Dayton Martindale

Climate change leaves conservationists facing unprecedented uncertainty and indeterminacy that make it hard to measure conservation success. The novelty of future ecosystems generates axiological challenges that leave conservation without clear action guidance. In this paper, we argue that our best tool to navigate competing viewpoints is through deliberative democratic mechanisms that bring as many voices to the table as possible. We do this largely by comparing two different wolf reintroduction efforts and emphasizing the epistemic, practical, and political challenges presented by climate futures (which have no present analog) that ecologists and conservation biologists anticipate climate change will bring. Rather than trying to solve these issues through resolving disagreements about environmental value, we suggest that centering democracy around deliberation allows for a more pluralist and practical way to sort out our obligations regarding nature. Our view offers an ahistorical, adaptive, and holistic approach to conservation in a modern and dynamic world.

Animal ethicists disagree as to whether animals have an interest in liberty, or control over their own lives. In one perspective, most nonhuman animals have no such interest, as they are not autonomous persons who frame, revise, and pursue their own conception of the good. If true, there is nothing wrong with their confinement, ownership, or use so long as this does not result in suffering or death. After first explaining this view, I will show that it is unconvincing. Drawing on the ethological literature, I suggest instead that the free exercise of agency, or self-willed action, is important to animal well-being, thus grounding a strong interest in liberty—one that, whether instrumental or intrinsic, is fundamental and pervasive. Finally, I argue that respecting animal liberty requires more than releasing them from the most obvious forms of captivity, but requires significant social transformation on at least three levels: the interpersonal, the infrastructural, and the institutional.

Animal and environmental ethicists have long discussed whether intervention in the wild to reduce predation can be justified. One class of responses to this problem draws on Aristotelian notions of flourishing, arguing intervention in the lives of prey animals would wrongfully thwart their characteristic activity. Here, I argue that while this is a valid concern about repeated intervention, one-time assistance for a prey animal will not always seriously impede his flourishing. In fact, such assistance can enable his future flourishing, and so might be permitted. However, there often will be ecological reasons not to intervene, insofar as the effects of predation enable the flourishing of other animals (including but not limited to the predator). After considering the predation case, I establish a more general framework for assessing when to assist wild animals, rooted in respect for their autonomous activity and for the ecological preconditions that sustain them.