[Re]animating predator conservation: linking perspectives on the reintroduction of the Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi)

ABSTRACT

Human and wildlife behavior, governance, and economics are often cited obstacles to wildlife conservation. Accordingly, conservation research has historically been conducted in the exterior terrains of behavior and systems, which can be empirically observed or known through systemic analysis and applied through institutional or technical fixes. However, conservation interventions are failing because they do not adequately address the influence of individual and collective interior phenomena including psychological states, worldviews, values, and identities of stakeholders, which can bear decisively on conservation outcomes.

This critical analysis of wildlife conservation science and the social and political histories of Southwestern landscapes illustrates the mechanism of social, cultural, and media narrative linking four irreducible perspectives of the natural world: the I, WE, IT and ITS, or the psychological, cultural, behavioral and structural/systemic terrains, which ground contemporary conservation. Through the conceptual [Re]animation of conservation, this research justifies a more-than-human approach to wildlife conservation that resists the ontological privilege of the human and contemplates human and non-human animals as vitally linked in their mutually relational, perceptual and material environments. The approach extends the human to the natural environment and also accounts for the individual and social needs and perspectives of wild animals, which shape their adaptation to changing environments and conservation interventions.

A qualitative analysis of emotion, metaphor, and narrative utilizing an Integral Ecology framework explores how psychological and cultural terrains link to, and influence, the behavioral and systemic terrains of Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) conservation in the U.S. Southwest. This research disentangles and comprehensively maps influential elements in the four terrains; enhancing relational knowledge on human-predator coexistence and conservation governance in the Southwest.