Like so many people, I’m passionate about protecting the diversity of life on Earth. You’d think that means I’m all in favour of biodiversity conservation, but no. I fear the word has run away with itself, and is distracting us from vital conversations about what we should protect. Here’s why:
- We use the word incorrectly
The term biodiversity was coined in the 1980s. Since then, it has become a buzz word that few people can define and even fewer people use correctly.
It has been defined in many different ways, with definitions often covering diversity at the genetic, species and ecosystem level. The UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity defines it as “the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems, including plants, animals, bacteria and fungi”.
However, it is often used it to mean ‘the number of species we can easily count’. Genetic diversity and ecosystem diversity are forgotten, along with the incredible species we can’t see or can’t easily identify.
- ‘Biodiversity’ sounds objective, but it’s not.
The word sounds scientific, as it if it’s an objective property of the natural world. Don’t be fooled. There’s no single way of calculating biodiversity – there are various metrics that will give you a ‘score’, but they all have limitations and hidden value judgments. Partly this is for simplicity – it’s easier to count the number of species than to put a figure on genetic diversity. Partly this is because you have to weigh up multiple aspects of biodiversity – how do you balance diversity at genetic, species and ecosystem level in your calculation?
This is particularly striking when we consider policies such as the UK’s Biodiversity Net Gain. For this to work, the government has a statutory biodiversity metric as a simple way of calculating ‘biodiversity’. However, this ignores other values, such as how important a habitat is culturally. It contains value judgements that have been challenged – how much weight should it give woodland vs meadows?
- People wrongly assume that ‘biodiversity’ has intrinsic value
I’ve argued elsewhere that species don’t have intrinsic value, and the same arguments are true for biodiversity. They’re also more intuitive for biodiversity, simply because of the way we perceive the world. We can easily identify and classify species (the larger ones anyway), so it feels like they could have intrinsic value. We can’t see genetic diversity in the same way, so don’t value it. If we claimed genetic diversity had intrinsic value, what would that mean? Would it mean that every sequence of base pairs had intrinsic value? That mutations were good, even if they caused suffering? That the world is a worse place if a particular genetic sequence is lost, even if it didn’t have any influence on the organism or ecosystem?
- Claiming we’re conserving ‘biodiversity’ can mask our true purpose
There are countless reasons to protect nature. One classic example is carbon storage to reduce the scale of the climate crisis. Protecting ‘biodiversity’ isn’t necessarily the best way to achieve this – the most diverse habitats may not store the most carbon. If our goal is to store carbon, we should follow that goal, not protect ‘biodiversity’ and assume our other goals will be realised.
With human rights abuses taking place in the name of conservation, we need to be clear on our goals. ‘Protecting biodiversity’ shouldn’t be an excuse for green land grabs and colonial forms of conservation.
- If we value biodiversity as our key aim, we should pollute some habitats
Pollution can spark genetic changes in micro-organisms (and sometimes larger organisms), creating new diversity at the genetic level. Polluted habitats also increase diversity at the ecosystem level. Scotland’s oil-shale bings (mining waste dumps) are a classic example of a diverse ecosystem that was only created by human disturbance.
Targeted pollution could therefore have great biodiversity benefits – very few areas in the UK have species that might go extinct, so we can afford to create new habitat types without decreasing biodiversity through species extinctions.
Rebecca Nesbit 