Celebrating Biodiversity

Vincent J. Curtis

23 May 2019


Celebrating biodiversity is metaphysically weird.  It’s like having a bag of mixed nuts and celebrating not the nuts but a mixture per se.

Or like being in a forest and celebrating neither the forest nor the trees but a mixture.

Diversity is a quality, not a substance.  Diversity exists in something else.  We don’t often celebrate the color blue per se or bigness per se.  Even if we celebrate a big, blue object, we are celebrating its beauty, not blueness or bigness per se, though they may contribute to the overall beauty of the object.

Sophisticated sounding words sometimes betray an underlying lack of sophistication.

What they seem to be happy about is a sign of health.  But what it is in diversity constitutes health is open to debate, and rather than debate what they mean by health in the thing they have in mind, the apparent sophisticates claim to celebrate an obscure quality that is so abstract it is hard to imagine.  That makes them look smarter than you.
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