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39 INTRODUCTION A SPECIES APART 2. FROM ECOCIDE TO GENETIC RESCUE CAN TECHNOSCIENCE SAVE THE WILD? Tracey Heatherington Banking on Extinctions A few years ago, the late Stephen M. Meyer announced “the End of the Wild” in the Boston Review. A distinguished MIT professor and passionate advocate for environmental policy, Meyer told us we had already lost all chance of saving “the composition, structure and organization of biodiversity” in nature (2004:1). His grim assessment was supported by the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007), which pronounced it “virtually certain” that the rates of species loss will accelerate due to trends in anthropogenic global climate change. Recently, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (SCBD) rather bluntly acknowledged that an eight-year international program intended to stem the tide of extinctions by 2010 failed to achieve its goal.1 Projections suggest significant impending changes in the distribution and abundance of species and biomes over the twenty-first century (Leadley et al. 2010). These unprecedented levels of species extinctions result not only in physical losses, but also in losses to traditional knowledge systems, future scientific knowledge, and the human spirit. Possibilities of better understanding human history itself are being lost along with the wild. In the years since the first Rio Earth Summit, the growing role of genomic research in environmental conservation science has promised new visions of nature and the way we should manage it. In 2004, for example, the Natural History Museum of London, in collaboration with the Zoological Society of London and the Institute of Genetics at the University of Nottingham, launched an initiative called the Fro- GENESE MARIE SODIKOFF 40 JANET CHERNELA TRACEY HEATHERINGTON TRACEY HEATHERINGTON zen Ark (Natural History Museum 2004).2 The project collects DNA samples and viable cells from endangered species and freezes them at minus 80˚C. One journalist proclaimed it “a modern version of Noah’s Ark, designed to save thousands of creatures from extinction.” He explained, “Scientists . . . are keen to preserve the DNA of endangered animals so they can continue research into their evolutionary histories even if they become extinct. More ambitiously, scientists hope one day to be able to use cells from the frozen tissue samples to recreate extinct animals using advanced cloning techniques” (Sample 2004). A growing international consortium of institutes, zoos, and museums around the world have signed agreements to store and share materials and information in this “DNA bank.”3 The institutional partnerships, financial articulations, technoscientific capacities, and global imaginaries mobilized for the Frozen Ark define an important new “global assemblage” (Ong and Collier 2005; Collier 2006). They suggest that gene banking and cloning biotechnologies will play a crucial role in the future of biodiversity conservation. With its biblical reference to imminent world disaster and its transcendent faith in technoscientific interventions, the Frozen Ark project reflects the moral discourses of global environmental movements that, after the multiple failures of the initiatives envisioned at Rio, are now permeated with urgency and irony. The Frozen Ark rescues representative samples of genetic diversity in icy vessels of liquid nitrogen, so that we may one day renew the abundance of the Earth in a future graced by better knowledge and moral understanding of both ecological systems and the foundations of life itself. The Frozen Ark is made feasible by burgeoning investments in genomics and emerging techniques associated with somatic cell nuclear transfer, usually glossed as “cloning .” Since this is a branch of science that has generated vehement reactions from fundamentalist religious groups, the biblical allusion of the Frozen Ark is both resonant and strategic across much of the Western world. Here at the frontier of imaginary futures, the moral and symbolic worlds of the Old Testament , environmentalism, and genomic science awkwardly converge. Will our growing ability to intervene in nonhuman systems of reproduction now offer redemption for the role humans have played in species extinctions? If so, how will this alter the nature and culture of biodiversity protection? The implications of the last question evoke Paul Rabinow’s (1996) famous prediction that we have entered an era of “biosociality” in which the social imagination will reshape the foundations of planetary life and biological experience , naturalizing its own interventions in the process. With the advance of new reproductive technologies and a growing ability to both understand and manipulate human and animal genomes alike, unexpected evolutionary vistas beckon. Against the bleak tide of species losses, the gleaming possibility of [3.145.23.123] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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