Introduction

THIS BOOK is about the value of living diversity—how these values are integral to what it means to be fully human, yet how they are increasingly threatened by a massive hemorrhaging of life on earth. Although the connection between these issues has become clearer to me of late, this recognition has emerged only after years of researching how people value living diversity: emotionally, intellectually, and materially.

I first became interested in the issue of how people value nature and wildlife two decades ago. From my innocent perch of the time, I was primarily concerned with the problem of how the effective management of wildlife often seemed less a problem of manipulating animals and their habitats than managing our own species' often callous and destructive disregard for much of the natural world. This perspective had certainly not originated with me. Aldo Leopold, one of the wildlife profession's pioneering ecologists, had suggested more than a half century before: "The problem of [wildlife] is not how we shall handle the [animals].... The real problem is ... human management. Wildlife management is comparatively easy; human management difficult." I was struck, nonetheless, by how little systematic research had been done over the intervening years to explore the human/animal/nature relationship.

Fortunately, during this early stage in my career, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) also became interested in American values and perceptions of wildlife and its conservation. The FWS seemed motivated by increasing concern about what appeared to be new trends in American relationships to wildlife—particularly attitudes that challenged many of the service's traditional emphases on managing wildlife uses, mainly sport hunting and fishing. The FWS also appeared uncertain about new regulatory responsibilities imposed by the passage of the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act in the early 1970s. They additionally wondered what was the motivation behind the explosion of wildlife recreational interest, particularly activities like birding, wildlife viewing, ecotourism, and others. All these changes represented significant new management challenges at the time, and the FWS believed an investigation of American values and behavior toward wildlife might better equip it for dealing with these profound shifts in American society.

A little historical perspective on the Fish and Wildlife Service is needed here to clarify its interest in this research. The service had traditionally focused on managing sport hunting and fishing and the hundred or more deer, ducks, salmonids, and other game species associated with these activities. This emphasis had served the profession well. Indeed, it was the basis for the generation of dependable revenues through the taxing and licensing of sportsmen, the elimination of the commercial wildlife trade, helping to restore depleted game species, and promoting the development of the wildlife management field. But it had also led to a strong financial, political, and ideological dependence on sport hunters and fishers. The price of this reliance had become a narrow management focus—and the exclusion of most of the public from the wildlife profession's inner circles.

Two trends had eroded this tight logic by the 1970s. The first trend involved two linked phenomena: growing opposition to sport hunting and growing interest in nonconsumptive wildlife activities. Most wildlife enthusiasts do not object to hunting, but all antihunters are by definition nonconsumptive users and thus the two groups became lumped together in the minds of many sportsmen and wildlife managers. The Fish and Wildlife Service hoped a national study might discover the motivation behind these two presumably connected phenomena.

The second trend was the passage of major new laws at considerable variance with the wildlife management profession's traditional approach. The Endangered Species Act of 1973, the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of 1973, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, and other environmental legislation—all suggested a widening recognition of the need to protect natural systems, biological diversity, and rare and endangered species. These new requirements meant vastly expanded and unprecedented regulatory responsibilities for the Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency that had restricted itself largely to providing services for a fairly narrow clientele. These dramatic legislative changes created considerable administrative uncertainty for this traditionally low-profile agency—as well as political risks. The FWS worried about public support for these new regulatory responsibilities, particularly when they conflicted with powerful political and economic interests. Few recognized at the time how the problem of endangered species would, in just two decades, erupt into a firestorm of crisis proportions involving a projected loss of tens of thousands of creatures and a scale of biological impoverishment unprecedented in human history.

The Fish and Wildlife Service believed that by discovering the wildlife-related values, interests, and activities of the American public through a national study, it might be possible to manage wildlife in a more socially acceptable manner. My study had several goals: the more equitable allocation of resources among users, a better basis for mitigating conflicts among wildlife interest groups, ascertaining support for protecting and restoring rare and endangered wildlife, educating the public about the value of wildlife and its conservation, and more fully understanding trends in American perceptions and uses of animals and the natural environment. The study's most significant challenge, given the extraordinary diversity of feelings and beliefs people direct at the natural world, was developing a means for classifying and measuring people's values of wildlife and nature. Logic suggested and science dictated the possibility of devising a set of basic values toward animals and the natural environment that might be systematically, empirically, and quantitatively studied across varying groups in society.

The first step was to delineate a taxonomy of basic values as a way of organizing and describing people's feelings and beliefs about animals and nature. This conceptual framework is described in detail in the following chapter, but here it might help to note the nine essential values: an aesthetic attraction for animals and nature, a dominionistic interest in exercising mastery and control over wildlife, an ecologistic and scientific inclination to understand the biological functioning of organisms and their habitat, a humanistic affection and emotional bonding with animals, a...