Abstract
The extinction crisis creates a need to increase conservation funding, and use it more efficiently. Most conservation resources are allocated through inefficient political processes, that seem ill-equipped for dealing with the crisis. In response, conservation triage emerged as a metaphor for thinking about the optimization of resource allocation. Since triage operates primarily as a metaphor, not means for allocating resources, its metaphorical implications are of particular importance. Of particular concern, the triage metaphor justifies abandoning some species, while acquiescing to inadequate conservation funding. We argue conservation hospice provides an alternative medical metaphor for thinking about the extinction crisis. Hospice is based on the underlying principle of caring for all [species], and places particular emphasis on expected survival time, symptom burden and relief, treatments, ability to ‘stay at home’ (i.e., in-situ conservation), and maintaining support for related species and landscapes. Ultimately, application of hospice principles may be ethically obligated for a society that accepts the idea that least some organisms are intrinsically valuable and may help place emphasis on resource allocation issues without providing implicit justification for abandoning species to extinction.
Highlights
The existence of an unprecedented human-caused extinction event (Barnosky et al, 2011; Ceballos et al, 2015) exacerbated in recent decades by climate change (Thomas et al, 2004) is well established
Conservation triage borrows from triage in medicine to suggest rapid calculations about the likelihood of extinction, and sometimes, the value of a species can guide resource allocation toward saving species in the most efficient manner possible (Bottrill et al, 2008)
Perhaps the most valuable attribute of a conservation hospice construct is providing a framework for constructive thinking about conservation of dying species
Summary
The existence of an unprecedented human-caused extinction event (Barnosky et al, 2011; Ceballos et al, 2015) exacerbated in recent decades by climate change (Thomas et al, 2004) is well established. Conservation resources are often allocated through relatively inefficient processes (Ando, 1999) that can be driven by ideology (Wallace, 2003), values (Karns et al, 2018), and voting. Conservation triage borrows from triage in medicine to suggest rapid calculations (e.g., optimization and utility functions) about the likelihood of extinction, and sometimes, the value of a species can guide resource allocation toward saving species in the most efficient manner possible (Bottrill et al, 2008). The medical metaphor, extends beyond the uncontested idea of efficiency to imply a need for abandoning expensive and potentially doomed species as a means to provide adequate resources to species with better prognoses and less expensive treatments (Jachowski and Kesler, 2009)
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