As game and fish agencies across the country struggle to figure out what the future of wildlife management<\/a> holds, comparing conservation vs preservation is more relevant than ever. The two words and their respective schools of thought toward natural resource management overlap way more than they differ. But that detail gets overlooked in heated debates about everything from realistic land use to protecting endangered species. How do we approach trophy hunting in North America<\/a>? Should grizzly bears finally be delisted<\/a>? How many mule deer tags should be made available to hunters after a season of major winterkill? How do we protect wildlife in extreme droughts and wildfires<\/a>?\u00a0<\/p>\n The answers to all these questions must balance conservation with preservation to determine whether sustainable use and harvest is appropriate and, if so, how much to allow for. Let\u2019s clear up some of the confusion around conservation vs preservation.<\/p>\n In the simplest terms, preservation-minded folks advocate for leaving wildlife and wildlands untouched while more conservation-minded folks advocate for the sustainable use of renewable resources. For instance, preservationists generally believe wild forests shouldn\u2019t be logged for timber. Conservationists believe logging can be done responsibly, both to obtain lumber (a resource that will eventually grow back) and to improve forest health. But ultimately, conservation and preservation both work toward identical goals: to safeguard natural resources for both the future success of the species and the enjoyment of the public.<\/p>\n Because the goals of conservation and preservation are so similar, their definitions are similar, too:<\/p>\n To understand the differences between modern conservation and preservation, we need to look deeper.<\/p>\n There are countless non-profit organizations working to support conservation efforts, preservation efforts, and a combination of the two. While it\u2019s tough to classify many of these groups as wholly conservationist or wholly preservationist, here\u2019s a list of each based on what they most closely represent in a wildlife and wildlands context.<\/p>\n These groups tend to target hunters, anglers, habitat managers, public-land users, and general wildlife enthusiasts. They can have some overlap with memberships from some preservation organizations, but supporting lawful hunting and fishing are generally part of the organization\u2019s focus.<\/p>\n These groups tend to target birders, backpackers, environmentalists, and general wildlife enthusiasts, as well. While most of these organizations don\u2019t denounce lawful, regulated hunting and some recognize the role that hunting plays in wildlife management, they might also involve animal welfare activism and anti-hunting perspectives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Conservation relies on the sustainable, regulated use of a resource as a way to protect it. This might seem like a contradiction to those unfamiliar with the many global successes of this model. Why kill animals to help safeguard a species? Why cut down trees to protect a forest?\u00a0<\/p>\n Conservation-minded folks acknowledge that our human reliance on natural resources\u2014food, water, land, minerals, and other materials\u2014is too great. They simply cannot be preserved in their entirety. Still, to enjoy those resources indefinitely, we must take care of them.<\/p>\n As European colonizers expanded westward in the 18th through early 20th centuries, rampant market hunting to support burgeoning demand for feathers, furs, hides, and meat almost wiped out species that have returned in robust numbers across North America\u2014deer, elk, waterfowl, upland birds, and furbearers. That\u2019s because modern hunters, who have a vested interest in healthy wild game populations, have helped restore and conserve<\/a> these species.<\/p>\n Some species, like wild, free-roaming bison<\/a>, essentially met their demise. The late conservation expert Jim Posewitz writes of this tainted moment in history in his book, Beyond Fair Chase: The Ethic and Tradition of Hunting<\/em><\/a>;<\/p>\n \u201cSince [wild] animals were owned by no one in particular, people were free to kill and sell them. Regulations and limits didn\u2019t seem necessary because wildlife was so abundant. As a result, enormous numbers were killed for commercial purposes. Their hides, meat, feathers, and other parts became resources in an unregulated marketplace. It was wildlife\u2019s darkest hour, and national tragedies occurred.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n It became clear that, as long as these unregulated hunting and trapping practices continued without moderation, there would be no wildlife left to hunt and trap. So, lawmakers started instituting responsible safeguards to suppress unlimited shooting of game and separate the practice from immediate financial gain. Regulators accomplished these modern conservation wins by setting hunting seasons that limited what species and how much hunters could harvest. <\/p>\n Some states on the East Coast had already established deer seasons as early as the late 17th century. Massachusetts closed<\/a> January through July to deer hunting in 1694; the penalty for a first violation was 40 shillings, or roughly $460<\/a> in modern U.S. dollars. New York instituted<\/a> a closed deer season from January to July in 1788. More states established closed deer seasons throughout the 19th century, before any federal action was taken to address market hunting concerns.<\/p>\n Here are some key pieces of conservation legislation that are essential to our modern approach to wildlife management in the U.S.:<\/p>\n These laws and regulations probably seemed like absolute nonsense to some hunters and anglers at the time. But we have them to thank for our current wildlife populations.\u00a0<\/p>\n Now, it\u2019s illegal to sell hunter-harvested meat from native, free-ranging wildlife in the United States, and the sale or purchase of hides, pelts, antlers, skulls, and other parts of hunter-harvested animals might be subject to regulations and permitting requirements depending on what state you live in. In order to harvest wild animal parts, hunters, trappers, and anglers first need to pay into a sustainable future for these species by buying licenses, permits, and taxed equipment. That revenue goes to state wildlife agencies tasked with managing those species. This pay-to-play standard is the basis of the North American model of wildlife conservation, which is the popular set of principles that honors hunting, fishing, and trapping as a keystone of modern wildlife management in the U.S.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies<\/a>, the seven pillars of the North American model include:<\/p>\n When state agencies manage wildlife, both game and nongame species, that management takes many forms:<\/p>\n The harmonious relationship that overwhelmingly exists between hunters, anglers, trappers, shooters, boaters, duck-stamp buyers, other wildlife conservationists, and many government agencies has sustained robust wildlife populations nationwide for decades. Ultimately, this model balances the human demand for wild game with the available \u201csupply\u201d of wildlife, to put it in sterile terms. But when the wildlife supply runs low, a much stricter approach is often necessary to protect the resource.<\/p>\n At its core, preservation involves strict limits on the human use of, and interaction with, natural resources. The ultimate goal is to protect those resources from imminent danger or destruction. Since preservation is a more hands-off approach to wildlife and land management, it\u2019s often reserved for managing species and landscapes that are in dire straits.<\/p>\n More preservation-minded folks wish to see species and landscapes left alone, free of any intervention. Preservationists are seriously concerned about the footprint our human activity leaves on natural resources and would prefer to see them used as little as possible to meet our needs. The ultimate goal is to leave the natural world to its own devices while we operate as independently of our natural resources as possible for the sake of protecting those resources.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The famous quote \u201ctake nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints\u201d sums up a preservationist approach to wildlife and land management perfectly. The earliest version of this quote is attributed<\/a> to Chief Seattle of the Duwamish Tribe, and it has since found a home on signs around national parks and is affiliated with Leave No Trace principles<\/a>. Whether you are more aligned with a conservationist approach or a preservationist one, outdoorspeople of all\u00a0creeds should get down with practicing personal responsibility and LNT on our lands and waters. Littering, destroying native vegetation, defacing cultural resources and artifacts, and not following safe campfire protocols range from being very uncool to very illegal.<\/p>\n In the 1960s and 70s, Congress passed a series of laws<\/a> meant to preserve endangered species in the face of growing environmental concerns. The Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966 was the first, and was accompanied by the inaugural list of endangered species. It comprised 36 bird species, 22 fish species, 14 mammal species, three reptile species, and three amphibian species. The act became the Endangered Species Conservation Act in 1969 and stretched to protect threatened species, or species that were in just slightly better shape than endangered ones. That same year, Nevada became the first state with its own endangered species laws. (Many other states also have their own endangered species lists and respective laws regulating the management of those species.)\u00a0<\/p>\n Congress passed the Endangered Species Act<\/a> in 1973 to combine and strengthen prior federal laws protecting at-risk species. Despite the seemingly repetitive nature of these multiple pieces of legislation, preservation from \u201ctake\u201d was the focal point of endangered species management.<\/p>\n To condense a complex area of natural resource law, any \u201ctake\u201d of a federally endangered species is a federal crime.\u00a0 But \u201ctake\u201d has a wide-reaching definition<\/a> that includes \u201cto harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture or collect.\u201d The inclusion of \u201charm\u201d also covers \u201csignificant habitat modification or degradation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n In other words, you can\u2019t legally mess with an endangered species. Obviously, killing one on purpose will get you in deep trouble. There can also be consequences for accidentally killing one, or otherwise causing it injury or distress. Endangered species are subject to more preservation practices because, aside from watching a black-footed ferret at a zoo or spotting a grizzly bear at a national park in the Lower 48, there is no real avenue for sustainable \u201cuse\u201d of them. Federal wildlife managers are tasked with protecting these species from any sort of human impact, with the exception of hands-on research practices, which must adhere to strict laws.<\/p>\n There\u2019s usually a good reason for this. Most species protected by the ESA are at serious risk of extinction or extirpation (extinction from a specific area or state), and modern society as a whole is mediocre at best when it comes to responsibly coexisting with wildlife.<\/p>\n There is obvious room for discord between conservationists and preservationists. These fights especially pop up in discussions about how to manage charismatic species like wolves<\/a> and grizzly bears<\/a>. Plenty of conservationists believe enough of each species exist on the landscape that limited hunts should be allowed. These are opportunities that hunters would pay top dollar into their state agencies for. In other words, responsible management of a few individual animals would provide more funding to help support the overall populations of wolves and grizzlies, while also helping manage human-predator conflicts. Many preservationists balk at such an idea, citing concerns about poaching, population dynamics, and other issues that could put an already-fragile species at increased risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n People have both conserved and preserved natural resources in North America for tens of thousands of years. But the most current laws modeled after these ancient principles are often traced back to two famous names: Sierra Club founder John Muir and U.S. Forest Service founder Gifford Pinchot.\u00a0<\/p>\n John Muir<\/a> was a naturalist and writer who cofounded the Sierra Club in his later years. Gifford Pinchot<\/a> was a forester, the first chief of the USFS, and the founder of the Yale School of Forestry. (He also went on to be a two-term governor of Pennsylvania.) Muir represented a more preservationist approach to land protection while Pinchot took a more conservationist approach. Both men<\/a> had the ear of president Theodore Roosevelt as he worked to establish his own legacy of protection in the wake of rapid westward expansion, unregulated market hunting of wildlife, and unsustainable logging practices razing much of America\u2019s standing timber.\u00a0<\/p>\n While today\u2019s approach to politics and resource management would suggest that Muir and Pinchot hated each other, they actually inspired one another. One account from Humanities<\/em><\/a> harkens back to a time when they shared a campfire on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, staying up long after their companions had returned to the hotel and gone to sleep. As the sun rose, they crept back to the hotel, feeling like \u201cguilty schoolboys\u201d as Pinchot wrote. They were even fishing buddies. (We could all stand to learn a thing or two from their relationship.)\u00a0<\/p>\n But they also butted heads over issues like construction of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in San Francisco. Pinchot thought it a necessity to meet the city\u2019s water demands, and the very idea broke Muir\u2019s heart. President Woodrow Wilson authorized the plan in 1913; Muir died just over a year later.\u00a0<\/p>\n Despite the various impasses Pinchot and Muir arrived at throughout their lives, each man\u2019s school of land management complemented the other\u2019s. Now, our heavily regulated national parks\u2014products of Muir\u2019s dream to preserve America\u2019s crown jewels\u2014are mostly surrounded by huge swaths of national forests born from Pinchot\u2019s vision of sustainable use. Most national parks are highly regulated. They require, for instance, entrance fees, backpacking permit applications, packing out human waste, and dogs to stay leashed or in your vehicle. This is the price we pay to continue coexisting with fragile natural features like the geysers of Yellowstone National Park, the rock structures of Arches National Park, and the alpine wildflowers of Glacier National Park. National forests, on the other hand, allow for regulated timber cutting, mineral extraction where permitted, hunting, fishing, foraging, and recreation. These landscapes are often just as beautiful and generally more accessible to the public.\u00a0<\/p>\n As OL<\/em> contributor Diana Helmuth points out in her beginner\u2019s guide to backpacking<\/a>, if you want to see the most shocking natural features on the continent, plan ahead and get a permit to backpack in a national park. If you want the freedom to roam, camp wherever you please, fish, forage, and hunt when legal, hop in your car and go backpack in a national forest or BLM land.<\/p>\n Based on decades of success, the best method of conservation for wildlife is to establish sustainable, regulated \u201cuse\u201d of a species that helps keep that population at a healthy size and generates revenue to invest in the species\u2019s future. This is how we enjoy and conserve our game species in the U.S., like whitetail deer and wild geese.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The best method of preservation in wildlife management is to protect a fragile species from human impact by supporting quality habitat for that species, studying it to better understand its needs in a human-dominated world, and legally prohibiting any harassment, habitat destruction, killing, or other forms of \u201ctake\u201d to keep the species\u2019 population from dropping even further. With roughly 500 wild migratory whooping cranes left in the world<\/a>, the species can\u2019t afford to lose a single individual.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Restoration<\/a> involves bringing missing or heavily impacted species and ecosystems back to sustainable levels. While conservation and preservation are both proactive approaches with the shared goal of keeping species healthy, restoration is a retroactive process that rebuilds what was lost. Rather than saying restoration is a type of conservation, it is more appropriate to consider restoration a solution for when conservation and preservation fail. For example, as we continue to lose countless acres of wetlands to urban sprawl and conversion for mass agriculture, rebuilding wetlands becomes critical for healthy migratory waterfowl populations. An example of trying to restore a critter is the reintroduction<\/a> of bison to tribal lands.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Preservation is important in a world with an ever-expanding human population that puts mounting pressure on global biodiversity. Conservation addresses the realities and demands of modern life and implements them into resource management. The two schools of management complement each other, even if they are sometimes at odds\u2014much like the two men who championed the approaches over a century ago. But at the end of the day, both approaches seek to protect wildlife and wildlands far into the future.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nConservation vs Preservation: The Upshot<\/h2>\n
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Conservation vs Preservation at Work<\/h2>\n
Popular Conservation Organizations<\/h3>\n
Popular Preservation Organizations<\/h3>\n
How Does Conservation Work?<\/h2>\n
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Conservation in Wildlife Management: The North American Model \u00a0<\/h3>\n
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How Does Preservation Work?<\/h2>\n
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Preservation in Wildlife Management: The Endangered Species Act<\/h3>\n
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When Conservation and Preservation Clash<\/h3>\n
The Land-Use Debate: Muir vs. Pinchot<\/h2>\n
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Conservation vs Preservation: FAQs<\/h2>\n
What is the best method of conservation?<\/h3>\n
What is the best method of preservation?<\/h3>\n
Is restoration a type of conservation?<\/h3>\n
Final Thoughts on Conservation vs Preservation<\/h2>\n
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