Every Individual Matters: Wildlife conservation body just widened the circle of what it protects
Compassionate conservation developed from the refusal to accept the presumed conflict between protecting individual animals and protecting populations or ecosystems as inevitable. It didn’t dismiss extinction, it asked, instead, whether conservation had accepted harm too quickly, and whether populations and ecosystems could be protected without treating the individuals within them as disposable. Individuals matter. Remove them, and a population may remain numerically present but lacking in behavioral diversity, cultural knowledge and the capacity to adapt. The loss of the individual and the weakening of the whole go hand in hand.
GOSIA BRYJA: For a long time, conservation and animal welfare were treated as opposed to one another. Conservation cared about populations, species, whole systems and their health. Animal welfare, on the other hand, cared about the individual animal and her well-being. Much of the conservation field held that the second concern got in the way of the first. Caring too much about one animal, the thinking went, was a soft-hearted distraction from the harder work of saving many… When the interests of the individual and the population collided, the individual was expected to give way…
Countless lives are thus sacrificed for others, with individual animals treated as expendable casualties once a population or species has been chosen for protection. Describing this approach while tracing the owl wars, journalist Warren Cornwall wrote that conservation’s history is “tinged with blood”…
Compassionate conservation developed from the refusal to accept the presumed conflict between protecting individual animals and protecting populations or ecosystems as inevitable. It brought the welfare of individuals into conservation decisions and asked that harm be avoided wherever possible. It didn’t dismiss extinction, ecological collapse or the reality of difficult choices. It asked, instead, whether conservation had accepted harm too quickly, whether killing had become a solution of first resort rather than last, and whether populations and ecosystems could be protected without treating the individuals within them as disposable…
Individuals matter. Remove them, and a population may remain numerically present but lacking in behavioural diversity, cultural knowledge and the capacity to adapt. The deaths of older and experienced animals can disrupt social structures, reproduction, migration and the transmission of survival knowledge. Interdependency asserts itself. The loss of the individual and the weakening of the whole go hand in hand…
This relationship now appears to be gaining formal recognition within mainstream conservation. One of the Society for Conservation Biology’s regional sections, SCB North America, has moved the circle again. Its board approved a new definition of conservation on January 22, 2026, and the section published it on July 8, 2026. A press release announced the definition and explained its purpose. The accompanying Definition of Terms establishes what its central language means. Together, the documents present a vision intended to guide SCB North America, encourage discussion across the wider Society for Conservation Biology and speak to others interested in the protection and recovery of nature…
The accompanying Definition of Terms makes clear what “all life” and “biological diversity” now include. The authors write:
“We specifically include the protection of individual nonhumans, because they have been historically ignored because of a conservation biology focus on populations or species, and an elevation of human needs above all other life.”
The language goes beyond animals understood collectively, as populations or species, and acknowledges and values individual living organisms of every kind. Long dismissed, the individual animal, an irreplaceable sentient being, becomes part of what conservation is for.
Importantly, the document also recognizes that an animal has value apart from human use. It states:
“each individual has its own interest separate from any human interest or extrinsic value” and places “the intrinsic value of each and every human alongside the intrinsic value of each and every nonhuman.”
RELATED VIDEO: