Tag Archives: technology

Strange Natures

Posted on by
1

In July, the book I have long been writing with my friend and colleague Kent Redford was finally published: Strange Natures: conservation in the era of synthetic biology (Yale University Press).  It explores the implications of novel genetic technologies for nature and its conservation. 

I had forgotten how long it takes to go from the idea of a book to actually holding it in your hand.  The germ of this book was back in 2013, when Kent organised a meeting in Cambridge on synthetic biology and conservation (helped by me and the hugely missed Georgina Mace).   But the book itself has older roots, in our running discussions about nature, culture, technology, and naturalness in conservation.  We talked about writing a book together for several years, before starting to develop an outline in 2015.  We finally found a publisher in 2017, when Yale University Press took us on.   We started writing in 2018, and submitted a draft manuscript in December 2019.  We then got (and took on board) comments from a wide range of reviewers, and rewrote it, as COVID began to shut everything down.  We submitted the final version in May 2020. A year later, Strange Natures was published (in June 2021 in the US, and a month later in the UK).

The book is, fittingly perhaps, a hybrid between an academic and  a trade book.  We set ourselves the task of writing in a way that could be understood by a general reader – by someone interested in nature and the world, without any advanced training in natural or social science.  But we also wanted to speak to conservation scientists and synthetic biologists.

I had forgotten how tough it is to write across disciplines.  Kent is an ecologist, I am a geographer.  Neither of us is trained in genetics, biotechnology, biological engineering or any of the other disciplines that dominate synthetic biology.   We had to work hard to make complex science clear  – and wrap it within a compelling narrative.  Every sentence of the book demanded a self-conscious act of translation.    

Co-authorship also involved a lot of micro-translation between Kent and I as writers. Despite 15 years of productive shared learning, we still think differently about lots of things.  We carry different disciplinary baggage, we have different suspicions and assumptions, and naturally call on different kinds of  explanations.  We often found ourselves coming at questions about synthetic biology from different directions.

The way we are educated and trained shapes not just what we know and think is important, but the way we think about it.  Our discipline, and the company we keep,  shape the language we use and the style in which our ideas and arguments presented.  I discovered, for example,  how loose my writing (as a political ecologist) could be, how dependent on the assumption that the reader (or co-author) would recognise what was unsaid, or would share assumptions about how capitalism or government regulation, or society worked. 

Writing Strange Natures demanded a lot of talking (thank goodness for Skype) and rewriting, to develop a common voice and an agreed argument.   One of us initially drafted each chapter, but by the end every paragraph had been rewritten so completely that the book’s DNA is profoundly mixed.

There was a lot to write about.   The field of synthetic biology is shockingly novel.  At times it feels like science fiction. Many articles are highly speculative, but the technologies of gene editing are becoming standard in biological and medical experimentation. Novel genetic technologies are being widely applied across fields as diverse as agriculture and food production, biofuels, biopharma, human medicine and public health.  Commercial investment is skyrocketing.  The global biotechnology market in 2020 was worth about U$ 752 billion US dollars, and had a predicted compound annual growth rate of 16% to 2028. 

The ambition and power of synthetic biology is potentially huge. In 2015, Science made CRISPR as its ‘breakthrough of the year’.  Not without reason, Jennifer Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020 with Emmanuelle Charpentier, entitled her 2017 book with Samuel Sternberg A Crack in Creation: the unthinkable power to control evolution.

The world of conservation is also showing increasing interest in the power to edit the genes of wild species for conservation purposes: to use gene drives to control invasive species; to manipulate the genomes of endangered species (or their microbiomes) to increase resistance to wildlife diseases (think chytridiomycosis); to bring back extinct species or recover genes missing from extant populations; to manipulate genomes to increase resilience to anthropogenic change (think making corals hot water resistant); or to develop novel organisms to treat stubborn pollution.  But such ideas are not just novel, they are controversial.  There is increasing resistance from some environmental groups to the release of gene-edited species, and widening debate about risk and technology governance. 

The debate about conservation applications of gene editing (and particularly the use of engineered gene drives) is starting to ramp up. In 2015, IUCN convened a meeting in Bellagio in the Italian Alps to discuss the future of synthetic biology, and its role in biodiversity conservation.  At the 2016 World Conservation Congress, IUCN resolved to develop a policy on biodiversity conservation and synthetic biology.  Two years later IUCN published an Assessment of Synthetic Biology and Biodiversity Conservation (by a task force Kent led).  The 2020 Congress (held in September 2021 in Marseille) resolved to conduct a new consultation, from which a new policy should, in theory, eventually emerge.   

It is quite possible that novel genetic technologies will, in future, be used by conservationists (the idea has supporters as well as detractors).  Debate about these applications are extremely important, and perhaps IUCN is right that this debate needs to be careful, slow and involve broadly consultation.  But the world will not wait for conservationists to make up their minds about conservation applications.  The first moves to release engineered wild organisms are already being made, in fields such as agriculture and in public health.  Biotech corporations see gene editing and synthetic biology more broadly as the fuel for the next tech-based growth industry.  Decisions about the gene editing of wild-living organisms will be taken far from conservation conference rooms, and are unlikely to be overly affected by possible impacts on wild nature. 

As we say in our book, these are strange times.  The field of synthetic biology is advancing at warp speed, with new scientific innovations and would-be commercial applications announced weekly.  The landscape has changed dramatically since Kent and I started to write Strange Natures.  It is hard to underestimate the significance of the new power to make direct deliberate alterations to the genomes of living organisms. The implications of the field for conservation are profound.   Hopefully the book will help kick-start debate. 

The Cyborg Conservationist

Posted on by
2

Haze from the 2015 forest fires in Southeast Asia may have killed about 100,000 people. It was also really bad for wildlife. Benjamin Lee and colleagues recently showed these effects by measuring acoustic activity on an ‘eco-overpass’ between two areas of forest in Singapore before, during and after the haze event. The data showed that acoustic activity dropped by 37% during the haze, and had showed only partial recovery 16 weeks later.

I learned of this research through the excellent BBC World Service Inside Science Programme on 12 October 2017. What caught my attention was the serendipitous nature of the study. Lee was supposed to be surveying bats to assess the effects of the overpass. But the haze triggered his asthma, and he had to stop work: but his acoustic recorders stayed in place. And hence a dataset was collected that spanned the haze event, recording not just bats but also birds and insects, and showing how they were silenced by the conditions.

This neat paper highlights the extraordinary power of remote devices to record biological data. Digital acoustic recording is widely used to survey bats (e.g. the iBats programme) and increasingly birds and insects. Moreover, archived sound recordings made for one purpose can be mined later for another. Citizen science recordings of bats in the UK have been used to identity stridulating bush-crickets. Continue reading →

Conservation and the final frontier

Posted on by
1

A few weeks ago I settled down to watch a BBC TV programme called The 21st Century Race for Space, hosted by celebrity physicist and one-time pop star Brian Cox. I had spent all day thinking about conservation at work, and was looking for a bit of escapism. In the programme Cox spent a lot of time ogling large shiny spacecraft in even larger hangars in the Nevada desert, putting on space suits and visiting simulated mars colonies. It was like a Top Gear special all about space rockets.

One of the striking things about the programme was the people that Cox was able to talk to. He had 1:1 interviews with Dennis Tito (the first space tourist), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and owner of Blue Origin, a ‘spaceflight services company’), and Richard Branson (founder of Virgin and owner of Virgin Galactic). He tried to get Elon Musk (founder of PayPal and owner of SpaceX) but had to settle for some guy who had once met him at a party.

These billionaires are revolutionising space innovation by moving it from being the exclusive preserve of state organisations (such as NASA) to the hands of private enterprise. They have extraordinary ambition – not just to advance our civilisation into space, but to make money while doing so. Bezos in particular spoke with fanatical zeal about the opportunity to provide a whole new canvas for human innovation and economic growth off our planet. Scholars of capitalism would recognise this as the ultimate spatial fix – capital seeking new frontiers for expansion in space (outer and virtual) once the possibilities on Earth are exhausted.

I found all this very interesting, but what really got my attention was when the subject unexpectedly turned to conservation. Several of the interviewees described their plans as part of a conservation strategy – both for biodiversity on Earth in general and human survival in particular (their arguments are very usefully summarised in this article from which I sourced some of the quotes below). This idea of ‘conservation through space travel’ builds on some thinking put forward by Stephen Hawking recently when he said “the human species will have to populate a new planet within 100 years if it is to survive. With climate change, overdue asteroid strikes, epidemics and population growth, our own planet is increasingly precarious”. Continue reading →

PristinePark2.0™: the future of offsetting?

Posted on by
1

A group of smartly dressed executives stands on a viewing platform, looking out over a verdant forest teeming with wildlife. A waiter glides among the party topping up glasses of champagne, while another offers elaborate canapés. A man steps forward and claps his hands.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as Chief Executive of Conservation plc, may I welcome you to this exclusive viewing of the wonderful place that we call PristinePark2.0™. You have been carefully chosen to have the first opportunity to visit this paradise, and to purchase a stake in it. But first, let me tell you our story. Continue reading →

The Conservation of Smellscapes

Posted on by
5

Recently, I cycled back late from town. There was no wind, almost no traffic, and no moon. I was struck by the power of smells in the dark: first some splashed diesel near the garage, then lilac in a garden, pine trees at the motorway bridge, and the warm ammonia of bullocks at the farm. Finally, home, and then, suddenly, the smell of my neighbour’s washing, hung out overnight: an overpowering and entirely artificial scent, a radical shift of smellscape.

I first came across the concept of ‘smellscape’ in a paper by the cultural geographer Douglas Porteus in 1985. He pointed out that smells tend to be place-related, and that the nose perceives smellscapes just as the eye sees landscapes. Porteus describes sampling smells on ‘smellwalks’, not unlike my cycle journey home. Different continents, countries, regions, neighbourhoods and houses have their particular smellscapes. As Victoria Henshaw pointed out in her book Urban Smellscapes, cities have characteristic smells.   Kate McLean, an artist and designer, makes ‘smellmaps’ of cities around the world. Continue reading →

Conservation Over There

Posted on by
6

Recently, I was talking about Conservation International’s Nature is Speaking videos with some PhD students and postdocs. I recalled that long before Harrison Ford brought his gravel toned menace to voicing The Ocean, he did another video for CI, dear to the heart of fans of his knowing self-parody and sense of timing. In it, Harrison Ford has his chest waxed, while talking about tropical forest loss. Slap on the wax and cue the last line, straight to camera: ‘Every bit of rainforest that gets ripped out over there’ … rip of chest hair; wince … ‘really hurts us over here’… rueful smile.

In the past, I have often used this video with student groups. It lasts 31 seconds, and usually gets a laugh. It raises a serious issue in forest loss. More usefully, there is another perhaps more significant story behind that, in what it reveals about the view of the world that dominates western environmentalism.

The wax job narrative has obvious problems. One thing those who object to it (aside from those allergic to Han Solo or Indiana Jones) focus on the selfishness of its message. The reason it gives to stop tropical forest loss is not because of its significance to local people, or the wonder awakened by its coevolved diversity, but its role in locking up surplus carbon. The video buys into the mainstream international approach to anthropogenic climate change, which is built on the idea of a single global pool of carbon. This allows carbon burned to run chiller cabinets, warm poorly designed houses or allow commuters to queue in their cars to be directly compared with the carbon in a tree or a peatland or plankton.

From this seed grows the whole jungle of carbon offsetting. There is too much carbon in circulation: should we stop producing it? No, too difficult, too disruptive and too expensive. We need to find a convenient (and cheap) way to lock some up. Why not ignore our own carbon use and put our money into stopping forest loss instead?

Harrison Ford outlines the classic ‘carbon colonialism’ of global climate management: let us stop their forest being lost or it will hurt us over here (real people, such as spaceship pilots, archaeologists and actors, who would otherwise have to cut back on their own fossil fuel use).

But Conservation International’s core concern is not carbon as such, but biodiversity. Its website declares ‘CI empowers societies to responsibly and sustainably care for nature, our global biodiversity, for the well-being of humanity’.

The same sleight of hand works for biodiversity loss as for carbon: the problem is constructed as global, and so too are the solutions Biodiversity is everywhere: we just need to find the fastest, cheapest and most convenient way to save as much as possible. Where do we get most bang for our buck? In the tropics, where biodiversity is highest, land is cheapest and people most need money. And where does CI work? In the tropics: it website shows offices in more than 30 countries, all of them less developed and almost all in the tropics.

Although the battered ecosystems of the developed world also have their passionate supporters, such as the Wildlife Trusts in the UK, all the world’s biggest conservation NGOs (and the scientists who advise them) share CI’s concern for tropical biodiversity. All of them aim to raise money ‘over here’ (from people in industrialised countries) to protect species and ecosystems ‘over there’ (in the tropical developing world).

Conservation is increasingly globalised. Its websites and magazines have come to look like travel brochures: rich colours, vibrant ecosystems, charismatic species (and sometimes quaint natives). Some conservation organisations even organise tours for their supporters, so they can see protected and threatened nature for themselves. A niche travel product has developed around ‘last chance tourism’. It is as if love of nature has become a love of the exotic: a documentary series, a holiday brochure, the immersive experience of 360o video.

Loss of natural diversity in the face of human consumption has become standardised, treated as a single problem, just like carbon. The problem with this is that conservation is not presented as depending on my actions (except in reaching for the ‘donate now’ button). More generally, the implied message of calls for tropical conservation is that global biodiversity loss has little connection with actions in the developed world, or the lifestyle and energy use patterns into which everyone is locked.

This is simply not true. The general links between global trade and biodiversity loss have been recognised for some time. Now a new paper in by Daniel Moran and Keiichiro Kanemoto has mapped the links between consumption in specific countries (such as the USA or the EU) and hotspots of species under threat in the tropics. These connections are entrenched, destructive and near universal. The new Trase transparency platform (Transparency for Sustainable Economies) uses production, trade and customs data to show flows of globally traded commodities such as palm oil, soya, beef and timber through supply chains from source, through trading companies to consumption. Whether we like it or not, transparency about the connections between consumption here and impacts ‘over there’ are going to become much harder to ignore.

Conservationists feel the destruction of nature as a hurt – we live, as Aldo Leopold said of ecologists – in a world of wounds. But the globalisation of biodiversity loss offers dangerous solace. It means that we mourn, but we do not have to change. If the real problem is over there, it is not us but those people who must change. Our job as conservationists is therefore to persuade them, or sometimes indeed to force their hands, with our donations and our buying power, our ideas of nature and our friends among their elite.

The problem is that the actions that cause the hurt are not just over there, they are also much closer to home, in excessive consumption (beef, soya, diesel, plastics, air conditioning: the list is endless), and in our acceptance that global supply chains that meet our every want are normal and inevitable (indeed – because we love our consumption – that they are basically good).

When CI talks about climate change, it presents ‘nature’ as ‘humanity’s biggest ally in the fight against climate change’. The idea of a global pool of carbon links the survival of that forest to our carbon consumption. So, as Harrison Ford argues, if tropical forests can indeed deliver ‘30% of mitigation action needed to prevent catastrophic climate change’, protecting them makes sense.

After all, the only other alternative would mean tackling the systemic dependence on fossil fuels of the capitalist system of production and consumption. And that would strike at the heart of the way the people live in the world’s richest countries – which would be really scary for all conservation’s key supporters, not least space pilots and Hollywood stars.

Synthetic Biology and the Metabolic Rift

Posted on by
2

Synthetic biology is an astonishing field. Its scientific ambition is breathtaking. According to the Global Network of Science Academies, it involves no less than ‘the deliberate design and construction of customized biological and biochemical systems to perform new or improved functions’. Synthetic biologists hope to create a new industry by treating DNA as if it was computer software.   Writing in Nature, Daniel Gibson observed ‘A biological cell is much like a computer – the genome can be thought of as the software that encodes the cell’s instructions, and the cellular machinery as the hardware that interprets and runs the software’. Scientists can act as biological ‘software engineers’, programming new biological ‘operating systems’ into cells. That is quite an ambition.

Synthetic biology  has significant implications for conservation, from the speculative world of de-extinction (whether the cloning of mammoth or the summer blockbuster of Jurassic World) to the idea of fighting wildlife disease (such as white-nose disease in wild bats or chytridiomycosis in amphibians), or addressing human impacts on land and ocean. It has the potential to transform the production of food, fibre and oils, the flows of materials through the urban-industrial system, and human ecological interactions. It is likely to be a seriously disruptive innovation in many fields, from medicine or agriculture to energy supply.

In a world of Promethean environmentalism, synthetic biology offers perhaps the perfect combination of possibility and risk. On the one hand it offers solutions to global sustainability challenges in food, water and energy. On the other hand, it channels environmentalist fears about the scope of corporate control of genetic knowledge and the development, patenting and release of novel organisms.

But synthetic biology is not just another technology. It has profound implications for relations between humanity and non-human nature. As Neil Smith observes, it extends human artifice – and corporate interests – right down to the level of the genome.   So a key question is, how should we think about it?

Continue reading →

Conservation is watching you

Posted on by
5

Over the last few years the conservation movement has been enthusiastically deploying new surveillance technologies that make it possible to monitor and protect the natural world in ways once unimaginable. There are camera traps that can send live images of warthogs, lions and blurry things with legs direct to your desktop. There are unmanned aerial vehicles (or drones) that buzz overhead, filming orang-utan nests or measuring forest loss. There are tiny tracking devices that can be fitted to wild animals, allowing them to be followed from space as they wander around the Kenyan plains or fly across the ocean. And there are computer programmes that can predict the behaviour of poachers and send drones out to intercept them.

All of this is very exciting for conservationists. New gizmos promise better and cheaper data that can be used to monitor populations and understand threats, and new ways to tackle those threats. What’s more, some of the outputs of the technology are visually appealing and easily communicated to the general public through websites and smartphone apps, meaning that technologies can also be used to raise funds and promote public awareness.

Clearly new technology has a lot of potential for conservation, and websites like the newly launced WildLabs.net showcase the range of applications that are being developed. But is there another side to this story? Are there any potential risks or dangers lurking in the shadows as conservation rushes to deploy the latest gadgets? Continue reading →

Community-based monitoring for science, management and local empowerment. A flash in the pan?

Posted on by
4

Citizen Science – research conducted in whole or in part by non-professional scientists – seems to be everywhere at the moment; from our back gardens to remote tropical forests, on our TVs and in our academic journals. It offers something for everyone: scientists like its potential to generate lots of data at low cost; sociologists like the way it changes the relationship between science and the public; the media like its ability to connect with individuals and their personal stories. There are concerns about the quality of data collected by amateur citizen scientists, but there is increasing evidence that they can be of comparable quality to professionals, if those collecting them receive the right training. Citizen Science has been used to look for climate patterns in historical weather records, to unlock the secrets of faraway galaxies, and to map the sacred sites of Congolese forest people. Conservation has been quick to jump on the bandwagon, with a whole range of applications, from detecting bats to identifying new species.

Citizen Science is not one thing, and typologies have been developed that recognise the different roles of citizens in the process (e.g. as passive participants or as active owners of the research) and the varied nature of the tasks performed by citizen scientists (e.g. as ‘sensors’ making observations or as problem solvers). Perhaps the most profound distinction is between individuals who participate in citizen science for pleasure as a hobby, and those for whom the findings have direct implications for their underlying wellbeing. The former category typically involves relatively wealthy people in developing countries (such as expert amateur birdwatchers) whereas the latter category is particularly relevant to conservation in developing countries, where many people depend on natural resources for their livelihoods.

Conservation citizen science in developing countries – often called ‘community-based monitoring’ – is growing in popularity. It has the potential, in theory, to create a fantastic win-win-win. Local people collect data on wildlife and resource use that are highly valuable to conservation and conservation science: win one. These data can then be fed into management of the same natural resources, creating improved long-term conservation outcomes: win two. At the same time, the process of involving local people in study design, data collection and (sometimes) management is empowering, which can create meaningful improvements in wellbeing for local people: win three. There is a real buzz at the moment about the potential of local citizen science to deliver this triple-win, but how robust is it in the face of changing conditions? In particular, to what extent is it dependent on the limitations of current technology? Continue reading →