Generally speaking, preservation is a hands-off approach, whereas conservation sees people as part of land management, wildlife management and fish management.
In the world of conservation, we talk about our projects. For example, we were just down in south Okanagan the other day. We were putting out a bunch more trail cameras where we're looking to do a prescribed and cultural burn, which is active land management in the Okanagan. This is a fire-maintained ecosystem—and a pile of it. A hundred years ago, we started suppressing fire. In the 1950s, we invented Smokey the Bear, a fraud who said, “Put out forest fires”. What we're learning here is that forest fires and controlled, prescribed and cultural burns are part of landscape management. Our ecosystems need fire to function.
That would be the difference between conservation and preservation, I guess, in this case.