Why to conserve Diversity

The case for conserving biodiversity can be grouped into three broad kinds of reason.

Narrowly utilitarian reasons recognise that humans have drawn material benefit from biodiversity since time immemorial -- resources for basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter, industrial raw materials such as resins, tannins and perfume bases, aesthetic materials for ornaments and artefacts, and medicinal use of plants and animals, which alone accounts for about 25% of the global medicine market. Roughly 25,000 species are used as traditional medicines by tribal communities worldwide, and many more remain to be explored for their medicinal potential -- a search now formalised as bioprospecting, the systematic search for new, commercially or scientifically valuable chemical compounds, genes and organisms drawn from nature. …