Gary K. Meffe and C. Ronald Carroll’s encyclopedic Principles of Conservation Biology (Sunderland: Sinauer, 1994) end on a note of cautious optimism about the future of conservation. Part of the reason for optimism, as Frederick Ferr~ argues in his contribution to the book, is that a” postmodern world” is in the process of being born and that it is” organized around the ideas and attitudes of ecology, the bellwether of postmodern science”(p. 533). Modernist science, according to FerrY, stressed quantity over quality, endorsed
