Wildlife Politics. BruceRocheleau. 2017. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. 375 pp. $64.99 hardcover. ISBN: 978‐1‐107‐18730‐6.

The intersection of wildlife and politics is usually avoided by most professionals in the wildlife sciences, but a working knowledge of policy and politics is essential to stewardship of natural resources and the practice of doing science to inform decisionmaking (Pielke 2007). Politics is a process of making decisions about shared assets and responsibilities (Birkland 2011). Stewardship of natural resources, such as wildlife, involves political decision making. Scientific information is emphasized in the process of planning policies for wildlife. However, the implementation of those policies depends upon the political process, which is an outcome of the actions of government and private stakeholder groups that are studied by political scientists. Bruce Rocheleau’s book, Wildlife Politics, provides the perspective of a political scientist on the action surrounding wildlife issues over the last 4 decades. Rocheleau asserts that the politics surrounding wildlife issues are more emotionally charged than other environmental issues, and thus more difficult to predict and to resolve. All wildlife biologists would agree that issues about wild animals can provoke passionate responses, especially when the issue extends beyond ownership of land and animals to culture and identity. Rocheleau presents an advocacy coalition framework that describes the organization of groups around core beliefs. Although Rocheleau does not fully explain or expand on this model, readers may be interested in further exploring work on values for wildlife (Schwartz et al. 2013, Manfredo et al. 2017, Sinn 2019). Wildlife Politics explores a series of themes on political action that include the cyclic pattern of priorities in public policy, economic or market influences, governmental procedures, and the characteristics of private stakeholder groups. Rocheleau provides numerous compelling examples with a variety of evidence from press articles and scholarly publications. Wildlife biologists and managers should find the reviews a useful source of new perspectives and novel sources. These themes are spread across 12 chapters that include an introduction to wildlife politics (Chapter 1); science and the protection of wildlife (Chapter 2); implementation and enforcement issues (Chapter 3); United States policies and legislation (Chapter 4); charismatic wildlife (Chapter 5); Endangered Species Act evaluation and politics (Chapter 6); comparative wildlife politics (Chapter 7); international wildlife politics (Chapter 8); politics, values, and ethics (Chapter 9); hunting politics (Chapter 10); and tourism (Chapter 11), with chapter 12 closing out the book with summaries and conclusions. Scientists may find the presentation difficult to follow without the familiar presentation of tables and graphs that are absent from the book. Rocheleau follows the style of his discipline as a political scientist, which is characterized by detailed arguments to convince other political scientists. Readers from the wildlife profession that are less familiar with environmental politics and policy may therefore wish to refer to introductory texts in this area for more context and structure (Sparling 2014, Rosenbaum 2017, Leopold et al. 2018).