CSTS

Playing God or Serving Mammon

On 6 November, I gave a presentation to about 35 people about the ethical concerns shaping public debates regarding agricultural crop biotechnology. I wanted to summarize the key contours of these debates, especially as they have engaged the Catholic community and tradition, and describe what I believe to be a more constructive approach to these issues. Most of the debates have fractured on the socio-economic benefit versus ecological harm divide, with advocates insisting that a moral imperative exists to develop the technology so as to feed a hungry world. Critics point to the risk consequences of the technology, following the same general path as the critics of agro-pesticides.

In contrast, I recommend critiquing the very broad patents on transgenic organisms as inconsistent with Catholic social teaching about economic justice. Seeds, like plants, were historically understood to be “the common heritage of humanity,” and thus ineligible for patents. This is consistent with a Catholic vision of the common good. Patents are now awarded for genes, gene sequences, engineered genes, and the technical processes which support transgenic engineering. This commodification of life seems to be incompatible with a Catholic vision for agriculture, food and society. Indeed, patents and the “negative property right” this represents seem likely to thwart efforts to feed the world. Patents are very well designed to reward inventors for their inventions, however, agriculture is fundamentally different than industry. The current ag biotech patent regime may be well suited for rewarding invention, however, it is poorly designed for meeting the needs of the poorest people in the world, many of whom depend on subsistence agriculture, and cannot afford to buy seeds.

This talk was based on an article in the Journal of Agricultural & Environmental Ethics.

Keith Douglass Warner OFM is a Franciscan Friar, and has worked at Santa Clara University since 2003. He lectures in the Religious Studies Department, and serves as assistant director for education at the Center for Science, Technology & Society, and is the Faculty Director for the Xavier Residential Learning Community. For another blog entry he wrote on agriculture, science, and social power, check out http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2008/11/agroecology_in_action.ph

 

mobile post

I am writing this on my iPhone. Nothing remarkable in that anymore--it's old news now but it certainly would have been a showstopper a couple of years ago!

In industrial countries like the US the use of mobile phones is largely for convenience and social grarification (there are rumors that some people actually use their phone for business reasons...). As we get ready to launch our new web service for Tech Awards Laureates, we will be actively exploring how to make the site and all it's features and resources accessible via mobile phone. For social entrepreneurs in the field, having such access to our system could make a significant difference in their work--which is the ultimate goal of our own efforts.

Pedro Hernández-Ramos

Steve Cisler - A Very Special Person

I did not know Steve well, despite the fact that we shared a cubicle for several months in the Center for Science, Technology, and Society. Because I was splitting my time between the Center and the Department of Chemistry, our paths crossed all too rarely, and our interactions became all the more infrequent when Steve moved to a different office, leaving me to my own devices in the cubicle. I must admit that I never thought I’d be “incarcerated” in a cubicle, thinking that only engineers (I’m a chemist) suffered such a fate, but Steve’s presence made this situation palatable, even enjoyable! Given his unexcelled talents for surfing the Web, he was constantly alerting me to websites that he knew were relevant to my interests but that I would never have discovered on my own. These ranged from informative sites on biotechnology, the program for which I’m responsible in the Center, to much less technical ones, such as the website that had pictures of a colony of bees making its home in a bell jar—I’m a “sideliner” beekeeper and the URL for the photos of this “hive” eventually ended up being posted on the website of the Santa Clara County Beekeepers Guild to be shared with all the beekeepers in the region.

Steve reveled in the unusual and creative, as embodied by his enthusiasm for the engineering associated with my folding bike and for events such as the “Maker Faire”, where all sorts of inventive creations, both serious and playful, are on display. Although I am yet to attend this event, it is on my radar screen and when I do go, Steve will be in my thoughts.

It was a blessing to know this incredibly erudite and sensitive human being, and I deeply miss him.

Jack Gilbert
Director, Biotechnology Program
Center for Science, Technology, and Society

Questioning the Fate of the White Space

In accordance with its mission to understand and promote good practices in creating the valuesof information design, CSTS participated in a public colloquium devoted to the topic of “Open Access and the New Net Neutrality”, convened June 13, 2008.  The event was organized by the Media Access Project www.mediaaccess.org, and gathered together leaders from industry and policy fields.  Two lively debates happened over the course of the day.  The first panel focused on the question ‘What does Net Neutrality Mean Today?’The urgency of this panel is based on Comcast’s recent interruption of P2P transmission.  According to some of its customers who discovered the practice, Comcast inserts forged reset packets into communications between peers in peer-to-peer (P2P) communications that terminate those communications and thus violates the FCC’s 2007 policy statement.  Readers interested in the details of the case can consult the 2007 TechLaw Journal story at http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2007/20071101.asp.The Comcast interruption phenomenon is an important one for CSTS, because it bears on philosophical and deeply pragmatic issues associated with technological innovation.  That the legal and political status of Comcast’s action are unsettled questions underscores that technology is a site for the working out of social relations of power, which are always contingent and under dispute.   Far more than a configuration of neutral instrumentalities, technology is a scene through which the social values and interests of various groups manifest.

In light of the Comcast controversy, panelists at The New Net Neutrality engaged in lively debates about the need for advanced net management technologies; they also focused more specifically on whether the private sector is capable of addressing the problem without government mandates.  Here, as in many conversations about the control of technologies and resources, debates often center around the question of which types of actors (market actors versus state actors) are in a better position to create most efficiently and democratically the parameters of technological practices.

Not surprisingly, this theme continued into the second panel of the day, which was focused on the implications of the FCC’s recent 700MHz auction. The 700MHz band is a crucial site of techno-politics because it penetrates walls fairly easily and travels well, making it perfect for either cellular or long-range wireless broadband that could provide an invisible alternative to DSL and cable. This spectrum is part of the 698-806 MHz band (“700 MHz Band”), which has been occupied by television broadcasters and is being made available for new commercial and public safety services as a result of the digital television (DTV) transition coming in 2009. Winning control over this spectrum could augment a major telecommunication company’s existing holdings with a powerful wireless network; it could also represent a lucrative new ISP for Google or some other non-telecom behemoth.

Auction 73 included 1,099 licenses in the 700 MHz Band:

176 EA licenses in the A Block
734 CMA licenses in the B Block
176 EA licenses in the E Block
12 REAG licenses in the C Block
1 nationwide license, to be used as part of the 700 MHz Public/Private Partnership, in the D Block.

The following table describes the licenses available in Auction 73.

                                                                                                                                                                                   

Block	Frequencies (MHz)	Bandwidth	Pairing	Geographic Area Type	No. of Licenses
A	698-704, 728-734	12 MHz	2 x 6 MHz	EA	176
B	704-710, 734-740	12 MHz	2 x 6 MHz	CMA	734
E	722-728	6 MHz	unpaired	EA	176
C	746-757, 776-787	22 MHz	2 x 11 MHz	REAG	12
D	758-763, 788-793	10 MHz	2 x 5 MHz	Nationwide	1*
Source	http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auction_factsheet&id=73

Verizon and AT&T won more than $16 billion of licenses, garnering most of the control over the coveted “C-Block” – the regional open access spectrum.  For more details on the auction see the Reuters full story http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN2042023420080320?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews.

In the June 13th SCU Net Neutrality panel, a group comprised of auction veterans discussed their own views about the auction model in general, as well as the meaning and implications of the 700MHz auction in particular.  The 700MHz auction debate was intriguing in that while it regarded as problematic Verizon’s and ATT’s dominance in the auction’s results, it also entailed a subtle shift into what seemed to be more crucial questions about the relative benefits of requiring, or not requiring, licensing for control of broadband spectrum a such.

Over the course of the debate, two of the discussants stood out as avid proponents of a non-licensing model.  Joanne Hovis is the President of Columbia Telecommunications Corporation, which provides communications engineering consulting services for public sector and non-profit clients throughout the United Stateshttp://www.ctcnet.us/ .Marc Berejkais the Senior Director of Public Policy at Microsoft Corporation.The two seemed to become increasingly aligned on the question of licensing models for broadband spectrum, and particularly with respect to questions around the mysterious “white space” whose fate indeed becomes urgent given the results of the 700MHz band auction.

When the US completes its transition to digital television broadcasts in February 2009, much of the spectrum between 54MHz and 698MHz (channels 2 through 51) will become available.  Space that exists between the individual channels (2-51) is called the “white space”.  Some actors hope that the white space will be made available for use by unlicensed devices.  Among them is a consortium of companies including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, and Google.  The consortium has submitted a device, which would use the "white space" in the analog television spectrum for wireless Internet access, to the Federal Communications Commission for approval.  The FCC is testing the new device and is slated to have results ready in July 2008.  If adopted, the device would provide residents of rural areas easy access to broadband and give a third alternative to DSL and cable.

Offering a refreshing counter-point to free-market advocates who routinely equate social and economic value, both Hovis and Berejka advocated non-licensing models for white space use.  Accentuating the importance of keeping public interest in clear view, Hovis’ argument was that unlicensed spectrum should be opened up for communities and/or municipalities who should in turn be able to makes decisions for and govern themselves.   One panelist balked at this suggestion, drawing attention to twenty years of failed broadband service provision by municipalities.  Aren’t these failures based on a lack of participation on the part of the private sector?Hovis countered the suggestion by acknowledging some of the municipal failures over the past three years.  She also raised the point that the media attention on these failures tend to suggest that the failures hinge on the more general inability of government service to work effectively.  In actuality, Hovis explained, the failures represent some flaws from 2-3 specific efforts that had used business models based on city-wide service provision and had attempted to transfer these models to service provision in rural areas at a fraction of the model case.  That cannot work; but it does not mean that municipal spectrum is inherently or generally wrong-headed.

Berejka supported Hovis’ position on this point, and specified that recent failed efforts on the part of municipalities were related to the fact that they were working within high-frequency spectrum, which will not affect the white space anyway.  Therefore, those root problems are not likely to be an issue.

The SCU panel represents but one moment in a larger social and political process around access to wireless spectrum. Interested citizens should keep their eye on the fate of what’s called the "Wireless Innovation Act of 2007" (submitted by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA)) which would permit the "unlicensed, nonexclusive use" of frequencies between 54MHz and 698MHz—channels 2 through 13 on the VHF dial and 14 through 51 on UHF—for wireless Internet service.

Watch that space.

Katie Vann
STS Center, Senior Research Fellow
.

Open Access and the New Net Neutrality forum at SCU June 12, 2008

Open Access and the New Net Neutrality forum June 12 at SCU

This forum was organized by the Media Access Project in collaboration with the Broadband Institute of California (Allen Hammond of SCU's Law School and Program Director at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society is BBI's
executive Director).

The day was organized into two panels. The first one focused on "What does Net Neutrality mean now?" and the second on "Spectrum policy after the 700 MHz auction."

In the first panel, Richard Whitt (senior policy counsel at Google), Ronald Yokubaitis (Chairman and CEO of Data Foundry), and Jay Monahan (general counsel at Vuze, Inc.) argued for a regulatory and policy framework that ensures net neutrality and an "equal playing field" that does not discriminate by type of users or type of media consumed. On the other hand, Richard Bennett (network architect) and George Ou (Technology for Mortals) criticized the current legal framework and suggested that all networks need to have intelligence built in, not only on the nodes, so that bandwidth can be more equitably shared rather than "hogged" by a small percentage of heavy users. Parul Desai of the Media Access Project served as the moderator and had her hands full given how passionate each participant feels about their positions.

In the second panel, moderated by Harold Feld of MAP, the participants were Coleman Bazelon (Principal, the Brattle Group), Gregory Rose (Economist, Gregory Rose & Associates), Carolyn Brandon (CTIA, the wireless industry's
trade association) Marc Berejka (director of public policy at Microsoft), and Joanne Hovis (president, Columbia Telecommunications Group). Participants' views on the outcome of the 700 MHz differed significantly,with Brandon and Bazelon calling it largely a success and the others criticizing it for its lack of concern for the public benefit. In particular, Hovis was very articulate about the fact that while the conversations are focused mainly on the benefits for urban dwellers, there are large numbers of rural and poor communities in the United States that are grossly underserved by the current telecommunications behemoths. She also agreed with Berejka that the unlicensed use of so-called "white spaces" (the interstitial frequencies between analog television signals and other bands) could be very useful in supporting innovation by allowing municipalities to provide services for themselves and their constituents.

The issues raised by this forum are very dynamic and the consequences of the policies and practices at issue very far ranging. This helps explain in part that why several Silicon Valley companies such as Cisco, Google, eBay and others are keeping a close eye on these developments. MAP's next event to follow up on this conversation will take place June 25th in Washington, DC with the title ""The Future of Innovation‹Media and Technology Options for the Next President."

The Center is grateful to Al Hammond for bringing this opportunity to Santa Clara. We will be looking ahead to linking the issues discussed here with Center activities taking place in the area of value-centered design of
information systems and technologies.

Pedro Hernandez-Ramos

Digital Race

   'Well, they've done it to Betty Crocker at the apogee of civilisation as well as mitochondrial Eve at its incecption - used computer programs to morph their faces into racially blended mixes into which our current differences can be read.  Nothing wrong with that of course - even Jesus has been having something of a makeover. 

Race, like gender, is a cultuural obbsession in the blobal North.  The two share several key characteristics.  First is that both are (literally) dressed up in a series of outwardand visible signs: dashikis vs kimonos, boots vs high heels and so forth.  Second, we maintain purity at the expense of ambiguity.  Census categories shoehorn people into racial identities (and although the choice has gotten a little easier in the US, it's still a limited, flawed set on offer for the melting pot.  The intersexed get assigned a gender category at birth, since the medical establishment and many parents believe that it's too confusing to be both male and female.  Third, we learn how to act as and identify with our own gender.  We reinforce the artificial categories by building culture around them. The current contest for the Democratic nomination is a clear example - voters have been pigeonholed into racial, ethnic, gender and age categories (reminds me of my favorite sociologists' T-shirt, which had 'Broken Down by Age and Sex' emblazoned across the chest).  Through the magic of the meaningless statistic and the persuasive power of pollsters, we have come to see the primariees in part as black vs white (a characterization recently lamentably championed by Hilary Clinton) as well as male vs female.   (I saw a lovely breakdown of the last presidential election which showed that a key variable was distance from a major highway or other arterial hub - people who are more 'hooked in' vote Democrat.  But we don't talk about the 'infrastructured' vs 'uninfrastructured' voting blocks because they don't have the same kind of cultural capital and organizational ability). 

When in 2003 the news broke that some 16 million folks today are related to Genghis Khan through their Y chromosomes (a mircale fiinding, since we  have no DNA from Genghis himself), it seemed that our quest for origins was finally being realized by modern science.  One such descendant is pictured above with his forefather.  And of course we are all carrying our heritage from mitochondrial Eve, should you chhoose to believe that story.  Khan as ur-patriarch and Eve as Great Mother: deeply engrained tropes expressing themselves now in science, now in the arts, and now in the humanities. The unholy persistence of racial discourse is but one symptom of a core feature of the global political economy so beauutifully desciibed in Zizek's The Fragile Absolute where he explores the drive to fit people into smaller and smaller categories both so that they can be niche-marketed to and so that they cannot recognize the larger political and cultural realities they share (create difference and conquer - I guess it beats Genghis' model).

In the diitial age, genomics cannot escape the racial dimensions of this discourse.   Consider the language of Bryan Sykes, who argued that the English, Irish, Welsh and Scots shared a single racial history - the consequent invasions by Romans and Normans not doing much to differentiate English stock.   Sykes argues that the cultural myth of Celtic difference for outlying areas of the UK: "is very entrenched and has a lot to do with the Scottish, Welsh and Irish identity: their main identifying feature is that they are not English" - he himself being: "an Englishman who has traced his Y chromosome and surname to an ancestor who lived in the village of Flockton in Yorkshire in 1286" (must have been a short life but prodigious life).  An an English person who has always proudly claimed my Roman invader heritage - the nose knows - I have to agree with him.  Many English are obsessed with their Celtic roots (for me its one eighth Manxness).  And when I go online to search for 'Celtic roots' on Googlle I get countless pages of information and community around that imagined collective; a similar search for 'Roman roots' brings up on the first results page information about the declension of Latin verbs and about root crops the Romans cooked.

At issue here is an important dimension of our understanding of the apparently limitless supply of information which is the Web.  I can type in any eldritch concept and find a website devoted to it, a hacker who has spent her time compoling sources and blogging about it andd so forth.  I can give you the population of China, the rate of continental drift or the futures market in Hong Kong at the touch of a button.  However, this information is not an ill-sturctured almannac.  It reproduces and reinforces the categories of the wider culture.  The smallest unit for the stories with which the Web abounds are the classification systems used (racial, gender, age and so forth).  Just because there's a whole lot of it out there doesn't mean that it's any less narrow than earlier cultural forms.  The Web is not democratic and playful if its constituent stories are elitist and rigid.   

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