Layers of biodiversity and a heuristic to everyday conservation

This generative philosophical examination lays out the concept of a biodiversity heuristic (mental simplification that is scientifically unprecise yet works well for guiding practical actions), discusses its value for everyday conservation, and proposes a heuristic for 'everyday conservation', that is, more inclusive biodiversity conservation that is comprehensible and meaningful to diverse actors in various contextual settings. In particular, this work aims to reconceptualize or reframe biodiversity and related notions in a way that is more suitable for capturing the everyday biodiversity actions and ‘everyday conservationism’ especially in environments that are cohabited by both humans and nonhumans. The purpose is not to replace environmental scientific vocabulary or research framings but to discuss how complex ecological concepts fit better into everyday realities when they are translated into heuristics. The first part of the presentation focuses on the mapping of the different layers of biodiversity. Here, I provide the outlook synthesis of how the basic ecological meanings of biodiversity are placed onto different layers of spatial scales, and I place them alongside the notion(s) of biocultural diversity, which forms an additional layer of biodiversity. After presenting the mapping, the presentation focuses on the idea of ‘a heuristic to biodiversity conservation’ which, it is argued, is present both in conservation-minded professional communities, such as biodiversity-benign farmers, and in many non-Western communities and their conceptions of reciprocally respectful nature relations. I will make the argument that while heuristics often emerge pragmatically and contradict with philosophical ideals of precision, it would be a very worthwhile project for philosophers to help communities constitute new heuristics that help make sense of complex and wicked problems such as biodiversity crisis. I illustrate the point by translating selected layer-points into a heuristic that provide applicable conceptualizations and imaginaries for the ‘everyday conservation’ of biodiversity, from farmland cohabitability to tree diversity in urban spaces and dietary diversity on our plates.