122 Historical Awareness of Biodiversity paramount value of species diversity (Kohm, 1991) Recognizing that species of fish, wildlife, and plants have been so depleted in numbers that they are in danger of or threatened with extinction and that these forms of life are of esthetic, ecological, educational, historical, recreational, and scientific value to the Nation and its people the ESA commits the nation to preserving these species for current and future generations While limiting its focus to species, and whittled down from its original ambitions by insufficient budgeting, cautious administrative bureaucrats, and restrictive judicial interpretations, the ESA remains one of the most powerful allies biodiversity has ever had Still, biologists were frustrated that efforts to protect diversity were not keeping pace with the furious rate of destruction Walter G Rosen, a biologist and senior program officer at the National Research Council (which advises the National Academy of Sciences (NAS)), brought together prominent scientists from the NAS with the clout of the Smithsonian Institution to host the National Forum on BioDiversity in 1986 At the National Forum, biologists and others concerned about imperiled diversity staged a consciousness-raising event that sought, and received, widespread attention from the public Rosen coined the neologism ‘‘biodiversity’’ for the event as a convenient shorthand, a buzzword that would at once encapsulate biologists’ understanding of a chaotic, diminishing natural world, and would raise public awareness about threats to the natural world (Takacs, 1996) In BioDiversity (Wilson, 1988), the collection of essays that chronicled the National Forum, Paul Ehrlich, Daniel Janzen, Tom Cade, Lester Brown, Michael Soule´, and other scientists declared the need to rouse public attention on behalf of biodiversity and exhorted their colleagues to adopt that mission As biologists promote the term and the complex worldview it represents, ‘‘biodiversity’’ has become a widespread conservation buzzword Biologists write about it in scientific and popular presses, both exploring its complexity and advocating its protection Environmental groups focus on it in fundraising efforts; conferences convened in its name occur regularly Laypersons have joined biologists in attempting to shape the planet’s physical, political, and normative environments to make more room for biodiversity Problems with Other Foci of Conservation Efforts Why has ‘‘biodiversity’’ gained prominence as a conservation buzzword, and why have biologists speaking on its behalf had some success in shaping public opinion about threats to the natural world? Various scholars (Cronon, 1995; Evernden, 1992; Williams, 1980) note that nature is so all-encompassing that what one attributes to it may say more about the speaker than it does about the natural world Previous attempts to preserve ‘‘nature’’ or ‘‘wilderness’’ are too vaguely defined or deemed elitist in some quarters For example, Guha (1989) sees traditional advocacy for nature or wilderness preservation as setting the aesthetic desires of the rich against the needs of the poor who need land to survive Guha’s critique has, to some extent, been incorporated into the biodiversity preservation discourse For example, as people came to appreciate the value of cultural diversity, they might also see diversity in all its forms as a normative good, particularly when efforts to preserve both may be mutually reinforcing (Nabhan, 1997) A document prepared for the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development notes that cultural diversity is closely linked to biodiversity Humanity’s collective knowledge of biodiversity and its use and management rests in cultural diversity; conversely, conserving biodiversity often helps strengthen cultural integrity and values (Reid et al., 1992, p 23) Prior to the advent of biodiversity, the most effective conservation efforts in the US focused on endangered species Biologists’ foci changed because biodiversity represents a more sophisticated ecological worldview, and a more sophisticated view of what biologists want preserved and how they want it preserved Biologists promoting biodiversity conservation also seek to circumvent certain problems arising from efforts to preserve endangered species Even though human activities accelerate the rate of species extinction, some opponents of conservation argue that species extinction is a natural process that we should let proceed Biologists have difficulties defining with precision what constitutes a species (or a subspecies, like the Northern Spotted Owl) in the first place We are not aware of the economic or ecological benefits some individual species confer, so it is difficult to argue for their conservation in some circles Many of the insects, bacteria, plants, and other members of what Wilson (1987) calls ‘‘the little things that run the world’’ remain unidentified and unloved; invertebrates comprise only a tiny percentage of organisms protected by the US ESA Land set aside to protect individual endangered species may prove insufficient if global warming induces species migration (Peters and Lovejoy, 1992) When we focus on species diversity, we sometimes ignore genic, population, community, or ecosystem diversity Endangered species conservation proves to be nearly impossible in poorly explored areas, in oceans, and in nations without species checklists Focus on species that are endangered can be a last minute emergency effort to save species that may no longer be playing functional ecological roles, and this strategy may be inferior to proactive efforts to preserve healthy populations in healthy ecosystems Finally, some view the US ESA as a mixed blessing: its unyielding allegiance to species on the verge of extinction is also a political lighting rod that leaves little room for compromise and has set many citizens against conservation efforts (Mann and Plummer, 1995) What is ‘‘Biodiversity’’? Elsewhere in this encyclopedia, one may read about definitions of biodiversity In the research conducted by the author (Takacs, 1996), prominent biologists were asked to define the term ‘‘biodiversity.’’ Little, if anything, in the natural world is