Conservation biology, ecocentrism and utilitarianism

Abstract

Conservation biology emerged in the 1980s as a purportedly interdisciplinary field of study (Callicott and Frodeman, 2009, Van Dyke and Lamb, 2020). In its origins, the objective was to provide principles and tools to preserve biodiversity (Soule, 1985). Among these principles, a series of normative postulates are proposed that would rest on the ecocentric ethics of deep ecology (Naess, 1973), which seeks to displace humans from the center of moral consideration and rather treat all ecological ensembles and their members equally. Conservationism has shown an important development from those pioneering works to the present day. In fact, in recent times, approaches have emerged that attempt to dissociate themselves from traditional conservation biology, to the point of proposing another field: conservation science (Kareiva and Marvier, 2012). This shift implies a conservation that centrally considers the utilitarian value of biodiversity and ecosystem services for humans. The aim of this paper is to analyze comparatively these two major moments of conservationism, inquiring to what extent they recover the ecocentric ideals that were originally held. By means of a discursive analysis, we will try to show that both traditional conservation biology and the new conservation sciences do not fully recover that ecocentric view since, to different extents, they present important utilitarian "marks" in their discourses. Finally, we will discuss some implications of this for conservationism.