Drawing on a chapter by Jimmy Bullock, Jr. and Cindy Dohner in "The Codex of the Endangered Species Act Volume II: The Next 50 Years," this article traces the intellectual and institutional origins of Conservation Without Conflict from the writings of Henry William Herbert in the 1840s through Theodore Roosevelt's Boone and Crockett Club and Aldo Leopold's foundational 1936 essay on threatened species, to the 1990 listing of the Louisiana black bear and the formation of the Black Bear Conservation Committee. That coalition, which ultimately achieved a fivefold increase in occupied bear habitat and the species' full delisting in 2016, is identified as the direct precursor to the CWC model.
Miranda-Castro carries the story forward through the Southeast Region's 2011 At-Risk Species Conservation Strategy, the growth of the National Alliance of Forest Owners' Wildlife Conservation Initiative to more than 47 million acres, the formal naming of Conservation Without Conflict by Cindy Dohner and Wendi Weber in 2017, and the coalition's first national summit in 2019. The article concludes with an assessment of where the movement stands today and why its core principles, voluntary collaboration, trust-building, science-driven solutions, and economic viability, represent the most promising path for wildlife conservation over the next 50 years.
Read the full article on the WMI Outdoor News Bulletin.
