 The conservation biology framing interprets “biodiversity” as a term that is to capture everything we want to conserve. An emerging socio-ecological framing of biodiversity requires that the term take on a broader scope—it is to be made operational, not just for conservation, but more broadly for sustainability, encompassing the many ways that society and nature are inter-linked. While conservation biology has interpreted “biodiversity” as, from the start, all about society’s conservation values, the socio-ecological framing of biodiversity adopts a different narrative. Here, the claim is that, the term “biodiversity” started out with a too-narrow, strictly biological, interpretation, and now should be re-cast to better reflect, in different contexts, what society values about nature. The term “biodiversity” in fact appears to wear two different hats in the rationale for a socio-ecological framing: one of expectation and the other of disappointment. The expectation is that “biodiversity” is obliged to capture society’s various values and relationships with nature; the disappointment is based on the claim that in reality “biodiversity” has been too biotic and creates a human-nature dichotomy.