The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 150

Box 10.5. Changing Lenses to Assess Biodiversity: Ecotourism with a
Hand-Lens in Cape Horn
Fig. 10.5 Ecotourism with a Hand-Lens in the Magellanic sub-Antarctic ecoregion, Chile
(Photos by Adam Wilson)
Today a vast diversity of living beings and human values are invisible,
because they do not have a place in the narrow worldview that governs
global society. The limitations of a worldview -the lenses through which we
view the world- become evident when confronting otherness . As an exam-
ple, global standard biodiversity assessments based on vascular plants had
considered fl oristic diversity of southwestern South America to be poor.
However, long-term botanical fi eldwork in the region disclosed its fl oristic
(continued)