm’s had a serious point. By the time Soulé called him, the modern conservation movement had been around for about a century, but the meaning of conservation was more debatable than ever.
The earliest modern conservationists in North America and Europe, many of them elite sportsmen, sought to head off the extinction of the charismatic large animals they loved to hunt. Over the following decades, more and more conservationists began to speak up for the protection of all species and their habitats, drawing attention not only to direct threats like overhunting but indirect threats such as habitat destruction and pollution.
Members of this second group were generally less interested in — and in some cases opposed to — protecting species for the sake of hunting them. Taking their cues from the science of ecology, they championed “biological diversity,” a term later shortened to biodiversity.
These two groups had, and still have, common goals; plenty of hunters want to conserve all species, not just those they hunt. Over time, though, a cultural and political divide emerged. Conservationists primarily motivated by a love of hunting joined different organizations and pursued different strategies. (Even after Republicans turned against conservation in the 1980s, sportsmen’s groups continued to tend Republican.) Those who became conservation professionals typically studied wildlife biology and pursued careers at state wildlife agencies, which have long received funding from hunting license fees and a federal tax on hunting and fishing equipment.
Most of the conservationists who founded the Society for Conservation Biology, meanwhile, were ecologists and evolutionary biologists who studied the relationships among other species — not the management of those relationships. Some, including Soulé, were hunters, and many respected hunting as a global tradition and a management tool, but their priority was protecting biodiversity.
So when the Society for Conservation Biology announced that they would “provide principles and tools” from ecology to the practice of conservation, wildlife biologists viewed the offer with some skepticism: Were their existing principles and tools not good enough for these Ph.Ds?
This divide is often papered over, but it’s deep, and in 2021, zoologist Fred Koontz plunged right into it. After a global career with the Wildlife Conservation Society and Wildlife Trust, he moved to Seattle to serve as vice president of field conservation at the Woodland Park Zoo. In Washington, Koontz came to appreciate the central role that state wildlife agencies play in what’s called the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation. He also came to recognize that only a fraction of state agency budgets is spent on conserving species that aren’t hunted. (Hunting and fishing licenses and taxes on hunting and fishing equipment still contribute about a quarter of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget.) His interest in state wildlife issues eventually led to his appointment to the Washington State Wildlife Commission by then-governor Jay Inslee.
The Washington wildlife commission, like other state wildlife commissions, is responsible for setting state wildlife policy, and Koontz saw that the commission was caught between its mandate to “maximize the public recreational game fishing and hunting opportunities of all citizens” and serve an urbanizing public that was less and less interested in hunting and more and more interested in biodiversity. Optimistically — or naïvely — he proposed to address the situation by broadening the agency’s mandate.
As a starting point, Koontz suggested a definition of conservation that included the phrases “safeguard the intrinsic value of non-human nature” and “provide equitable benefits to current and future generations of human and non-human life.” When that language was included in a draft conservation policy released in 2023, the public reaction was swift and brutal: Some hunters and fishers, already concerned about declining interest in their sports, saw the prominent mention of intrinsic value as a threat to the instrumental value they derived from wildlife. A few interpreted “non-human life” as code for an animal-rights agenda.
Koontz resigned from the commission, but remains involved in state wildlife policy reform. At a Society for Conservation Biology event last year, he reflected that below the animosity he faced was a dispute about the ethical treatment of ecosystems, species, and individual animals. As commissioners, he said, “we were at a loss to know how to think about entangled ethical issues, so we just kind of kept going around and around in circles.”
Koontz had some recommendations for his fellow Society for Conservation Biology members. “We should equip our members with tools to help navigate the moral frontiers of conservation,” he said. As a first step, he suggested that the organization attempt what he had tried and failed to do in Washington: define conservation for the present day.
Over the following ten months, a working group within the society’s North American section consulted with researchers, educators, students, retired state and federal natural resource professionals, and other members of the public. In January, the section’s board approved the definition, and last week, the society made it public along with a definition of terms:
Conservation is a practice informed by the best evidence-based science and place-based knowledge, whose outcomes protect and restore the natural environment — including its air, soil, water, biological diversity, ecosystem processes, and evolutionary potential — to ensure equitable benefits derived from nature and safeguard its value for current and future generations of all life.
This definition was developed in North America, and is intended in part to address a conflict within North American conservation. Is it equipped, as the society hopes, to guide the work of the Society for Conservation Biology worldwide “and all those interested in the protection and recovery of nature”? I’m not sure yet. What I do like is that it avoids some of the problems with previous definitions, including Koontz’s own.
It avoids left-coded phrases like “non-human.” It doesn’t dictate how humans should value nature (the question of whether conservationists should be motivated by intrinsic or instrumental values — as if it’s a binary choice! — has led to painful disagreements even within the Society for Conservation Biology). It emphasizes that conservation is a practice, undertaken by humans, that seeks to restore systems rather than individual species. It includes Indigenous and other local knowledge in its definitions of “evidence-based science” and “place-based knowledge.” And, in recognition of conservation institutions’ past and present exploitation of vulnerable people, it stipulates that conservation should ensure “equitable” benefits from nature for “all life.”
No definition will single-handedly unite the modern conservation movement; the ethical disputes Koontz witnessed will surely continue. But this definition manages to capture much of current conservation science and practice while allowing for the many possible motivations for conservation. I hope conservationists of all kinds will see themselves in it.
Conservation at Work
Speaking of the meaning of conservation, Tara Sayuri Whitty of Conservation Realist recently proposed her own definition. Check out her informative note:
Also related to the above: Russ Mason, former chief of the wildlife division of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, reflects on the changing culture of hunting in “Why is conservation so hard to explain to many hunters?,” a column in Outdoor News.
The literary world has been paying a lot of attention to ecological grief in recent years, and I have mixed feelings about the trend. I know that grief, I feel that grief, and yet … grief, at least in my experience, is enervating, and there’s so much that can be done. (And those with enough leisure time to read beautiful essays about ecological grief probably have the resources to do more than most.) I’d love to see more writers experiment with energizing narratives that could close the hope gap.
I’m intrigued by two new metrics: the Personalized Ecology Index and the Nature Relationship Index.
The good people of WILDLABS have released their latest report on the state of conservation technology, based on five years of user surveys. The central finding? Conservationists don’t necessarily need new tech; they need help making the most of existing tech. As the report authors write: “Progress may depend as much on strengthening the enabling conditions around conservation technology — including funding, training, support networks, and maintenance — as on developing entirely new tools.”
Finally, Colorado poet Robin Walter — inspired by Robert Haas — sends us a “July prayer to survive the summer.” May we all.
I'm very glad the definition includes "place-based knowledge." Plant ecology as I learned it in graduate school in the early 1980s did not respect other systems of understanding natural communities, and that was a great loss to research at the time. Particularly our understanding of the key role big sagebrush plays in the Intermountain West. And now that sagebrush communities and the hundreds of species they support are threatened by invasive species that promote frequent and devastating fires, we need every bit of knowledge about conserving and restoring these communities, especially that from the people who stewarded this land for millennia. I'm also relieved to see that last clause "for all life." It's not just about vulnerable humans, as you point out, but also an acknowledgment that conservation needs to work for the species we don't often focus on or care about, not just the charismatic ones. Thanks for the thoughtful look at this definition, Michelle!
A quote from Lynn MARGULIS from the book „Biocivilizations“: „Life is a planetary-level phenomenon and Earth’s surface has been alive for at least 3,000 million years. To me, the human move to take responsibility for the living Earth is laughable – the rhetoric of the powerless. The planet takes care of us, not we of it. Our self-inflated moral imperative to guide a wayward Earth or heal a sick planet is evidence of our immense capacity for self-delusion. Rather, we need to protect us from ourselves“. So we need to protect ourselves from our own autocracy!!