Biodiversity
— Jamieson, Companion to Environmental Philosophy 2001

"Biodiversity," in Dale Jamieson, ed., A Companion to Environmental Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), pp. 402-415.
Online at: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/234882

Whether humans have duties to endangered species is a significant theoretical and an urgent practical question. Initially, the focus was on endangered species, which are still central, but in recent years attention has widened to other levels of biodiversity, such as types of ecosystems at a regional level, or genetic diversity at the microbiological level. The rationale for saving species may be anthropocentric, and/or naturalistic, sometimes said to be biocentric. One rationale is that nature is a kind of wonderland.