Nature - autonomous learning

strange natures 39Box 1.8 THE INVENTION OF BIODIVERSITYThe loss of biodiversity is currently a major environmental issueworldwide. It’s estimated that humanity has discovered only a fractionof the naturally occurring species and habitats that exist onearth. At the same time, it’s believed that many of these unknownspecies and habitats are being irretrievably destroyed by urbanisation,land clearance, agriculture, logging and road construction (toname but a few). What is biodiversity? According to conservationbiologists, it describes the number and variety of plant, animal,insect and microbial species, as well as (at the subspecies scale)the number and variety of genetic traits and (at the supraspeciesscale) the number and variety of habitats and ecosystems. Tropicalcountries, like Cameroon, are among the most biodiverse places onearth, while cold and dry countries are much less biodiverse.Countless books have been written about biodiversity, and biologists,agronomists, plant scientists, forest managers, geographersand environmental scientists are just a few of the professionalresearchers who take a keen interest in it. Biodiversity seemsundeniably real and the current loss of biodiversity seems equallyundeniable if one believes commentators like Norman Myers(author of the famous book The Sinking Ark, 1979). Indeed, if itweren’t the case the United Nations would not, presumably, havecoordinated efforts to create the global Convention on Biodiversityduring the 1990s. Today this Convention has more than 100signatory-countries from around the world translating its principlesinto national law.Despite this, the American social scientist John Takacs (1996)has argued that biodiversity is an invention. Takacs’s historicalanalysis shows three important things. First, he reminds us thatthe term ‘biodiversity’ did not enjoy common currency untilrelatively recently, entering the public domain only in the late 1980s.Second, he demonstrates that biodiversity has only become a wellrecognisedterm because of the intensive efforts of a small numberof conservation biologists with real concerns about the loss of