Biodiveristy – a service for humans or a right of every species and nature in itself?

Sammanfattning

Within the topic of sustainable development, the loss of biodiversity is one of the most urgent global challenges of our time. We are in the midst of our planet’s sixth mass extinction, caused by human activity, where we constantly lose more and more species. This led me to wonder how we as humans view this issue and which aspects lies behind how we choose to work for biodiversity. The objective of this study is therefore to identify different views on nature and to study the correlation between these views and how the problem of biodiversity loss is represented in the work for biodiversity. The research questions that led this investigation have been the following: What different views on nature can be found in actors within environmental work for biodiversity? and What correlations can be found between the actors’ view on nature and how they present their work for biodiversity? To investigate these questions, a mix of semi-structured interviews and text/policy analysis have been used to get a broad perspective of the actors. Five actors in the form of organizations and agencies have been invesitgated, all within the field of working with biodiversity. To analyze the gathered information, three theoretical frameworks have been used to shine the light on different aspects of view on nature. These three are: environmental ethics, nature-culture dualism and Hillevi Helmfrid’s categorizations. In the analysis, multiple views on nature connected to the collected material from the organizations and agencies were detected. Even if some of the actors clearly were tilted towards certain views, it became clear that views on nature often contains contradictions and that it’s not easy to categorize a whole establishment within a single view on nature. The correlation between view on nature and work for biodiversity showed to be complex and was not always predictable.