On the Impossibility and Dispensability of Defining ‘‘Biodiversity’’

Abstract

The impressive success of the concept ‘biodiversity’ in the last decades, in particular in the arena of politics, is in a large part due to its power to amalgamate facts and values: the fact that living beings show variety on every level of their existence, and the assumed values that are associated with this variety. These values are far from obvious or objective, they are rather normatively prescribed. They are already at work in the process of selecting the level of analysis, e.g. the level of genes, species, or ecosystems. The concept thus ties together many different discourses from the fields of biology and bioethics, aesthetics and economy, law and global justice. One important consequence of the concept’s integrative power is the impossibility of its general definition. Just as ‘life’, ‘time’ or ‘world’ the word is an “absolute metaphor” or “non-concept” in the sense of Hans Blumenberg: it cannot have a fixed meaning just because it mediates between various contexts and disciplines. Any attempt to define ‘biodiversity’ in general terms is thus futile and does not capture the role it fulfills in contemporary discourse. Rather than trying to define the concept, reconstructing the interaction of its various contexts is a more promising approach. These include, besides the obvious reference to biology and nature conservation, ancient narratives about divine creation, paradise and Noah’s ark as well as political ideas of pluralism, egalitarianism and non-hierarchical representation of individuals, or the values of market economy. In order to understand the current success and discursive role of the concept, I will analyze some of the underlying ideas, especially with respect to the representation of biodiversity in images.