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.