Special Issue "Economic Growth and Sustainable Wildlife Management"

Guest Editor
Dr. Jerry V. Mead
Watershed and Systems Ecology Section, Patrick Center for Environmental Research, The Academy of Natural Sciences, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA
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Dear Colleagues,

Finding a balance between the economy of humans and wildlife within our ecosystems is critical for conserving fish and wildlife. The field of ecological economics is advancing rapidly, professional conservation and economic societies have and are adopting position statements on the conflict between growth and wildlife conservation, and ecologists are becoming more involved in economics. However, much work still needs to be done to understand the relation between the human economy and wildlife management. This special issue examines how economic growth influences wildlife management and bioconservation. The majority of papers in this issue will be research papers, with the exception of a few papers that examine the performance of conservation efforts from a historical context. The objective of the issue is to examine the successes and failures of economic policies, especially economic growth, that impact bioconservation.

Dr. Jerry V. Mead
Guest Editor

• gross domestic product
• ecological economics
• bioconservation
• environmental policy

Type of Paper: Review
Title: When Worlds Collide: Reconciling the Often Opposing Agendas of Economic Growth and Wildlife Sustainability
Authors: Sheryl Law ¹, Anne Fairbrother ¹, Jessica Glicken Turnley ²
Affiliations: ¹ Exponent, Bellevue, WA; E-Mail: afairbrother@exponent.com (A.F.)
² Gallisteo Consulting Group, Albuquerque, NM
Abstract: Successfully achieving both economic growth and wildlife sustainability requires acknowledgement and reconciliation of apparently conflicting goals and incompatible metrics. Development and wildlife management apply widely divergent economic metrics, time horizons and geospatial scales to decisions about the same geographic locations. Economic growth is based on maximizing income (cash-based, short-term) while sustainable wildlife management is accomplished by maximizing wealth (asset-based, long-term, intergenerational). Geographic scales differ as well; economic growth is a local issue while wildlife populations are managed regionally. We will describe these inherent conflicts and present case studies of creative solutions that were acceptable to all stakeholder groups.