NATURE: Connecting Well-Being and Conservation Praxis

After decades of increasingly devastating anthropogenic impacts on the biosphere and climate, the United States significantly reduced protections for human health, the environment and climate stability in the late 20-teens. The world responded by rising up in support of nature conservation. To meet the challenge, the field of nature conservation and its practitioners prioritized transparency of values, equitable solutions, systems thinking, and deliberate collaboration to co-create models of social-ecological systems. As a result, conservation evolved from being relatively insular and a primarily scientific field to become more self-aware as a politically enacted community endeavor. The conservation community committed to understanding stakeholder values and agency and to using evaluative inquiry to reveal the intersectionality that would enable sustainable and equitable solutions. From the context of ecosystem management and wildlife trade, the materials below introduce three case examples. Each case exemplifies opportunities that were taken and that were missed in order to: humbly understand human values; let go of power and expectations of certainty and control; investigate and respect intersectionality of social-ecological systems with particular attention to cultures, politics, and economics; discover collaborative solutions; use evaluative inquiry to shape practice over long term processes; and develop praxis for transformation.