by Fred Powledge

About the author: Fred Powledge is an agricultural research consultant and a writer specializing in environmental and agricultural issues.

More than 11 years ago [in 1986], a group of prominent scientists gathered in Washington, DC, to report on a new way of looking at the planet and the people who use it. The staff of the National Research Council, which cosponsored the conference with the Smithsonian Institution, came up with a new term to describe the subject of the inquiry: biodiversity.

The word (spelled Bio Diversity and sometimes BioDiversity in documents at the time), was short for “biological diversity,” nine syllables that refer, in the words of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson, to the “variation in the entirety of life on the planet.”

The conferees at...