The Difference Between Conservation And Preservation

Or, how hunting works to foster healthy wildlife populations, despite its image as a bloodsport

One of the most surprising things about animal conservation is how few people understand how it works. As we enter a time in which one side of the political spectrum is attempting to realize mass sell-offs of public lands—the places where wildlife lives—while the other is challenging the foundational tenants of conservation with anti-hunting ballot measures, it seems like a simple, clear explanation has become necessary. Here’s my attempt to create just that.

One of the problems here is that the Internet lacks concise, definitive definitions that set the two terms apart. Let me attempt that:

• Conservation is the carefully managed use of natural resources with the purpose of protecting them through a sustainable funding model.

• Preservation is the practice of protecting natural resources at all costs.

When it works as intended, conservation pays for itself, and can be scaled across dramatically large areas as a result. In contrast, preservation requires external funding and typically proves very expensive, limiting its applicability.

Conservation is the model employed on public lands like National Forests, those run by the Bureau of Land Management, and in Wildlife Refuges. It includes landmark legislation like the Migratory Bird Treat Act, and the Pitttman-Robertson and Dingell-Johnson Acts. Preservation is the model practiced in national parks and similar, and is encoded into laws like the Endangered Species Act.

I should note right from the beginning that conservation and preservation practices, policies, and programs often overlap. The real world is rarely as clear as we sometimes make it seem on paper.

It’s also worth acknowledging that this is fundamentally a conversation about money. There is no longer any such thing as untouched nature or pristine wilderness, free from the impact of human activity. We can no longer just leave wildlife alone and expect it to survive, much less thrive. And the habitats, resources and management required by healthy wildlife populations must compete with agriculture, extraction, development and other economic activities. The cold, hard truth here is that if you care about wildlife, you have to find a way to pay for it.

Let’s dive into some examples. And just to challenge the deeply held beliefs of as many supposed animals lovers as possible, let’s make that example the brown bear.

Coming up on two years ago, Virginia and I went on a two-week hunt for Alaska Peninsula Brown Bear, and harvested a nice one. While the physical result of that hunt is a trophy, the point of the hunt was bear conservation.

Thanks to the Pittman-Robertson Act, an 11 percent tax (on top of all other taxes) has been assessed on every item of hunting equipment we’ve bought throughout our lifetimes. Every box of bullets we’ve ever taken to the range to practice with, the hunting rifle I dragged along (and which broke) on the hunt, and also the archery equipment I use during other times of the year, have all, since 1950, paid into a general fund managed by the federal government, and dispersed to state wildlife agencies.

Last year, Pittman (hunting) dispersed $989.5 million to state wildlife agencies, and Dingell, (fishing) spent $381.8 million. Those funds go straight to agency activities, and aren’t spent on on other projects like trail building and maintenance, additional fundraising, executive salaries, and some of the stuff that can account for large proportions of philanthropic activity.

Those excise taxes, plus hunting licenses and other fees provide over $122 million of Alaska’s $200 million annual budget for its Fish and Game department. That money is used to conduct population surveys across all game species, which are then combined with science-based management goals (again funded by those fees) to set targets for how many members of a geographically-specific population should be harvested to ensure the optimal ongoing health of that population. Hunters then provide that management by killing mature male bears that have already bred for multiple seasons in order to foster genetic diversity within local populations. The area in which we hunted, for instance, was about the size of Massachusetts, and six total permits for out-of-state hunters are currently issued for it annually.

But the money hunters provide to conservation doesn’t stop there. Public lands operated for conservation are managed by two guiding principles: multiple use and sustained yield. Management decisions try to achieve those two goals, while considering the needs of all relevant stakeholders, and public input. On federally-managed lands, that’s dictated by three more pieces of high profile legislation: The National Environmental Policy Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

Those laws establish a public hearing and comment process that’s open to everyone, and mandate consideration of impacts on businesses and other stakeholders in areas being impacted by management decisions on public land. The needs of industries operating on public lands must be balanced with healthy wildlife populations as a result.

In addition to all the taxes and fees assessed on hunters, we are also drivers of significant economic activity, especially in small, rural communities. Our bear hunt involved an outfitter, multiple guides, travel, hotel stays, restaurant meals, groceries, dock fees, boat fuel, and more. And all the local businesses providing those goods and services are reliant on visiting hunters for that income. For that reason, the needs of a small group of people—bear hunters—have an outsize impact on decision making for the public lands where those bears live.

Since the biggest threat to bear populations is logging and the road construction it brings, bear hunters then provide the most significant counterweight to that industry continuing to expand its operations in places where bears live. That then provides total ecosystem benefits across coastal southeast Alaska, helping conserve the entire ecosystem in that very undeveloped place, without creating a burden on taxpayers elsewhere. Even as the human population and industrial activity have grown massively in Alaska over the last century, the number of bears has remained steady.

Contrast that with brown bear populations here in the northern Rockies. No matter where you are in the world, brown bears are all the same species. But since they vary so much in size and behavior, we apply different names to their different populations. Here, we call them grizzlies.

Since big, aggressive omnivores don’t get along well with humans, grizzlies were largely extirpated from the lower 48 by the late 1800s. Small populations remained in and around what became Glacier and Yellowstone national parks, those populations were further protected by the ESA in 1975, and in 1983 work began on a recovery plan, with the ultimate goal of restoring a continuous population running through the mountains between the two parks. Since that time, all of this has gotten wrapped up in politics, the culture war, and the slow, messy process of human intervention into natural systems.

There’s a lot more to grizzly recovery than I can dive into in a single article, let alone this one. Today, they’re still managed under the ESA, and obviously by the park service when they’re within those borders. National parks are funded by taxpayers, the Land and Water Conservation Fund (which applies fees to offshore oil and gas leasing), user fees, private philanthropy, concession contracts, and more. The ESA is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Budgets in those two national parks are in the $30-40 million dollar range annually, and are augmented by special funding (Biden’s now-dead Inflation Reduction Act devoted an additional $700 million to addressing maintenance and $500 million for staffing across the service) and philanthropy (the Glacier Conservancy, for instance, spends about $3.5 million annually on projects in that park).

Managing grizzlies in parks and elsewhere under the ESA still involves population surveys and ecosystem analysis. And it also involves fostering genetic diversity in many of the same ways hunters do outside the lower 48. Older males, and ones who get involved in conflict with humans are relocated to allow younger males to breed. And, because the population in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is small, and cut off, USFWS is currently undertaking efforts to bring bears in from elsewhere. And the part that I think people are going to find wild about all of this is that none of this stops bears from dying.

As of October 24, 69 mortalities from the GYE’s grizzly population had been reported for 2024. That’s out of a total population of less than 1,000 bears. Livestock depredation-related removals totaled 28 of those 69. On average 10 bears from that population are killed in self defense by us humans. 16 deaths were still under investigation at the last report. The “dashboard” Montana’s FWP created to track these deaths is not functional, so we have to assume the remainder were traffic accidents, natural causes, and management actions.

That number is not flattering to management in the GYE. Compare its 69 of 1,000 mortalities in a single year to non-hunting brown bear mortalities in Alaska, which loses on average 68 bears each year, out of a population of 30,000 to 35,000.

Of those deaths, the ones resulting from livestock (or pet) or human conflicts were carried out by management officials, all at a net cost to taxpayers. This tracks for other species too. Wildlife Services, a division of the Department of Agriculture, kills hundreds of thousands—sometimes millions—of wild animals each year. All are killed at taxpayer expense, and those killings are carried out using largely inhumane methods like trapping, poisoning, and shooting from aircraft (from which accurate shots are pretty much impossible, ensuring injury and suffering). In 2022, the budget for Wildlife Services exceeded $109 million.

Ultimately, both preservation and conservation models are successful at recovering wildlife populations. From an estimated 600-800 individuals in the 1960s, the number of grizzlies have grown to about 2,000 bears. Given the worst-case scenario here—a large, slow-breeding animal prone to conflict that will never be able to exist across most of its former range—nothing but the careful protections provided by national park boundaries and ESA protections could have worked.

But compare the grizzly’s success story to that of (admittedly easier) species that have benefitted from conservation efforts. In 1914, there were 14,000 elk remaining in the American west. Today, that number is over a million, and is expanding into states as far east as Pennsylvania and Missouri. There were 200,000 wild turkeys left alive in 1940 (half the population than the number of wild elephants left in Africa today), now there’s over 6 million. Only half a million deer remained in this country by the early 1900s, today there’s 25 to 30 million. You get the idea. All of those recoveries and more were made possible not by taxpayers, but by hunters, practicing the carefully managed use of natural resources. If you care about wild animals, you must acknowledge these successes, along with maintaining brown bear populations in Alaska. Nothing else could have worked, anything else would have cost shocking amounts of money.

That preservation costs more money than conservation is not the argument people fighting against hunting think it is. This is an imperfect comparison given the often overlapping nature of models and policies, but national parks account for only 85 million of the 640 million acres of federally managed public land in this country. And while wildlife populations are owned by the public, they obviously also live on private land, which is managed by an even more nuanced and complex mix of approaches.

Ultimately we need both models. Given its extreme levels of protection, preservation is necessary to protect the most fragile or heavily visited places and the most vulnerable wildlife. Conservation can then offset the extreme cost of preservation by protecting and growing wildlife populations everywhere else. It’s only by working together that we’ll be able to continue to foster this country’s uniquely abundant wild places and wild animals.