conservation of biodiversity

1. KHAWAJA TAIMOOR SHAHID
SUPERIOR COLLEGE M.B.DiN
Definition
Wildlife conservation is an activity in which humans make conscious efforts to protect plants
and other animal species and their habitats. Wildlife conservation is very important because
wildlife and wilderness play an important role in maintaining the ecological balance and
contribute to human quality of life.
Description
The phrase wildlife conservation conceptually invokes a valuation process in which it is decided
that something, in this case wildlife, must be conserved. The decision to conserve requires a
justification and associated valuation of that which is to be conserved. Justifications for
conservation can be thought of broadly as falling into two categories: The first category
assumes that there are potentially identifiable benefits to be derived through conservation, and
the second category is based on the idea that organisms have a right to exist because they have
already existed for a long time, so that there is a difficult to define though recognizable benefit
to be derived by these organisms’ mere existence (see Margules & Usher, 1981, among others,
for a thorough review of these categories). Valuation, then, in terms of wildlife conservation,
must recognize distinctions between “held” and “assigned” values of wildlife (Brown, 1984) and
must consider what values underlie attitudes toward wildlife and what types of wildlife and
their number, in what settings in which we find them, and what opportunities they provide
(Brown & Manfredo, 1987).
Decker and colleagues (Decker, Brown et al., 2001) traced the development of wildlife
conservation and management by reviewing textbooks and other important documents starting
with the work of Aldo Leopold and leading up into the 1980s. In this work, these scholars
concluded that the most useful concept for contemporary wildlife management and
conservation was that wildlife management and conservation consists of “the science and art of
making decisions and taking actions to manipulate the structures, dynamics, and relations of
populations, habitats, and people to achieve specific human objectives by means of the wildlife
resource” (Giles, 1978).
Kinds or categories of values that stimulate efforts to engage in wildlife conservation include
recreational, aesthetic, educational, biological, sociocultural, and commercial (for further
discussion of categories and typologies of values and wildlife conservation, see King (1947),
Kellert (1980), and Decker and Brown et al. (2001)). Each of these kinds or categories of values
in some way relates to quality of life; however, additional study is required to empirically
determine the ways in which, and the degrees to which, wildlife conservation contributes to
human quality of life.