This growing disconnect between people and the land was something Aldo Leopold poetically wrote about nearly 100 years ago. Leopold expressed great concern over the broader implications of a public growing increasingly disconnected with nature. He wrote, “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.” Although Leopold lacked the social science backed studies, concepts, and nomenclature we can now apply to this disconnect and the resulting challenges, his fears were justified, and his concerns have been more than validated.

Social scientists at Colorado State University’s Warner College of Natural Resources have been among the world’s leaders in studying the phenomenon of Wildlife Value Orientations. This field of research explores how people view and value wildlife, how those views and values have changed through time, and why these changes may be happening. The findings are both vast and insightful. One aspect of particular relevance to my message here is, just as Leopold feared, as people become more urbanized, the way in which they value and relate to wildlife, changes from the views and values of those in more rural locations. Urbanization is strongly correlated with a view of wildlife as part of one’s social network and wildlife having rights often like the rights of humans. Additionally, the anthropomorphizing, that is giving wildlife human names and characteristics, is also more common in urbanized centers than rural locations.

What does this mean for wildlife conservation and management? It would seem like a relatively minor difference in how different individuals relate to wildlife, but it manifests itself in some large and politically divisive ways. Many of the debates over how best to manage wildlife occurring at state level wildlife commission meetings around the country, most of the wildlife-focused litigation, and nearly all the wildlife-related ballot initiatives are a manifestation of differing wildlife value orientations. Some wildlife value orientations appear to more readily accept the sometimes-cruel consequences of nature like injury, disease, and starvation while many people insulated and distanced from some of nature’s harsh realities are more prone to hyper focus on the well-being of individual animals, seeing them as peers. Some people rely on the biological science-informed expertise of state wildlife agency staff, federal scientists, and university researchers to ensure the persistence of healthy managed populations. Others, absent science, data, or academic context, may see the loss of an individual animal as a loss of a member of their extended social network and thus perceive it as a significant personal affront.

The changes in wildlife value orientations have been occurring everywhere in the U.S. and the trends, although occurring at different rates, are all moving in the same direction, toward a public relating to wildlife in a more human to human manner than to a human to wild animal manner. Urbanization isn’t the only positive correlate of this change. Education and earnings are other correlates that suggest the more wealth and education one has, the more likely they are to view animals as having rights like the rights of humans and seeing animals as part of their social networks.

As we so often hear, from the frequent references to the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, wildlife is a public trust resource. However, when the public changes how they want “their” wildlife managed it can create significant challenges and especially if the desired change is counter to another tenant of the North American Model, such as scientific wildlife management.

As people’s wildlife values continue to change, we are likely to see more manifestations of those changes at the ballot box, particularly in ballot initiative states that have witnessed large shifts towards urbanization like Arizona and Colorado. In a matter of days, Coloradans will have an opportunity to vote on a ballot initiative intended to prohibit hunting and trapping of mountain lions, bobcats, or lynx. When wildlife management is ultimately decided at the ballot box, the scientists, managers, many members of the public, and the species of focus often suffer. Although it is the public’s wildlife, distilling and disseminating decades of relevant knowledge and nuance about a complex wildlife issue to create a well-informed voting public is extremely difficult at best. Especially so when the increasingly urbanized public is often disconnected from nature and bombarded with varying unique perspectives and truths.

If wildlife managers are to be successful in continuing to see biological science-based and informed management of species and systems, we must continue to use the wildlife governance models that were created specifically for input, public engagement, and intellectual discourse around these issues before they get to the ballot box. Meaningful engagement with the public and connecting people to nature are the remedies to ballot box biology. The public has changed and will continue to change more, therefore so must we. Because, as Leopold feared, the growing disconnect between people and nature has become one of conservation’s biggest challenges. Mahatma Gandhi said, “to forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” As urbanization continues and wildlife values change, lest we not become a society that forgets itself.