ABSTRACT
The phenomenon of rapid biodiversity decline was transformed in the late 1980s from a purely academic problem to a discourse for social, economic and political change thanks in large part to the communicative skills and scientific authority of distinguished biologists such as E. O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich, Thomas Lovejoy, Norman Myers and Peter Raven. They expressed alarm that natural habitats were being modified and species eliminated at a pace and scale unprecedented in the Earth’s history, with potentially dire consequences for long-term planetary health and human well-being (Wilson, 1988). This discourse has since become firmly implanted in the general public consciousness, propelling a powerful global environmental movement, persuading governments to take conservation measures, and giving birth to the ‘crisis discipline’ of conservation biology. The effective result has been a concerted research, policy, and action agenda that encompasses: scientific efforts to catalogue, classify, and map biodiversity throughout the world; inquiries into the ecological processes that regulate biodiversity; projects aimed at monitoring the rate of habitat alteration and species extinction; attempts to identify the threats as well as to anticipate the outcomes; and the search for effective policies that will halt or hopefully reverse this destructive trend.
