What is the Public Trust Anthology Project?
The concept of public trust has emerged as a central theme of professional discourse among practitioners and academics in the
conservation and management community. Attention to the concept has grown largely due to widespread interest in two phenomena occurring concurrently in the wildlife management community: (a) interest in maintaining the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, wherein the public trust doctrine is described as the “cornerstone” for the model; and (b) calls for agency transformation to retain relevancy of the wildlife conservation institution to citizens. These developments have led many wildlife professionals to improve their understanding of public trust thinking and its implications for wildlife conservation and management.
Although public trust thinking has ancient philosophical and practical roots, its importance in contemporary wildlife conservation has experienced something of a “rediscovery” over the last several years. Many papers on the topic have appeared in professional journals and have been presented at professional conferences. They explore the depths and boundaries of both the Public Trust Doctrine and public trust thinking. These articles and presentations have contributed to professional discussion on public trust, but they have not been compiled as a collection of work readily accessible by wildlife professionals.
This public trust
has been created to provide the interested reader with a brief overview of many ideas presented in papers prepared by the authors and their colleagues. It is not meant to be an exhaustive review of every related paper on the subject, or a complete collection of the articles written by this group of authors. Instead, it is a roadmap to nearly three dozen papers written by a group of wildlife professionals over the last several years. Basically, the anthology is an annotated bibliography to a selected body of work, where the annotations are synthesized into one document with source papers indicated. The anthology has been organized as a set of five frequently-asked questions.
Click on the buttons below to read brief answers to these frequently asked questions:
View the Full Public Trust Anthology Publication List
