Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Washington
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

As global environmental changes continue to accelerate, research and practice in the field of conservation biology may be essential to help forestall precipitous declines in the earth’s ability to sustain a diversity of life. However, many conservation programs have faced scrutiny for the social injustices they create, especially within the paradigm of demarcating protected lands. Currently, a new conservation paradigm emphasizing landscapes shared by people and wildlife is emerging, and with it, an opportunity to ensure that justice for both human and beyond-human groups is given consideration. Here, we examine a practice emblematic of this new conservation paradigm, the reintroduction and recovery of large carnivore species, and draw from theories and practices from environmental justice to detail the many forms of justice at stake in this practice. Our analysis shows that a pluralistic application of justice is required to ensure that new conservation practices do not produce and reproduce injustices for people. In addition, we show that the success of these emerging programs in meeting their conservation goals in fact depends on meaningfully addressing a range of justice concerns. By developing this framework, we also identify domains in which environmental justice scholarship can expand its scope. To this end, we introduce the novel concept of affective environmental justice, which describes the complex role of emotions as an environmental harm, as a disruptor of understanding other forms of justice, and as a link between logics of oppression. Our framework offers a comprehensive resource to work through in planning and implementing a large carnivore reintroduction and recovery, and we conclude by describing the challenges and opportunities for further aligning conservation and environmental justice in research and practice.