미국에서의 야생동물 위기와 과학 중심적 야생동물 관리에의 여정: 아메리카 들소에서 북부얼룩올빼미까지

초록

The current study tracks the way how the modern American people’s idea of and approach to wildlife preservation has changed, through a couple of exemplar cases. By doing this, the study tries to highlight the course of the gradual integration of management and science regarding wildlife preservation, as well as grasp the essence of each case of the preservation. Among the American’s efforts to preserve American bisons threatened with extinction in the latter half of the 19th century, there hardly was an aspect of active attempts at government-level or a scientific approach based on the very ecological characteristics of wildlife. It was the tragedy of the Kaibab that keenly enlightened the American on the blind point of the simple-minded way of wild animals preservation which had been mainly based on and limited to predator-killing or prohibition of hunting. The mule deers’ massive death by starvation due to the over-population on the Kaibab Plateau contributed to the scientific conception such as the importance of vegetation and carrying capacity, which then started to be applied to wildlife preservation. That is, the tragedy of the Kaibab marked a turning point toward scientific wildlife management in America. The sharp conflict on the preservation of northern spotted owls (NSOs) inhabiting in Oregon and Washington fold growth forests in the northen part of the USA reveals the progress in the American people’s scientific understanding of preservation of wild animals. The acceleration of environmental destruction accompanied by economic exploitation in the post-World War II era had been resulting in more number of parties’ concerns and more complex conflicts between those parties. In the pursuit of reconciliation of such conflicts, the attempts to preservation of wild animals came to be based on scientific concepts and approaches, more than in any other period in the American history. While preservation of wild animal against economic greed used to rely on the value of wildlife as national symbols or the normative motivation for the protection of the environment, the preservation attempts for NSOs made full use of the ecological value of the species and scientific analyses of such value. That is, in the NSO conflict, wildlife preservation revealed an aspect of science-based wildlife management. In a nutshell, the evolution of wildlife preservation in modern America has been integration of management and science, namely, wildlife preservation’s progress toward the stage of science-based management via that of scientific management.

키워드