An Ethics of Biodiversity

Christianity, Ecology, and the Variety of Life

Kevin J. O'Brien

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781589016453
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016644
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Life on earth is wildly diverse, but the future of that diversity is now in question. Through environmentally destructive farming practices, ever-expanding energy use, and the development and homogenization of land, human beings are responsible for unprecedented reductions in the variety of life forms around us. Estimates suggest that species extinctions caused by humans occur at up to 1,000 times the natural rate, and that one of every twenty species on the planet could be eradicated by 2060.

An Ethics of Biodiversity argues that these facts should inspire careful reflection and action in Christian churches, which must learn from earth’s vast diversity in order to help conserve the natural and social diversity of our planet. Bringing scientific data into conversation with theological tradition, the book shows that biodiversity is a point of intersection between faith and ethics, social justice and environmentalism, science and politics, global problems and local solutions. An Ethics of Biodiversity offers a set of tools for students, environmentalists, and people of faith to think critically about how human beings can live with and as part of the variety of life in God’s creation.

Part I
Defining Biodiversity

Chapter 1

The Variety of Life

One of countless subjects to ponder at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City is the changing role its scientists and curators understand for themselves. Older exhibits tend to feature specimens and models in cases, with descriptions that offer fascinating insight into how scientists ask questions about the world. Newer exhibits intersperse artifacts the public is encouraged to touch along with interactive computer programs and attention-grabbing films. This generational contrast is particularly clear when walking from the North American Forests exhibit to the Hall of Biodiversity. In the former, visitors see models of leaf patterns and greatly magnified earthworms behind glass and are invited to study cross sections of thousand-year-old trees from the other side of a plastic wall. In the latter, the visitor is immediately greeted by a “Biobulletin” film about current research in field biology and invited into a replicated section of the Dzangha-Sangha Rain Forest, complete with sound effects and lighting appropriate to life under a heavy canopy.

These differences in the style and media of presentation are all the more striking given an equally sharp distinction in the two exhibits’ messages. In the North American Forests exhibit, one walks through sections on “Weather in the Forest” and “Forest Soils”; the emphasis is very much on how forests work and how scientists investigate them. If this exhibit is intended to inspire anything other than a fascination with the flora and fauna of North American, the goal is hidden. In the Hall of Biodiversity, by contrast, the designers were quite openly motivated by moral urgency. There are not only sections demonstrating the “Spectrum of Life” and “Spectrum of Habitats” but also a “Resource Center” that discusses the anthropogenic sources of “Transformation of the Biosphere” on one side and “Solutions” to such transformations on the other. Interspersed around the hall are inspiring quotations from a diverse group of environmentalists and a somber plaque commemorating all animal species confirmed extinct at the time of the exhibit’s installation. The message is clear: biodiversity is not only a fascinating natural phenomenon but also under threat and in need of serious moral and political attention.¹

The Hall of Biodiversity is an appropriate starting place for this chapter because it shows that biodiversity is a subject of both careful research and impassioned activism, and that these activities often go hand-in-hand. The exhibit moves, as a great deal of discourse about biodiversity does, from the attempt to objectively represent the way the world works to explicit advocacy of certain moral attitudes and public policies. This chapter follows that move by defining biodiversity both descriptively and morally, a dynamic explored first through ecological definitions and second through Christian ethics.

Three distinct but compatible definitions emerge: a broad scientific definition that captures the reality of biodiversity, a more precise ecological definition representing the research goals of scientists who study and measure the concept, and a third definition linking the biodiversity of this planet to the Christian doctrine of creation. Understood together, these definitions reveal how much is contained in the concept of biodiversity and how complex a thoughtful response to it must be.

Two Scientific Definitions of Biodiversity

Most ecologists who study biodiversity see themselves as seeking not only to understand it but also to contribute to its protection. Some of these scientists have taken to identifying themselves within a related academic field, conservation biology, to emphasize that they apply their research to a particular environmentalist agenda.² However, even among researchers who agree that biodiversity must be conserved, there are important disagreements about whether it serves their research and cause better to articulate a narrow, clear, and quantifiable definition or a broad, inclusive, and adaptable one.

These distinct approaches to a scientific definition are introduced well by E. O. Wilson in a 1997 book of essays about biodiversity:

So what is it? Biologists are inclined to agree that it is, in one sense, everything. Biodiversity is defined as all hereditarily based variation at all levels of organization, from the genes within a single local population or species, to the species composing all or part of a local community, and finally to the communities themselves that compose the living parts of the multifarious ecosystems of the world. The key to effective analysis of biodiversity is the precise definition of each level of organization when it is being addressed.³

Given that the term “biodiversity” has been in use since the mid-1980s and the significance of nature’s variety was widely discussed even before then, it might be somewhat surprising that the question “So what is it?” would still be asked, but there was in 1997 and remains today no standard and widely accepted definition.⁴ Still, as Wilson makes clear, the fact that the term has broad and wide-ranging implications need not be an excuse to surrender any attempt to understand it, and so he offers two definitions: On one hand, biodiversity is “everything.” On the other hand, biodiversity is a carefully delineated measurement of particular phenomena at different scales of attention. One ecological definition seeks breadth and comprehensiveness, the other precision and measurability.

A Broad Ecological Definition

Those who advocate a broad and sweeping definition of biodiversity frequently begin with basic etymology: biological diversity straightforwardly means “the variety of life.” In this sense the concept reflects an observation about the character of our world, noting that the planet displays a wide array of living things and that evolutionary processes and ecological systems seem to be structured by and dependent upon this variety. Biodiversity is a way to talk about the vast variety of life, a way to note the differences and distinctions between individuals, species.

This broad and vague concept exceeds the capacity of any one research program or number to quantify, a fact emphasized by the most familiar measurement of biodiversity: the number of species on Earth. Thus far, taxonomists and researchers have identified and at least partially catalogued more than 1.75 million species, but no one realistically claims that this represents even half of the species that exist, and a common estimate suggests that there may easily be 10 million or more distinct species, the vast majority of which have not been classified.⁵ The variety of life is clearly bigger than contemporary science can measure, catalog, or understand.

Even this uncertain number of distinct species—which ecologists call species richness—is at best a synecdoche and at worst a gross simplification of biodiversity and its complexity because it ignores the diversity within each species and the diversity of systems in which species are organized. Thus, biodiversity is generally expanded to include at least three levels: species, genetic, and ecosystemic variety. Genetic biodiversity refers to the variety within a stock of particular organisms. For example, while human agriculture cultivates only two domestic species of rice, included within these are 120,000 distinct genetic varieties.⁶ While few species are studied and cataloged as comprehensively as rice, all are incredibly genetically diverse. Ecosystemic diversity observes that life has evolved within a vast variety of communities and biomes, and so biodiversity must also be recognized in the systems into which species are organized. Some authors seek to rename these levels or add others to the list, but the central, widely agreed-upon point is that the variety of life crosses multiple levels and scales.⁷

When understood as including not only species but also genes within species and the ecosystems in which species are organized, the vastness of the variety of life is clear. This also reminds ecologists about how much they do not know: the enormous number of uncataloged species, unexplored genetic diversity, and ecosystems not fully understood.

For many ecologists, the broad definition of biodiversity is ideal precisely because it emphasizes the vastness of life’s variety and the limits of human knowledge about it. For example, Reed Noss and Allen Cooperrider write that “biodiversity is not just a numbers game” and then applaud the fact that “simplicity is not one of the virtues of biodiversity. Ecosystems are more complex than we can imagine.”⁸ Noss elsewhere defines biodiversity broadly as “the variety of life and its processes” and argues that this definition can serve as “an appropriate organizing concept for what it is we’re interested in protecting.”⁹ The virtue of biodiversity understood this way is that it expresses the vastness of the natural world.

A broad definition also emphasizes that biodiversity is not merely a characteristic of distant rain forests or scientific labs but a fundamental part of the world as a whole, a characteristic of life wherever it exists. This is a phenomenon almost as broad as nature itself, more focused only because it calls explicit attention to the variety therein and marks out living creatures as uniquely important.¹⁰ It is therefore impossible to ignore the vast complexity of biodiversity and the fact that if we care about life—life on Earth, the life of the natural world, human lives—we must care about biodiversity. Biodiversity in this broad definition is clearly a moral concept, and it serves to increase attention on the complexity and degradation of the natural world as a whole.

Measuring Biodiversity: A Precise Ecological Definition

While a broad approach to biodiversity signals human participation in the complexity and vastness of the variety of life, such a definition lacks clarity, cannot be quantified, and therefore cannot be uncontroversially identified. These disadvantages lead some ecologists to seek a more precise definition, one that can be objectively studied and measured according to careful and rigorous scientific standards. These researchers argue that the authority of ecology comes from its status as a science, and such expertise requires a narrow and careful classification system. To this purpose, Ian Swingland argues in the Encyclopedia of Biodiversity that “an unequivocal and precise meaning of biodiversity that is scientifically sensible and universally applicable” is required if ecologists hope “to help guide the design of policy and programs for the future, as well as to make critical decisions in the present.”¹¹

In this spirit, wildlife manager Don DeLong undertook a literature review of eighty-five scholarly definitions in order to develop the most “objective and sound” one possible. His definition is intricate but worth citing at length for both its content and its style: “Biodiversity is a state or attribute of a site or area and specifically refers to the variety within and among living organisms, assemblages of living organisms, biotic communities, and biotic processes, whether naturally occurring or modified by humans. Biodiversity can be measured in terms of genetic diversity and the identity and number of different types of species, assemblages of species, biotic communities, and biotic processes, and the amount (e.g., abundance, biomass, cover, rate) and structure of each.”¹² This definition is careful and involved, presenting biodiversity as quantifiable and concrete. Biodiversity is not simply the variety of life; it is the variety of organisms in an array of configurations, measured within a specific area. Like the previous definition, this understanding of biodiversity is explicitly multiscalar, paying attention to genetic, species, and ecosystemic diversity. But this definition is different because it specifies that biodiversity should be measured at each of these levels, emphasizing a number of factors that must be delineated in such measurements.

A more technical definition like DeLong’s allows ecologists to more clearly and consistently identify biodiversity, a process important not only for the standards of their science but also for the conservationist purposes to which their work will be applied. Those who seek such a precise definition are committed to ecological research that serves the cause of conservation, but they argue that conservation is best when it is informed by rigorous and careful science. Political leaders and society as a whole will be more likely to respect and act upon clear and quantified findings rather than vague and broad assertions. Ecologists have unique access to information about biodiversity, and they should offer concrete accounts of how Earth’s living systems work and how biodiversity fits into it. Richard Tracy and Peter Brussard, for instance, argue that what distinguishes ecologists from others who advocate on behalf of biodiversity is precisely their commitment to scientific rigor and their authority as “open-minded and objective” students of environmental problems.¹³ Other environmentalists might make sweeping claims without careful substantiation, but ecological researchers must take a different approach.

One reason for a technical definition is that biodiversity raises difficult questions that require careful answers. For instance, there are many questions about whether human activity can actually increase biodiversity: When human beings genetically engineer new organisms, does this make the world more diverse? Does it make a difference whether the new organism can sustainably survive as part of a healthy ecosystem? When human attempts to suppress fire across North America create a forested habitat that serves as a pathway for species like the barred owl, does this increase biodiversity? When barred owls threaten to drive spotted owls to extinction, does this reduce local biodiversity, or does the exchange of one owl for another maintain the status quo? Does it make a difference which changes in ecosystems are caused by human beings and which happen despite humans?¹⁴ These questions will not have straightforward answers if biodiversity is defined solely as “the variety of life.” By con...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Defining Biodiversity
• Part II Why Biodiversity Matters
• Part III The Levels of Biodiversity
• Part IV Political and Morally Formative Conservation
• Part V Social Justice and the Conservation of Biodiversity
• Conclusion: The Work of Conserving Biodiversity
• Bibliography
• Index