New Thinking in Conservation

April 26 (Friday)

Arts and Humanities Building, 0426, Fourth Floor

• 8:30 Breakfast, opening remarks, ground rules.
• 9-12 Conservation Goals (15 minute break roughly halfway through)

Arts and Humanities Building 1, Dean’s Conference Rm,Tenth Floor

• 12-1:30 Lunch available at 1230
• 1:30-4:30 The Conservation Regime (15 minute break roughly halfway in between)

• 6:00 Dinner

April 27 (Saturday)

Arts and Humanities Building, Dean’s Conference Rm,Tenth Floor

• 8:30 Breakfast available
• 9-12 Open discussion about first two topics, and what we did not discuss that we should have

• 12-1 whether there is anywhere some or all of us might want to go from here

• 1:00 Lunch

Cristina Balboa

Associate Professor, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, Baruch College - CUNY

ARNOVA-the Association For Research on Nonprofit Organization and Voluntary Action

I’m an interdisciplinary social scientist who teaches in a school of public and international affairs. I use qualitative research methods to explore power between and within conservation NGOs, philanthropy, and resource-dependent communities. While most of my research has focused onsoutheast Asia and the Pacific, I also study the field of environmental studies in general - what we teach and how we train leaders. Most of my work focuses on why the environmental movement has not been as successful as it might be - based on critical examinations of power, capacity, accountability, and authority.

Craig Callender

Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Institute for Practical Ethics, UC San Diego

President-Elect, Philosophy of Science Association

I’m a philosopher of science who has mainly focused on physics but is now branching out into applied ethics, especially environmental conservation. When I first taught environmental ethics in 1994 I barely mentioned climate change; now I am chairing the academic senate’s campus climate change comm and have many initiatives in progress. Topics of interest include technology and conservation goals, future discounting, fossil fuel industry shenanigans.

Shermin de Silva

Assistant Professor of Ecology, Behavior, and Evolution, UC San Diego, (www.elephantresearch.net) and President and Founder of Trunks and Leaves, a 501c3 dedicated to evidence-based conservation of elephants and their habitats

(www.trunksnleaves.org).

Kristy M. Ferraro

Ph.D. Candidate, Yale School of the Environment

http://www.kristymferraro.com

I am an ecosystem ecologist, biogeochemist, and conservation ethicist interested in all the ways animals matter: from their roles in ecosystem function to how we consider them in conservation. In my work I aim to straddle the fields of conservation ethics, conservation biology, and ecology.

Derek Halm

Institute for Practical Ethics, UC San Diego

I am a philosopher of biology that works on conceptual issues in conservation science. My current research focuses on hybridization and choices biologists make in their field work. I am also fond of snakes.

Heidi M. Hurd

Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law, Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Program in Law and Philosophy, University of Illinois College of Law

My work draws on moral, political, and environmental philosophy to illuminate problems in the law–principally criminal law, tort law, and environmental law. My work also concerns the ways in which traditional schools of philosophical thought fail to justify the constraints on human greed,indifference, and excess that must be exercised or imposed if we are to protect the 10M+ other species that are struggling to compete with us for increasingly scarce means of survival.

Natalie Jacewicz

Furman Academic Fellow, NYU School of Law, Assistant Professor, University of San Diego (starting August 2024)

I research the intersection of administrative law and environmental law. My background in evolutionary biology (undergrad) and science journalism (masters) first motivated my interest in conservation. A more recent interest in animal wellbeing has both refined and complicated my engagement with conservation law. My paper Crafting a New Conservationism, 113 Calif. L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025) assesses how agencies grapple with tradeoffs between animal wellbeing and more traditional conservation goals.

Jennifer Jacquet

Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, University of Miami

http://jenniferjacquet.com

I am motivated by the need to protect wild animals and spaces and am particularly interested in how society’s relationships to nature can and have changed. My work has mainly focused on the exploitation of aquatic animals and our failure to see seafood as animals, but more recently I have become interested in the conservation-related co-benefits of addressing animal agriculture’s climate impacts.

Dale Jamieson

Director, Center for Environmental and Animal Protection, Affiliated Professor of Law. Medical Ethics, and Bioethics, Professor of Environmental Studies and Philosophy Emeritus, New York University

Visiting Scholar, UC San Diego

I have been thinking about the failures of conservation and the diverse values involved for much of my career, especially (but not exclusively) conflicts between individual animal welfare and species preservation. Much of my early work on this topic is collected in Morality’s Progress: Essays on Humans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature. The second edition of my book, Ethics and the Environment, will be out whenever Cambridge University Press manages to sort itself out.

Karen Kovaka

Department of Philosophy, UC San Diego

I’m a philosopher of science primarily interested in environmental issues and various forms of public participation in science. Lately I’ve been working on questions about how to interpret and apply evidence from conservation science (e.g. meta-analyses) and on a project measuring the public’s environment-related values (e.g. how much people support non-interference in nature altering ecosystems to make them more resilient to climate change).

Doug Kysar

Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law, Yale University

I am a legal scholar who works on environmental law, tort law, and animal law. Much of my work is critical of dominant policy paradigms such as risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, which ask policymakers to, in essence, “regulate from nowhere.” I’ve argued that such paradigms fail to adequately motivate ethical engagement with questions about how we relate to future generations, foreign nations, and other forms of life. I also have an active research agenda focused on climate change litigation, with a special interest in the potential exposure of industrial animal agriculture to legal challenges.

Justin Marceau

Professor, Sturm College of Law, University of Denver, Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy

I am a legal scholar who works in criminal law, constitutional law, and animal law. I have been critical of approaches to animal law that overly focus on criminal prosecutions or other punitive approaches to advancing the status of animals in the law. I have argued that such approaches distract resources and attention away from systemic animal abuse. I spend a fair amount of time in my animal law course on the tension or perceived tensions between individual animal welfare and conservation.

Aseem Prakash

Professor, Department of Political Science, Walker Family Professor for the College of Arts and Sciences, Founding Director, UW Center for Environmental Politics, University of Washington, Seattle

I'm a professor of political science and study how governance challenges in the governmental, for-profit, and nonprofit sectors, might be corrected through voluntary and mandatory measures. My recent work has focused on the political impediments to climate policy, both mitigation and adaptation. I actively contribute to public scholarship and have a byline on Forbes.com.

Annabelle Tao

Ph.D. candidate, philosophy, NYU

I focus on philosophy of ecology and environmental ethics. I’m also involved in prescribed fire and fire policy in California.

Anncy Thresher

Postdoctoral Scholar, McCoy Family Center for Ethics, School for Sustainability, Stanford University

I’m a philosopher of science who thinks about environmental bio-technology and how to maximise the benefits of science while minimising the risks. My current research involves the use of gene-drives for conservation, public trust in science, and how to build mutually beneficial partnerships with communities, in particular in places with histories of scientific exploitation and colonialism.

Dave Tilman

Regents Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in Ecology, University of Minnesota and Distinguished Professor, University of California Santa Barbara

I am an ecologist. My career began with the study of the causes, then the consequences and subsequently the conservation of biodiversity. My early work helped uncover the incredible importance of biodiversityfor numerous aspects of ecosystem functioning. I have since been searching for ethical and equitable ways to meet global food and timber needs while reducing their extinction risks and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Solutions, I am increasingly feeling, are particularly difficult because they are at the interface of science, society, ethics, economics, and law, and must address international and intergenerational equity.

Mark Woods (invited)

Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of San Diego

I am an environmental philosopher who has been teaching courses such as environmental ethics and environmental justice for decades. I am affiliated with an environmental science program and co-teach environmental studies courses in a number of international locations. My research is interdisciplinary in philosophy, law, and social and natural sciences. More recently, I’ve combined my teaching interests in the two areas of environmental philosophy and philosophical issues of war and peace and am writing a book trilogy on armed conflicts and the environment.