Environmental political theory critically engages core environmental concepts, such as nature, sustainability, wilderness, place, and biodiversity. Such critique addresses the rigor or contestability of key environmental concepts, whether these concepts advance or actually undermine prospects for a greener society, and how these concepts reinforce or conflict with political values like racial and gender equality, justice, rights, and democracy. Theorists often elicit unfulfilled promise in the very terms or concepts they interrogate.

The concept of biodiversity is the subject of Rafi Youatt’s sympathetic critique in Counting Species. Youatt analyzes biodiversity discourse as it has evolved since the 1980s. Though partly a scientific, biodiversity is also a political concept that reflects contending ideological perspectives. the author does a terrific job unpacking how the term has been deployed and how its meaning has evolved. He also aims to explore “some of the lost potentials of biodiversity to act as a more fundamental and radical political critique of contemporary relations between humans and nature” (p. 4). Here, I think he falls short; regarding how a better biodiversity politics would look, he ends up in somewhat vague theoretical territory and shortchanges the promise of urban biodiversity. The richness of his critique left me seeking a correspondingly insightful prescriptive dimension.

Youatt details four overlapping phases of biodiversity discourse. The first, spanning the late 1980s and early 1990s, focused on the intrinsic value of nonhuman life and on species as the object of biodiversity protection (pp. 25–45). The second was the push during the 1990s for a biodiversity census of the Earth’s species (pp. 47–64). The third phase involved a debate in the 1980s to 2000s surrounding UNESCO World Heritage sites and whether they should be classified as either natural or cultural, as a combination of both, or under some new hybridized category (pp. 65–100). The fourth phase, covering the first two decades of this century, involves a focus on biodiversity’s benefits to human beings and on efforts at biodiversity by design through enhanced urban biodiversity and rewilding of large swaths of the landscape (pp. 101–26).

Youatt shows how biodiversity discourse has evolved, but he also reveals key recurring themes: the contested, socially constructed character of concepts like biodiversity and species; the ways in which biodiversity discourse draws upon but ultimately problematizes the nature/cultural divide; the tension between seeing biodiversity in terms of abstract and often reductionist categories like species and seeing it in more concrete and holistic terms involving relationships among human beings, nonhuman organisms, and abiotic entities like rock formations; a tendency to overlook the global social and economic inequities bound up with biodiversity politics; and the privileging of top-down, antipolitical managerialism in biodiversity policy and how the agency of human beings, nonhuman organisms, and even abiotic entities ultimately resist such efforts at administrative control. Looming over all this is the failure of biodiversity discourse to stem our headlong rush into what may be the sixth major extinction in Earth’s history. This failure is reflected in an overall shift in the focus of biodiversity discourse. Whereas this discourse originally emphasized the intrinsic value of nature and nonhuman life, it “has become recast along axes that are now directly more connected to its utility to humans than ever before” (p. 102). And, “in this shift, biodiversity itself has become reconfigured and … downsized” (p. 102), perhaps out of sheer resignation. Although readers unfamiliar with Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, and Judith Butler may find the theory a bit challenging in spots, the insights Youatt gleans from his critical history of biodiversity make this book absolutely worthwhile for students of biodiversity conservation and environmental politics and theory more generally.

My main criticisms concern the last two chapters. The first is the chapter on urban biodiversity and rewilding. “Urban biodiversity” refers to the diversity of wild species and wild places within urban areas, as well as efforts to enhance such diversity and more generally foster greener, sustainable cities. Youatt sees promise in the concept of urban biodiversity; it “tries to bring nonhuman life closer, forcing us to confront the nature in which we live and the array of human and nonhuman life that makes up urban landscapes,” and it “can be a transformative category of practice that permits a politics across species lines” (p. 114). At the same time, he rightly argues that focusing on urban biodiversity can lead us to overlook the nature that urbanization has displaced and also overlook the larger extinction crisis. However, he perhaps overstates the degree to which urban biodiversity discourse promotes this disregard (p. 115). He might have considered the regionalist literature that shows how urban biodiversity can be one part of a larger fabric of mutually sustaining landscapes, ranging from the wild to the built. He also overlooks the degree to which urban biodiversity can complement and reinforce rewilding, a movement to which he seems much more sympathetic, and also the ways in which urban biodiversity can bridge the nature/culture divide and promote the concept of biocultural diversity, which he discusses in his chapter on World Heritage sites. Relatedly, the author might have also engaged the concept of place, which unites cultural and natural elements and provides the sort of concrete and holistic focus of preservation that he finds wanting in biodiversity discourse.

Youatt also notes that urban biodiversity has been deployed in a discourse of climate change adaptation and postdisaster resilience and security that privileges antipolitical managerial planning over democratic governance and ignores inequities in disaster vulnerability among different urban populations (pp. 110–13). Here, he goes too far in characterizing urban biodiversity as involving a “top-down, design-heavy form of control” (p. 121). He tends to conflate the politics of the Transition Town movement, which in fact has strong grassroots democratic elements, with this top-down approach (p. 111), and he overlooks the role of environmental justice activists in pursuing democratic approaches to greener, ecologically resilient, cities.

The final chapter, in which Youatt envisions a future biodiversity politics, is obscured by underspecified theoretical concepts and short on substantive prescriptions. He urges a rewilding program that is “three-legged: personal, ecological, and political” (p. 135). In terms of the ecological leg, he calls for large-scale rewilding projects (p. 136). Relatedly, he suggests “an ecological politics of biodiversity based on communities” (p. 136). He notes that communities are “a functioning ecological unit, and hold the advantage of being localized and identified as actual, materialized living beings, relating to one another” (pp. 136–37). But what sort of ecological communities? Would these be only ecologically or also culturally defined? This is left highly unspecified. Again, he might have enlisted useful concepts such as place and regionalism here.

Also underspecified is the political “third leg of rewilding,” what the author calls “the occasional, but regular and passionate, engagement in politics aimed at extending the personal and the ecological into new political structures and categories of practice.” This “is more likely to mean taking up and reworking explicitly political categories, such as rights, sovereignty, justice, equality, and security, and thinking them through interspecies lenses” (p. 137). But, again, what might this mean in practice for biodiversity and addressing the extinction crisis?

Most problematic perhaps is the personal leg of rewilding. Even as he criticizes the antipolitical turn of biodiversity discourse, Youatt emphasizes a kind of self-fashioning in which “individuals … remake themselves through encounters with nonhuman nature that exceeds human design” and are “only occasionally engaged with politics” (p. 126). Again, the reader is left wondering what this entails concretely and whether it would encourage a personal withdrawal from the very serious collective political challenge posed by the sixth extinction. In the end, Youatt may be replicating the failure, which he so aptly criticizes, of biodiversity advocates to offer a more concrete account of biodiversity and its protection. Ultimately, his otherwise excellent Counting Species leaves one wanting more in terms of a practical, prescriptive complement to his invaluable critique.