Is Biodiversity the Enemy of Nature?

It’s easy to use a word so often that its meaning is taken for granted. Nuances are lost, conceptual freight laid aside, assumptions unexamined. Take biodiversity: just a few decades old, the word is now ubiquitous, a default frame for thinking about nature — and that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Writing in the journal Biological Conservation, environmental philosopher Freya Mathews of Australia’s Latrobe University challenges biodiversity: not its scientific meaning, but the way it’s used in policy settings. There the word is not just scientific but political, says Mathews, and “it drastically limits what conservationists may aspire to achieve.”