NRES 315 – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice

Why this comes after evidence and learning

Week 4 asked how a management problem is framed, how evidence enters a plan, and how monitoring changes the next cycle.

This week asks the prior question: who is in that process, whose knowledge is taken seriously, and who is able to influence the result?

Source: Chapter 4, §4.2

Today’s question

How do diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice shape whether a conservation decision is legitimate and durable?

Source: Chapter 4, §4.1

What you should be able to do

By the end of today, you should be able to:

distinguish diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice;
explain why representation, capacity, and relevancy matter to the profession;
tell the difference between presence in a process and influence over it; and
name one guideline for working across knowledge traditions.

Source: Chapter 4, §§4.2–4.5

Justice is a management condition

Access, influence, and recognition shape whether a conservation decision can be publicly legitimate.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.2

DEIJ is part of management practice

DEIJ shapes:

access to land and water;
whose knowledge is recognized;
who bears costs and receives benefits; and
who has influence in public processes.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.2

Four related terms

Diversity: varying attributes within a community.
Equity: fair opportunity to engage and benefit, including attention to barriers.
Inclusion: being accepted, supported, and able to contribute.
Justice: fair practices that dismantle barriers and enable full participation.

Source: Chapter 4, Table 4.1

The four terms are not interchangeable

Institutions are sometimes criticized for emphasizing diversity and inclusion, which are more widely accepted, while avoiding the deeper questions of equity and justice that challenge existing power structures.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4

Why DEIJ matters to the profession

Chapter 4 gives three practical reasons:

capacity: who enters, stays, and leads in the profession;
representation: whether the profession reflects the publics it serves; and
relevancy: whether conservation institutions can respond to changing communities, values, and relationships with nature.

Source: Chapter 4, §§4.3.1–4.3.3

A “first” is rarely enough

Numerical representation does not always translate into organizational influence.

Organizations need a critical mass of diverse voices to support innovation and belonging.
Critical mass may still fail to change direction unless people reach formal leadership roles.
Without sustained change, people experience tokenism: inclusion as a symbolic representative rather than as a full participant.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.1

Internal and external DEIJ work

Internal

Hiring, retention, leadership development, workplace culture, institutional policy. Often top-down.

External

How agencies work with publics, communities, Indigenous nations, and partners. Often bottom-up, driven by publics asserting rights, values, and knowledge.

Both face real constraints. Both are necessary.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4

The 2025 executive orders

Header of a White House Presidential Actions page. The presidential seal appears above the label PRESIDENTIAL ACTIONS and the title 'Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing', attributed to The White House and dated January 20, 2025.

EO 14151 and EO 14148, both signed January 20, 2025. An executive order directs the executive branch; it is not a statute or a court ruling.

Time: 4 minutes. Source: Chapter 4, §4.4; Chapter 5, §5.5.1. Set the frame out loud before advancing.

We are studying a governance mechanism and its documented effects on the profession, not evaluating the policy. No student is asked to state a position. If one volunteers, acknowledge it and return to the mechanism. If asked what you think, decline plainly — the question this course answers is what an agency can and must do, and how a professional works inside that.

The image is cropped to the document header; the surrounding site navigation is not part of the order. Read the title as data: the language an instrument uses about itself shows how the issuing authority frames the problem, which is separate from what it operationally does.

Three factual points, all mechanism and none of them an argument. Chapter 5 lists executive orders among the tools used to guide agency priorities. Civil-rights statutes — the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Pay Act — are unchanged by an order; courts, not orders, determine what the law is. And an order can be rescinded by a later one: EO 14151 itself rescinds EO 13985.

Mention the state-level parallel in one sentence so this does not read as being about one administration: Chapter 4 pairs the federal orders with Alabama’s Senate Bill 129, which prohibited DEI offices and the teaching of what the bill termed “divisive concepts,” restructuring programming at universities feeding that state’s conservation workforce. Similar bills appeared in multiple states.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4; Chapter 5, §5.5.1

What it means for fish and wildlife

Chapter 4 reports three effects on the profession: DEI-related programs were suspended across executive-branch agencies; restrictions on university programming affect the workforce pipeline; and TWS noted that layoffs of early-career professionals may hinder management of public lands and trust resources.

The profession adopted its own position first. TWS’s workforce-diversity position statement dates to October 2020, and argues from management effectiveness: engaging a greater proportion of the population lets us “more effectively manage wildlife, the ecosystems on which they depend, and the human communities that interact with them.”

Time: 4 minutes. Source: Chapter 4, §4.4; Arnett et al. 2025; Rodgers and Arnett 2025; TWS Position Statement on Workforce Diversity (2020). Keep the three effects as reported events with sources, which is what they are. Note TWS’s framing: a concern about capacity to manage trust resources is a professional argument, not a partisan one. Connect back to §4.3 — capacity, representation, relevancy. Whatever a student concludes about the orders, an agency that loses staff and pipeline has a capacity problem, and capacity determines whether it can do the work.

The 2020 date is the point of the key-idea box. The societies reached this position independently and four years earlier, on effectiveness grounds. In early 2025 TWS, the American Fisheries Society, the Society of American Foresters, and the Society for Range Management issued a joint statement warning of long-term impacts.

TWS runs this operationally: Trailblazer Grants, the Native Student Professional Development Program, an Ombuds, and working groups including Women of Wildlife and Out in the Field. Several are open to students in this room — name them, since that is the concrete reason to care.

If time allows: “You are a district biologist in 2027. Your engagement program was suspended and your partnership contacts are gone. Chapter 4 says relevancy is a condition of effective management. What do you do?”

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4; Arnett et al. 2025; Rodgers and Arnett 2025; TWS Position Statement on Workforce Diversity (2020)

Presence is not influence

A process can include people without sharing influence.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.2

Presence only, or meaningful inclusion?

Presence only

People are invited, but barriers limit their participation or their knowledge has no effect on the decision.

Meaningful inclusion

Relevant publics can participate, their knowledge is recognized, and the process makes clear how their input can affect the decision.

Source: Chapter 4, §§4.2–4.3

Participation has to be designed, not announced

Identify affected publics and barriers to access.
Engage early enough for input to shape the problem and the alternatives.
Explain the scope of influence and how input was used.
Build collaboration and accountability into the continuing relationship.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.2

When a process is seen as exclusionary

Publics use many routes to assert influence: activism, protest, media, lobbying, public comment, public relations, and community organizing.

Bottom-up participation is often a response to a process that did not share influence in the first place.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.2

Protected areas show the stakes

Protected areas established without local consent often lack enduring public and political support. They can become:

vulnerable to PADDD — downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement; or
“paper parks” that exist on a map but lack the legitimacy needed for actual protection.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.2

Grand Staircase–Escalante

Designated in 1996 to protect an ecologically rich landscape.
Many local communities and Indigenous nations felt they were not sufficiently consulted.
Reduced by nearly 50% in 2017 through executive action.
Critics point to the lack of local engagement and long-term political consensus as key factors.

Panoramic view across Grand Staircase--Escalante at sunset. Pale sandstone ledges and scattered juniper in the foreground drop into a green canyon bottom, with banded red and white cliffs and mesas receding to the horizon under a broken pink and grey sky.

Instructional content: Chapter 4, §4.4.2. Illustrative image: Bureau of Land Management.

Time: 3 minutes. Chapter 4, §4.4.2. Use only these case facts; do not supply external policy detail. Ask students which of the four design rules on the earlier slide appears to have been missed.

The photograph is scene-setting only and carries no instructional content — a student who cannot see it loses nothing, which is why the alt text describes the landscape rather than making an argument. Give students a beat to look at it before starting: most have never seen this landscape, and the scale is part of why the designation and the reduction both mattered so much locally.

Note for the instructor: this slide writes its footer as an explicit source-note div, because the footer has to carry the image credit as well. Keep the citation keyword out of these speaker notes or the footer filter will add a second, overlapping line.

Image provenance: the photograph is from the BLM’s Grand Staircase–Escalante page. Works of the U.S. government are in the public domain, and that page showed no separate photographer credit or licence statement when it was checked. If BLM later attributes it to a named contributor, update the footer credit to match.

The other direction: reasserting local control

Communities also use protected areas to reassert authority and sustain relationships:

Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa comanaging a national monument with the National Park Service;
transfer of the National Bison Range to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes; and
the Indigenous Circle of Experts in Canada.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.4.2

Box 4.3 — Salmon justice

For more than a century, Tribes in the Pacific Northwest have fought for the right to harvest salmon and steelhead and to sustain their communities around these fisheries.

Timber, mining, agriculture, hydropower, and commercial fishing transformed the rivers and devastated the runs.
Losses were ecological, economic, cultural, and spiritual — salmon is a primary “first food.”
Because many Tribal members eat more locally caught fish, contaminant risk can exceed what regulatory standards assume.
A 2023 federal settlement shifted control of restoration funds toward Tribal governments.

Source: Chapter 4, Box 4.3

Knowledge traditions

Disciplines, fields of study, and intergenerational ways of knowing that shape how people relate to the natural world.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.5

The Six Rs

Many North American Indigenous knowledge systems summarize their research and relationship principles as:

respect · relationship · relevance · reciprocity · responsibility · representation

Source: Chapter 4, §4.5.1.1

Work across knowledge traditions with humility

Five principles for working across knowledge traditions in conservation: ask whose work is being built on; recognize limits of expertise; understand epistemology; remember knowledge is positional and relative; and balance inquiry and practice.

Source: Chapter 4, Figure 4.1

The same guidelines, in words

Identify whose work and knowledge you are building on.
Recognize the limits of your expertise.
Understand epistemology — how a tradition decides what counts as knowing.
Remember that knowledge is positional and relative.
Balance inquiry with practice.

This is a practice standard, not an invitation to treat every knowledge claim as interchangeable.

Pair rehearsal: presence or influence?

With a partner, take one of these and decide whether it is presence only or meaningful inclusion, and say what would have to change:

A 30-day comment period on a completed draft plan.
A standing basin council that sets its own agenda but cannot decide.
A comanagement agreement that gives a sovereign partner a decision role.

Wednesday and Friday

Wednesday: Chapter 5 — the governance machinery that decides who can share influence, and what it costs.

Before Friday: read the Week 05 Case Brief: the Cottonwood River Access and Restoration Plan. It is a separate document in the Canvas module and is required preparation.

Source: Chapters 4–5

Close: a management standard

Conservation decisions are more durable when they are ecologically sound and publicly accountable to diverse publics, authorities, and contexts.

Source: Chapter 4, §4.6