Biodiversity in the Information Age

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My 1985 Issues article was among the first to document and assess the problem of biodiversity in the context of public policy. It was intended to bring the extinction crisis to the attention of environmental policymakers, whose focus theretofore had been almost entirely on pollution and other problems of the physical environment. Several factors contributed to this disproportion: Physical events are simpler than biological ones, they are easier to measure, and they are more transparently relevant to human health. No senator's spouse, it had been said, ever died of a species extinction.

The mid-1980s saw a steep increase in awareness concerning the living environment. In 1986, the National Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian Institution cosponsored a major conference on biodiversity, assembling for the first time the scores of specialists representing the wide range of disciplines, from systematics and ecology to agriculture and forestry, that needed to merge their expertise in basic and applied research to address the …