The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Biodiversity

Justin Garson, Anya Plutynski, Sahotra Sarkar, Justin Garson, Anya Plutynski, Sahotra Sarkar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315530192
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Biological diversity - or 'biodiversity' - is the degree of variation of life within an ecosystem. It is a relatively new topic of study but has grown enormously in recent years. Because of its interdisciplinary nature the very concept of biodiversity is the subject of debate amongst philosophers, biologists, geographers and environmentalists.

The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Biodiversity is an outstanding reference source to the key topics and debates in this exciting subject. Comprising twenty-three chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts:

• Historical and sociological contexts, focusing on the emergence of the term and early attempts to measure biodiversity
• What is biodiversity? How should biodiversity be defined? How can biodiversity include entities at the edge of its boundaries, including microbial diversity and genetically engineered organisms?
• Why protect biodiversity? What can traditional environmental ethics contribute to biodiversity? Topics covered include anthropocentrism, intrinsic value, and ethical controversies surrounding the economics of biodiversity
• Measurement and methodology: including decision-theory and conservation, the use of indicators for biodiversity, and the changing use of genetics in biodiversity conservation
• Social contexts and global justice: including conservation and community conflicts and biodiversity and cultural values
• Biodiversity and other environmental values: How does biodiversity relate to other values like ecological restoration or ecological sustainability?

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, environmental science and environmental studies, and conservation management, it will also be extremely useful to those studying biodiversity in subjects such as biology and geography.

Part I

Historical and sociological contexts

1

A confluence of values

Historical roots of concern for biological diversity

Timothy Farnham

Biological diversity was originally crafted as an all-encompassing concept for conservation that could unite many different interests under one umbrella goal: the protection of life on Earth. The term itself, in its modern usage, has been around for less than fifty years. While several prominent individuals and groups in the American environmental movement used “biological diversity” sporadically in the literature in the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the first published definition did not appear until 1980, in the second chapter of the Annual Report of the Council for Environmental Quality (CEQ), a White House advisory body that helps to coordinate US federal environmental policy (Farnham 2007). The chapter was entitled “Ecology and Living Resources: Biological Diversity” and it was written by Elliott Norse and Roger McManus. At the time the CEQ staff was planning the report, the destruction of tropical forests and the subsequent threat to endangered species were drawing a great deal of public attention. Norse and McManus were asked by senior staff members to research and write “on an unprecedented subject: the status of life on Earth” (Norse 1996: 6). Norse, however, also felt that such a broad topic deserved a larger scope than simply focusing on species extinctions. Indeed, there was a strong concern in certain conservation circles over the loss of genetic diversity – often referred to as “germplasm resources” – and at the other end of the spectrum were groups who primarily focused on protecting the natural world at the ecosystem level. As Norse describes in an interview, “we were talking about the loss of diversity at all stages” (Norse 1999). Certainly, the plight of endangered species was popular, but the protection of genes and ecosystems was deeply interconnected to the successful conservation of the variety of plants and animals. Combining these different levels – genes, species, and ecosystems – would become the practice for those who sought to draw attention to the threats to life on Earth. As Norse wrote, “Knowing no existing term that encompassed all that was being lost, we called it ‘biological diversity’” (Norse 1996: 6).

While Norse and McManus’s original 1980 definition did not explicitly identify the three levels of genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity, their work served as the foundation for the concept as public and private groups started to use and write about the term. One of the more popular definitions often cited in later literature was published in a report by the US Congress’s Office of Technology and Assessment (OTA) entitled Technologies to Maintain Biological Diversity:

Biological diversity refers to the variety and variability among living organisms and the ecological complexes in which they occur. Diversity can be defined as the number of different items and their relative frequency. For biological diversity, these items are organized at many levels, ranging from complete ecosystems to the chemical structures that are the molecular basis of heredity. Thus, the term encompasses different ecosystems, species, genes, and their relative abundance.

(OTA 1987: 3)

The contracted form “biodiversity” was first introduced in 1986 at the National Academy of Science’s National Forum on Biodiversity, where E. O. Wilson became the most prominent spokesperson for the cause and edited the papers presented at the conference in the book Biodiversity (1988). Thus, the late 1980s marked the years when the concern for biological diversity rose to prominence, fueled by attention from the government, numerous private environmental groups, and an increasingly aware general public.

For those interested in the evolution of the environmental movement (both in the United States and internationally), one question worth exploring is why the term “biological diversity” became so popular in such a short amount of time. A likely reason is the initial careful construction of the concept by Norse and McManus in the 1980 CEQ Annual Report. By bringing together various levels of diversity under “biological diversity,” they were able to combine the foci of different conservation concerns under one banner. The reason that the term gained a foothold in the greater conversation is because it had been introduced into an environmental community that needed unification. Norse was keenly aware of this situation: “The concept has real value … It looked at conservation differently. It had the potential to bring people together who had not been together before …” (Norse 1999). By the time the OTA definition was published, the three tiers of diversity – genes, species, and ecosystems – were firmly partnered together and framed as the three levels at which research and conservation of biological diversity should occur. These tiers were not new topics of inquiry or concern, but it was novel that they were so explicitly linked in a single term. Tying them together affirmed the interconnectedness of the natural world while at the same time taking advantage of already established conservation traditions. Thus, the rise of popularity of the biological diversity cause was not necessarily a paradigm shift, but it was a confluence of values and concern that had been fostered over time, coming together in one concept that represented the protection of the living components of the natural world.

In trying to trace the historical roots of such a confluence, difficulties arise in identifying boundaries. Any evidence of concern for living nature could reasonably be seen as a precursor for the rise of concern for biological diversity. However, if we confine ourselves to the categories of the three tiers, we find stories of human interest in protecting genes, species, and ecosystems that provide a compelling background for understanding where the concern for biological diversity came from. In addition, it is useful to overlay the more recent rise of concern for “diversity” with the stories of those three categories. This variable helps to limit what precursor concerns we examine. For example, we could discuss seventeenth-century hunting laws in colonial America as an early example of the modern concern for species conservation. But such laws were not cultural expressions affirming the value of species diversity; they were more specifically to protect a food – and later, a recreational – resource. Similarly, the great land preserves set aside by the United States federal government in the late nineteenth century that formed the basis of the national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges could be seen as early evidence of concern for ecosystems. But while numerous factors were at play in this conservation effort, including aesthetic, cultural, and economic values, the specific goal of protecting a diversity of ecosystems was not originally articulated in these monumental efforts to protect the land and its resources.

In general, the concern for a “diversity” of genes, species, and ecosystems is a twentieth-century phenomenon that came about because of the swift encroachment on the natural world by unprecedented human population growth and the consequent extraction of resources. By the 1970s, the desire to protect all of the natural variety present on Earth was most often expressed in conjunction with a reminder of all the benefits humans would lose should the diversity of nature be reduced. It is these instances that are arguably most useful for illustrating the history of concern for biological diversity. By examining related examples of concern for living diversity at the three different levels of genes, species, and ecosystems, we can begin to see the accretion of societal and cultural values that would become associated with the conservation of biological diversity.

Concern for species diversity

Of genes, species, and ecosystems, the species level is arguably the most recognizable and most commonly understood component of biological diversity. Interactions with plants and animals are as old as humanity itself, and our close relationship to the living things that provide us with food and material resources is not surprising. The classification of different species is how humans have made sense of nature for millennia.

In the United States, efforts to protect the buffalo and the passenger pigeon in the nineteenth century were well publicized and are often referred to as the precursors to the modern sentiment of protecting endangered species. The Lacey Act of 1900 was the first federal action that moved beyond protecting game species, and sought to conserve the populations of wild birds that were being decimated for their feathers, used in making stylish women’s hats (Cart 1971). Further federal action in the early to mid-twentieth century would protect individual species, such as the bald eagle and whooping crane, and increasing numbers of states adopted laws that limited hunting of certain valuable game species. But these examples of societal concern were not specifically directed at preserving the diversity of species. The first expressions of the imperative to protect the full range of variety came from the scientific community, with individuals voicing the worry that if we were to lose some of the different parts of nature, we would never completely understand how nature worked.

In many ways, this initial impulse for the conservation of species diversity was an outgrowth of the nineteenth-century tradition of the naturalist/explorer who collected specimens of life from the far reaches of the globe. By the early twentieth century, scientists were becoming well aware of the human impact on wild populations; this was most apparent on islands where unique species had small population numbers and were easily exterminated. An early example of this concern in the scientific literature is Willard Van Name’s article published in Science in 1919 entitled “Zoological Aims and Opportunities.” Van Name wanted to draw attention to the “protective work which is very important to science … This is the protection of what remains of the unique and peculiar forms of animal and plant life that inhabit many of the remote islands … in various parts of the world” (Van Name 1919: 83). While Van Name’s call to protect the variety of living forms in the name of science was one that likely found a sympathetic audience among his fellow zoologists and biologists, he also recognized that non-scientists may not find this argument compelling; as he wrote, the importance of preserving species for study was not something that “the general public [could] be expected to appreciate” (Van Name 1919: 83). Other scientists began to express similar values in arguments to protect diversity, even when the threatened species were not popular with the public. For example, in 1915 the federal government had established the Predator and Rodent Control (PARC) program and by the 1920s, 35,000 coyotes were being killed each year in the American West (Dunlap 1987: 51). This eradication was supported by a commonly held belief that predators no longer had a place in a world where humans could manage nature. To make certain that livestock would survive and to guarantee that there would be enough game for humans to hunt, it was reasoned that the predators should be removed. In response, some members of the scientific community claimed that exterminating any species would be a significant loss for understanding how the natural world functioned. They also argued that because predators played such a significant ecological role, their removal could have many unforeseen consequences. This viewpoint was best represented by the words of Lee R. Dice, from his 1925 article “The Scientific Value of Predatory Mammals.” Dice wrote that:

The lives of all species of animals living in one locality are closely interrelated; especially close are the relations between carnivores and the forms on which they prey … with the predatory mammals eliminated, it will become more difficult to explain the origin of many adaptive structures and habits in the remaining species.

(Dice 1925: 27)

But Dice also went one step further and made an early plea for preservation of diversity for science’s sake: “every kind of mammal, as well as every other kind of organic being, is of great scientific significance, and the world can ill-afford to permit the extermination of any species or subspecies” (Dice 1925: 25). In the face of losing animals that many people disliked and claimed no longer had any useful function, an argument for protecting species diversity arose, largely for the sake of scientific understanding of the natural world.

This kind of argument in the scientific world served to chip away at an older, well-established, notion that there were “good” and “bad” animals and plants in nature. A newer ecological understanding, related to the “balance of nature,” supported protecting all living components of any natural community. As E. L. Scovell wrote in 1938 in an essay entitled “Overlook No Living Thing”:

Man cannot escape his dependence on all forms of life … Who knows what is good or bad, friend or foe? Under certain conditions, a plant, animal, bird, insect, fish or reptile may be an enemy. Under other conditions it may be a real friend … We cannot overlook any species of living thing.

(Scovell 1938: 295–296)

This was an extension of the ecological argument articulated by Dice, claiming that we knew little about the interconnections between the living components of the world, and that we should take care not to remove any important working parts of ecosystems.

While support for preserving variety for scientific and ecological reasons continued to grow, others began to argue that we should protect the diversity of species for largely aesthetic reasons. Aldo Leopold, in his seminal text Game Management (1933), offered a pointed observation about non-game species near the end of his book. He wrote:

The objective of a conservation program for non-game wild life should be … to retain for the average citizen the opportunity to see, admire and enjoy, and the challenge to understand, the varied forms of birds and mammals indigenous to his state. It implies not only that these forms be kept in existence, but that the greatest possible variety of them exist in each community.

(Leopold 1933: 403; emphasis in original)

This pointed declaration for diversity is especially noteworthy as it occurred in a book that focused largely on a single class of valued species: game. Leopold’s sentiments were shared by colleagues, and the call to preserve variety for aesthetic reasons would become more common in texts and articles in wildlife magazines (see Rush 1937, Lehmann 1938, Gabrielson 1942, Devoe 1944, and Skutch 1948).

Certainly, one of the most important precursors to efforts to preserve biological diversity was the interest in protecting endangered species. On a global level, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) began earnest work on gathering data by establishing the Survival Service Commission in 1956, whose mission was to “collect data on, and maintain lists of, all wild animals and plants that may be in danger of extinction, and to initiate action to prevent it” (Fisher et al. 1969: 10). These lists would evolve into the Red Data Books, which by the 1960s were viewed as the authoritative so...