October 17th to 27th 2022 : Bio & Agri Zero¶
This section of the MDEF journey focuses on giving a condensed recap on the building blocks of biology, the scientific method and the ways designers can interact it. Nuria Conde Pueyo and Jordi Plat taught us the Biology part, each day unloading new swaths of knowledge. Some information was entirely new to me and had to do with to complex systems and the interaction between the scales of life. Jonathan Minchin then intervened on the Agriculture section, sharing his journey with projects ROMI and OpenSource BeeHives. He emphasized the necessity of working with life - practically before conceptually.
I was particularly struck by the concept of Measure Transitions explained on the first day: The first measure transition is the appearance of Something from Nothing. The second measure transition is the appearance of unicellular life.The interaction of macromolecules leads to the third measure transition: Multicellular life. Some people consider a fourth measure transition which includes the appearance of organisms whose multicellular systems interact in complex systems: eg animals. Because of the interaction between bodies (complex multi-multicellular organisms), we can have a Cultural Evolution. And because of this, we are now able to change things. We are not a passive subjects of evolution we are an active participant. Cue Synthetic Biology
So what will be the next measure transition?
The course allowed us to learn about DIY Biology and biolabs, Nuria having founded the one in Barcelona. She shared with us the basic equipment of a biolab and to each one, its hacked version. To me, that was very exciting: The fact that complex equipment can be reproduced on the cheap. the fact that biotech equipment becomes more and more affordable, and that many people are working on offering accessible versions, for science eduction and beyond. And the fact that designers can use these to start experimenting at home or DIY Labs.
Assignment: Choose a journalistic article relating to biology or agriculture and comment on it + tie it to existing scientific articles
I chose an essay from Aeon, an online publication with a philosophical focus. Its title: «Mutual entrapment: As Neolithic people transformed prehistoric forests, they stumbled into an ecological trap. Domestication goes both ways»
The article is beautiful, well written. It starts with a portrait of Neolithic times, describing the scene of a forest clearing by Neolithic peoples and how that action allows for Heather to proliferate freely: the fire activating its seeds for the next spring.
The author: Mette Løvschal , goes on to describe how this scene, while it may be seen as the domestication of a landscape, could also be thought of as the beginning of a long period of mutual entrapment. « Among the first forest clearings, we see early humans engaging in a new form of worldmaking, unaware that in some distant future this changed landscape would lock its domesticators into trajectories of care and maintenance from which it will become almost impossible to escape ».
Indeed, when we look at the literature, we find several papers that studied heather and its « fire response ». Some varieties of heather almost demand to be burned for their seeds to spread properly, while others don’t. The varieties that have a fire response correlate to deep time patterns in human activity [Vandvik, Vigdis & Töpper, Joachim & Cook, Zoë & Daws, Matthew & Heegaard, Einar & Måren, Inger & Velle, Liv. (2014). Management-driven evolution in a domesticated ecosystem. Biology Letters. 10. 10.1098/rsbl.2014.0156. ] proving a history of coevolution, and arguably, mutual domestication.
« The heathlands of the Holocene were anthropogenic. The sunlight and fire were not gifts of a changing climate. They were bestowed by Neolithic agro-pastoralists who began felling and burning the understory to make forest clearings. […] It couldn’t be left alone. Heather now depended on the focused attention of people, on frequent grazing by the animals of pastoralists, and on fire to prevent its botanical competitors, such as birch and crowberry, from taking over the new sun-lit clearings. ».
The article reminded me of the concept of the Anthropocene, and the debate over when it can be deemed to have started. Was it back then? Nuria gave a definition in class that was interesting, she felt it meant that « we have changed the environment enough that we are active agents of evolution. We force other living organisms on earth to survive or die in our landscape forming». This article argues that Anthropocene or not, the changes we make on our landscape lock us in patterns of mutual dependency, and suggests that we are not fully conscious agents of the changes we make. In other words, our inability to think in deep time has locked us a myriad of systems of domestication that may not serve us. These patterns are ongoing, and in creation: « We have become entrapped in an unethical, unsustainable and damaging high-fertility production apparatus, with its own logic of expansion. Even the infrastructures that make agricultural production possible involve an ever-expanding formation of consultants, subsidy schemes, education, science, materials and technologies. But domestication never gives free gifts. The costs are high – and inflective. They turn back on us ».
Løvschal’s view is not optimistic. And the story he tells is important. As we move into territories of genetic engineering, it becomes even more imperative to understand how human interventions on species and landscape change society, and the pattern these changes lock us into. But is this even possible? There are limits to the human brain after all. Could technologies like AI or quantum computing help us predict the deep time ways in which ongoing domestications will trap us? And even further, could we more away from patterns of domestication but instead into conscious Interspecies Collaboration? What would that even mean? To be explored…