Conservation conflicts are gaining importance in contemporary conservation scholarship such that conservation may have entered a conflict hype. We attempted to uncover and deconstruct the normative assumptions behind such studies by raising several questions: what are conservation conflicts, what justifies the attention they receive, do conservation-conflict studies limit wildlife conservation, is scientific knowledge stacked against wildlife in conservation conflicts, do conservation-conflict studies adopt a specific view of democracy, can laws be used to force conservation outcomes, why is flexibility needed in managing conservation conflicts, can conservation conflicts be managed by promoting tolerance, and who needs to compromise in conservation conflicts? We suggest that many of the intellectual premises in the field may defang conservation and prevent it from truly addressing the current conservation crisis as it accelerates. By framing conservation conflicts as conflicts between people about wildlife or nature, the field insidiously transfers guilt, whereby human activities are no longer blamed for causing species decline and extinctions but conservation is instead blamed for causing social conflicts. When the focus is on mitigating social conflicts without limiting in any powerful way human activities damaging to nature, conservation-conflict studies risk keeping conservation within the limits of human activities, instead of keeping human activities within the limits of nature. For conservation to successfully stop the biodiversity crisis, we suggest the alternative goal of recognizing nature's right to existence to maintenance of ecological functions and evolutionary processes. Nature being a rights bearer or legal person would imply its needs must be explicitly taken into account in conflict adjudication. If, even in conservation, nature's interests come second to human interests, it may be no surprise that conservation cannot succeed.

中文翻译：

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自然在保护冲突中的地位

保护冲突在当代保护学术中变得越来越重要，以至于保护可能已经进入了冲突炒作。我们试图通过提出几个问题来揭示和解构此类研究背后的规范假设：什么是保护冲突，他们受到的关注有什么理由，保护冲突研究是否限制了野生动物保护，科学知识是否在保护冲突中反对野生动物，保护- 冲突研究采用特定的民主观点，是否可以使用法律来强制保护结果，为什么在管理保护冲突时需要灵活性，是否可以通过促进宽容来管理保护冲突，谁需要在保护冲突中妥协？我们建议该领域的许多知识前提可能会破坏保护并阻止它真正解决当前的保护危机，因为它正在加速。通过将保护冲突定为人与野生动物或自然之间的冲突，该领域阴险地转移了罪恶感，即不再将人类活动归咎于导致物种减少和灭绝，而是将保护归咎于造成社会冲突。当重点是在不以任何强有力的方式限制破坏自然的人类活动的情况下减轻社会冲突时，保护冲突研究冒着将保护保持在人类活动范围内的风险，而不是将人类活动保持在自然范围内。为了保护成功阻止生物多样性危机，我们建议将承认自然生存权的替代目标用于维持生态功能和进化过程。作为权利承担者或法人的自然意味着在冲突裁决中必须明确考虑其需求。即使在保护中，如果自然的利益排在人类利益之后，那么保护不能成功也就不足为奇了。