Endangered Species Protection

Endangered species protection is the subfield of environmental governance concerned with developing policies to address the loss of species (both plants and animals) caused by human activities. Historically, threatened species constituted the first environmental issue, in that this issue first brought home the realization of the need to protect a natural environment threatened by excessive exploitation. This issue also projected environmental governance onto the international level. Moreover, the first protective policies emerged from the combined efforts of governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Endangered species protection thus exemplifies two broader trends of environmental governance, an increasing involvement of nongovernmental actors, and the change of governance scale to the international. Current international conventions concerned with the protection of endangered species include the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), together with a range of conventions aimed at a particular species or at specific geographic areas (such as the 1971 Ramsar Wetlands Convention, the 1979 Bonn Convention on Migratory Species, and the various [Page 273]international and regional conventions on whales, tuna, seabirds, or seals, etc.).

The endangered species debate is divided between those who want to preserve endangered species from human exploitation at all costs, commonly referred to as preservationists, and the conservationists, who contend that sound conservation policies need to balance out the necessity to ensure the long-term survival of the species with the demands to exploit it. Against what they see as the hubris of modern societies, preservationists emphasize the importance of respecting nonhuman species, as a way of respecting nature, including human nature. Their argument is often couched in terms of the intrinsic value of the species, rather than its market value. Their intellectual influences extend from the American romantics (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman) and their notions of wilderness to the deep ecology literature. The preservationists underline the impossibility of effectively restraining exploitation, as illustrated by the history of the whaling case, a line of argument that often taps into the “tragedy of the commons” logic. The preservationist approach is associated with the development of “green tourism” (for example, whale watching), which leaves the species intact. For conservationists, this focus has tended to obliterate the human component—humans too, they argue, are part of the ecosystem. Moreover, this position is affordable only at higher levels of economic development. The conservationists thus denounce an inequitable approach to conservation. Against what they see as conservation from afar, they argue for the need to involve the local populations that both live with and depend on the species (as a raw material or as a food). Their argument, which emphasizes human needs, is germane to the sustainable development discourse.

Endangered species protection has come under increasing criticism for the narrow, species-by-species approach it perpetuates. CITES, for one, has tended to single out “favorite” species for protection (such as elephants or whales), often at the expense of other species (including human), or especially, of leaving out of the policy focus the deeper factors that may have led to endangerment in the first place. In contrast, the ecosystemic approach enables a broader perspective.

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