Paper short abstract:

This paper considers the value of exploring biological, cultural, linguistic and ecological diversity conservation practices in comparative perspective.

Paper long abstract:

We are currently in the mid point of what the United Nations has named 'the Biodiversity Decade' (2011-2020). And yet, even though it has come to dominate the ways in which we understand, value and care for the 'natural' world, 'biodiversity' as a concept is relatively young, only emerging as a specified conservation target during the 1970s and 1980s. In this paper we explore the concept in comparative perspective with a range of other transactional realities of the 'endangerment sensibility' (Vidal and Dias 2015), each of which is concerned with the conservation of specific forms of categorical diversity which have similarly focussed the work of conservation agencies worldwide, and which have emerged and coalesced over the same period. In doing, so we draw on our work with the Svalbard Global Seedbank, Kew Gardens, Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Preservation Progamme, the Frozen Ark project and International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as a component of the large collaborative interdisciplinary research project "Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage", to show how this and adjacent transactional realities are enacted though specific techniques, technologies and 'worlding' (c.f. Barad 2007) or 'heritagizing' practices, and consider the potential for a comparative ethnology of heritage and diversity conservation practices globally.