Figure 1.5 The Society for Conservation Biology began publishing Conservation Biology in May 1987 and held its first conference that June.

      The founders of conservation biology had many more links to institutions of basic biological sciences (e.g. genetics, zoology, botany) than to natural resource management institutions and they wove some novel and diverse intellectual threads into the discipline’s tapestry. Ideas from evolutionary biology, population dynamics, landscape ecology, and biogeography provided a new understanding of the diversity of life, its origins and maintenance, how it is distributed around the globe, and what threatens it.

      By forming a new professional society dedicated to the maintenance of biological diversity, conservation biologists partly overlapped the domain of some older professional societies. This was especially true of The Wildlife Society, which, on the very first page of The Journal of Wildlife Management, described wildlife management as “part of the greater movement for conservation of our entire native flora and fauna” (Bennitt et al. 1937). Today wildlife managers place an ever‐growing emphasis on endangered and nongame species, including reptiles, amphibians, and sometimes even invertebrates and plants. However, much of their attention, arguably most, is still focused on “game” species, in large part because most of the funding for wildlife management agencies comes from the fees hunters and anglers are required to pay. Perhaps, if more wildlife managers had reached out to embrace all forms of life that are wild, not just the vertebrates, and to work with a constituency of all people who care about nature, not just hunters and anglers, then conservation biology might never have arisen as a separate discipline. This is especially apparent if one defines “wildlife” as “all forms of life that are wild,” a definition that overlaps substantially with biodiversity. Notably, the first institution to apply science to conservation was the “Roosevelt Wild Life Station,” established in 1919 to integrate science, natural history, and natural resources management for training a new generation of students to implement this new idea of “conservation” of “wild life.” To be clear that this book uses a broad definition, we retain the original, two‐word spelling, “wild life.” As you can see, these terms “wildlife,” “wild life,” “biological diversity,” and “biodiversity” have a long and inter‐related history and still remain in use in different contexts.

CASE STUDY 1.1 Return of the Tortoises to Española Island¹

      The year is 1960. On the island of Española, a low dry expanse of eroding lava far to the southeast in the Galápagos Archipelago, a giant tortoise rests under a bush and gazes out to sea. The edges of her shell flare out dramatically – a distinctive characteristic of her lineage – but lichens cover it, a sign that she has not met with and bred with another tortoise in decades. Moreover, her head lies weakly on her outstretched forelimbs, her body withering within her shell. Beyond the small bush sheltering her from the blazing sun, hooves of goats thud against rock and dust swirls. Kids bleat hungrily after their mothers. The island is devastated, and even the goats are starving, driven to eat seaweed and drink seawater. The magnificent stands of arboreal cactus that once crowned the island are gone, torn down and stripped of their pads. Gone also is the carpet of fragile herbs and grasses that once covered the island, species that the large tortoises with their soft elephant‐like feet and simple “beak” could only graze, but the toothed and hooved goats could destroy. Even the finches and mockingbirds that flitted about noisily in search of seeds and insects on the leaves of shrubs have mostly disappeared. Little remains but patches of prickly mesquite and expanses of exposed, powdery earth, from which lava blocks protrude polished brightly by the shells and claws of thousands of generations of giant tortoises. But they too are now all gone. Seemingly only the old female tortoise remains.

      By the 1950s the Española Island tortoise had been given up as extinct. The island was low and accessible and the first stop for many whaling ships visiting the Galápagos in the 1800s. These sailing ships disgorged hungry sailors, who wobbled on their unstable “sea legs” deep into the trackless island, smoking clay pipes and clutching precious water supplies in fragile, hand‐blown glass bottles. After much searching these sailors would haul tortoises down to the shore, likely