Meeting notice: The 07-20-99 meeting will be held at 7:30 
p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block 
down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new 
and can't recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably 
know where we are. 

Suggested topic(s):  The Nature of the Wild in the NT era.


The US, like many other countries, tries to prevent "foreign" 
plants and animals from taking up residence inside its borders. 
One arm of this effort lies in filtering overseas visitors and 
freight for foreign species; another is expressed by the growing 
agitation by environmentalists to prevent assemblies of 
"unnatural" genes developed by the biotech industry from  leaking 
into the wild.  

In both cases the rationale is that local species have to be 
protected against overly vigorous foreign competition and the 
risk that foreign (or genetically unnatural) species might not 
play the ecological roles customary to the neighborhood.   While 
it is easy to dismiss this prejudice as so much bionativism, it 
is not difficult to find historical cases of what seem like real 
losses, from kudzu to the zebra mussel.   

Still, when you look down the road it is hard to see how these 
quarantines will stand for more a couple of decades at the most.  
As flying machines get smaller and more numerous and cross border 
transport more frequent the odds of accidental introductions of 
at least the smaller creatures will rise continuously.  
Eventually genetic engineering techniques will get deskilled and 
semi-automated, and when that happens they will pass into the 
hands of landscape architects, horticulturists, and gardeners 
interested in creating novel examples of fungi, plants, and even 
animals.  Surely some of these will escape, if only though 
incompetence.

If the 'finger-in-the-dike' policy wrt to foreign introductions 
fails, the natural fallback would be to develop "natural gardens" 
in protected enclosures, such as conservatories or large 
greenhouses, in which close monitoring of the biology and control 
of the water and air will allow us to protect ecologies 
representing the state of nature as it was at any given date (as 
well as fantasy gardens with no precedent at all).  

These enclosures would be set in and surrounded by a new kind of 
wilderness, a landscape where both new and historic biologies 
from around the world would subject themselves to the test of 
natural selection.  Perhaps we would agree to accept the results 
of this certifying process as 'natural'  but perhaps not.  It is 
also possible that if kudzu and starlings (or their equivalents) 
took over someone, somewhere,  would resent their domination and 
breed and release kudzu-eating snakes or viruses optimized to 
attack starlings, whereupon another selective cycle would 
commence.

Much has been written over the last few years about 'The Death of
Wilderness', the idea that all the processes of nature have become 
human responsibilities.  Many of those writing on this issue seem 
to believe that this is a bad thing; that humans need to live next 
to environments that are constantly just a bit, or maybe more than 
a bit, out of control.  Maybe they should take heart.  We might get 
there yet.

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Note: Up until ten years ago the trajectory of aeronautics over 
the next century seemed pretty obvious: hypersonic planes and 
huge airbuses, with capacities of 1000+.  In the past few years 
hints have begun to emerge that the aeronautical engineers of the 
21st century are a lot more likely to earn their salaries working 
on various combinations of airships, VTOL technologies, and 
autonomous navigation techniques. A recent issue of GPSWorld 
illustrates the point with a compelling narrative of the recent 
Atlantic crossing by an autonomous craft: 
http://www.gpsworld.com/0699/0699feat.html.

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Announcement Archive:
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