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Tiger deaths in Nagarhole Park, where he was working, appear to have been the turning point for Karanth, when he went from being a tiger biologist to becoming a tiger conservationist. Realizing that tiger conservation requires a broader perspective than work in a single protected area, Karanth shifted his research from individual tigers to populations. To Karanth, any hope of long-term tiger survival requires an understanding that people and tigers can coexist at the scale of a country or state, but not at the scale of a single protected area. [Extracted from the article]

The social sciences are often seen as being in opposition to conservation and the practice of conservationists. Yet social scientists have made important contributions to conservation and could make even more contributions if they are willing to use their perceptive, insightful tools as a means of both improving the practice of conservation and sharpening social science’s critique of conservation ideas and practices. I provide two lists: first, a list of the ways in which I think social science work has already improved conservation practice and, second, a set of generalizations made by some social scientists about the practice of conservation that are incorrect or incomplete. I argue that a more careful application of social science tools and approaches could begin an active and informed exploration of the diversity of values, histories, institutions, politics and approaches in conservation. This would facilitate the sharpening of social science’s critique of conservation ideas and practices and, through these, improve the practice of conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we provide an empirically-based way to address the general question of the broad-scale spatial relationship between poverty occurrence and areas of interest to those seeking conservation of large wild areas. We address the question of the spatial relationship between poor people and areas less impacted by human activity by asking three questions about the global spatial relationship between poor people and ecological intactness and how it varies by major biome and geographical region. We use infant mortality rate as a proxy for poverty and the Human Footprint as a proxy for ecological intactness, comparing global terrestrial maps of both. The analysis shows that the vast majority of the world's poor people live in extremely urban and very transformed (pen-transformed) areas. Only a small percentage of the world's most poor are found in areas that are somewhat or extremely wild: about 0.25% of the world's population. This fact has implications for the calls being made for conservation organizations to under- take poverty alleviation, suggesting that at a global scale those groups with interest in conserving wild areas would be able to contribute little to globally significant poverty alleviation efforts. However, these conservation groups are well positioned to develop new partnerships for delivery of benefits to some of the least accessible poor people in the wildest places of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of wildlife conservation dealing with why one must save the wild relatives of domesticated animals.