PAN Works began over 20 years ago when we began to assemble the people and perspectives to influence public policy about wild and domesticated animals alike.
We played the lead in bringing ethics to wolf and predator management, undertook the first ethics review as originally envisioned by the National Environmental Policy Act, transformed the policy debate over outdoor cats and biodiversity, and pioneered the use of trustees to speak for the wellbeing of wolves and other animals in policy arenas. Through our past and present, PAN Works brought animal and nature ethics out of the academic closet, prefiguring today’s focus on compassionate coexistence in conservation, rewilding, and multispecies justice.
On the way to becoming a nonprofit, we operated for a time as an informal lab out of Clark University. There we networked collaborators across the globe for our article, “A Moral Panic Over Cats” (2019). This publication upended the conversation about cats and biodiversity, contributing to an ongoing reassessment of how we think about new species on the landscape. In 2021-2022 we incorporated and were recognized as a 501c3 non-profit by the US federal and Massachusetts state governments. New programs, projects, and publications have cascaded since then.
Why Use the Acronym PAN?
Pan as a prefix comes from the Greek πᾶν meaning “all”, “of everything”, or “involving all members” of a community. Pan is also the Greek god of the wild. For our purposes, PAN also serves as an acronym for People, Animals, and Nature. Too often those interested in environmental issues think only in terms of human society and the environment. This leaves out individual animals and their socio-ecological groups as a distinct domain of moral and scientific concern. Yet animals are our closest connection to the nonhuman world, and our complex relationships to them deserve greater attention. We enrich our understanding about both society and nature when we include animals in the conversation. Hence PAN.