Diversity (2003)

Abstract

B y all credible accounts the diversity of species is in sharp decline, headed toward what Richard Leakey and Robert Lewin (1995) call “the sixth extinction.” The causes of species decline include population growth, economic expansion, pollution, climate change, mining, logging, urban sprawl, overfishing, and the displacement of indigenous peoples. The legal and administrative protections placed between endangered species and eternity work, at best, in a limited fashion for a time. Our successes in preservation, as David Brower once noted, are temporary while our failures are permanent. But the problem is not limited to the decline of biological diversity Many of the same forces that erode biological diversity jeopardize diversity of all kinds, including that of languages and culture. The modern world, it seems, is at war with difference even while professing devotion to it.