Evocentrism

Through the intensity of their activities, humans have become the primary driver of biological evolution in the living world. Scientific research has documented rapid evolutionary changes in wild populations in response to global change, as well as their current and projected impacts on biodiversity inherited from evolutionary history. The main drivers of evolutionary impact include climate change, direct overexploitation of species, pollution, land and ocean use change, and invasive alien species. M.E. Soulé, one of the founders of conservation biology, proposed in 1980 that the intrinsic evolutionary dynamics of species should be placed at the forefront of conservation. By promoting the protection of biodiversity and living beings for their intrinsic value alone, some conservationists refuse to condition conservation action on human interest. However, this anthropocentric utilitarian approach has become dominant in conservation policy movements, as evidenced by the development of the ecosystem services concept in the early 2000s. These two approaches to conservation — sharing some means but with fundamentally divergent ends — fuel an important scientific and ethical debate. One of the fundamental questions that emerges is whether it is even possible to move beyond the Anthropocene. In 2016, François Sarrazin and Jane Lecomte proposed to re-examine this question and revisit these issues in light of the conservation legacy in their article Evolution in the Anthropocene. They define scenarios based on the ethical positioning of humans in relation to other living beings and explore their consequences from an evolutionary perspective. They suggest an evocentric approach to conservation — that is, centred on evolution — as an ethical and scientific positioning with respect to the evolutionary trajectories of both humans and non-human living beings, aimed at reducing the impact of anthropogenic activities on those trajectories by guaranteeing degrees of evolutionary freedom.