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Article Excerpt
Despite the high political and environmental salience of such questions, social scientific analysis of the broad field of conservation genetics currently lags far behind the proliferation of inquiries into the ethical, legal and social aspects of genomics in human health (see, e.g., Rabinow, 1996; Rose, 2001; Waldby, 2002; Fletcher, 2004; Gottweis & Petersen, 2007). This article begins to redress this imbalance by introducing the broad field of conservation genetics and discussing social and policy implications of incorporating advanced biotechnologies into the tool-kit of wildlife preservation. The next section discusses the emergence of extinction as a policy problem in the early twentieth century. Section three canvasses the relatively young field of conservation genetics by examining some prominent examples of research projects that seek to document or to restore lost ecosystems or species. Section four is a short case study of one highly visible project--the Australian Museum's Thylacine Cloning Project (1999-2005)--that illustrates the social tensions produced when a project premised on the idea of "reviving" an extinct species escapes the lab to engage with widespread media and public attention. The concluding discussion places the field of conservation genetics within a social framework. This article does not purport to judge whether or not cloning an extinct species will ever be possible. Rather, it introduces conservation genetics to a broadly defined policy audience in an effort to stimulate further research and discussion about the use of advanced biotechnology in environmental and wildlife management.
Extinction Matters
That species adapt, change, and disappear over eons of evolutionary time is one of the crucial insights of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. At the end of the nineteenth century Darwin's insight into extinction as a natural process, subject to inexorable evolutionary processes, crossed from science into the social realm (in a bastardized version) so successfully that it became a major justification for Western colonialism. Colonial elites often equated the extirpation of indigenous peoples and cultures with the theory of "survival of the fittest," a phrase coined by Herbert Spencer (see, e.g., McGrath, 1997; McNiven & Russell, 2005). Political manipulation of Darwin's ideas (encapsulated in the phrase "social Darwinism") found its most notorious twentieth-century expression in Nazi eugenics. Rudolph Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, stated, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology" (see Enoch, 2004, p. 53).
Alongside social Darwinism, there is also a significant moment in early twentieth century Western thought wherein various independent observers began to notice that wildlife extinctions, while natural in a basic scientific sense, could be artificially accelerated via anthropogenic factors such as unregulated hunting and habitat depletion. For instance, in 1921, E. Buxton argued in the Journal of the Royal African Society, "the wild life and varied fauna of Africa is an Imperial asset, and worthy of preservation, and I may remind you that some interesting species of large animals have totally disappeared in the past 150 years--e.g., the Quagga and Blue-buck. What would posterity think of us if we allowed this process of the steady elimination of species to continue" (Buxton, 1921, p. 279)? Similarly, in the Journal of Mammology, H. Carey begins with a roll call of extinct and endangered American species such as the Carolina paroquets, pronghorn antelopes, prairie hens, heath hens, sea otter and passenger pigeons, before shifting to an impassioned plea for nations to recognize a collective international interest in saving the fauna of Africa that ends with a call for a wildlife preservation campaign that is "militant, unified, international" (Carey, 1926, p. 78; emphasis original). Of course, both of these statements contain vestiges of the colonial mindset, particularly in the conceptualization of Africa's natural resources as an "imperial asset." Nevertheless, they also reflect a crucial shift from the Western belief that the elimination of "exotic" species in the colonies was a natural outgrowth of imperial superiority, to an initial realization that wildlife extinction could be a problem caused by humans and subject to human intervention. In a discussion of the acid rain controversy in Britain, M. Hajer argues, "whether or not a situation is perceived as a political problem depends on the narrative in which it is discussed. To be sure, large groups of dead trees as such are not a social construct: the point is how one makes sense of dead trees. In this respect there are many possible realities" (Hajer, 1993, p. 44). Likewise, large numbers of dead mega-fauna can be read in several ways. The Western shift in environmental awareness signaled by such observers such as Buxton and Carey represents a radical re-framing of extinction that bridges the colonial past and the environmental present, despite the lingering cultural biases in their writings.
The Great Depression and World War II superseded environmental issues...
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