Future of Conservation

Last year I posted about a paper that attempted to gauge the opinions of modern-day conservationists about the perceived role of conservation biology today and in the near future.

My main point was that it’s not a dichotomy (or trichotomy, etc.), and that the complexity of the modern discipline means that many different approaches and philosophies must be implemented.

Following that article, Chris Sandbrook of the United Nations World Conservation Monitoring Centre and the University of Cambridge just contacted me to promote a new survey that allows a broader section of the conservation community to contribute views.

The new survey will provide data to establish whether there are any factors (such as nationality, educational background, or experience of different ecosystems) that explain some of the variation in the views held by conservationists.

Chris and colleagues aim to disseminate their findings among the conservation community through their website and publications in conservation journals.

I therefore urge you to take the survey yourself (apparently it takes only 15 minutes, but I found that it took much less time than that).

For me, the results merely confirmed my suspicions about where I fell in the spectrum between ‘New Conservation‘, ‘Market Biocentricism‘, ‘Critical Social Science‘, and ‘Traditional Conservation‘.

As it turns out, my opinions place me almost exactly in the middle of all of these gross categories (although perhaps with a slight leaning to ‘Critical Social Science’; this result expresses my view that the biology part of conservation biology is more or less complete — instead, conservation science has become more a socio-economic endeavour now in terms of how to minimise extinction rates).

See? I’m more or less in the middle, with a slight leaning toward the lower-left quadrant (‘Critical Social Science’)

CJA Bradshaw