Abstract:
Humans are altering their living environment to an extent that could cause environmental collapse.
Promoting change into environmentally sustainability is therefore urgent. Despite a rapid expansion
in conservation biology, appreciation of underlying causes and identification of long-term solutions
have largely been lacking. I summarized knowledge regarding the environmental crisis, and argue
that the most important contributions towards solutions come from economy, political sciences, and
psychology. Roles of conservation biology include providing environmental protection until
sustainable solutions have been found, evaluating the effectiveness of implemented solutions, and
providing societies with information necessary to align effectively with environmental values.
Because of the potential disciplinary discrepancy between finding long-term solutions versus short
term protection, we may face critical trade-offs between allocations of resources towards achieving sustainability. Since biological knowledge is required for such trade-offs, an additional role for
conservation biologists may be to provide guidance towards finding optimal strategies in such
trade-offs.
