ABSTRACT
The term “biodiversity” is a recent addition to the public vocabulary. Generally speaking, biodiversity is a new word to refer to the abundant variety of life on earth. It is a current popular science word for nature that has arisen out of academic and activist discourse and made its way into common culture and law precisely at the moment when the variety of life on our planet is being lost at an unprecedented scale in human history.1 Indeed, the growing consensus of biologists is that we
1 The term “biodiversity” (short for biological diversity) was advanced in the 1980s by a concerned community of scientists, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and others to take the place of the 1970s term “endangered species” in public and political
are entering a sixth mass extinction of life on earth: the five previous caused by asteroids, volcanism, and other natural phenomena, but this emergent sixth mass extinction a result of human transformations of the earth (Wilson 2002). The word “biodiversity” thus has a big job to do in the common culture and in the domain of law: it must designate nature as a field of differences (variety); it must indicate that we are at risk of losing this diversity if we do not find better ways to govern it; and it must speak to a spatial sensibility about life on a planetary scale. A planetary scale! What kind of spatial sensibility is this?
