Annual scientific gatherings can be sleepy affairs, with their succession of jargon-laden PowerPoint presentations. But there was a nervous buzz at the start of the 2014 conference of the Western Society of Naturalists in mid-November, in Tacoma, Washington. The first morning would feature two titans of ecology squaring off over the future of conservation. It wasn't billed that way, and neither man wanted to cross swords in a public forum. But the expectant crowd knew that Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and Michael Soule, a founding father of conservation biology, had become unlikely adversaries in the past few years.
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