Meeting notice: The 99.12.21 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. 

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Suggested topic:

Enviro NT (2)

If you believe both that green values are positively associated with prosperity 
and that the next few decades are going to see significant wealth creation 
effects, it follows that we should expect steadily more emphasis on green issues 
and the missions of environmental organizations.  At this moment, at least, it 
looks as though this influence might include a steadily developing hostility to 
biotechnology, or at least genetic engineering.  

This trend is of concern to anyone who believes that social and technological 
change is a measure of life and especially those with an interest in NT, since 
cellular or ribosomal engineering is one very plausible route to that 
technology. One approach to reversing this trend is to find applications, first 
for biotechnology and later for NT itself, that promote green values.  

A simple example might be airborne viruses custom-built to infect alien or 
exotic species, like kudzu or the zebra mussel. Another would be sensor plants 
that would monitor changes in the chemical or physical environment, perhaps 
fluorescing when something interesting happened.  (There are in fact several 
projects exploring this application underway right now.) 

As the technology improved, a full-blown ecological immune system would 
gradually take shape -- bots that would wander through the biota, checking 
genomes, and taking action when one was found that was not on the approved list.   
(No doubt there would be the equivalent of auto- immune diseases that would need 
to be dealt with.)  The ecological immune system would be a prime gardening 
tool, programmable as it would be any ecological ideology: nature as it existed 
in 1900, on another longitude, etc.

A somewhat more radical application would be engineering the ecology directly.  References are often made in the green literature to genetic and ecological 
diversity as though biota that were more diverse were "better" than those that 
were not.  To the degree that this is true -- and such landscapes do seem at 
least more satisfying to experience -- biotech/NT can be used to design and release organisms with the idea of packing the largest possible number of self- 
sustaining ecological links into a region's nutrient flow.   

Both these ideas assume some form of top-down, centralized, ecological 
'governance'.  The most far-out application would be 'Open Source Ecology,' in 
which the best or most natural biota is defined as the one that gives natural 
selection the richest range of material to work with.   

In this vision people would feel free to develop and release life forms at will.  
These forms would be tracked (see above) and their creators gain status 
according to how well, and how ingeniously, these forms endured, prospered, and 
contributed to the biota.  While the idea sounds implausible today, it is easy 
to imagine it emerging at least in protected spaces or areas, such as very large 
terraria, perhaps the size of Central Park.   

It is of course a long step to imagining this natural selection- centric 
definition of nature taking over our management philosophy of the general 
outdoors, but cultures take some funny bounces.  This perspective would 
guarantee a nature that would dynamic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable.  It 
would be constitute the return of wilderness in the old sense, and the time 
might come when we will decide that there is no act of restoration more in 
keeping with green values than letting nature be wild again.  

Not that I'm not holding my breath.


Fred Hapgood





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Announcement Archive: 
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