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The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses and Expertise

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The Rise of the Idea of Biodiversity: Crises, Responses and Expertise Quaderni Communication, technologies, pouvoir 76 | Automne 2011 Les promesses de la biodiversité The rise of the idea of biodiversity: crises, responses and expertise Libby Robin Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/quaderni/92 DOI: 10.4000/quaderni.92 ISSN: 2105-2956 Publisher Les éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’Homme Printed version Date of publication: 1 September 2011 Number of pages: 25-37 Electronic reference Libby Robin, « The rise of the idea of biodiversity: crises, responses and expertise », Quaderni [Online], 76 | Automne 2011, Online since 01 September 2014, connection on 30 April 2019. URL : http:// journals.openedition.org/quaderni/92 ; DOI : 10.4000/quaderni.92 Tous droits réservés D o s s i e r the rise of Background Biodiversity is a fundamental concept in global the idea of environmental management today. It is usually regarded as an ecological idea, but it is also a political idea and a tool for managing non-hu- biodiversity : man nature. A series of historical crises have reshaped the way the western world considers, deines and manages biodiversity. This paper crises, responses uses the methods of cultural history to analyse the emergence of biodiversity as a driver and and expertise shaper of policies and international conservation conventions, particularly where the conventions are responding to alarm or crisis. ‘Biodiversity’ here includes species diversity, ge- netic diversity and ecosystem diversity, as deined by the peak expert group, the International Union Libby for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (Farnham 2007: 2). The IUCN, originally founded in 1948, Robin claims to be the world’s irst ‘global environmen- tal organization’. Its international headquarters Australian National University, are in Gland, Switzerland. Sponsored by the Canberra / Royal Institute of Technology United Nations, IUCN now describes itself as (KTH), Stockholm a democratic network that connects over 1,000 government and non-government organisations (IUCN 2011). It is a major authority on biodiver- sity. ‘Species richness (the number of species in a given area) represents a single but important metric that is valuable as the common currency of the diversity of life’, its website states, but it also considers genetic diversity and ecosystem diversity as part of its brief. The central argument of this paper is that a crisis itself frames its own solution. Responding to a crisis depends on the understanding of the under- lying problem. This understanding also identiies QUADERNI N°76 - AUTOMNE 2011 THE RISE OF THE IDEA OF BIODIVERSITY .25 appropriate ‘expert’ problem-solvers. Thus it is 1973). Ecosystem health and biodiversity are helpful to consider the historical construction of therefore seen to be mutually supportive. environmental crisis in parallel with the develop- ment of scientiic ideas about biodiversity, and the Biodiversity is a framework for understanding role the concept of biodiversity might play in any both ‘the phenomenon of life’ and the impact solution to the environmental crisis. It is also use- the activities of humans put on it. While the ful follow the history of the particular expertise term biodiversity carries a veneer of scientiic that is called on for speciic crises in different eras. independence, its emergence as a ‘buzzword’ in the 1980s was because of its usefulness in Biological diversity is a construct of the discipline environmental activist circles: it became more of biology, usually ecology, genetics or evolu- than a mere measure of nature: it became a moral tionary biology. A response to environmental entreaty to respond to the ‘environmental crisis’ crisis, however, is not necessarily scientiic. It that was understood and deined in terms of loss is just as likely to be political, or provided by a of natural variety. (Farnham 2007). management or policy framework. Thus biodi- versity may be simultaneously both a scientiic The idea of biological diversity could be seen to and a social tool, and a key concept for science, the earliest ideas about ordering and classifying management and governance. Any drive to plan nature, if not Aristotelian world views, then at an environmental future (or to ‘solve’ the crisis) least back to the 18th century Swedish natural draws on basic science, but it also depends on philosopher, Carl von Linné, whose Systema practical action and ways to measure response natura (1753, 1758) still shapes the binomial to, or outcomes from, that action. classiications system used to name plants and animals throughout the world. The European Biodiversity as the Measure of Environmental vision of enlightenment science provided the Crisis dominant narrative for nomenclature, for naming and differentiating the species we count when we Biodiversity is more than a ‘new name for nature’ talk about ‘biodiversity’. (Farnham 2007:2). It provides a way to measure change in nature, human-induced and otherwise. The next major step was to make biological diver- Biologists quantify species, measure genetic va- sity urgent, rather than merely descriptive. A new riation and consider the pressures on the health sub-discipline, conservation biology, emerged in of whole ecosystems. The goal of conservation is the 1980s, which founder Michael Soulé (1985) a healthy ecosystem. How this may be achieved dubbed a ‘science of crisis’. In this moment of demands a variety of specialist expertise and a crisis, the media-friendly term ‘biodiversity’ good measure of political will. Managers and emerged. Thomas Lovejoy and Edward O. Wil- scientists agree that more biologically diverse son have both been claimed as the originator of systems are more complex and therefore better the term biodiversity (Farnham 2007; Wilson able to withstand shock and change (Holling 1992): it was a word of the 1980s environmen- 26. THE RISE OF THE IDEA OF BIODIVERSITY QUADERNI N°76 - AUTOMNE 2011 tal crisis. Biological diversity had been used as is some basis for David Takacs’s strong assertion a political concept before: for example, it was that biodiversity became a ‘tool for a zealous de- used in parliament in defence of wild country fense of a particular social construction of nature’ in the Little Desert, in Australia in 1969. (Robin in the 1980s. This term was undoubtedly a claim 1998). But biodiversity had a grand ‘international for power by conservation biologists (Takacs moment’ when the ecological crisis met politics 1996: 1-2). But if we are to understand the full in the United States, and its applications became international implications, and to get beyond increasingly global, with funding from national the narrowly North American frame adopted governments, international lobby groups and by Farnham, Takacs and the self-proclaimed non-government organisations. biodiversity experts themselves, it is helpful to historicise and internationalise the nature of the The environmental crisis about threatened species environmental crisis itself and step outside the and their habitats brought policy and ecology white hot politics of the 1980s. While there is a together. The future of the biota depended on dominant narrative that argues that biodiversity politics and people, ecologists realised: they were emerged in the 1980s with ‘the’ environmental no longer documenting species in the wild, but crisis, there are clearly earlier environmental rather performing triage under emergency condi- crises, where ideas of biological diversity also tions and bigger scales than ever before. The crisis played a part. These offer perspective on how that Soulé (1985) identiied demanded concerted the 1980s ‘moment’ emerged, and allow us to action on more than just local and regional scales: move on from it and consider where the idea of this was emergency management for the planet. biodiversity has travelled since. Farnham documented the rise of the term ‘biolo- Environmental crises and ecology for mana- gical diversity’ in the Institute for Scientiic Infor- gement mation database. It hardly appeared at all in the early 1980s. There were, he noted, zero references There were a series of environmental crises in the to biodiversity in 1980 and 1981 and just 7 in western world that shaped the relations between 1982, but by the 21st century there were thousands ecological science, natural resource management – over 4,000 references in 2004 (Farnham 2007: and environmental politics in the half-century 1-3). The database is grounded in only North between the 1930s and the 1980s. Here, I consider American data and it only counts ‘scientiic infor- just three of these, in roughly chronological order: mation’, but Farnham’s analysis relects the rapid desertiication, the national parks movement and rise in international currency of the term biodiver- environmental health. sity (or biological diversity) in just three decades. The crisis of desertiication When ‘experts’ like Wilson coin the term bio- diversity, and then the term shapes deines the The dramatic dust storms of the American mid- understanding of ‘the environmental crisis’, there west in 1935 darkened the skies of New York and QUADERNI N°76 - AUTOMNE 2011 THE RISE OF THE IDEA OF BIODIVERSITY .27 signalled the devastation of agricultural crops. of ‘sand drift’ that year. He concluded that pasto- Ecologist, Paul Sears’ Deserts on the March ral development needed to be more attuned with was written during these storms, all about the the limits of the arid country (Ratcliffe 1949). Soil limits of the land and his science. ‘We have been conservation authorities were established soon deceived by the glib statement that science has after these storms in New South Wales (1938) given man control over nature… We do not and and Victoria (1940). Ratcliffe, like Sears, had a cannot manipulate nature from the outside. We wider readership than just scientists. His popular must work our will by knowing laws and confor- book Flying Fox and Drifting Sand relected on ming to them, never forgetting that we are a part the limits of both his science and the outback of that upon which we work.’(Sears 1949: 167).
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