Biodiversity loss may portend the next mass extinction, but what is biodiversity? Euro-American concepts of biodiversity have become a category of policy and politics at local, regional, national, and international levels. This course will track the development of these concepts from the 18th century to the present, paying special attention to the growth of natural history collections to document taxonomy, evolution, biogeography and ecology of species. How does the idea of living variation in genes, traits, species, and ecosystems relate to human and non-human beings? |