Preface

      11:15 P.M. 20 June 1990 I’m not used to being this hot so late at night. I don’t know the sounds coming through the window … crickets? … frogs? … a wheezing air‐conditioning system? I don’t know what to do.

      I’m in a dorm at the University of Florida; the fourth meeting of the Society for Conservation Biology has just ended; I’m sifting through various conversations of the last 4 days. I wonder if I should postpone my plans to write a sequel to my book on managing forests for biodiversity – a sequel that would focus specifically on tropical forests. At the meeting I’ve discovered that professors are using my book for a much broader range of conservation courses than I ever anticipated and that tells me that there is a niche to be filled.

      Apparently various multiauthored books on conservation biology topics are not filling the need for a basic text. Perhaps I should add a brick to the foundation of the discipline before pursuing a more specific project. Now if I can rough out an outline before I get too sleepy …

      27 August 1993 Over 3 years later and I have just finished the first draft. Actually the writing went reasonably quickly (I did not begin in earnest until May of 1992) because I chose a sort of stream‐of‐consciousness approach in which I wrote only what I knew or thought I knew. Now I look forward to spending the next several months combing the literature, correcting, refining, and updating this draft. It might seem that this approach would make it easier to convey my original thinking about conservation biology as opposed to reporting on everyone else’s thinking. Perhaps so, but I claim no truly original thoughts. I tend to think each person is no more than a unique melting pot for a vast community of ideas.

      24 August 1994 Sifting through the literature of conservation biology has been great fun, although it has entailed some difficult choices. If many of my readers will be North American, should I keep things familiar and easy by illustrating general principles with redwoods, bald eagles, and well‐known foreign species like tigers? Or should I try to open some vistas by describing fynbos, huias, and thylacines? Many years of working abroad predispose me toward the latter approach, but I have curbed this temptation to some degree, partly to save the space it would take to describe the fynbos, and partly because I have tried to select literature that will be reasonably accessible.

As I enter the final stages of production I often think about my readers and how they will use this book. My primary audience is students who have some background in biology and ecology but who have not taken a previous conservation biology course. I also hope to reach some general‐interest readers and have tried to keep the prose fairly lively so that they can manage at least half an hour of bedtime reading before dozing off.

      This is an opportune place to explain two features of the book. First you will note that there are almost no scientific names in the text; they are all in a separate list of scientific names, which also constitutes an index to all the species mentioned in the text. Furthermore, the literature cited section constitutes an index to authors, because after each