Biodiversity and Environmental Philosophy

Abstract

This book explores the epistemological and ethical issues at the foundations of environmental philosophy, emphasising the conservation of biodiversity. Sahota Sarkar criticises attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature and defends an anthropocentric position on biodiversity conservation based on an untraditional concept of transformative value. Unlike other studies in the field of environmental philosophy, this book is as much concerned with epistemological issues as with environmental ethics. It covers a broad range of topics, including problems of explanation and prediction in traditional ecology and how individual-based models and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology is transforming ecology. Introducing a brief history of conservation biology, Sarkar analyses the consensus framework for conservation planning through adaptive management. He concludes with a discussion of directions for theoretical research in conservation biology and environmental philosophy.

Systematic Conservation Planning: an Updated Protocol

“…Subsequently, in an important contribution, Cowling & Pressey (2003) noted that the identification of appropriate stakeholders should be regarded as a distinct component. Sarkar (2004Sarkar ( , 2005 introduced (Justus & Sarkar 2002, Pressey 2002 and became a major research component within conservation biology; it was one of the features that distinguished that newly-emerging field from traditional ecology (Sarkar 2004). …”

A review of applications of the six-step method of systematic conservation planning

“…Based on these early concepts, Margules and Pressey (2000) outlined six key steps for SCP (Table 1). These were later expanded upon by others to provide details on the step of goal setting (Step 2;Tear et al 2005) and to refine and expand the other steps (Gaston et al 2002, Sarkar 2005, Wilson et al 2005, Pressey and Bottrill 2009, Sarkar and Illoldi-Rangel 2010.The literature on SCP has proliferated in the past two decades (see Fig. 1 in Kukkala and Moilanen 2013).…”

Microbial diversity and the “lower-limit” problem of biodiversity

“…This is very much so in many related philosophy of science texts that have elaborated on the concept of biodiversity (e.g. Oksanen and Pietarinen 2004;Sarkar 2005;MacLaurin and Sterelny 2008) 2 . This situation may be due to the salience of specific conservation issues in the 1980s-1990s and to the prominence of ecologists -and not microbiologists -in this debate (e.g.…”

“…One of the likely reasons why the term "biodiversity" was put under the spotlight in the 1980s, and came to replace the expression "ecological diversity", is that research on ecological diversity at that time appeared to be stuck in a dead-end. This situation came about because ecological diversity studies were incapable of accounting for the relationship between the diversity of species and the stability of ecosystems, from both theoretical and empirical standpoints (Sarkar 2005) 1 . Furthermore, specific conservation issues became much more pressing in the 1980s, thereby requiring less abstracted debate and more applied solutions.…”