Drivers of support: The case of species reintroductions with an ill-informed public

ABSTRACT

Successful rewilding of large carnivores depends on public acceptance, but the public frequently has little awareness about wildlife and specific reintroduction proposals. This article evaluated the determinants of public support for grizzly bear reintroduction in California to understand how value orientations, political ideology, and demographics predict attitudes when the public has little species-specific knowledge. We surveyed 980 Californians, showing that value orientations, awareness, and perceptions of costs and benefits shaped attitudes toward grizzly reintroduction, even when only one-quarter of the respondents knew that grizzly bears were extirpated from California. Almost two-thirds of respondents were supportive of reintroduction, rationalizing their support with assessments of societal and ecological costs and benefits. Lack of public awareness, perceptions of personal threats, and willingness to rationalize stated preferences provide cautionary notes to managers. Our results suggest that managers should offer early articulation of costs, benefits, and threats before reintroductions become politicized and opposition becomes entrenched.

KEYWORDS:

• Grizzly bear
• cognitive hierarchy
• public opinion
• reintroduction
• wildlife management

Notes

1. Sampling methodology and other supplemental information is available at https://www.calgrizzly.com/aisuppmat.

2. Sixty-nine percent of Californians live in the 19 coastal counties, while most of the National Parks are in the interior eastern portion of the state (United States Census Bureau., 2010).

3. Black bears are present throughout California, can be brown in color like grizzly bears, and are morphologically different. Bald eagles are currently present in California. Bisons are not present in the wild in California, but there is a small, managed herd on Santa Catalina Island. Wolves have migrated in and out of the state; during the time of this survey, wolves were present.

4. A robustness check with an ordered logit (see online Table S11) yielded roughly the same estimates, except that respondents who did not know if grizzlies existed in California were not significantly different from those who thought they do exist.

5. Removing value orientations and ideology and treating rural as an indicator variable investigated whether collinearity masked the effect of rural residence. There remained no significant relationship between rural residence and support for reintroduction (online Table S12).

6. When value orientations were replaced with a measure of environmentalism from the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP; Dunlap, 2000), environmentalism was negatively related to support (B= −0.10; p= .07). The NEP scale ranges from 1 to 5, and a one unit increase in environmentalism was associated with a − 0.10 decrease in support, which is very small (online Table S13).

7. When each PCA estimate and personal threat measure was added sequentially into the model, the benefits component and recreation measure reduced the significance of value orientations to p < .05. The other measures did not substantially change the significance of the value orientation measures.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [1633764]; H. William Kuni Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Collaboration.