Posts Tagged ‘climate change’
“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything”*…
A “great reshuffle” of the land is underway, Michael Albertus explains– and it will force us to reconsider traditional ideas of property and ownership…
… It can be easy to forget the significance of the ground beneath our feet – and how much it has shaped the societies we live in. For most people, their home is their house – or their landlord’s. It is bought, sold or rented along with the land underneath it, passing between families over the years. But at some point – and probably several times – there have been abrupt changes to that seemingly permanent arrangement. Land tenure can be profoundly reshuffled. It has in the past and it will be again in the future.
As a political scientist, I’ve studied how land power has shaped societies all over the world. From Ireland to Italy, from Chile to South Africa, and across the US West, struggles over ownership and land use are etched in family histories and have determined the fate of nations…
… Today we are in the middle of a ‘great reshuffle’ of land. Over the past two centuries, nearly every society has reallocated land ownership and property rights. And because of the power that land confers to those who hold it, this reshuffling has set societies on distinct trajectories of development. It’s helped some countries become more egalitarian and productive, whereas for others it has embedded racial hierarchies, deep inequalities and economic stagnation.
The global population bubble and climate change will amplify the reshuffling, and a picture of how that will happen is starting to emerge. Land will become ever scarcer and more valuable as populations increase – and the opposite could occur in the next century as the world’s population plummets. Meanwhile, a changing climate will make vast areas of land more attractive and productive while rendering other areas uninhabitable. Amid these changes, the question is how to reshuffle land well. One thing is clear: centuries-old approaches to property rights and ownership are not up to that task…
[Albertus quickly reviews the hstory of property regimes, with special emphasis on the devlopment of today’s, whihc he calls “the Great Reshuffle”…]
… This great reshuffle began in different ways. In some cases, it entailed the appropriation of Indigenous lands on the part of settlers. Other times, it involved stripping large landowners of their property and granting it to peasants, whether collectively, in cooperatives or as individuals. My ancestors in southern Poland won a small plot of land – presumably taken from the local noble family – through the 1848 revolutions that swept across Europe.
Land reshuffling rewired nearly every country on Earth and set societies on new trajectories of development, race and gender relations, and treatment of the environment. For some societies, that meant becoming more egalitarian. In the years after the Second World War, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan all adopted sweeping programmes that transferred land from landlords to their tenants in small, family-sized plots. The governments of these countries followed that up with generous subsidies. Within a generation, families were sending their children to schools rather than the fields. Urbanisation and industrialisation followed, vaunting these nations to the forefront of the global economy.
Far more countries stumbled. Following the end of China’s civil war in the late 1940s, the Communist Party seized all private land in the country, nationalised it, and then formed large land collectives that incorporated some 430 million people. It was one of the largest experiments in land reshuffling in human history. And it wreaked havoc as China’s forests were felled and underproductivity in agriculture drove the Great Famine. Walking through the fields of a place like Dali in Yunnan province today, as I have done, paints a different picture of productivity that emerged only after China broke up its collectives and allowed families to farm specific plots of land…
In the US, land reshuffling had varied consequences. The displacement of Indigenous communities and reallocation of their land to settlers set the stage for a radical experiment in democracy among smallholding settlers in New England, the slavery and plantation system in the South, and a system of Indian reservations in the West. When I did fieldwork at the Agua Caliente Reservation that centres on Palm Springs, California in late 2023, tribal members pointed to repeated land grabs as the root of attempts by outsiders to break down tribal cohesion and cultural preservation.
Around the world today, people are living and breathing the consequences of how the great reshuffle has rewired societies – from resource depletion to racism, gender inequalities, prosperity levels, and the global pecking order. In the coming decades, addressing problems linked to these shifts will require recognising their origins and crafting policies that turn land into a force for positive social change.
After all, land is still the world’s most valuable asset, despite the economic rotation toward technology and manufacturing in advanced economies. Growing populations and the need to feed them and generate resources for them have driven a spiralling demand for land. This is true even in urban areas, where land prices typically skyrocket. Pressure on the land is only going to increase in the coming decades. More land reshuffles are coming…
… The future lies to the north. Latitudes north of the 45th parallel make up only 15 per cent of the world’s surface area but have 29 per cent of its ice-free land and are very sparsely populated. Even more northern land is set to shed its ice and permafrost in the coming decades and become more temperate and productive. Much of this land is owned directly by governments and Indigenous communities, often with colliding claims; little of it is privately owned.
Canada and Russia, the world’s two largest northerly countries, will undergo the most dramatic changes. Agriculture could dramatically expand through longer growing seasons, warmer temperatures and the melting of millions of acres of permafrost. One recent climate model shows Canada gaining 4.2 million square kilometres of arable land suitable for growing crops like wheat, corn and potatoes by 2080 – a fourfold increase of its current stock of suitable land. A comparable amount of land will become newly arable in Russia, positioning these two countries as the world’s key breadbaskets of the future. At the same time, these changes will threaten expansive boreal forests and the forestry industry.
The more temperate climate and increased economic activity in these countries will drive population growth and migration, placing pressure to reshuffle lands. In Canada, 89 per cent of all land is ‘Crown land’ – publicly owned by the federal government and provincial governments. Indigenous First Nations people lay claim to large portions, so tensions could boil over as private interest strengthens…
… As for the US, the picture in Alaska parallels that in Canada. The US federal government owns 61 per cent of Alaska’s land, and a growing share will become arable within decades. With Indigenous claims to a large portion, there will be campaigns to reallocate this land – for instance by privatising more federal land – as it becomes more attractive for settlement and economic activity.
And alongside this thawing, governments, private interests and, where present, Indigenous communities, are poised to clash over sparsely populated territories like Greenland and Antarctica with weak, absent or transitional sovereignty. Indeed, under President Donald Trump, that has already begun.
While looming northern land reshuffles will catch outsized attention, climate change will also foster internal reshuffles on the land in countries across the globe. That dynamic could be scary and destabilising, but it is also an opportunity. Changing land relationships and migration patterns associated with climate change present a possibility to put land in service of society in ways that have rarely been attempted in human history…
[Albertus describes some of the approaches to land rights developing around the world…]
… There will inevitably be mistakes and growing pains associated with such approaches. But these efforts will be increasingly important if we are going to manage future land reshuffling to the benefit of societies as a whole, and without systemic conflict. Everyone from Aboriginal Australian leaders to Minnesotan farmers have expressed excitement to me about this future under new land arrangements.
In the 22nd century, the great reshuffle will shift once again. There will be major changes in the size of human populations, the climate, technology and, inevitably, in politics. The result will be new relationships with the land that could look foreign to what we experience today. Experiments with new forms of property rights will need to go mainstream in order to accommodate shifting populations and climate change in an orderly and equitable fashion.
There is considerable uncertainty in population projections beyond 2100 but, if fertility rates continue their steady decline, the several-millennia-old human population boom is most likely going to bust. If the world converges to today’s average low fertility rate in East Asia, the 22nd century would be one of rapid depopulation, tracing back to some 2 billion people…
… In the 22nd century, many cities may trace Detroit’s trajectory. If housing remains dense, city footprints will have to shrink dramatically. Meanwhile, in the countryside, there will be far more land to go around, but that land may be degraded if it was not adequately protected.
The climate picture in the 22nd century will also drastically alter where people live on the land and how they relate to it. Even if emissions slow considerably, global temperatures and sea levels will rise, and weather patterns will be more extreme. As we explored earlier, a thawing North will continue to open up to agriculture, but land elsewhere will undergo drastic change. Arid and drought-prone areas like northeastern Brazil, the US Southwest and the African Sahel will become increasingly hot and pose a challenge for human livelihoods. Crop yields in the US Southwest are already declining and farmers are struggling to access water for their fields. Some are giving up and fallowing or leaving the land. Meanwhile, low-lying coastal areas in places like Florida and Bangladesh will disappear, as well as entire island nations like the Maldives.
That changing land use will inform the political landscape. Some countries may trace the path that Canada envisions for itself: welcoming immigrants into a dynamic economy. An influential group of Canadian leaders are already organising around an idea known as the Century Initiative that aims to triple the country’s population by 2100, largely by supercharging immigration. Other countries may wall themselves off to protect existing landholdings, resources and wealth from outsiders.
Growing wealth inequality could directly impact who owns the land, too. Powerful multinational companies have increasingly amassed land in order to secure their supply chains, crowding out local populations. If wealthy individuals and investors buy up land at a large scale, a significant portion of the world’s population could end up as renters, mimicking patterns of concentrated large landholding and widespread landlessness that prevailed prior to the onset of the great reshuffle.
Amid all these climatic and economic changes, future generations will make choices once again about whether to spread out on the land or to concentrate in shrinking cities. Land will once more undergo a radical reshuffle in either scenario.
If humanity is to flourish, the next century and beyond will again require a rethink of land relationships…
Reconsidering property rights and ownership: “On unstable ground,” from @mikealbertus.bsky.social in @aeon.co.
* Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind
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As we ponder just how real real estate is, we might recall that on this date in 1916, the Easter Rising, an insurrection launched by Irish republicans against British rule in Ireland with the aim of establishing an independent Irish Republic. It was the most significant uprising in Ireland since the rebellion of 1798 and the first armed conflict of the Irish revolutionary period.
High on the republicans’ list of grievences with their colonial masters was the issue of land reform.
“Every picture tells a story”*…
The world’s populations is unevenly spread across the globe. But, plotted by latitude (as per this visualization from Engaging Data), it’s a little more concentrated…
… which is interesting (perhaps better said, “bracing”) to consider aside this illustration from NOAA…
Global warming is coming for most of us: “World Population Distribution by Latitude and Longitude,” from @engagingdata.bsky.social and @climate.noaa.gov.
See also: “The world is heating up. How much can our bodies handle?” from @gristnews.bsky.social and “Understanding Climate Migration,” from RAND.
* traditional saying
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As we feel the heat, we might spare a thought for John Graunt; he died on this date in 1674. A haberdasher turned statistician, he is considered by many to be the father of demography (the statistical study of human populations).
A charter member of The Royal Society, Graunt distributed a 90-page book, Natural and Political Observations Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality at the February, 1662 Society meeting. He described his work as having “reduced several great confused volumes” of parish records into a few easily to understood tables, and “abridged such Observations… into a few succinct Paragraphs.” He initiated “life tables” of life expectancy. His use of demographics was further pioneered by his friend Sir William Petty and Edmond Halley, the Astronomer Royal.
Graunt’s work also gives him some claim to having been the first epidemiologist.
“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today”*…
… But you might be able to make a buck on it.
We humans are prone to illusions– ideological enthusiasms, avoidance, et al.– that don’t just allow, but encourage us to avoid hard truths. If there’s one sector in which that’s less true, it’s likely finance– where the altogether unemotional logic of profit-making prevails. But as Corbin Hiar illustrates, that can accrue as finding ways to profit from, rather than avoid, the problems that are brewing…
Top Wall Street institutions are preparing for a severe future of global warming that blows past the temperature limits agreed to by more than 190 nations a decade ago, industry documents show.
The big banks’ acknowledgment that the world is likely to fail at preventing warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels is spelled out in obscure reports for clients, investors and trade association members. Most were published after the reelection of President Donald Trump, who is seeking to repeal federal policies that support clean energy while turbocharging the production of oil, gas and coal — the main sources of global warming.
The recent reports — from Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and the Institute of International Finance — show that Wall Street has determined the temperature goal is effectively dead and describe how top financial institutions plan to continue operating profitably as temperatures and damages soar.
“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”
The stunning conclusion indicates that the bank believes the planet is hurtling toward a future in which severe droughts and harvest failures become widespread, sea-level rise is measured in feet rather than inches and tropical regions experience episodes of extreme heat and humidity for weeks at a time that would bring deadly risks to people who work outdoors.
The global Paris Agreement, from which the U.S. is withdrawing under Trump, aims to limit average temperature increases to well below 2 degrees Celsius. Scientists have warned that permanently exceeding 1.5 degrees — a threshold the world breached for the first time last year — could lead to increasingly severe climate impacts, such as the demise of coral reef ecosystems that hundreds of millions of people rely on for food and storm surge protection.
Morgan Stanley’s climate forecast was tucked into a mundane research report on the future of air conditioning stocks, which it provided to clients on March 17. A 3 degree warming scenario, the analysts determined, could more than double the growth rate of the $235 billion cooling market every year, from 3 percent to 7 percent until 2030.
“The political environment has changed, so some of them are conforming to that,” Gautam Jain, a former investment banker who is now a senior research scholar at Columbia University, said of Wall Street’s increasingly dire climate projections. “But mostly it is a rational business decision.”
The new warming estimates come as heat-trapping gases continue to rise globally and as international commitments to limit the burning of oil, gas and coal that’s responsible for the bulk of emissions have stalled. Meanwhile, megabanks like Wells Fargo are backsliding on their previous climate pledges and exiting from the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a United Nations-backed group that encouraged members to slash their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement.
Morgan Stanley, which in October watered down its climate-related lending targets, declined to comment.
Betting on potentially catastrophic global warming is both an acknowledgment of the current emissions trajectory and a politically savvy move in the second Trump era, according to Jain.
“Nobody wants to be seen as going against” the administration’s pro-fossil-fuel energy policy, he said. “These banks are businesses, so they have to look at the risk that they have in their portfolio and the opportunities that they see in the most likely environment.”…
Making hay in the havoc: “Big Banks Quietly Prepare for Catastrophic Warming,” from @corbinhiar.bsky.social and @eenews.bsky.social via @sciam.bsky.social.
Related: “Reinsurers: placing an economic price on climate change.”
* Abraham Lincoln
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As we sweat it out, we might spare a thought for Hugh Robert Mill; he died on this date in 1950. A geographer (President of the Geographical Association) and meteorologist (President of the Royal Meteorological Society), he was influential in the maturation of geography and cartography– and relevantly to this post, in the development of meteorology as a science.
“Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand”*…
(Roughy) Daily has looked before at that most common– and essential– of substances, sand. (See here, here, and here.) Today, via Michaela Büsse, an update…
After water, sand is the second most used material in the world. Each year, approximately 40-50 billion metric tons of sand are consumed worldwide.
This accounts for 79% of all aggregates extracted and traded, making sand the literal foundation for global human infrastructure. Sand plays a vital role in the production of glass, steel, and concrete. Silica, one of the most common minerals found in sand, is the key ingredient in silicon chips and thus for the development of digital technologies. But sand is also fundamental to the creation and maintenance of land itself, rendering it constitutive to processes of urbanization. Artificial islands, port expansions, and beach nourishment projects consume vast quantities of sand. As the bedrock of urban infrastructures, sand is embedded in the very fabric of modern life. Yet, its ubiquity belies its complexity. As a sediment, sand is foundational for the functioning of ecosystems. The relentless expansion and intensification of cities is starving rivers and coasts of sediment, depleting sand at a rate that far exceeds its natural replenishment.
Intensive dredging of rivers and seabeds has fundamentally altered sedimentation patterns, disrupting the delicate equilibrium that governs ecosystems. Rivers, which once carried sand from mountains to coastlines, now struggle to replenish beaches and wetlands. This depletion has far-reaching consequences. Without sufficient sand deposits, coastlines are left vulnerable to erosion, rising sea levels, and the devastating impact of extreme weather events. In ecosystems already on the front lines of climate change—like deltas, wetlands, and estuaries—the effects of sand extraction are compounded. Delta regions, for instance, rely on continuous sediment deposits to counteract the natural sinking of land. When sand is removed faster than it can be replaced, these regions are exposed to subsidence, where land sinks at an accelerated rate, amplifying flood risk and increasing the salinization of freshwater resources. Such impacts are often delayed, manifesting years or even decades after extraction, making them challenging to monitor and mitigate effectively.
As global sand consumption surges to unprecedented heights, the profound and far-reaching consequences of extraction come sharply into focus. Numerous journalistic and scientific accounts warn of the “looming tragedy of the sand commons,” highlighting environmental concerns related to dredging and mining sand, such as pollution, biodiversity loss, and soil disturbance, as well as illegal practices in the sand trade. The reality of the sand trade is both dirty and messy, intertwining national and transnational politics. In regions like Southeast Asia, rapid urbanization and investments in large-scale infrastructure projects have spurred an unprecedented demand for this essential resource. Here, land reclamation has emerged as a flashpoint where extraction practices intersect with issues of sovereignty, livelihoods, and environmental justice, transforming sand into a highly sought-after and contested commodity. Building new land for some means taking old land from others. The exploitation of sand goes hand in hand with exploitative labor and geopolitical maneuvering.
Sand’s impending scarcity has fueled a black market, giving rise to “sand mafias”—criminal organizations that exploit extraction and trade through corruption, violence, and intimidation, often circumventing national mining and export bans. It is not uncommon for sand to become a matter of life and death for those who mine it as well as for those who seek to prevent it from being mined. Across the world, activists and local communities have mobilized against sand extraction and land reclamation, fighting the prevailing narratives of development and progress that often justify environmental exploitation. However, these initiatives are rarely successful, resulting (at best) in compensation payments to the affected communities. A transboundary governance of sand would require international standards, which many researchers and organizations have requested. Even so, it is nearly impossible to control the natural flow of sand.
As sand transitions from a sediment to a precious resource, it has become instrumental in urban ideals of late modernity. Cities like Dubai and Singapore epitomize how architectural ambitions is built on vast quantities of imported sand. Land built from scratch, towering skyscrapers, and sprawling infrastructure are testaments to sand’s transformative potential. Yet, these urban landscapes are haunted by their materiality: each grain is a silent witness to the ecological and social disruptions that enabled its journey. The sand in these structures embodies the persistence of environmental degradation, displaced labor, and the exploitation that made them possible. In this way, sand is both an architect and a specter of modernity’s unrestrained ambitions, leaving us to confront the shadows cast by our own constructions…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Granular Power: The Gritty Politics of Sand,” from @michaelabussey.bsky.social and @eflux.bsky.social.
* Jorge Luis Borges
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As we get grainy, we might send insightful birthday greetings to James Hansen; he was born on this date in 1941. An atmospheric physicist, he was Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (from 1981-2013). He is best known for his (June, 1988) testimony to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that there was 99% certainty the cause of climate change was known with 99% certainty to be the buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere– helping raise broad awareness of global warming– and for his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. (Hansen has since proposed a revised explanation of global warming, where the 0.7°C global mean temperature increase of the last 100 years can be to some extent explained by the effect of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide (such as methane).
Currently the Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, he remains a climate activist.
“The advance of genetic engineering makes it quite conceivable that we will begin to design our own evolutionary progress”*…
The obligations of a multi-day meeting (and the travel involved) mean that, from this issue, (R)D will be on pause until February 12 or 13 (depending on how connections play out…)
… and indeed the evolutionary progress of others species. But, Deputy Co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics Melanie Challenger asks, have we been sufficiently thoughful about the implications of this power?…
In 2016, Klaus Schwab announced that we had entered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This is the era of the industrialization of biology, the leveraging of technologies to modify biological materials to meet human goals. While the first two Industrial Revolutions exploited energy and materials and the Third exploited digital information, the current revolution is a direct manipulation of life-forms and life’s substances.
The signature invention of this new era is CRISPR, dubbed “genetic scissors.” CRISPR is a ground-breaking method of making precise changes to DNA for a wide range of possible uses from disease reduction and elimination to the eradication of “pest” species and increases in the productivity of farmed animals. CRISPRs (the best-known system being CRISPR-Cas9) originate in RNA-based bacterial defense systems. Naturally occurring in species of bacteria, the Cas9 enzyme cuts the genomes of bacteriophages (viruses that will attack a bacterium), saving a record for defense against future infections. Scientists realized that this immunological strategy could be coopted to innovate a general tool for cutting DNA.
The optimism among those that seek to utilize these tools has been palpable for some time. As noted by the researchers at The Roslin Institute, creators of Dolly the Sheep, the world’s first cloned mammal: “Until recently, we have only been able to dream of…the ability to induce precise insertions or deletions easily and efficiently in the germline of livestock. With the advent of genome editors this is now possible.”
But the technologies of this new industrial era present ethical dilemmas and unknown consequences. What will it take to ensure that this revolution avoids worsening the enormous challenges we already face, especially from biodiversity loss and climate change? How can we get the balance right between the benefits and risks of human inventiveness?
In the 1980s, tech theorist David Collingridge presented his eponymous dilemma for those seeking to control potentially disruptive technologies. First, there is an “information problem” in which significant impacts are often invisible until the technology is already in use. Second, there is a “power problem” in which the technology becomes difficult to shape, regulate or scale back once it has become integrated in our lives. If we are going to navigate the Fourth Industrial Revolution successfully, we need to examine our use of CRISPR through the Collingridge dilemma.
The investors and engineers of the first industrial revolutions in the nineteenth century provide a vivid example of the information problem. They hoped that innovations like the combustion engine would unlock efficiency across multiple human sectors, from transportation to logistics to tourism. Such optimism was not unwarranted. Yet, as Collingridge’s dilemma suggests, it is easier to picture gains than to predict trouble. Building road systems and infrastructure carved capital movements into the landscape, symbolising freedom and the flow of wealth and creativity. Yet the striking visual parallels with our circulatory system did not stimulate anyone to forecast the ninety per cent of people today who are exposed to unsafe pollution levels from traffic or the associated health burdens from heart and lung disease to asthma. Nobody then foresaw the yearly deaths of two billion or so non-human vertebrates on our roads today, or that high traffic areas would cause localised declines in insect abundance of at least a quarter and, in some studies, as much as eighty per cent.
And, of course, most calamitous of all, there is climate change. Traffic emissions account for a fifth of all contributions to global warming. Yet the idea that a profitable and efficient machine like the combustion engine might precede devastating shifts in temperature and weather patterns was scarcely conceivable at the time. Now, it is a near ubiquitous feature of our understanding of the world.
When it comes to the engineering of biology, a similar information problem abounds. Not only is our understanding of biological life incomplete, but we know little about what the industrial processes that we are advancing inside the cells of organisms will do. The changes are both physically and ethically occluded. The ramifications of this and other related biotechnologies are not only rendered uncertain by the inherently complex nature of biological systems but are largely inaccessible to our imaginations.
We must struggle with the radical character of the industrialization of biology. Gene drives (a tool to increase the likelihood of passing on a gene) can weaponize the bodies and reproductive strategies of organisms to bias evolution in a directed way. Artificial chimeric organisms (those composed of cells from more than one species) mix and match biological traits and functions to bring about beings that wouldn’t occur otherwise, transforming autonomous organisms into useful parts for plug and play. But while evolutionary processes will sift those forms and strategies that most benefit future organisms, our acts of creation primarily benefit us alone. Survival of the fittest gives way to the contrivance of the functional.
Yet, despite the disruptive nature of these technologies, CRISPR is already entrenched in our research and economic landscape: here is the power problem of our new technology. The efficiency of modern versions of CRISPR has allowed the technology to pick up users fast. It is now a commonplace tool in labs around the world – with uses amplified during the pandemic – and continues to be utilized in ethically provocative trials, including the cloning of mammal species. CRISPR has been normalised by stealth.
This largely uncontested rollout has been enabled by biases in the evaluation of who is at risk. Put bluntly, humans worry about humans, and take risks to non-humans less seriously. As such, there are vastly different acceptance thresholds for certain kinds of uses and these can be exploited by those that seek to deregulate or profit from the technologies…
… This discrepancy is evident in the anxieties of Jennifer Doudna, one of the Nobel-winning scientists who made the CRISPR breakthrough. In her book, A Crack in Creation, she writes of a dream in which Hitler appears to her with the face of a pig and questions her excitedly about the power she has unleashed. Doudna’s anxieties relate not to the pigs of her dream (who are subject to a wide range of CRISPR applications) but to the potential of eugenics re-emerging in human societies. Her dream reflects not only the inevitability that any technology such as this will be equal parts destruction to rewards, but also that we must confront uncomfortable ideas about what it is to be a creature as much as a creator. Recognizing that these technologies work in the bodies of all biological beings, including humans, is a continual assault on the reasoning behind a hard moral border between us and them.
At present, the lives of non-human animals are the experimental landscape for our technologies. Their powerlessness to protest the uses of their bodies, wombs, physical materials, or futures leaves them vulnerable to being the test sites for a wide range of possible human applications. As a direct consequence of the serviceability of the bodies of organisms, CRISPR has been integrated into our world with little fanfare, directly facilitating the power problem that will, eventually, impact us too. Given Collingridge’s dilemma, what concepts and strategies could help us reduce the risks from CRISPR?
The first thing we need is a new definition of pollution. When it comes to combustion engines and other technologies of the first industrial revolutions, pollution is by far the most consequential harm. Direct impacts include the release of particulate matter or chemical compounds like nitrogen oxides or carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pollution from traffic has an immediate impact, especially fifty to one hundred metres from the roadside, with effects that we can measure, such as reduced growth rates or leaf damage in plants, or changes to soil chemistry and nutrient availability. On the other hand, long term effects of emissions, such as global warming, or the sustained impacts of waste on organisms and ecosystems, have proven tricky to anticipate and even harder to hold in mind…
…What is curious about the Fourth Industrial Revolution is that while several branches of science are arming us with the evidence that justifies an expansion of the moral circle to encompass a larger range of organisms, other branches are cranking up the objectification and exploitation of life-forms. As a result, there’s an obvious gap. Without addressing this, most concepts of pollution will remain anthropocentric. This may prove a critical misstep…
A provocative argument that “Gene Editing is Pollution,” from @TheIdeasLetter. Eminently worth reading in full.
See also: “The Ethics and Security Challenge of Gene Editing” and “The great gene editing debate: can it be safe and ethical?“
* Isaac Asimov
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As we ponder permuted progeny, we might send microbiological birthday greetings to Jacques Lucien Monod; he was born on this date in 1910. A biochemist, he shared (with with François Jacob and André Lwoff) the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.”
But Monod, who became the director of the Pasteur Institute, also made significant contributions to the philosophy of science– in particular via his 1971 book (based on a series of his lectures) Chance and Necessity, in which he examined the philosophical implications of modern biology. The importance of Monod’s work as a bridge between the chance and necessity of evolution and biochemistry on the one hand, and the human realm of choice and ethics on the other, can be seen in his influence on philosophers, biologists, and computer scientists including Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and Richard Dawkins… and as a context setter for the deliberations suggested above…
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