When imagining how we should collectively address the global climate and nature emergency, there are many who advocate that information is key. Taken broadly, ‘information’ might include research that involves collaborative and community-based fieldwork, thick description of contexts, and insights generated by Indigenous perspectives or critical theory. However, the term is increasingly used as a gloss for ‘information systems’ that deal with sundry quantified measurements and that are attached to a particular vision of the ‘green’ economy that envisions technological innovation as the most viable pathway to sustainability. Corporate lobbies call to rectify a perceived ‘data deficit’ by directing international investment to support research and data management to collect, categorise, collate, analyse, and render legible and accessible some colossal quantities of measurable data. At the UN Environment Assembly in 2021, the Working Group on Big Data and Frontier Technologies for the Planet met in the context of the third Science-Policy-Business Forum, in which ‘participants stressed that knowledge obtained through the latest digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things could speed up progress on environmental goals’ (UNEP 2021). Their perspectives informed the current UNEP plan for digital transformation, which is considered necessary to resolve a planetary crisis related to the intermingled effects of pollution, rapid biodiversity loss and changing climates. The huge recent expansion of information infrastructures seems to recommend ‘opportunities for big data in conservation and sustainability’ (Runting et al. 2020), yet their political purposes and cultural alignments often remain uninterrogated. Many blithely assume that environmental domains of data-gathering and analysis are set apart from social inequalities and the dark legacies of colonial history that can affect other kinds of science and technology.1
What is at stake as the dimensions of climate, environment, the economy and social life are abstracted and represented in quantified terms? In one of her final essays, legal anthropologist Sally Engle Merry invited us to consider a ‘burgeoning turn to measurement both as a mode of knowledge production and a dimension of governance’ (2019: 163). As she explored how indicators are used to assess UN Sustainable Development Goals, she reflected:
There are myriad gaps where data is missing, of poor quality, or based on proxies that were designed to measure something else. Committees of experts make decisions about what to count, how to categorize, and how to deal with missing data. Numbers often provide a distorted picture of the situation they endeavor to describe because of limited or inaccurate data, counting phenomena that are not readily countable, the demands of making diverse entities comparable, and the inability to include wider contextual variations into the measurement system. Any system of counting requires substantial interpretive work in deciding what to count, how to categorize it, and what to call what is measured. Since such systems of quantification have important knowledge effects, in that they offer a picture of the world, and governance effects, in that they determine policy, they are significant site [sic] of power. (Merry 2019: 145–146)
Merry saw these quantifications as a mechanism of control that tends to escape critical recognition, because they are implicitly naturalised by the very process of their creation and are inescapable in multiple domains. This builds on long-established critiques of science and expertise in governance to reject the idea that such systems are value-neutral (e.g. Ferguson 1990; Mitchell 2002). Louise Amoore's (2020) discussion of ‘cloud ethics’ similarly reflects on social processes and orientations that can be tacitly embedded within the data and ultimately hidden from view by it. A crucial point highlighted in Merry's synthesis, however, is that demands to monitor a plenitude of indicators for sustainability are compatible with ‘a marketized, neoliberal conception of society’ (2019: 162).2 We see this in dominant models of ecological modernisation, the ‘business as usual’ approach to the problems of global climate change and the crisis of mass extinction.
In the introduction to this collection, Kopper and Knox review literature on the rise of data as an aspect of neoliberal governance that transforms everyday processes of political organisation. I consider the implications of this for the political ecology of conservation. Based on my own research projects, two domains stand out where late capitalist logics are being tacitly embedded in the information technology (IT) systems geared towards biodiversity management. The first regards efforts to protect wild species and landscapes in situ, and the second involves the ex situ protection of plant genetic resources. Neoliberal paradigms are both amplified and reified by the design of the IT systems themselves, luring overdependency on concepts and tools that affirm a narrow, instrumental approach. The push to scale-up technologies around ‘big data’ is thus deeply political – or more precisely, anti-political, in the sense articulated by James Ferguson (1990). Drawing on insights from the anthropology of parks and conservation, I argue that, notwithstanding the nuances of data expertise and subjective commitments to use data appropriately, the expanding ‘data consensus’ (Cearns and Knox in this issue) around sustainability tends to authorise and naturalise the frontiers of green capitalism. As data is fetishised through spectacles of its accumulation (cf. Tsing 2000), the seeming advantages, efficiencies and necessity of embedding more and more ‘information’ at the heart of our efforts to protect nature also confirm the subtlety of hegemony at work.
Frontiers of Conservation
Evolving information infrastructures have shaped the vision and practice of nature conservation related to wild species, landscapes and collections of biological diversity, efforts that are germane to nation-building and many other political projects. The abstractions of quantification are not entirely new, but are historically embedded in approaches to parks and protected areas. These are territorial designations that establish the social relations of environmental management, and invest legal responsibility for managing aspects of nature in the hands of some institutional authority, usually an arm of the public service. The process of protecting nature in this way entails ‘virtualism’, the act of planning that starts with a simplified abstraction of reality that is affirmed and then used to generate an ideal model of the wild (Carrier and West 2009). Communities of social actors seek to bring this ideal into being through the enactment of legal instruments, institutions of governance and articulations of authority that define or reshape existing landscapes into what they envision. The idea of ‘virtualism’ was originally proposed to describe how abstractions about the economy are naturalised and taken for granted, until they achieve agency of their own (Carrier and Miller 1998). In conservation too, abstractions of nature themselves become actants.
Mapping and charting take on importance here. Before you create a protected area, you must identify particular reasons for making it: usually in reference to an existing policy mandate or aspiration, such as protecting endangered species, ecosystems or natural features. In order to do this, you must define what nature is, in practice. The mapping process involves identifying relevant categories, characterising them and tracking or enumerating them across space. There are maps of existing property lines, maps of natural features and geology, maps of soils and vegetation, maps of wild species and maps of archaeological, historic or culturally significant places. These maps are necessarily what James C. Scott once described as ‘thin simplifications’ (1998: 11). The products of mapping exercises are, of course, vulnerable to challenge. Critical studies of conservation establish that protected areas are deeply implicated in colonial and post-colonial projects that are contested by various movements for sovereignty and social justice.3 However, that contestation has usually been concerned with land claims or access to particular resources, whereas the domains of environmental management and species management have multiplied, producing complex assemblages of legal and institutional frameworks, technological and communications infrastructures. Aspects of the functioning of these assemblages are now obscure or gated off in ways that are not readily vulnerable to contestation, simply because they are rarely visible in the physical, social spaces inhabited by the stakeholders who might have an interest in doing so. Some kinds of wildlife and environmental monitoring may be carried out by remote tracking or sensing. Planning procedures removed to offices and digital platforms may also appear banal or illegible, because they are suffused with abstractions embedded in the quantified data, objects that require highly specific forms of literacy and expertise along with access to mediating technologies.
In practice, park authorities and other agencies for the management of natural assets are not the monolithic enterprises that many take them to be. In the twenty-first century, they are fluid and flexible, with many facets of operation invested in short-term projects, ‘five-year plans’ or work subcontracted to local agencies or private organisations. Increasingly, they not only coordinate initiatives of scale like the implementation of protected area systems and conservation standards determined at a national or international level, but also multi-scalar collaborations. Evolving partnerships mediate the integration of different scales and heterogeneous types of organisations, a process that selectively unbundles and reconfigures the territorial sovereignty of states (cf. Sassen 2006). It requires the ongoing coordination of orientations and mandates, so that institutional narratives are refracted through multiple lenses – never fixed but endlessly rearticulated and mutually referential.
Today, various maps are cross-referenced and visualised through the medium of Geographic Information System (GIS) databases. The digital world of environment and biodiversity governance has become so involuted as to be disorienting, yet the extensive convergence, layering and interlacing of data streams affirms a global aesthetic around knowledge production, which itself is also commodified. The abstractions of nature are normalised through infinite repetition – hyperlinked portals, documents, data sets – and even through acts of contestation that nevertheless reproduce fragments of discourses and aspects of practice that they are intended to challenge. In this shifting hall of mirrors, the recast images retreat so far into themselves that they are eventually lost to sight. The values and imaginaries embedded in these techno-cultural worldings assert the inevitability of neoliberal futures.
Into the Mirror Room
What Merry (2019) called ‘the turn to quantification’ and Sheila Jasanoff (2017) described as ‘an explosion of data’ puts me in mind of an infinity mirror, a metaphor that suggests how the techno-social relations of knowledge production are naturalised in the context of late capitalism. An infinity mirror refers to the effect of placing two or more reflective surfaces in relation to one another, so that the images they contain are multiplied endlessly. This is a principle employed in kaleidoscopes, an optical toy where three or more mirrors, placed inside a tube, create symmetrical patterns that can be viewed by peering into the space through a peep hole. Contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama gained distinction in the 1960s for her innovative mirror rooms, which brought people inside a giant kaleidoscopic space where repetitive visual elements and three-dimensional forms were mirrored so as to produce spectacles of infinity (Yoshitake 2017). During the time she lived in New York City, Kusama also used these rooms as evocative settings for performance art. Decades later, she gained new renown for a bold series of such installations featured at major international art galleries. These consist of elaborate mirror rooms that accentuate the synaesthetic bodily experience conjured by the combination of endless spatial reflection with sound and lighting effects. Visitors to the popular exhibits must purchase timed tickets to spend fleetingly brief periods inside a mirror room, marking a temporal contrast that perhaps accentuates the near totalising perception of infinity. The effects are evocative, even in two-dimensional photographs and videos.
The mirror room metaphor helps us perceive how, in the planning process, certain virtualisms come to dominate understandings of place. In the early days of Europeanisation, the establishment of the extensive Natura 2000 system of parks and reserves constituted a flagship conservation initiative, launched just before the Rio Earth Summit. By the turn of the millennium, this entire network of landscapes was represented in an interactive GIS database, the European Union Nature Information system (EUNIS). EUNIS can be used to summon various abstract representations of these landscapes, which are broken down under the categories of species, habitat type and protected sites. This effect of duplicating the landscape is created through our interactions with a curated information system that is automated by algorithms to perform limited searches on demand. Specific ‘natural’ features and attributes of real places are decontextualised from the living, troublesome, social world, and resituated in an authorising, digital space.
This can be understood as a kind of ‘data double’ for the landscape (Heatherington 2012). The idea of a ‘data double’ is derived from Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson's (2000) study of the rise of surveillance mechanisms. They explored the implications of what they saw as the emergence of ‘a fractured rhizomatic criss-crossing of the gaze such that no major population groups stand irrefutably above or outside of the surveillant assemblage’ (2000: 618). According to them, ‘bodies are observed by various means, and the observations are broken down and abstracted, only to be re-assembled in different settings through a series of data flows. The result is a decorporealized body, a “data double” of pure virtuality’ (2000: 611). Similarly, A. Aneesh (2006) has argued that data profiles summarising key statistics and information about individuals are now routinely used by governments, banks and businesses to ‘stand in’ for the real people they represent. Data doubles such as tax records and credit reports are used in automated information systems, so that the data profiles – the artefacts of particular selection and abstraction processes – become the primary basis of algorithmic decisions, such as whether to extend further credit. And while these databases often omit information that could be thought germane, they create the façade of seamless, fair authority while imposing non-negotiable processes and action scripts. Aneesh (2006: 5, 109–10) called this ‘the rule of the code’.4
The example of EUNIS demonstrates use of data doubles to summarise information about natural landscapes, wild species, climate and the environment. Complex, contested, more-than-human histories of landscape and ecology are reduced to brief profiles that appear on pop-up file cards for each entry. It is the selection of quantifiable variables, their organisation across the geographic representation of Europe, and the relationality and comparability between data points that become truly meaningful, rather than the content of any individual entry, which ultimately lacks much specific detail. The information reflected in the system becomes self-referential as it is cross-referenced. As Antonia Walford suggests about another archive of environmental information, ‘the sensation of totality is created out of not so much encompassment but the potential for constant and generative variation. Data collected for one purpose can be endlessly repurposed, and put into relation with any number of other datasets’ (2018: 111). In turn, analyses of the data bear upon policy initiatives.
The EUNIS database is found under the umbrella of the larger European Information and Observation Network (EIONET) launched by the European Environmental Agency in the mid-1990s. EIONET was touted as a way to serve citizens in their needs to know about environmental quality, in order to make everyday decisions. It was also seen as a means to facilitate evidence-based decision-making for public servants and officials. There are political stakes involved in this representation of environmental governance: the role of nationalism and other identity-building narratives are central. For the European Union (EU), this information system was claimed to fulfil a public trust, providing direct evidence of the collective stewardship of nature and ecology. EIONET also enacted an emerging form of post-national governance. These environmental information systems supported Europe's claim to leadership in electronic governance (Waterton and Wynne 2004). Each member country of the EU is required to submit data relevant to ongoing monitoring programmes, so that ongoing flows of quantified data validate and naturalise a single, common territory in the digital sphere: Europe's data double. More than two decades later, EIONET integrates the output of ten different European topic centres dedicated to climate change adaptation, climate change mitigation, environmental health, resource use and recycling, sustainability trends, biological diversity, and water quality, and an entire topic centre is focussed on data integration and digitalisation.
The composite visualisations of EIONET reify neoliberal partnerships and reshape the conceptual spaces of governance. The territoriality of nation states can no longer be mapped simply and directly onto geographic space; rather, ‘a range of representational and discursive strategies’ shape the ongoing transformation of states as ‘dynamically evolving spatial entities’ (Brenner et al. 2003: 11). This has broad implications for political anthropology. Digital archives like EIONET were presented as enabling connection and collaboration, but they are also spaces of epistemic and ontological discipline, producing particular forms of abstraction, isolation and disconnection, and modes of authority. During my research in the late 1990s, I found that the landscapes targeted for nature conservation in central Sardinia were fundamentally shaped by the multispecies socialities of a rich pastoral heritage. Yet, when I went back later to examine what the landscapes of my fieldsite looked like, refracted through the algorithms of the EUNIS sub-system for parks and protected areas, there was little evidence of the human dimensions of conservation that had concerned me for so long. The database enables public users to visualise data about biodiversity – species, habitats and sites – related to the Natura 2000 system. The search engine both directs and limits the journey through a digitised reflection of landscape, and the names of towns – or any reference to cultural context – are absent. Local ways of understanding ecology and environment have been erased, and any discordances across expert knowledge systems are suppressed in the representation (Heatherington 2012: 569–570). The datafication of conservation management serves to circumvent the most troublesome aspects of local politics, where the making of a national park was deeply contested, and conservation initiatives were rife with social tensions and inequalities.5
The digital spaces of biodiversity governance do not reflect the lively negotiation for control of these landscapes in situ. Rather, they are enclosed spaces of technical discourse that go largely unremarked by local residents. This illustrates how technologies of ecological management and conservation come to condense the cultural assumptions and values consistent with green capitalism while rearticulating the role of IT systems through particular understandings of public science and digital citizenship. Linked to the larger paradigm of green economic growth, this approach dismisses or co-opts ontological challenges and reproduces ‘business as usual’ through the performance of ecological modernisation. Dominant narratives around sustainability in Europe highlight ‘green infrastructure’ and ‘digitisation’, which present responsive environmental management as good business.6 Such initiatives not only naturalise the datascapes being created, but also affirm that their production has economic value.7 In this way, landscapes and species are decontextualised from historical human, social, political and material contexts, while their situation within flows of data is naturalised.
Valuing Genetic Diversity
Another frontier of conservation is the evolution of ex situ gene banking, where information systems have also come to play a central role. International organisations are increasingly concerned not only with protecting biodiversity in the wild, but also with safeguarding the genetic diversity of domesticated species, including both agricultural crops and their wild relatives. Since the modernisation of farming has proceeded through the displacement of biodiverse landraces as crops, agencies like the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) consider banking crop genetic resources to be crucial to future food security.
My recent project has looked at initiatives for global partnerships in agricultural gene banking. Fieldwork carried out from 2015 to 2019 was multi-sited, including visits to the Global Crop Diversity Trust (hereafter, Crop Trust) and a handful of gene banks, research labs and other spaces of collaboration for gene bank managers and plant scientists. While many studies have explored pertinent legal issues around seed collection and ownership, my ethnographic interest is focussed on institutional transformations that respond to changing climates by attempting to facilitate the use of plant genetic resources for crop improvement. Management of global collections began to be coordinated across multiple gene banks in 2004, when the International Seed Treaty (commonly called the ‘Plant Treaty’) came into effect. The Crop Trust was founded to oversee this effort, focussing particularly on the gene banks of the CGIAR system, a network of international agricultural research centres (originally under the World Bank) that hold the largest, most actively used libraries of agricultural genetic resources in the world.8
When I interviewed personnel at the Crop Trust in 2015, three different initiatives were underway to build or enhance data systems. They had just undergone a major update to the software supporting the collections in the CGIAR research centres and the Svalbard Seed Vault to create the GENESYS database. GENESYS provided the first global information platform for accessions of plant genetic resources stored in international seed banks, from which samples can be requested by public users. With over four million accessions in a huge data pool estimated to be about half of the world's crop diversity currently under conservation, GENESYS has continually evolved and was just given a ‘makeover’ in June 2022. In addition to this system, the Crop Trust was also supporting smaller gene banks in the development of GRIN-Global software to store data about their own seeds and share it with others. Finally, they were leading the launch of another platform, the Diversity Seek (DIVSEEK) international database that brought together genomic and phenomic profiles of seeds from – at the time – about seventy organisations in thirty countries. For Peter Wenzl, who took charge of the DIVSEEK initiative at the Crop Trust as it was getting established, efforts to standardise and calibrate a central information system were essential to the future of food security:
It is to create this link between all this big data that is being generated and the physical accessions in gene banks to stimulate their much greater use; that's one of the big things . . . to use all these new technologies to add a rich layer of information on top of the accessions being conserved in gene banks to facilitate a much more intense use, a broader use, for improving crops for nutrition and food security in the wake of climate change. That's really what DIVSEEK is about. (Personal interview, Bonn, Germany, 4 June 2015)9
This was particularly valuable for crops in less developed areas that had not benefitted from earlier programmes of research on crop improvement. Varietal differences in plant characteristics are used in crop breeding programmes to reintegrate resilience against new conditions, for example, drought tolerance, frost tolerance or the ability to withstand shifts in seasonality. They are also relevant to crop yield, nutritional profiles and disease resistance. Wenzl's comments reflect how, in the context of adaptation to climate change, the value attached to the archive of plant materials comes not from existing crop varieties, but from the endless possibility of recombination:
Genetic resources are a perfect example where the value is only unleashed when you start combining things, where you start bringing things together. So a particular accession [that is] collected somewhere in the wild and brought into a gene bank, the accession itself is not really valuable, but it becomes valuable if you combine a genetic factor contributing to drought tolerance coming from this accession . . . with a particular gene variant that confers resistance to disease in a different accession that comes from a completely different country. … Value is generated by bringing things together, but the value in itself doesn't necessarily exist in each of these accessions in separation.
Considerable attention is invested in determining the best targets for plant crosses amongst myriad possibilities. Research projects have undertaken selective genetic mapping of key crops – this is known as DNA barcoding, since it applies to the statistical analysis of biogenomic variation across a given species. Thanks to advances in high throughput computing, relevant sections in the genome can be correlated with particular characteristics expressed in the plants (identifying which part of the DNA is responsible for which aspects of phenotype) to enable quicker results in crop development, whether employing gene-editing technologies or using fertilisation techniques to achieve Mendelian plant crosses. But these genetic profiles – the data doubles of archived crop types – must be connected to actual seed samples, and historically, a variety of indexing and cataloguing practices were employed in different collections. Standardisation is needed to make all the new data useful.
Like that of museums and libraries, the work of gene banks involves not only curating historical collections, but also facilitating access to them, and this requires the management of snowballing quantities of heterogeneous technical information. According to Wenzl, the scientific problem of genetic characterisation (learning about the nature of plant materials in the archive) has been surpassed by the technical problem of managing that information: ‘The biggest challenge there . . . it used to be generating data [but] it's not anymore – it's digesting data! The brains to digest this enormous flood, this tsunami of data being generated – converting data into information and knowledge’. The critical importance of data to the modernisation of seed banking is marked by DIVSEEK's speedy expansion into an independent network, fostering public partnerships around research into crops such as sorghum and lentils.
Yet despite efforts to streamline gene bank workflows, automate procedures and coordinate across institutions, gene banking is not a totalising system. Many perspectives and priorities co-exist. Everyone knows that the data doubles of seeds listed in GENESYS or DIVSEEK leave out complex cultural histories of agriculture and different value systems. There are alternative ontological realities around seeds, deep affective attachments to traditional cultivars, and profoundly different ways of conserving and enhancing crop diversity (cf. Angé 2018; Brush 2004; Nazarea et al. 2013).10 Debates around governance of digital genomic sequence information – what Sylvain Aubry (2023) labels ‘in silico conservation’ – have recently widened the gap between farmer-based social movements and the agricultural gene-banking community, potentially impeding the system of seed distribution (Halewood et al. 2020). Social movements tend to conflate the Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA) system with industrial agriculture and big corporate monopolies, even though the work of gene banks channels many resources to help small farmers, who depend on less commercialised crops.
There are many ways to imagine a nourishing future for farmers and their communities; a growing imperative to ‘reconcile ways of knowing’ around seeds (Courtois et al. 2020; cf. Atalay 2020; Kimmerer 2015) suggests a vital shift transforming the context of gene banks. There are ongoing efforts to collaborate with Indigenous communities in the repatriation or ‘rematriation’ of traditional crop varieties, most famously in relation to Peru's Potato Park (cf. Lüttringhaus et al. 2021). In 2018, as part of my research to map out the network of seed banks, I spoke with Alfonso del Rio, a research scientist responsible for tasks related to genome data crunching, at the US Potato Genebank (USPG) research lab in Madison, Wisconsin. Del Rio was part of a research team working to improve frost tolerance in Peruvian potatoes, using hybrids and back-crosses utilising ancient potato germplasm from Peru. He explained they had sent a selection of materials back to communities for testing and evaluation some years earlier and that, after follow-up, they were now ready to release two new varieties.11 They were also planning to return the results to the Quechua communities of origin and the research materials to the local university. Del Rio had discovered a new passion for his work during this project, as they were making preparations to fly down with over a thousand kilogrammes of the new potatoes to gift to the communities in ritual ceremony. We might say that affective, social labour had come to animate the science.
A maverick approach to the use of genetic materials stored in seed banks is found in the work of former CGIAR scientists, Salvatore Ceccarelli and Stefania Grando (2020, 2022), who propose a more decentralised and collaborative approach to plant breeding. Working in tandem with farmers’ organisations coordinated through the Rural Seed Network (Rete Semi Rurali; RSR) in Italy, the scientists assisted small farmers to experiment in back-crossing modern cultivars with ancient grains. Matteo Petitti, an agricultural scientist at the RSR, described a crisis: ‘The old approach to breeding for climate change is a problem because in some cases you know more or less how climates are changing, but there is also change within the seasonal cycles and greater extremes. Thus, the approach to breed greater diversity into populations is one answer’ (Personal interview, Scandicci, Tuscany, 3 October 2019). In this case, the end goal is not to breed stable, homogeneous varieties, but rather to enhance intra-crop diversity with adaptive characteristics, so that the planted fields have greater range of inherent resilience in the face of unfolding climate conditions and weather. Citizen science is involved throughout the process; not only farmers, but also bakers and chefs may be involved with crop selection and testing over the course of consecutive harvests, so that yield is not the sole concern. The RSR maintains its own seed bank and database, yet the initiative also depends on the public seed banks that maintain a spectrum of ancient landraces as well as specific types of information about them and that continue to disperse these for research.
Spectacles of Infinity
The rise of data governance must be taken into account by political ecology; it is germane to the political anthropology of conservation. The examples of EUNIS and DIVSEEK reflect cultural visions of a quantified future where information systems are increasingly central to public investments in the green economy at the supra-national level. The emerging ‘data consensus’ (Cearns and Knox in this issue) reduces the political frictions of neoliberal governance, since advanced technical literacies are necessary to participate in (or contest) these ‘epistemic cultures’ (Knorr-Cetina 1999). The practices of data production that are increasingly embedded in environmental monitoring, species management, wilderness protection, the valuing of ‘natural capital’, the development of ‘green infrastructure’ and the banking of plant genetic resources all change the ‘nature’ of biodiversity conservation in ways that are inherently less open to social contestation and political challenge than they might otherwise have been. This does not presume the overdetermination of technological outcomes, but rather suggests a kaleidoscope of human intentions and institutional mandates mediated by emerging data infrastructures. In this context, participatory approaches and community-based research will matter more than ever. This is something that interviewees at the Crop Trust and the USPG openly appreciated, while the RSR innovated ways to actively put the principle into practice.
I initially suggested the infinity mirror rooms designed by the contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama as an apt metaphor to help us consider the knowledge effects of multiplying virtualisms in nature and biodiversity conservation. One of Kusama's latest works is a room called ‘Let's Survive Forever’ (2017), now permanently installed in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto after a crowd-sourced funding campaign. This 400-square-foot mirrored room is filled with suspended, reflective spheres: a gleaming, futuristic variation on Kusama's trademark dot motif. It also features a mirrored column enclosing a dioramic interior, mirrored space into which visitors may peak. The interactive exhibit suggests the infinite horizon of an abstract natural landscape or seascape. The title is open-ended, like the experience of the visitor. Participating in the spectacle of endless space makes it possible to imagine endless time as well; it is a bold evocation of scale and possibility. One could even fancy that it reflects a global sensibility not unlike that in the mantras of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, ‘protecting crop diversity forever’, ‘conserving crop diversity worldwide’ and ‘securing our food, forever’.
Born into the same generation as Kusama – perhaps inspired, in part, by art like hers – philosopher Michel Foucault (2008 [1967]) was also intrigued by mirrors. He thought of them as spaces of ‘heterotopia’, a liminal world of representation with the subtle power to order our own ontological reference points, precisely because what we see in the mirror has everything to do with the lens of culture and subjectivity, our own orientations to apperception. Like the archives he considered as kinds of heterotopia, the database, too, is a kind of mirror. We can now programme the archive with algorithms to retrieve, filter, combine, process, resolve, organise, project and apply visualisation protocols to data that we call forth. It is a machine that both enables and compels us to convert qualitative knowledge into various forms of quantification, and eventually back again, as we make sense out of the numbers and images we have generated. The tools of our knowledge-seeking embody the presuppositions of endless development. They entail expectations towards infinite accumulation of tangible and intangible resources, as well as the progression of technological solutions enabling the transcendence of limits. They suggest ontologies of perpetual growth and expanding mastery, rather than frugal sustainability or cyclical renewal. Datafication adores infinity.
The seeming inevitability of quantified futures is tied to global imaginaries of green capitalism that are immanently engaged with the production of hegemony (cf. Gramsci 2011). James Igoe (2017) points out that when abstractions of nature are composed into visual and poetic narratives used to promote parks, ecotourism and charitable conservation organisations, the spectacle of nature attracts substantial revenue streams to fund big conservation. In the midst of environmental emergency, narratives of biodiversity conservation wax all the more nostalgic, perpetuating familiar circuits of capital. Plotlines are established: in the face of mass extinctions and impending climate crisis, true nature is a vanishing commodity.
In the engorged knowledge economy of digital futures, however, information itself has become the new frontier of nature protection. Building on Igoe's insights, I argue that the conservation of biodiversity must continually generate not only spectacles of nature, but also spectacles of knowledge production and accumulating expertise: spectacles of modernity. The rise of big data in environmental governance is an excellent field for business, as the outcome of the 2021 UNEP-sponsored Science-Policy-Business Forum confirmed. It also, however, provides the incomparable lustre of a win-win solution to climate change, one that is perpetually in the making, even as the impacts of crisis loom larger. Such spectacles not only drive capital-intensive investments, but also affirm strategic political narratives around the green economy. The attractiveness of wilderness, wild species and landraces that appear as the focus of conservation is in fact outmatched by the glittering promise of data speculation, a potent dream of the future that naturalises an entire ecology of post-national governance in the Anthropocene.
An extravagant interpretation of the mirror room parallels the burgeoning expansion of information databases amidst this neoliberal culture of spectacle. In 2021, in the aftermath of pandemic lockdowns, the permanent installation ‘Air’ was opened at the top of the fourth-tallest skyscraper in New York City. An expansive two-story gallery designed by Kenzo Digital Immersive Art Studio is suspended one thousand feet up. It combines mirrored and glass walls and floors and ceilings with a ‘sound bath’ and dynamic lighting effects at night. ‘Air is an immersion in nature in the heart of Manhattan, a Central Park in the sky . . . Air connects you to everything: weather, light, people . . . Air serves as a monument for the unification of man and nature – a beacon of possibility’, says the artist's statement (Kenzo Digital 2021). Hailed as part of New York City's recovery after COVID-19, the attraction is gated and unabashedly commercialised for tourism. The attraction features an outdoor observation deck, a lounge and internal mirror rooms with interactive exhibits, including the installation ‘Clouds’ by Yayoi Kusama herself (Feinstein 2022). Pricey tickets to enter the SUMMIT One Vanderbilt Experience are timed for an hour and a half, and thousands of visitors arrive each day. The building is considered a model of sustainable urban architecture, notwithstanding the carbon footprint of energy necessary to lift its elevators skyward over ninety floors.
As we debate the future we want for information systems, the contrast between these two artists suggests why we might need to examine our heterotopias, for not all mirror rooms are the same. Kusama's infinity mirror rooms have marked a journey from avant-garde tastes to twenty-first-century futurism in art and design, but the trickster element of her success is an underlying reflexivity around the conditions of her own participation as an Asian woman in the international art scene, and a certain relish in exposing them, and her own sexualised subjectivity, often in political protest. Kusama has never been shy of commercialism and was famously thrown out of the Vienna Biennale for calling attention to the capitalist circuits of the art world by peddling elements of her own display, ‘Narcissus Garden’, to visitors in 1966 (Morris 2012). This flamboyant provocation, self-irony and political engagement is generally lacking in ‘Air’. The spiritual references of ‘ascendance’ and ‘transcendence’ embedded in the designer's narrative engender a deliberate forgetfulness of politics, and – given the lingering structural violence of the Anthropocene's first major pandemic – the social inequalities that will inhibit some New Yorkers from frequent pilgrimages to the SUMMIT One Vanderbilt Experience. It is a piece of design that seems to embody today's utopian green capitalism at its most self-congratulatory.
Mutually reinforcing practices of quantifying abstraction uphold what Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena (2018) call a ‘one-world’ world, a world that obscures, limits and marginalises the relative power of alternative ontologies, including what development scholars typically gloss as ‘the view from the bottom up’ of the political/institutional hierarchy. In this way, the specific logics and historicity associated with Western modernist epistemes in environmentalism (cf. Argyrou 2005; Scott 1998) are replicated across diverse regimes of bureaucratic and transactional expertise, and they are naturalised by evolving rhetorics of environmental emergency, with the effect of reproducing themselves. If you are a critical scholar of the Anthropocene, there is work to be done looking beyond the spectacles of datafication, to shine a light on how our modes of understanding ecological processes, our technological practices of managing risks and remediating problems, and our world system are continually rendered through reciprocal engagements (cf. Knox and Nafus 2018). For the mirror room is an artefact of someone's meaningful design which invites us to participate in an optical illusion, disregarding the material circumstances of its production. But what we see in the mirror, as Kusama has shown us, reflects complex articulations of positionality, cultural imagination and access to resources. What is at stake in our understanding of information infrastructures is our own awareness of the material and social relations taking shape.
Acknowledgements
Funding for research on ‘Seed Banking and Adaptation to Climate Change’ was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) Graduate School and the UWM Center for 21st Century Studies. Sincere thanks to the leadership and the Science Team at the Global Crop Diversity Trust, the Rural Seed Network of Italy and the US Potato Genebank for facilitating my fieldwork. An earlier version of this article was presented as a keynote lecture at the International Symposium on Quantified Futures at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles in September 2022. I gratefully acknowledge my ongoing conversations with Bernard C. Perley, and also thank the editors and reviewers of this article for their productive guidance.
Notes
Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist scholarship establish the embeddedness of scientific knowledge in social and historical context (Edwards et al. 2007; Haraway 1991; Harding 2008; Knorr-Cetina 1999; Latour 1987). MacArthur Fellow Safia Noble (2018) has argued that the algorithms that animate search engines on the World Wide Web are suffused with virulent racisms and sexisms, which they act to naturalise, authorise and amplify. Eric Nost and Emma Colven (2022) show that these critical concerns remain for algorithms in some climate AI initiatives, for example.
See Harvey (2005) on historical transformations of late capitalism. Hugh Gusterson places the rise of automated algorithms during the 1980s, when ‘bureaucratic protocols were intensified and automated through computerization in a moment of political economic transition where neoliberalism, a more virulently extractive form of global capitalism, supplanted the Keynesian-Fordist form of capitalism’ (2019: 5–6).
Foundational studies include Agrawal (2005); Neumann (1990); Moore (2005).
See Aneesh (2009) and Danaher (2016) for further critical discussion of ‘algocracy’ in governance.
See Heatherington (2010) on political contestation around the establishment of Gennargentu Park.
The term ‘green infrastructure’ has recently been applied to all green spaces and protected natural areas, such as those in the Natura 2000 system. Once understood as areas taken out of production and extractive systems in order to provide the unique satisfactions of wilderness to the human spirit, they are now considered to provide quantifiable material assets in terms of ‘ecosystem services’ (MEA 2005) and ‘nature-based solutions’ (UNEP 2021) to the climate and nature emergency. Today, green infrastructure – a turn of phrase that might once have been thought a contradiction of terms – is essential to the claim that effective policies for conservation and development are amongst the most powerful accomplishments of European co-operation. As an ideological construct of late capitalism, green infrastructure could hardly be taken seriously without the virtual architectures of information described above.
This is an extension of the logic of natural capital, a concept adopted in the late 2000s to resist externalising the costs of ecological degradation and incorporate environmental assets within a framework for economic accounting. The approach has been exquisitely critiqued in the work of Sian Sullivan, who argues that ‘“natural capital” does not exist in any a priori sense . . . [rather it is] being conjured into being through particular practices of conceiving, framing, measuring, numbering and calculating the so-called natural world’ (2018: 48).
Media attention to seed banking has tended to focus on activities at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in 2008, yet this vault is simply a refrigerated, secure storehouse designed as a backup for the living gene banks that undertake the ongoing curation, distribution and cyclical regeneration of the genetic materials they are tasked to archive. The Svalbard vault has become a spectacle of nature conservation in its own right, both an instrument and a symbol of urgent efforts to adapt to changing climates (Heatherington 2021; Heatherington and Perley 2017).
This citation applies to all subsequent quotes from Peter Wenzl.
The anthropology of food and agriculture has revealed many critiques of the mid-twentieth-century Green Revolution, including the critique of yield-focussed crop breeding and chemical-dependent agriculture that deplete soils, pollute water and increase social inequalities (e.g. Dewan 2021; Scott 1985). Ethnographers have also contributed to the critique of corporate seed companies and genetically modified crops (Fitting 2011; Hetherington 2020; Stone 2010).
Ethical protocols have been developed to resist biopiracy in the collection and use of plant resources. Del Rio noted that collecting plant materials stopped in Peru in 1998; materials collected prior may be used for research but destroyed afterwards. The group would not profit from the research, and intellectual property rights would be returned to stakeholders in Peru (Personal interview, Madison, WI, 29 June 2018).
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