An Ethics of Biodiversity: Christianity, Ecology, and the Variety of Life

Chapter 1. The Variety of Life

19 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 20 defining biodiversity 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 multifari- The Variety of Life 21 ous ecosystems of the world. The key to effective analysis of biodiversity is the precise definition...