HOW WE MAKE SENSE OF (WHAT WE CALL) NATURE - Making Sense of Nature - page 20

US National Research Council. The word first appeared in a publication in
1988 when Harvard University entomologist E. O. Wilson used it as the
title of the proceedings of that meeting. 13 By November of that year, the
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) convened the Ad Hoc
Working Group of Experts on Biological Diversity. Its work fed directly into
the first UN 'Earth Summit' held in Rio in 1992, where national govern-
ments signed up to a global Convention on Biological Diversity geared to
conservation and enhancement. That Convention has legal force and, at the
time of writing, most countries worldwide are signatories.
This is not the place to explore how, in the space of a few short years, a
little-known word became commonplace in a wide variety of debates and
arenas worldwide. What interests me is how the meaning of 'biodiversity',
notwithstanding the term's relative youth and apparent novelty, is closely
linked to the meaning of the much older term 'nature'. Biodiversity is a
holistic concept: it encourages us to regard life's variations, not so much as
a set of discrete differences between 'natural kinds', but as a set of relation-
ally produced differences emergent from species interaction. Ralph Waldo
Emerson once called this 'the unity in variety

...

that meets us everywhere'
(1836/2005: 29). We're enjoined to focus on 'external nature' as a com-
plex system - be it 'wild' or 'anthropogenic' biodiversity we're considering.
Diversity is taken to be an intrinsic aspect of living nature, especially evi-
dent in those so-called 'biodiversity hotspots' found mostly in the tropics
and subtropics. Thus, the idea of biodiversity trades on the venerable idea
of nature as an object (or other) existing 'out there', and on the idea that it pos-
sesses certain innate qualities that are definitive of its character - so much so
that they require active protection. Modern humanity is positioned as a threat
to and custodian of biodiversity, at once a destroyer and potential saviour. 14

THE DUALISMS OF WESTERN THOUGHT 1

We've come a fair way in understanding what nature means for us - but
not yet far enough. We've seen that the idea of 'nature' is a tool we use
to make sense of the world and aspects of ourselves. We've identified its
principal meanings and its collateral concepts. And we've established that
they appear in a wide range of debates and discussions. To enrich the analysis
above, we now need to situate nature and its collateral terms in a much wider
semantic field, whose boundaries and contents I'll summarise using the term
discourse . I utilise this word in a deliberately loose and non-technical sense.
According to my Oxford dictionary , discourse is communication between two
or more people, either face-to-face or at a distance. It's both a thing and an
action. We're all creatures of discourse and use a huge repertoire of words
and meanings to affect each other and (through our actions) the world we
inhabit; however, for this use to be more than babble, we have to achieve
semantic consistency over time.