The Bear Minimum: Reintroduction and the Weaknesses of Minimalist Conservation

Often, wildlife management and conservation policies gauge the success of conservation initiatives by setting minimum targets for conservation. Investigating the many varieties of this “conservation minimalism” demonstrates that this common approach leaves out several essential theoretical suppositions that inform the conservation conversation. Any minimal standard inevitably excludes some worthwhile conservation targets—values, obligations, and principles that ought to be upheld, or specific ecosystems and species that ought to be protected—by factoring them out as irrelevant to the specified minimum. A discussion of potential California grizzly bear reintroduction and other conservation cases, along with an examination of several theoretical axes of conservation, shows that a more productive approach to conservation would be that of conservation reasonabilism. This view, advanced and outlined in this paper, suggests that a focus on the channels through which free and open discourse can occur ensures a flexible, practical, and ethical conservation approach.