Conservation biology arose as a field of academic science and management practice to intervene in what biologists and related professionals identified and perceived as a biodiversity extinction crisis (Soulé 1985). Although it has earlier foundations (e.g., Biological Conservation began to be published in 1968), the new discipline was consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of a group of eminent biologists, who institutionalized this paradigm via their seminal writings, with the creation of the Society for Conservation Biology in 1987, the founding of the journal Conservation Biology in 1988, and the proliferation in the number of conservation biology graduate programs during the early 1990s (Meine et al. 2006). Initially focused on critical biological aspects of conservation, such as genetics, systematics, ecology, and evolution, conservation biology professionals increasingly recognized that the human dimensions of biodiversity are requisite components to the field's overall success (Meine et al. 2006). However, given its personal, epistemological, and institutional roots in the natural sciences, less attention has been paid to the social aspects until relatively recently (e.g., see Fig. 1 in Soulé [1985], Mascia et al. 2003).