Abstract

After wondering why environmental aestheticians tend to undervalue biodiversity as an indicator of nature’s well-being, I discovered that Philosophy and Science are in a face off regarding biodiversity’s utility. For the most part, philosophers meet science’s confidence regarding biodiversity with skepticism. Rather than get bogged down in technical disagreements between scientists and philosophers over the possibility of measuring and utilizing biodiversity, this paper sidesteps that conflict by turning to the relationship between biodiversity and cultural engagement. By describing: the link between spoken languages and species diversity, the significance of cultural differences, the role of cities and remote communities in encouraging and safeguarding biodiverse habitats, and the heterogeneous nature of difference itself when determining biodiversity; I effectively demonstrate how human beings who value their own culture protect nature, which reveals the most important reason to value biodiversity. Biodiversity may be impossible to track, extremely difficult to measure, and shares no correlation with stability, yet no other yardstick indicates cultural proliferation. This paper surveys three ways in which biodiversity can serve as a bio-indicator for human cultural engagement, just as lichens are bio-indicators for air pollution, ozone depletion, and metal contamination.