in
Queensland, Australia Distinct trends exist regarding conservation development. The need for conserving land has only recently intensified during what some scholars refer to as the
Capitalocene epoch. This era marks the beginning of
colonialism,
globalization, and the
Industrial Revolution that has led to global land change as well as
climate change. While many countries' efforts to preserve
species and their
habitats have been government-led, those in the North Western Europe tended to arise out of the middle-class and aristocratic interest in
natural history, expressed at the level of the individual and the national, regional or local
learned society. Thus countries like Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, etc. had what would be called
non-governmental organizations – in the shape of the
Royal Society for the Protection of Birds,
National Trust and County Naturalists' Trusts (dating back to 1889, 1895, and 1912 respectively) Natuurmonumenten, Provincial Conservation Trusts for each Dutch province, Vogelbescherming, etc. – a long time before there were
national parks and
national nature reserves. This in part reflects the absence of wilderness areas in heavily cultivated Europe, as well as a longstanding interest in
laissez-faire government in some countries, like the UK, leaving it as no coincidence that
John Muir, the Scottish-born founder of the National Park movement (and hence of government-sponsored conservation) did his sterling work in the US, where he was the motor force behind the establishment of such national parks as
Yosemite and
Yellowstone. Nowadays, officially more than 10 percent of the world is legally protected in some way or the other, and in practice, private fundraising is insufficient to pay for the effective management of so much land with protective status. Protected areas in developing countries, where probably as many as 70–80 percent of the species of the world live, still enjoy very little effective management and protection. Some countries, such as Mexico, have non-profit civil organizations and landowners dedicated to protecting vast private property, such is the case of Hacienda Chichen's Maya Jungle Reserve and Bird Refuge in
Chichen Itza,
Yucatán. The Adopt A Ranger Foundation has calculated that worldwide about 140,000 rangers are needed for the protected areas in developing and transition countries. There are no data on how many rangers are employed at the moment, but probably less than half the protected areas in developing and transition countries have any rangers at all and those that have them are at least 50% short. This means that there would be a worldwide ranger deficit of 105,000 rangers in the developing and transition countries. The terms
conservation and
preservation are frequently conflated outside the academic, scientific, and professional kinds of literature. The United States'
National Park Service offers the following explanation for the important ways in which these two terms represent very different conceptions of
environmental protection ethics: During the
environmental movement of the early 20th century, two opposing factions emerged: conservationists and preservationists. Conservationists sought to regulate human use while preservationists sought to eliminate
human impact altogether." C. Anne Claus presents a distinction for conservation practices. Claus divides conservation into conservation-far and conservation-near. Conservation-far is the means of protecting nature by separating it and safeguarding it from humans.
Evidence-based conservation was organized based on the observations that
decision making in conservation was based on
intuition and/or practitioner experience often disregarding other forms of evidence of successes and failures (e.g. scientific information). This has led to costly and poor outcomes. Evidence-based conservation provides access to information that will support decision making through an evidence-based framework of "what works" in conservation. The evidence-based approach to conservation is based on evidence-based practice which started in
medicine and later spread to
nursing,
education,
psychology, and other fields. It is part of the larger movement towards
evidence-based practices. == See also ==