The Nature of Planetary Habitability: A Conceptual History of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

Abstract

This essay traces the conceptual history of biodiversity and ecosystem services from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. In contrast to recent historical studies that have interpreted biodiversity and ecosystem services as expressions of a liberal paradigm in environmental governance, it argues that the conceptual nexus harbored two distinct, and in some sense diametrically opposed, environmental ideas: one of nature as a set of discrete resources, and the other of nature as a producer of conditions of habitability on a planetary scale. In dialogue with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of the planetary, the essay suggests that the case for habitability that was articulated in debates about biodiversity and ecosystem services is of vital interest for the ongoing discussion of the planetary in the humanities. This case suggests that the common analytical distinction between anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric environmentalisms is unhelpful and should be replaced by a distinction between economistic and noneconomistic approaches.