Abstract
As global environmental changes continue to accelerate, research and practice in the field of conservation biology may be essential to help forestall precipitous declines in the earth’s ability to sustain a diversity of life. However, many conservation programs have faced scrutiny for the social injustices they create, especially within the paradigm of demarcating protected lands. Currently, a new conservation paradigm emphasizing landscapes shared by people and wildlife is emerging, and with it, an opportunity to ensure that justice for both human and beyond-human groups is given consideration. Here, we examine a practice emblematic of this new conservation paradigm, the reintroduction and recovery of large carnivore species, and draw from theories in environmental justice to detail the many forms of justice at stake in these efforts. Our analysis shows that a pluralistic application of justice is required to ensure that new conservation practices do not produce and reproduce injustices for people. In addition, we show that the success of these emerging programs in meeting their conservation goals in fact depends on meaningfully addressing a range of justice concerns. By developing this framework, we also identify domains in which environmental justice scholarship can expand its scope. To this end, we introduce the novel concept of affective environmental justice, which describes the complex role of emotions as environmental harms, as disruptors of understanding other forms of justice, and as links between logics of oppression. Our framework offers a comprehensive resource to work through in planning and implementing large carnivore reintroduction and recovery programs, and we conclude by describing the challenges and opportunities for further aligning conservation and environmental justice in research and practice.
Highlights
Over the past several decades, the signatures of global environmental change have become unmistakable, altering the conditions under which both human and beyondhuman life can survive and thrive (Steffen et al, 2007; Barnosky et al, 2011; Agyeman et al, 2016)
We develop this interchange between conservation biology and environmental justice around a rapidly growing conservation practice: the reintroduction and recovery of large carnivore species
We organize this section according to 3 major categories of environmental justice as they relate to large carnivore reintroductions and recoveries (LCRRs): multispecies justice, which extends questions of justice to humans and beyond-human species; social justice, which considers the inequities for human communities in terms of procedural, distributive, and recognitional justice; and affective justice, a term we introduce that describes ramifications for EJ from complexities introduced by affect, perception, and implicit bias
Summary
Over the past several decades, the signatures of global environmental change have become unmistakable, altering the conditions under which both human and beyondhuman life can survive and thrive (Steffen et al, 2007; Barnosky et al, 2011; Agyeman et al, 2016). In many cases, protected areas inordinately impact vulnerable groups like Indigenous peoples, forest peoples, immigrants, hunters, and other rural folk who may have used the land for centuries or millennia (Nelson, 2003; Colchester, 2004; Igoe, 2006; Schmidt-Soltau and Brockington, 2007; Agrawal and Redford, 2009; Dowie, 2009; Holmes, 2014; Kelly and Gupta, 2016) These revelations have encouraged a perception that biodiversity conservation and social justice cannot be reconciled (ShoremanOuimet and Kopnina, 2015), especially as the ambitions of biodiversity conservation programs grow (Wilson, 2016; Buscher and Fletcher, 2020). Conflicts between large carnivores and humans date back millennia, and both local and total extinctions of
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