What Should “Biodiversity” Be?

Abstract

This paper argues that biodiversity should be understood as a normative concept constrained by a set of adequacy conditions that reflect scientific explications of diversity. That there is a normative aspect to biodiversity has long been recognized by environmental philosophers though there is no consensus on the question of what, precisely, biodiversity is supposed to be. There is also disagreement amongst these philosophers as well as amongst conservationists about whether the operative norms should view biodiversity as a global heritage or as embodying local values. After critically analyzing and rejecting the first alternative, this paper gives precedence to local values in defining biodiversity but then notes many problems associated with this move. The adequacy conditions to constrain all natural features from being dubbed as biodiversity include a restriction to biotic elements, attention to variability, and to taxonomic spread, as well as measurability. The biotic elements could be taxa, community types, or even non-standard land cover units such as sacred groves. This approach to biodiversity is intended to explicate its use within the conservation sciences which is the context in which the concept (and term) was first introduced in the late 1980s. It differs from approaches that also attempt to capture the co-option of the term in other fields such as systematics.