Loss and recovery of diversity in the Anthropocene

Owing to the accelerating forces of globalisation, there is a perceptible reduction in diversity both ecologically and culturally. The simplification of ecosystems through industrial agriculture and infrastructural developments weakens their resilience and drives species to extinction. The dual dominance of the modern state and capitalist market leads to comparable simplifications of cultural worlds, reducing the number of languages used, standardising education and kinship systems, and making us all reliant on a globalised, monetised economy for sustenance. These developments make the living world, including the human world, less flexible and more vulnerable. Humanity has painted itself into a corner and alternative ways of living and relating to other people and species are most called for, but flexibility is being reduced, options are shed, peeled away, forgotten, lost, often unwittingly. In this lecture, a perspective from biosemiotics is proposed as a tool enabling the study of biological and cultural diversity and loss through a shared analytical lens. Rather than painting an unequivocally grim picture of the state of the world, the final part of the lecture explores extant forms of resistance, the emergence of alternatives to homogenisation (and their pitfalls) and suggests a solution. This article arises from a Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthropology delivered on 30 April 2024.