The centrality of ethics for managing land under ecological transformation

Human-driven ecological transformations threaten traditional management approaches to protected areas. The resist-accept-direct framework has been utilised within the U.S. National Park Service to help land managers make decisions during global change. But in U.S. land management agencies and beyond, there is often not enough appreciation that decisions about responding to change are laden with values. Using academic and agency literature, and drawing on interviews with U.S. National Park Service staff, we show how ethics is central to decisions about managing for the future. We identify six particularly salient ethical considerations that may be helpful for managers. We explain why they are ethical and why they should be recognised as such. During this ethical examination, we find connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous environmental ethics for land management and suggest that ‘relationships gathered in place’ may be an especially valuable ethical lens for thinking about ecological transformation. The article closes with some tentative recommendations about how to consider trade-offs when values conflict.