The cost of casting animals as heroes and villains in conservation science

By Adam Meyer, PhD Candidate in Ecosystem Ecology, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Kristy Ferraro, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan

Scientists are philosophers, explorers, data collectors and number crunchers. They are also storytellers, placing data within a broader scientific and societal context. How they tell these stories matters.

In our work as ecologists, we find that the “hero-villain” narrative trope is a popular tool in ecology and conservation writing. For example, wild pigs – a hybrid of human-introduced wild…

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