Brave New World of Conservation Paleobiology

Conservation paleobiology is a rapidly developing, socially relevant field that uses information from geohistorical records to address current problems in the conservation and restoration of biodiversity and ecosystem services (Dietl et al., 2015). Over the past decade, the field has achieved critical mass—filling an empty niche in the conservation landscape—with the beginnings of a core literature, regular symposia and workshops at professional meetings, and the training of the first generation of students who identify themselves as conservation paleobiologists. However, this period of rapid growth has occurred without explicit acknowledgment and expression of the assumptions that define the young field and unite its practitioners. Here, I open a discussion about the central role of values in conservation paleobiology. A logical place to start is by asking how values fit into the field of conservation biology. Conservation biology emerged in the 1980's as a field defined by its goal: biodiversity preservation. Thus, conservation biology is inherently based on a normative standard—that is, it makes the claim (or value judgment) that biodiversity is something good and thus worth being preserved. It is this value-laden nature of conservation biology that makes it conceptually distinct as a field (Soule, 1985; Barry and Oelschlaeger, 1996). By asserting the identity of conservation biology as a " value-laden, mission-driven science, " conservation biologists committed to having to justify why biodiversity should or ought to be conserved (Van Dyke, 2008). Two broad ethical positions have long motivated conservation action (Soule, 1985; Kareiva and Marvier, 2012; Hunter et al., 2014). Some conservation biologists embrace the claim that biodiversity has intrinsic value. Accepting the intrinsic value of biodiversity means that species have value independent of human interests. Thus, people have an ethical and moral responsibility to protect biodiversity, regardless of whether such action benefits humans. Conservation is also motivated by a range of more anthropocentric concerns, particularly the instrumental value (usefulness) of biodiversity in providing goods or services to people (e.g., food security or clean water). These different views invite debate—as recent polemic about the " new conservation " illustrates (Tallis and Lubchenco, 2014)—because the acceptance of either value framework influences what counts as conservation and the way conservation policy is conceptualized and formulated. Nevertheless, conservation biologists understand that values are the engine of conservation action (Van Dyke, 2008). If conservation biologists didn't ground their work in a clear value system, they would be left with no argument for why we …