In this presentation, Professor John Vucetich & Professor David MacDonald, will examine how the terms “ecosystem health” and “endangered species” are underdetermined to the point of being increasingly problematic for advancing real-world conservation
Many real-world conservation issues are also treated as negotiations between those who are for and against conservation, where the effort is either discovering a win-win outcome or the assertion of political power for some particular win-lose outcome. These hyper-political environments distract from steep ethical trade-offs that rise from the inevitable conflicts about four basic goals: conservation, social justice, animal welfare, and increased agricultural production. The best outcomes almost certainly require that more of society’s leaders become more facile with the ethical dimensions of these trade-offs.
