Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy: An Introduction Sahotra Sarkar This book explores the epistemological and ethical issue at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasizing the conservation of biodiversity. Sahotra Sarkar criticizes previous attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. However, unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is concerned as much with epistemological issues as with environmental ethics. It covers a broad range of topics, including problems of explanation and prediction in traditional ecology and how individual-based models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology are transforming ecology. Introducing a brief history of conservation biology, Sarkar analyses the new consensus framework for conservation planning through adaptive management. He concludes with a discussion of the future directions for theoretical research in conservation biology and environmental philosophy. Sahotra Sarkar is Professor of Integrative Biology and of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. He is director of the Biodiversity and Biocultural Conservation Laboratory and works on the design of conservation area networks, primarily in Mexico and India. A former Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, he is the author of Genetics and Reductionism , and Molecular Models of Life