Human-wildlife conflict has emerged as the central vocabulary for cases requiring balance between resource demands of humans and wildlife. This phrase is problematic because, given traditional definitions of conflict, it positions wildlife as conscious human antagonists. We used content analysis of wildlife conservation publications and professional meeting presentations to explore the use of the phrase, human-wildlife conflict, and compared competing models explaining its usage. Of the 422 publications and presentations using human-wildlife conflict, only 1 reflected a traditional definition of conflict, >95% referred to reports of animal damage to entities human care about, and <4% referred to human-human conflict. Usage of human-wildlife conflict was related to species type (herbivores with human food, carnivores with human safety, meso-mammals with property), development level of the nation where the study occurred (less developed nations with human food and more developed nations with human safety and property damage), and whether the study occurred on private lands or protected areas (protected areas with human-human conflict and other areas with property damage). We argue that the phrase, human-wildlife conflict, is detrimental to coexistence between humans and wildlife, and suggest comic reframing to facilitate a more productive interpretation of human-wildlife relationships.

Environmental policy makers are embracing consensus‐based approaches to environmental decision making in an attempt to enhance public participation in conservation and facilitate the potentially incompatible goals of environmental protection and economic growth. Although such approaches may produce positive results in immediate spatial and temporal contexts and under some forms of governance, their overuse has potentially dangerous implications for conservation within many democratic societies. We suggest that environmental decision making rooted in consensus theory leads to the dilution of socially powerful conservation metaphors and legitimizes current power relationships rooted in unsustainable social constructions of reality. We also suggest an argumentative model of environmental decision making rooted in ecology will facilitate progressive environmental policy by placing the environmental agenda on firmer epistemological ground and legitimizing challenges to current power hegemonies that dictate unsustainable practices.

Conservationists commonly have framed ecological concerns in economic terms to garner political support for conservation and to increase public interest in preserving global biodiversity. Beginning in the early 1980s, conservation biologists adapted neoliberal economics to reframe ecosystem functions and related biodiversity as ecosystem services to humanity. Despite the economic success of programs such as the Catskill/Delaware watershed management plan in the United States and the creation of global carbon exchanges, today's marketplace often fails to adequately protect biodiversity. We used a Marxist critique to explain one reason for this failure and to suggest a possible, if partial, response. Reframing ecosystem functions as economic services does not address the political problem of commodification. Just as it obscures the labor of human workers, commodification obscures the importance of the biota (ecosystem workers) and related abiotic factors that contribute to ecosystem functions. This erasure of work done by ecosystems impedes public understanding of biodiversity. Odum and Odum's radical suggestion to use the language of ecosystems (i.e., emergy or energy memory) to describe economies, rather than using the language of economics (i.e., services) to describe ecosystems, reverses this erasure of the ecosystem worker. Considering the current dominance of economic forces, however, implementing such solutions would require social changes similar in magnitude to those that occurred during the 1960s. Niklas Luhmann argues that such substantive, yet rapid, social change requires synergy among multiple societal function systems (i.e., economy, education, law, politics, religion, science), rather than reliance on a single social sphere, such as the economy. Explicitly presenting ecosystem services as discreet and incomplete aspects of ecosystem functions not only allows potential economic and environmental benefits associated with ecosystem services, but also enables the social and political changes required to ensure valuation of ecosystem functions and related biodiversity in ways beyond their measurement on an economic scale.