CSTS

Biodiversity and Globalization

It's amazing the language that gets used around so-called invasive species.  New Jersey refers to the 'alien invaders' amongst us where California talks about "Zebra Mussel Outlaws".  In the days since 9/11 a fair amount of the protecting the homeland talk has been taken up by environmenalists.  We don't want these foregn agents coming into our country and wreaking untold havoc, now do we.  It's a long way from the heady days of the nineteenth century where there were societies to turn parts of the United States into bucolic England - one such had the goal of importing and nurturing every plant mentioned in Shakespeare. 

It's an odd term, 'invasive species'.  Sort of reminds me of the (circum)locutions folks indulge in when they talk about the 'homosexual community'' - it sounds like a reasonable term till you try to imagine its other - the non-invasive species, or the 'heterosexual community'.  The unmarked categories (native species, heterosexuals) are not, so the rhetoric goes, a single unit - they are doing just what they should be doing until the outsider comes along to threaten them.  Let's stay with the species, since I don't want to strain the analogy.  It's sort of in the nature of species to be invasive.  Never met a good species that wasn't.  Certainly not our own - we are invaders par excellence - living in a wider set of environments than most other entities on earth.  We bring our invaders with us (cats, for example, are a major source of biodiversity loss in Australia - since the marsupials there did not have natural predators in the available trophic slot).  We have invaded many landscapes with our wheat, corn and soy.  We have ourselves internally been invaded countless times, and are the better for it - infants who don't get a good dose of their mother's bacterial colonies in the birth process at are a signficant health disadvantage.  Bring a species to a new place, and of course it will try to survive.

And then there's the problem of what the natural environment is.  Take the midwest of the US - that part of it which I know well (the "I" states - Iowa, Illinois, Indiana) live in the rainshadow of the recently created Rocky Mountains.  The prairie landscapes which have developed there are still basically in their early stages - there are few or no 'native' species - everything is an invader.  Further, when restorationists try to preserve the ancient prairie, they tend to preserve to a period when the Native Americans were practicing fire management of the landscape - were already changing it significantly.  So in principle preserving the prairies becomes a somewhat tortuous question of preserving what might have been had there not been two waves of human invasion.  I'm a little unclear on why precisely this is worth doing.

I live in the redwood forests.  Second growth - billions of metric feet got shipped out, built with, used to fire kilns and so forth till the slaughter stopped.  In the troubled area I live in the invasive madrones have come into the environmentally disturbed area and have clawed out a foothold.  They tend to get pretty good press.  The poor old French broom doens't (isn't it nice when you can associate nationalities to epidemics - just like the Spanish flu?) - many of my friends pull these out of the ground whernever they see them with nary a qualm at the destruction they are causing.

So we arrive at the point where I am generally asked if I'm being just deliberately hornery or whether I have something to say.  Surely no-one wants lantana or cane toads in Austrlia, French broom in Calironia, and zebra mussels coursing through our waters.  Well I guess not - it does sadden me to see any species die, and if one species is doing a lot of killing in new territory (excepting ourselves I guess) then there's arguments for eradication.  However, if we are trully living in one world right now, and are trully travelling as much as we seem to want (as a species) to then I don't think that people jumping up to see if there's any insects in the undercarriages of jets in Hawai'i is really going to do much for the very long term.  It's like the British obsession of stopping the 'spread' of rabies - millions of dollars spent keeping a pretty harmless disease (when is the last human vicitim you can think of - and it's endemic in Europe) out of the United Kingdom  - united against invasion. 

We need to recast the debate - and as with so many issues in our technoscientific world - we can use a similar argument for humans and for non-humans.  Creating Maginot lines, massive wallls against Mexican immigrants or between the Palistineans and the Israelis is bound to be a failed endeavour, as well as being wrong-headed.  Maintaining purity is a massive amount of work and all historical examples show is that it always fails.  ("Beware of purity it is the vitriol of the soul" as Tournier's Robinson Crusoe says).  There's a wonderful book by Arthur Waldrup called The Great Wall of China: from History to Myth, where he shows that the Wall, stood at a site of great exchange - often the nomadic hordes invaded through it, became sinicized, and then sat around (became sedentary) for several generations till the next invasion through the Wall.  Similarly with nature.  If we insist on deploying the communications technology we do (and I'm personally looking forward to a day with less planes, but more airships, since I do love to travel) then we should accept other species as our fellow-travellers.  If we don't get so het up about invasion, we may get some really unfortunate things happen along the way (loss of some great species) but we will be acting much more naturally.   

The biodiversity debate which isn't happening in this country needs to be careful not to get caught up in cheap and easy rhetoric borrowed from myths of racial purity and crazed aliens.  We need to be, socially and naturally, cosmopolitan.

Geof Bowker

Famine and the Evidence of Experience

I'll get to famine in a few minutes - I'm not quite up to writing about it yet, though the picture here is a token that I will.   

What got me into this post was a realization that two things I deeply hold to be true don't quite sit well together.  And this struck me as an issue coz I was sitting in Bookshop Santa Cruz the other night hearing Donna Haraway reading from her latest book - When Species Meet.  The book is a wonderful exploration of how we live with other creatures - inside us, around us, between us... .    Toward the end of the talk, Donna gave a great recipe for 'creative indigestion'.  The idea here is that rather than try to reconcile all of our conflicting beliefs, passions and philosophies, we should recognize the ineluctability of irreconcilability.  We shouldn't try to conjure the world around us according to any one true right or only way - we should accept contradictions within us and between ourselves and others. Thus she - bravely in front of the standard Santa Cruz audience of underaged, aging and ageless hippies - spoke movingly of her practice of eating meat, while attacking the 'meat-industrial complex'; of raising purebred dogs while living in a world where's more than enough mutts in the world being put down on a daily basis.  The creative indigestion is in the 'both/and' as opposed to the 'either/or'.  (I do recognize the irony of talking about indigestion in a strip alongside such an incredibly powerful image).

So what I was thinking about was my deeply held beliefs that experience doesn't matter and that it does.  The former is somewhat the harder case to make, so I'll start with that (leaving the procrastination for later, when I have time :-)).  There's a great article by Joan Scott called The Evidence of Experience which I commend to you all.  It starts off describing Samuel Delany's autobiographical account of being gay in San Francisco as a youth - the high times of Height Ashbury and prodigal sexuality.  She uses this as a way into discussing the refrain from many particpants in the world's events: "I was there and so I know what really happened", too often intoned contrpanutally with "You have no right to talk about that time - you weren't there, you don't know what it was like".  Scott's is an incredibly clear statement of why 'being there' is not a priveliged position - indeed it is one that has significant disadvantages.  Think of all those people who tell us what the Sixties were like.  A time of discovery, of love, of hope, of change.  Well yes, I had my moments of that.  But those of us who thought that was the Sixties are a very narrow group of people.  I remember one of the things we used to construct the sixties in our collective heads was to demonize the fifties as conservative, naive, happy families time - Dick van Dyke getting his martini from Laura and the two retiring to separate single beds in the evening....  Now there was just as much a rich radical counterculture in the fifties - we just tended to deny it.  And there sure was an incredibly powerful conservative culture in the sixties, if you stopped listening to those nattering nabobs of negativism for long enough.  Experience itself is always partial, biased, myopic.  Now experience intertwined with distance from events - that's something which can give a truly rich understanding of the past.  And you don't even need the experience to get the rich understanding.

Which brings me to famine, and the other belief I hold.  Jericho Burg at UCSD is just finishing a superb thesis on Famine Early Warning systems in Ethiopia.  She traces in part how the evidence of experience (people reporting their own difficulty getting food, their own hunger, and reporting on crop failure) is not really to be trusted as far as the international aid community goes.  We all know, the sages say, the politics of this - locals (what a horrid word) exagerate so that they can get more, or in some political configurations overstate their food supply so that they can get elected.  And these nations are so corrupt.  What we need, the argument goes, is an objective measure.  And lo and behold the eye of God, in the form of an orbiting satellite, can provide this.  The satellite can give an objective measure of ground cover (so much vegetaton, which an algorithm can turn into so many calories per capita), as well as an objective forecast of next year's crops.  No matter that vegetation cover can be noxious weed as much as foodcrop - here is a meaure that we can finally trust, and which we can use to unlock the coffers of the global north.

So part of me says never accept the evidence of experinece, and another part of me is outraged that the evidence of experience is being treated so casually.  Jericho's discussion is much richer than this - I am just pointing to it to indicate the contradiction. 

Now is the time that by genre conventions I should be providing a moral.  Sorry.  Happy indigestion one and all.

Ubiquitous Information Gathering

These are strange days for entities in the world.  Never before have they been so surveilled - and all for their own good.  From the furthest reaches of the ocean to the aridest stretches of desert, sensors are recording inormation about us.  Let's stick with humans for the nonce.  My own private homeland of England is arguably the most monitored nation on earth - it's hard to walk down the streets of London town without being picked up on cameras as you dip into Tesco's for a Guardian (that should protect you :-)) or swing into the pub for a half pint of Fuller's ESB.  On the Underground, the only bit of tape that seems to have gone missing in the past few years is the recording of the unfortunate incident of Jean Charles de Menenez, shot for wearing a bulky jacket.

For non-human entities the story is not so different.  In order to understand what's going on with the environment, it seems an unproblematic truth that we need more information about what's going on.  We constantly monitor changes in the ozone layer, ocean currents, clouds, species distribution, forest cover, earthquake distribution, asteroids in near earth orbit and so on ad inf.  The latter is an interesting case - there's a debate going on about how to inform the public about threats (like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs) - since new instrumentation will enable us to pick up many more possible collisions over the next twenty to forty years, and 'we' (being the Western scientists) aren't sure just how much to let the public know about these, since there is a risk of panic.  (On a tangent - they had to change the definition of TB in the 1950s since more sensitive measures were able to pick up sub-clinical cases which fit the then definition; just as we are all in some stages of cancer if we don't filter the findings accordingly - we adjust our information to what the market will bear). 

A basic premise in all this information gathering is that more information is always good.  If only we could monitor everyone all the time (down to seeing through our clothing in the latest aiport security scanners), monitor nature in real time - then somehow our problems would go away.  We'd be able to manage ourselves and our plannet better.  There are sound economic reasons for this - monitoring is a multi-billion dollar business, and feeds and clothes an inordinate number of people.  However, there is a strong sennse in which we are using monitoring as a substitute for thought.

Let me give an example from left field.  In the 1980s, there was a terrific project out of UC Irvine which put the complete body of classical Greek literature onto a CD (no DVDs in those benighted times).  This was called the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae.  How marvelous that was.  No longer was the classical Greek scholar doomed to wander the earth finding every trace of agape (Platonic love) in obscure texts - they could do it with the punch of a button.  A lifetime of travel in a trice.  What joy never to have to see the mountains of Thessaly (and, more seriously, what a cutdown in carbon footprint).  Two issues arose here. First, as Karen Ruhleder wrote, the new omnibus edition froze certain readings of the texts - so that possible variations in the interpretation of a given fragment were rendered even more undiscoverable than before.  Second, and more to the point here, a classical Greek professor I spoke with said that the problem was they were just asking the same darned questions, just getting much quicker responses.

To spell this out.  Monitoring of all sorts is heavily structured - we know what we are looking for and we don't see the 'noise'.  There is a tendency to believe that because we have teraflops of data we have the complete story.  *Every* story is partial, incomplete, imbued with cultural and political values.  That's a good and necessary thing - but the simple fact needs to be recognized if we are to grow as a species.  Second, we really really need to start thinking about new kinds of question to ask.  There is a massive disproportion in the world right now of information gathering with respect to information analysis.  The latter involves sitting back, contemplating, talking, generating new ideas.  But wait - there's no time for that, the latest batch of information just came in. 

Invasive global biotrade disrupts local populations

In 2007, the Light Brown Apple Moth was unexpectedly detected by a retired entomologist in the Berkeley Hills. The LBAM, a native of Australia not previously found in North America, long-feared, had arrived and threatens to become a permanent resident here. This has embroiled the extended Bay Area, the California Department of Food & Agriculture, and the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service of the Federal government in a contentious and emotional conflict. The LBAM is a polyphagous (eats lots of kinds of things, in this case, plants) lepidopteran (the taxonomic order of caterpillars and butterflies) Class A pest, meaning that it is a “clear and present danger” to the state, according to the CDFA. The LBAM is an invasive species that threatens significant economic harm to California’s agricultural industry, not through direct pest damage or pesticide costs. Other countries do not want to be contaminated by LBAMs, and are blocking imports of some California agricultural goods that they fear may be contaminated. The flashpoint of public controversy is the spraying of a synthetic pheromone to disrupt the sexual reproduction of the LBAM. Even though the vast majority of scientists see this technology as the safest approach to controlling the pest, virtually every aspect of CDFA’s eradication program has been challenged by various members of the public. Eradication campaigns reveal the uneasy relationships between science and society, but the global trade promises to exacerbate latent tensions, and erode public trust in all manner of institutions that use the ecological sciences.

The LBAM is an invasive species, which is a relatively new term to describe a species from another part of the world that negatively impacts a new environment (where it invades) by disrupting its ecosystem functions or ecosystem services provided to human society. Biotic invasions, as they are also known, are of increasing concern to environmental scientists, managers and policy makers because the rate of invasive species movement and establishment is increasing correlative with global trade. Certain taxa seem better adapted to hitchhiking through the global trading system, establishing populations in a new environment, and causing various types of harm. The trade in electronic goods poses less of a threat than moving products of the environment (e.g., fresh fruits and vegetables). The international movement of live plants for the horticultural trade has come under greater scrutiny because living plant material is a highly risky pest pathway, and it appears this might have been the way LBAM got here.

In response to years of public distaste for pesticides, CDFA has designed this eradication campaign using many new non-pesticide technologies, including the pheromone mating disruption technology. This is not a pesticide because it does not kill anything. Pheromones are chemical signals produced by all manner of living organisms. As part of my dissertation/MIT Press book I researched how practical scientist in agriculture worked to use synthetic pheromones to confuse male codling moths so they could not find potential mates, which reduces reproduction. Because of state law, however, pheromones are classified as a pesticide, which means they are reported as such by the media, even though they cannot kill (= “-cide”) anything.

So the folks at CFDA who thought they were going to be lauded for using non-toxic pesticide alternatives were stunned, caught by surprise, when hundreds of angry citizens in the Santa Cruz and Monterey areas protested the planned aerial spraying. When it comes to public risk perception, the three words that matter most are “government” “planes” “spray”. After those 3, nothing else matters. People understandably do not want their persons or property sprayed by anyone, much less the government. The split between scientific experts, who thought they were doing what the public might support, and the various expressions of anger, resentment, protest by the public reveals divergent assumptions about risk, technology, and the benefits of agriculture to society. More generally, it also suggests that society is happy to receive the economic benefits of global trade in biological organisms and is not aware of the various harms caused by invasive species.

In a weak moment, at the request of the California Secretary of Agriculture, I agreed to serve on CDFA’s Environmental Advisory Task Force for the LBAM eradication project. I am very concerned that a public backlash against this eradication campaign has the potential to undermine public support for future invasive species prevention and management efforts, and I wrote an open letter to CDFA explaining my concerns. In future blog posts, I hope to explain how STS scholarly tools can help untangle some of the controversies that swirl around this, such as: the need to eradicate; whether eradication is possible; concerns about human health impacts; the nature of risk perception and risk management in invasive species issues; and the future of public confidence in invasive species prevention and management.

In the mean time, I leave you with my favorite quote from the eradication campaign so far:

TO REPORT SUSPICIOUS MOTHS, CALL TOLL-FREE: 1-800 491-1899

--Keith Douglass Warner

The Truth According to Wikipedia

VPROinternational of Holland has produced an excellent 48 minute documentary about the controversy surrounding Wikipedia and the greater issue of the role of participatory masses in cultural and knowledge production. There are interviews with Tim O'Reilly who some say coined the term Web 2.0, Bob McHenry, former editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia who has started a more scholarly encyclopedia Citizendium, Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur and a strong critic of the attacks on knowledge gatekeepers.  Finally, Ndesanjo Macha, a Tanzanian who blogs in Swahili, a strong supporter of Wikipedia, and an eloquent voice about the importance of local knowledge coming from average folks.
The Truth According to Wikipedia

--Steve Cisler

Cyberinfrastructure as a Public Good

I leapt out of the car when I saw this shortlived ad campaign (unfortuunately timed to coincide with 9/11) on a mildly dilapidated building near Berkeley.  What with bridges falling down in Minnesota and general handwringing about the state of our national infrastructure it's been on my mind some lately. 

How do you convince folks that infrastructure is important in a country where the concept of 'public goods' seems to be so demode?  Public goods require public money - all of our lives are made better because of them, but no-one quite wants to pay.  John King made a great point in conversation the other day about cyberinfrastructure (the networking of computers, people and objects in such a way as to facilitate genuinely new forms of learning, discovery and play) - he pointed out that when we built the highway system in America it was taken for granted that taxes would be used as the basis for building what was once a wonderful Interstate highway system.  Now we are trying to build cyberinfrastructure on the relative cheap - without providing adequate funding to really make it so.  The benefits are really obvious - enabling students from throughout the country who normally would not have access to scientific laboratories to manipulate telescopes, take part in environmental planning; enabling researchers from minority serving institutions to enter into rich research collaborations from which they are now excluded; exponentially increasing citizen participation in science so that important environmental data gathering and policy making can be truly democratic and so forth ....  .  But then again, so are the benefits of high speed rail links between major hubs across America, of low cost and efficient point to point public transport and so forth.

In general, the way that 'public good' gets spelled out right now is in terms of 'national competitiveness' - the 'only sustainable edge' (as John Seely Brown puts it) in a flat world being training and supporting knowledge workers.  There's something very like this going on in the world of biodiversity right now - you don't sell the wonders of nature, you sell what we might be losing economically in terms of crop losses, fragile environments etc.  This is a way Procrustean bed to fit a public good argument into.  Let's change the terms of the discussion so that a negative turn (economic threats) becomes a positive agenda.

Rules for Design in the Developing World

The March/April 2008 issue of World Ark, a publication of Heifer International, contains an article entitled, “Designing New Technologies for a Better Life”.  It touches on many of the issues regarding the introduction of appropriate technologies in the developing world.  The article is a “good read” and may be found here.
Jack Gilbert

KnowledeX Video Project For Tech Laureates

In November 2007, the twenty five finalists in the Tech Awards were invited to take part in a project where camcorders and tapes were provided so that the Tech Laureates could record local activity and interviews and help plan a video that would serve their internal needs or provide publicity about their projects.

Nine laureates accepted, and over the past five months they have been shooting raw footage in Australia, Africa, Nicaragua, the United States, Bangladesh, and central Asia. The Center is recruiting editors in Silicon Valley with experience and time to work with a Tech Laureate in order to produce a story line that fits into a five to ten minute finished video. This will entail a close collaboration and consultation among the organizations and the editors who are not familiar with these projects. For instance, how can an American editor edit a voice over in a language she does not understand?

The videos will be put on the organization's web site, the KnowledeX site (when we launch it later this year), and on video sites such as YouTube and other specialized ones that focus on international development projects around the world.

If you know of people with editing skills and interest, please have them contact me (sacisler AT y  a  h  o  o. c  o  m).

Indigenous Knowledge and I

"under Kaanju law if proper land management is not carried out Pianamu will not allow the land to be sustainable"

               

                  

                                                                                                                                         Kivu Proverb String

Leigh Star and I got into a conversation the other day about a question that popped up for her: when did the Brits realize that they were living on an island.  As we talked, my first reaction (that this was an unanswerable, uninteresting question) turned into my current position - that it's an unanswerable but very interesting question.  I think that the British Isles case is relatively easy to respond to.  We Brits only ever arrived on our native sod by invasion - it took seafarers to get over here; and I believe that seafaring nations have a good sense that the world is made up of an ocean with various islands around it. 

But then you turn the same question to when/whether Native Americans realized that they were living on a continent (that there was sea in every direction) and you are dealing with a much more difficult issue.  I can imagine ways in which that kind of knowledge could be created out of a non-universalistic, non-continent wide organization.  We know that there was very good lines of communication between tribes (negotiations, capture, wandering sellers) - and indeed the general rule of anthropology is that there was more contact back there in those benighted pre universal culture days than is generally imagined (you should see the Southern European artifacts that the roadbuilders of Denmark uncovered over the past twenty years).  And we know that directionality (East, South, West and North) played a big part in tribal culture.  What we don't know - I think, I must qualify, because I really haven't ready the literature - is whether this ever turned into a 'shape of the whole' question.

I offer this solely in the form of a thought experiment.  And the outcome (verified by my thoughts; double-blinded :-)) is that it is indeed possible to have a system of universal knowledge without (shudder) universities, books and ICT.  That's just one of the reasons why I trip over the words 'indigenous knowledge' which are being so overused nowadays in our (Western economic elite) coming to terms with the fact that there are other ways of knowing the world. 

Indeed, when it comes to indigenous knowledge, I am somewhat in the position of Bruno Latour, who wrote a great piece about the problems with 'actor-network theory'.  There are four problems, he said, the word 'actor', the word 'network', the word 'theory' and the hyphen between 'actor' and 'network'.  Well indeed.  'Indigenous knowledge would be similarly flawed if it had a hyphen.  Calling it 'indigenous' is silly - does that mean that mestizas  can't produce other ways of knowing; does it mean that you have to produce birth certificates over untold generations to prove that something is indigenous?  (The latter is, unfortunately, a non-trivial question - the World Bank makes some momentous, generally bad, decisions based on whether a particular community is 'social' or 'cultural' - you can build huge dams on land owned by the former, not the latter). 

And the word 'knowledge' is problematic.  The overarching issue is that the way the term is used in this context it generally means something that we have and they don't - something which we can recognize coz we know what knowledge is.  Well that's completely wrong.  There's two images up above.  One is of Aboriginal fire management of the land.  This took 'us' a long time to recognize - Stephen Pyne has written beautifully on the topic for both America and Australia (as well as one of the most exquisite books on ice, during his cooling-off period).  For us - and I won't keep adding the parentheses, just assume it's an ironic use - our way of managing the landscape goes back to our first industrial revolution, in the twelfth century: the invention of the water wheel which in a house that Jack built sort of a way provide a new form of motive power which permitted the accumulation of surplus goods which in turn allowed merchant guilds to arise and an urbanization of Europe which had previously been inconceivable.  So we think water.  It took the longest time for us to recognize that you can be oriented to the environment by fire (for us, that's destructive, to be fought - something our Forest Service has only recently turned around on).  Helen Verran has written a wonderful piece about communication, and lack thereof, between Aboriginal land managers and Australian environmentalists on a controlled burn.  So, in order to recognize what we call 'indigenous knowledge' we need to be open to other ways of knowing that we are not at present.

Which leads to the central problem with 'knowledge'.  Take the Kivu proverb string pictured above.  Not something you would immediately recognize as a mnemonic device holding a wealth of wisdom - just looks like a somewhat eldritch string of translucent objects.   Our reasoning about knowledge tends to go this way around.  We (oh lucky culture!) have figured out what knowledge is and the packages that it comes in.  If it fits into our classification systems and our disciplinary structures, then it's knowledge - otherwise it's just culture.  In many case, that wondrous phrase 'pre-literate' culture.  Now that seems a little crazy - we know what knowledge is and how to recognize it in other cultures.  It's a little like saying we know what democracy is and we can export it holus bolus to other cultures.  Almost as if we were living in Bush America... .  Consider the option that there are ways of knowing the world which do *not* translate into what we think knowledge is.  The wonderful work of the pre-literate epic poets to weave huge transmissible narratives - from Homer to the Yugoslavian singers on - might just encapsulate a form of apprehension of the world which is lost when words are put down on paper.  We are not the ultimate arbiters of what knowledge is or of what forms it should take - we are a highly successful culture which really needs to learn about other apprehensions.  Our current model is that of the Borg: we assimilate or destroy.  The time is ripe for other options.

And a brief coda to this, which I may follow up on some day.  I find it very difficult to deal with the question of intelligent design, say.  Of course I believe that it shouldn't be taught in schools - it's a classic deus ex machina theory, which makes the world a less interesting and complex place and does not lead to new ways of thinking.  On the other hand, I do not believe in the theory of evolution.  That's a theory which is a cultural, social, political and scientific creation.  To teach it as the truth is absurd.  Where this gets difficult to argue is that these observations - because we believe in universal knowledge - can be taken as condoning any attacks on empirical science.  No, the issue is that we don't as a culture have a good handle on what 'knowledge' - indigenous or other - is.  We have, by the standard definitions, a great indigenous culture where evolutionary theory is proved.  Taught that way, I would be totally happy.  And I'd have a more honest basis for rejecting intelligent design: it renders the world less interesting, where the role of any knowledge enterprise I respect is making it more interesting. 

Geof Bowker

Saving the World - One Seed at a Time

Let me introduce you to a few images which have been in the news in recent weeks.  First, is the so-called doomsday vault that has just gone into operation in Norway. It's goal is to preserve seeds that might preserve the race come climate change or political disaster.

The second is an attempt to restore the fragile ecosystems of the Grand Canyon by regularly controlled flooding.

Through these pictures we glimpse the extent of our current planetary management.  We have interpolated ouselves into nature to such an extent that now we must manage nature just as we manage each other and our technologies.  (And indeed, just as.  The precursor to the seed vault is one of the origin stories for the Internet - we didn't want to get into a Library of Alexandria situation again - just think how much richness there is in the scattered remains of Greek texts - so we should distribute our knowledge through digitial libraries.  The same argument came up a few years later about rebuilding Manhattan after September 11, 2001: why should we concentrate all our smart folks in one small area... .  Some time I'll get it together to write a paper detailing these kinds of crossover strategies between the social, natural and technical worlds - they are more the norm than the exception, so examples are prolix - and some of the pictures are pretty).  The possible benefits are manifold - the canonical example is that a particular disease strikes our corn which the curerent superstrain has no resistance to.  You would go to the bank, search out wild or cultivated corns to locate a variety which could bestow that resistance and bob's your uncle.  Or take the climate change variant.  One current possibility - and my personal nightmare - is that the California vines are going to hitch themselves up and start migrating north, winding up in Michigan by one account I read.  Wouldn't it be nice to have vines which could adapt to the new California climate?

So why Norway?  Well, there is some curious reasoning indeed here - given in the New York Times article linked above: "In reviewing seed bank policies a few years ago, experts looked at the banks in a new light, Dr. Fowler said: “We said, we may have some of the best seed banks in the world, but look at where they are: Peru, Colombia, Syria, India, Ethiopia, the Philippines. So a lot of us were asking, what’s plan B?”   The goal of the new global plant banking system is to protect the precious stored plant genes from the vagaries of climate, politics and human error. Many banks are now “in countries where the political situation is not stable, and it is difficult to rely on refrigeration,".  So the reasoning goes that ultrasable Norway will be able to manage this enterprise in an ultrasable physical environment.   Of course that's just a silly statement for any period of time longer than say 50 years, and not much better for shorter spans.  Europe has had its fair share of political instaability in the past 100 years - it's certainly engaged in more World Wars than any other continent I can think of.  And who knows the status of polar ice in that region - there's already signs of permafrost melt damaging the Alaskan pipeline, and there's a possible huge multiplier effect for climate change in the vast methane deposits currently transfixed in frozen soil: if the predictions are right about the amount there and the possible speed of its release, then we ain't seen nothing yet. 

The Seed Vault has some possible great benefits, but it is fundamentally flawed in its conception.  So much of our th8king of dealing with environmental disturbance is to preserve the status quo - make the present moment go on forever.  In Seed Vault terms, this means that we are basically pretty pleased with the agricultural world we have - massive monocropping which is destroying complex ecosystems, thus rendering all of our species more vulnerable, including our very own.  So we are going to keep brussel sprouts, willy nilly, in the Santa Cruz area, because that's what local enterprises want and our economy is built around that.  The best way to do this is to carefull preserve the seeds in the bank.  There are two other fairly obvious solutions - you can work to ensure that we are not dependent as a species on a few strains of a handful of crops.  That sets in train a virtuous cycle - by encouraging biodiversity on the ground rather than in banks, you create a much more robust ecosystem.  (Reminds me, btw, of another crossover - just as we have been downsizing our businesses to create what's been called the anorexic organization - lean, mean and effective but completely unable to respond to fresh challenges because there are no slack resources, so we are downsizing nature - making it highly productive but highly vulnerable to change).    It also means that we as a species could start thinking about adapting to inevitable change rather than chasing the chimera of stability. 

Related to this is that in many ways we really are preserving the wrong darned thing.  People, plants and animals only ever exist in complex communities.  Preserving a single species in isolation makes the same identity error as those who assume that a clone will be like its original: nurture really does matter.  I think it would be wrong to assume that what we really had better do (because we have no choice, they say, because the damage has already been done) is take over the process of evolution ourselves - freezing it at the present moment - because it's too important a job for nature to carry on by itself.  This is what Michel Serres ironically calls the 'natural contract' we have entered into over the past few centuries - from about the time when Rousseau invented the 'social contract' (that's the one we just broke in New Orleans...). 

Now I don't much like contrarian positions - fighting species preservation is a little like battling world peace.  So I won't even talk here about good logging policy (which makes the forests uglier for us who happen to be alive but allows for much faster recovery) or mention the fact that the real biodiversity hotspots are the big cities....  So let's just say that the Seed Vault is a good idea - but that it should be one of many.  It should be seen as a member of a toolkit, not a solution in itself.