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Book Review
| Saving Nature's Legacy: Origins of the Idea of Biological Diversity. By Timothy J. Farnham. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. xii + 276 pp. Figures, bibliography, and index. Cloth $45.00.
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| The subject and approach of this book are expressed in its subtitle. Farnham examines the intellectual streams that converged in around 1980 to make biodiversity a conservation paradigm. The concept was articulated, notably by science bureaucrat Elliott Norse, to link officials working on problems extending from breeding to forest management and animal protection. Biodiversity transcended utilitarianism by encompassing all forms of life, and it held more scientific power than "nature" because it distinguished three levels—genes, species, and ecosystems. |
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Much of Saving Nature's Legacy surveys the development of Americans' interests in the three types of biodiversity. Farnham first details the shifts from nineteenth-century concern about game as a commodity through the Leopoldian debates over wildlife management to the 1973 Endangered Species Act, which confirmed (albeit without much legislative awareness) the inherent value of every species. In dealing with genetic diversity, Farnham emphasizes the scientific prestige of genetics and then sketches the histories of varietal introductions, breeding, concern over loss of (non-U.S.) land races, and the convergence of scientists, corporations, and governments in the 1970s around seed banks. He also examines population biologists' emphasis on gene pools. His discussion of ecosystem preservation sketches development of that concept around mid-century; it then surveys efforts to preserve natural areas from the creation of the national parks to the emergence of the Nature Conservancy. The information in these chapters is drawn substantially from secondary sources, but original historical research is introduced at relevant points. |
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Farnham's emphases are threefold. He shows that arguments for conservation shifted over time from the narrowly utilitarian to pluralistic invocation of values that included science, aesthetics, recreation, and ethics. Additionally he argues that people increasingly saw linkages among levels of organization and among different values being advocated, thereby making the broad concept of biodiversity gradually more thinkable. Less explicitly, he distinguishes between scientific ideas as conservation sources and resources; biodiversity was not an application of science but rather a science-linked term that enabled numerous bureaucratic and ideological interests to cooperate; the new paradigm then motivated research. |
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This is all good. The book has, however, some of the limitations associated with history written by activist policy scholars. Farnham embraces Norse's metaphor that the development of the concept of biodiversity was like a river, in which drops of water fall, accumulate, and gradually converge to form a single stream. In fact history is the opposite of a river: it is not a system in which structure and outcome are predetermined, but rather an open field where events generate novelty. Farnham's use of the concept of the precursor rhetorically reverses historical causality; more consequentially, his model of history elides significant developments during his critical period. Dividing diversity among genes, species, and ecosystems excluded a level of organization—the individual—that systems biologists long emphasized. And while Farnham notes that prominent biologists questioned whether diversity was a scientifically meaningful concept and whether stability was a value consistent with evolutionary realities, he does not consider the extent and consequences of academic scientists' relative absence from the biodiversity bandwagon. The notable exception was E. O. Wilson. Through his leadership in the National Academy-Smithsonian conference that resulted in Biodiversity (1988), Wilson sloughed off the mixed reputation he had acquired from Sociobiology, spread his wings as America's naturalist, and displayed that Ronald Reagan's Washington supported science and conservation. Such bargains formed the biodiversity consensus. |
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Philip J. Pauly is a history professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. He is the author of Fruits and Plains: The Horticultural Transformation of America (Harvard, 2007). |
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