Key takeaways

The desire to build healthy human-nature relationships is a goal that is shared by restoration ecology and wild animal welfare. Both disciplines incorporate environmental stewardship into the human-nature relationship, yet they have subtle differences in how people orient their problem-solving behavior.

Restoration ecology can direct people to be reactive to harms to the environment. This orientation limits our ability to imagine ourselves as a part of the solution to environmental problems.

In contrast, wild animal welfare calls on people to act to improve wild animals’ lives. This proactive human-nature relationship empowers people to benefit wild animals, not just exacerbate the issues they face.

Urban wildlife diseases are an opportunity for wild animal welfare and restoration ecology to synergize. Whereas welfare biology may focus on administering vaccines and medicine to benefit wild animals directly, ecological restoration could focus on urban planning and restoration to reverse the amount of impervious surface in cities. This combined approach addresses the problem of urban wildlife diseases on two fronts.

Summary

It is crucial to cast people as active participants in ecosystems who can, and should, do more than just exacerbate environmental problems. People need the opportunity to benefit the natural world and its inhabitants. The wild animal welfare ethic empowers people to have a positive impact by defining a healthy human-nature relationship in proactive terms.

Assumptions about the human-nature relationship influence stewardship goals. A wild animal welfare approach seeks to provide for animals’ individual and collective needs. In restoration ecology, the goal is to restore native flora, fauna, and ecosystems (Fig. 1). Each project has its strengths and weaknesses in terms of prioritizing long-term sustainability, maintaining ecosystem function and community biodiversity, being informed by the past and future, and engaging and benefiting society (Fig. 2, Table 1).

From a pragmatic point of view, restoration ecology and welfare biology can and should form a productive union to solve complex wildlife issues. Wildlife diseases in urban environments are an example of a transdisciplinary cause area. There are several mitigation techniques that are available today, the most salient being providing medicine and reducing the impervious surface in the landscape. Whereas providing wild animals with medicine is favored by the wild animal welfare community, restoration ecology has its own expertise in landscape planning and restoration. Combining these approaches reveals the potential synergy for addressing this problem. Overall, mitigating diseases in urban environments can improve the well-being of wild animals, as well as serve as a larger case study as to how projects for animals’ well-being can complement traditional modes of environmental management.

Article

Both restoration ecology and wild animal welfare aim to build healthy relationships between humans and nature in order to inspire people to steward the natural world.1, 2 What is a healthy human-nature relationship? The concept is value-laden along two lines: the type of relationship between humans and nature and how to make the relationship healthy once it has formed.

The type of human-nature relationship that is advanced varies between welfare biology and restoration ecology. The difference arises because the two disciplines have emerged from different schools of thought. The wild animal welfare movement often draws upon utilitarian philosophy: doing as much good for as many sentient beings (human and nonhuman animals) as possible.3 Restoration ecology is informed by Leopold's land ethic,4 which blends an intrinsic value of nature with the instrumental value of ecosystems to support nonhuman and human life. It is worth noting that both disciplines contain pluralistic ethics5, 6 and that the utiliarian school of thought is also not exclusive to animal welfare, as conservation also uses consequentialism.7 Regardless, the dominant value systems usually advance subtly different roles for people innature (Fig. 1).