Conservation's Conundrums (Field Notes on Nature as It Was, Is, and Should Be)

What happens when good conservation intentions collide with politics, economics, public expectations and the stubborn complexity of the natural world?

In Conservation's Conundrums, Lorne Fitch draws on more than five decades of work in fish, wildlife, land and water conservation to examine why protecting nature is so much harder in practice than it often appears in principle. These essays move beyond familiar arguments about conservation versus development and into the messier territory where ecological limits meet public policy, competing land uses, economic pressure and strongly held ideas about what landscapes are for.

Fitch writes about wildlife and habitat, biodiversity loss, watershed stewardship, restoration, resource development, shifting ecological baselines and the uncomfortable distance that can open between what science tells us and what institutions are prepared to do. His experience is rooted in Alberta and western Canada, but the questions reach well beyond any one province.

Clear-eyed and informed, Conservation's Conundrums is for readers who want to understand what conservation should accomplish and why doing it well can be so damnably difficult.