But when diversity is constrained, whether by a dam or by the eradication of a top preditor, ecosystems become fragile and unravel. When diversity is suppressed, surprises can become more catastrophic, and novel pathogens are more likely to emerge and spread.
The story is much the same in human contexts – diversity of cultures, languages, ideas, and ways of being is essential for resilience, creativity, innovation and social evolution. Actively unspinning the global tapestry of cultural and ecological diversity robs us of the raw materials for imagining and creating better futures.
Diversity manifests in myriad forms beyond just the number of species present. Within a single species, there can be a vast diversity of behaviours, ecological roles, life history strategies, and even sexual patterns.
Traditions
Salmon, for instance, exhibit an array of adaptations to the unique attributes of their natal rivers. Some populations migrate thousands of miles to the ocean, while others complete their entire life cycle in freshwater.
Some mature rapidly, while others delay reproduction for years. This diversity of life histories makes the salmon populations much more resilient to environmental disturbances.
Humanity also displays an equally breathtaking spectrum of diversity. Across the globe, there are more than 7,000 languages spoken, each encoding a unique way of perceiving, describing, and interacting with the world.
Cultures encompass an incredible range of beliefs, values, traditions, and knowledge systems that shape people’s relationships with each other and their environments.
Antifragility
Humans also have great life history diversity, expressed in part through our diversity in gender and sex and sexuality.
Many cultures have long recognised non-binary genders. Even within a single society, human behavioural diversity abounds, from neurotypical to neurodivergent, liberal to conservative, risk-taker to risk-avoider.
Just as diverse species occupy different niches within an ecosystem, this human diversity allows people to bring different perspectives and strengths to the collective project of human thriving.
We can never know which particular expression of diversity, which unique life history or localised practice or bit of ecological knowledge, will be critical during the next crisis or opportunity.
But we can know that the diversity itself is the key to our ability to not just weather the storm during tough times but to grow and evolve through them.
To borrow a term from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, diversity is what gives life its ‘antifragility’: the ability to not just withstand and bounce back from disruption and volatility but to grow and thrive because of them.
Biogeophysical
The more time I spend contemplating it, both as a scientist and a queer man, the more I believe that queerness is the best concept we have for comprehending diversity.
Not queerness in the sense of sexual preference, but queerness as a rebuke of the notion that nature is characterised by simple consistent patterns like male and female or straight and gay.
To acknowledging that nature is queer is to acknowledge that the patterns we might see in, or more accurately impose upon, nature, are averages not rules. These concepts are more of a product of our own limited ability to perceive and understand the nature of the world than they are a characteristic of it.
This leads me to something I think we get quite wrong about diversity: we contrast it with simplicity. But that isn’t quite right: you can find ecosystems around the world that are relatively more or less simple or complex.
The Arctic tundra, for example, have comparatively fewer species than the tropics of the Amazon. But that doesn’t mean that there is something less natural about Arctic ecosystems than Amazonian ones, just that they exist in more or less constraining biogeophysical contexts.
Supremacy
Diversity is a process as much as it is an outcome, an indicator that life if doing what it is meant to be doing within its set biogeophysical constraints. If diversity is what happens when life is encouraged, then the opposite of diversity is supremacy: the outcome of life oppressed.
We oppress salmon when we block from the spawning habitats with dams because we find our own needs more important. We oppress plants and birds and insects with chemical inputs because we believe in the supremacy of our own food needs. We oppress traditional and artisanal foodways and economies because we believe in the supremacy of globalized markets.
In every case, the powerful use oppression to flatten the landscape of what is and what is possible because they believe in the supremacy of a single way of living and being.
The good news is that supremacy is thermodynamically destined to fail because it contradicts the fundamental principles of life. While the current regimes of supremacy and oppression are formidable and deeply entrenched, we must recognise that the more we oppress diversity, the more we undermine our own long-term viability.
Wealth
Our globalized food systems, to stick with the example I know best, have been hollowed out over the decades by modern civilisation’s obsession with the supremacy of one particular way to produce food.
The result? Our food systems are like zombie regimes, not really alive but merely coerced to keep moving by cheap inputs and labor. They are entirely absent any ecological wealth and resilience.
Around the world, communities are working to revive diversity and resilience by re-localising food systems, decentralising governance, and restoring traditional languages and land practices.
Community-supported fisheries, for example, are offering diversified alternatives to industrial seafood supply chains by rebuilding direct, reciprocal relationships between fishers and eaters.
These alternative models cultivate diversity by enabling a broader range of species to be harvested, traditional fishing practices to be revived, and wealth to be more equitably distributed.
Moral
During the COVID-19 pandemic, this diversity proved profoundly valuable, allowing many community-based fisheries to rapidly adapt and keep local food supplies flowing while Industrial fisheries faltered.
There are many battles of great consequence being fought, over everything from education to healthcare to the sovereignty of territory.
They all start to look more similar, more unified, when you see them as boundary skirmishes in a larger, unified war on diversity by those who wish to choose supremacy.
Diversity is not merely an environmental conceit, or matter to be relegated to identity politics, but the central contention of this existential moment.
Standing up for diversity is simultaneously a moral and instrumental imperative. To live through this moment and emerge with a world transformed for the better, we need to have the courage to treat it as such.
This Author
Dr Philip A Loring is global director of human dimensions science, global science at The Nature Conservancy. The views expressed here those of the author and not necessarily those of his employer.
