Nature conservation

Conservation is to preserve things from harm, loss, decay, waste, exhaust and neglect and to install the way to achieve that.

In physics and chemistry, the term is also used for referring to the nature that a physical quantity remain same when the surrounding environment has been changed. For example, "mass" is conservative when the temperature is changed. Boyle's Law is an instance.

The term is usually distinguished from a political ideology, conservatism.

In common usage, the term refers to the activity of systematically protecting natural resources such as forests, including biological diversity. Carl F. Jordan defines the term in his book Replacing Quantity With Quality As a Goal for Global Management

"biological conservation as being a philosophy of managing the environment in a manner that does not despoil, exhaust or extinguish."

While that usage is not new, the idea of biological conservation has been applied to the principles of ecology, biogeography, anthropology, economy and sociology to maintain biodiversity.

Even the term "conservation" may cover the concepts such as cultural diversity, genetic diversity and the concept of movements environmental convervation, seedbank (preservation of seeds).

The recent movement in conservation can be considered a resistance to commercialism, globalization. Slow food is an instance.

History of biological conservation

The origins of biological conservation can be traced to philosophical and religious beliefs connecting Man with Nature. Taoist and Shintoist philosophies encourage recognition of special sites, allowing spiritual experiments.
Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism, grant a sacred value to animals. Primitive religions also recognize sacred values to sites such as forests, lakes, mountains...

There are three main philosophical movements

Romantic-Transcendental

Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, in 1880, defend the idea that Nature has a meaning, beyond economic profits. Nature is a temple where the Man can share and communicate with God.
John Muir defends a preservationist ethic, according to which the beauty of Nature stimulates the religious feelings and supports spiritual experiments. He also sees in biological communities, groups of species evolving together and depending ones on the others. These communities, superorganisms, are a prelude to the Gaia hypothesis developed later by James Lovelock (1988).

Resource Conservation

Gifford Pinchot, at the beginning of the XX century, develops an ethics of resources conservation, which is based on an utilitarian philosophy. According to him, Nature is a set of things defined by their utility or their harmful character. He defends the sharing of resources between all users, current and future (a first approach to sustainable development) by avoiding despoiling. However, he does not take into account the costs of degradation and pollution of the environnement nor the erosion of resources.

Evolutionary-Ecological

With Aldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac, 1959), an evolutionary ecology develops, a prospect marked by dynamism rather than by static conservation. In his famous chapter Land Ethics, Leopold states A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

References

Conservation: Replacing Quantity With Quality As a Goal for Global Management by Carl F. Jordan-John Wiley & Sons - ISBN 0471595152 - (January 1995)
Conservation Biology : an evolutionary ecological perspective (Soulé et Wilcox, 1980)
Conservation and evolution (Frankel et Soulé, 1981)
Leopold, A (1966) A Sand County Almanach. Oxford University Press. New York.