Recent columns have argued that science and technology, especially in the environmental fields, have become necessarily and unalterably normative, and that nothing less than a fundamental re-imagining of the Enlightenment is required if humanity is to respond ethically and rationally to the challenges of the Anthropocene. It might help ground this discussion, then, to return to one of the more fundamental issues of concern to many environmentalists from the perspective of science as normative discourse: the "biodiversity crisis." A previous column noted that what appears to be an extinction crisis if only evolutionary biodiversity is considered, may in fact simply be a cusp as the source of biodiversity shifts from natural evolution to human design, and that reductions in information content in biological systems resulting from extinctions of evolved life forms may be balanced by creation of new information content as new bioengineered life forms are designed and commercialized.

Whether this dynamic is indeed at work is obviously in part a very complicated factual question. But it is more than that: it is a cultural and a political power question as well. In this regard, perhaps the most interesting question is: what group gets to define the cultural construct of biodiversity, and why does it matter? As it turns out, it matters a lot: the community that controls the definition controls social perception of the phenomenon, with significant distributional implications.

To begin with, it is apparent that "biodiversity" is not a factual observation, but a cultural construction. One way to construct it is by considering only biodiversity that arises from evolutionary processes, in which case loss of "traditional" species equates to loss of biodiversity. Alternatively, one can consider only designed biodiversity, in which case gains in constructed forms of life, such as GMOs or engineered bacteria constitute gains in biodiversity. Or one could consider overall information content of biological systems of all sorts as biodiversity, in which case no one knows whether it's increasing or decreasing.

What community gets rights to define the cultural construct of biodiversity matters because the definition of the term in large part bounds public perceptions, and thus potential policy responses. Biodiversity traditionally has been defined by the conservation biology community, which by self-selection, focus and training has a strong incentive to perceive losses in evolutionary biodiversity, and little experience or interest in understanding designed biodiversity at all, except perhaps as it overlaps "natural" systems (a major reason for this is that designed biodiversity tends to be found in industrial and agricultural systems, as opposed to "natural" environments). This definition accordingly is based on the construct of “species” generated by evolved biology, and - given the continued development of the anthropogenic Earth - necessarily implies a “crisis” in biodiversity, requiring in turn strong policy measures to “preserve biodiversity”.

For their part, biodesigners have had little incentive, or disciplinary pressure, to consider issues of biodiversity except defensively (that is, showing that their products will not adversely affect “natural” biological systems). Moreover, no scientific community has an interest at present in understanding biodiversity in the fully integrated sense, including both evolved and designed biological systems. This is primarily because the conservation biology concept of biodiversity is so dominant, but even if there were anyone interested in such a reconstruction of the concept, definitional and measurement issues are daunting. After all, “species” is a convenient measure of biological information content even if it is partial and increasingly misleading, whereas trying to understand the relevant measures of information of constructed biodiversity is quite difficult. The end result is that it is the community that has the authority to construct the concept “biodiversity” simultaneously constructs a “crisis” and, in turn, policy responses to the perceived crisis. In other words, the state of crisis is inherent not (necessarily) in the data, but in the definition of the concept.

This emphasizes the importance of understanding what community lies behind the concepts that drive modern environmental science, and what their constructions, perceptual frameworks, and mental models are. Such communities not only explore facts, but create cultural constructs which reflect far more than facts, and which in turn are reified in the structure of the science and public perception, and thus policy responses. This matters because most cultural constructs change existing distributions of costs and benefits (else, of course, they are not needed); thus, the community that creates such a construct is able to redistribute costs and benefits across society in line with their belief systems.

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Brad Allenby is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, a fellow at the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business, and previously was AT&T's vice president of environment, health, and safety.