Compassionate Conservation. Compassionate conservation (CC) is a new paradigm of conservation. It stresses the intrinsic moral value and wellbeing of animals as both individuals and communities, and the practical steps people may take in this light. This emphasis has strong and often controversial implications for conservation policy and practice. It challenges notions that lethal control and habitat preservation are the unquestioned manner by which to protect wildlife. And it contests nativist ideas about species cleansing as a pillar of biodiversity. Instead CC informs conservation science with an ethics of care for the entire community of life. With roots in an integration of animal welfare science, conservation biology, and ethical reasoning, our program embraces a number of projects that advance and clarify the theory, method and practice of compassionate conservation.
PAN-Ethics. This is not simply an eponymous term for animal ethics. Rather PAN-Ethics (panethics) is an effort to return animal ethics to its interpretive roots, and thereby improve our moral understanding about what we owe other animals themselves, and in relation to people and nature. For too long, animal ethics has been siloed as a corner of academic philosophy where contending theorists fight over who has the correct view. This may be intellectually stimulating but is of little practical use. There is a better way to do ethics, one that welcomes the moral insights of philosophical theories, and integrates them into a practical discourse that provides insights for specific cases. And because cases vary in both character and context, we listen to the full range of ethical insights from the humanities, sciences, and professions. This helps us identify the moral issues at stake and provide guidance about what to do about them. Aristotle notes that politics (and thus policy) is ethics writ large. To be practical use, panethics ask not who is absolutely right, but what they are right about.
Animals and Sustainability. Two crises of nature imperil our planet — climate change and the collapse of biodiversity. These crises are interconnected, with climate change driving species and ecological damage, and the loss of biodiversity making climate adaptation that much harder. All of this impacts the ecological services that animals and nature provide for themselves as well as humankind. As importantly, it affects the wellbeing of animals as both individuals members of their social and ecological communities. The underlying driver of these crises is a matter of values — the ethos and practice of human supremacy that generates the rampant exploitation of people, animals and nature. This program addresses the need to change our values and challenge human supremacy so we may coexist with other forms of life. This reflects the true meaning of sustainability, that is, the perpetual preservation of the entire community of life.
Our intent across all the priorities is to build the ethical capacity of society to make better decisions about how we ought to live with animals. We put this intent into practice through research, education and outreach. Our research is highly interdisciplinary and results in peer-reviewed writing published in leading journals and books. We then translate the insights of this research in into educational and outreach activities. Our education efforts are called PAN U. Here we offer educational content for courses, seminars, trainings, and workshops. PAN U also serve as a platform for the global network of fellows who are part of PAN Works. Outreach is how we bring the fruits of our labour to the public at large. We engage communities and a wider society directly through social media (e.g., Flipboard), our column on Medium, and our podcast “PAN Thinks.” We also take an active role in policy deliberations with carefully crafted briefings, commentary and testimony.