By the mid-1990s, it had become clear that a new interdisciplinary science,
conservation biology, was emerging, with concepts, techniques, practices,
and traditions of its own and with the explicit goal of conserving biodiversity.
The extent to which it was diverging from the disciplines that had spawned
it – especially ecology, in which it claimed to have most of its intellectual
roots – remained unclear. Two possibilities were clearly present: (i) conservation
biology would emerge as a new applied subdiscipline within ecology,
one of the many such emerging subdisciplines (for instance, metapopulation
ecology and landscape ecology) that were transforming traditional ecology
in unprecedented ways, or (ii) it would emerge as a discipline rather distinct
from ecology, in part because it was co-opting resources from many other
disciplines, including those belonging to the social sciences, and in part
because it was explicitly a goal-oriented enterprise with the aim of conserving
biodiversity. This normative goal required a type of philosophical
justification that is unusual in the customarily purely descriptive scientific
context. Conservation biology was both exciting and fashionable in the
rich European and neo-European countries (which, along with Japan and a
few other rich countries, comprise the so-called North) because it tapped
into a growing “environmental movement,” which, since the 1960s, had
begun to reconfigure the space of the traditional politics of the Left and the
Right. Conservation biology was particularly interesting for philosophers
of science – and also for anthropologists, historians, social scientists, and
others who followed and interpreted the development of science – because
it afforded a rather unique opportunity. Philosophers and these other scholars
were given a chance to watch a science during its gestation, to see
how a new conceptual framework comes to be formulated and refined; how
new techniques are introduced, and how they interact with each other and
with the developing framework; how technical, social, political, and other
constraints modulate the theory and practice of a new science; and, especially,
how conventions are introduced on pragmatic grounds and then
become reified. It is unfortunate that few philosophers have so far availed
themselves of this opportunity.