ABSTRACT
One of the attractions of the concept of biodiversity in environmental policy making is that it has the authority of science behind it. Biologists and ecologists are given the task of measuring biodiversity and developing plans to prevent its loss. At the same time concerns over the loss of biodiversity can register more widely held environmental concerns about the increasing destruction of particular habitats such as rainforests, and the threats to, and actual loss of, many biological species. At a more everyday level it can register people’s concerns about changes in their familiar worlds and landscapes. Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring captures in its very title one expression of such concerns. In the UK, the disappearance of familiar features of the landscape – the red squirrel, the dragonfly and the local pond in which it was found, the skylark and the sound of its song, the local copse, the flower meadows, the hedgerow – all matter to people’s everyday environmental concerns.
