Arks, Freezers, and Gardens: Biodiversity Repositories in Toxic Landscapes and Planetary Futures

• In Event: Global Animals: Science and Technology

Abstract

The ex-situ conservation of endangered species, animal or plants,domestic or wild, is a technique increasingly used to supplement conservation efforts on the ground, or to overcome the limitations imposed on species by severely disturbed and polluted landscapes. They can take various forms (zoos, aquaria, botanic gardens, the cryoconservation of gametes or seeds in banks, field gene banks), and involve the dislocation of ecosystem, niche, geographic range and individual bodies. Biodiversity repositories seem to be enterprises for fabricating what Latour has called “immutable mobiles”: fixing the bodily becomings of individuals and species in the form of samples which can be moved freely at the cost of speciation and symbiotic relationships, they have the potential to ontologise biodiversity as dismembered genetic information according to colonial and late-capitalist inheritances.
But repositories are also unruly collections of lively specimens and potentialities, plugging into disrupted metabolic relationships with landscape and planet and sometimes exceeded by the very bodies they seek to regiment. Archives of almost-extinct pasts, static sedimentations of evolutionary presents and anticipatory devices all at once, they are sites for performing human-nonhuman relationships and ecological futures. These performances are particularly significant in the context of wide-ranging pollution, ecological disruption and rampant extinction, which trouble the stated conservation goals of ex-situ repositories.
I will address the question of biodiversity conserved ex-situ from a philosophical-ethological angle, in order to investigate what forms of biosociality are severed, performed, reconstructed or made materially and discursively possible in the liminal space of the repository, that time capsule implanted in an encroaching . Understanding the types of worlding and the futures constructed through the specific regimes of care and classification at work in biodiversity repositories can unpack how multispecies relationships function through and with technological assemblages that are as normative as they are anticipatory.

Author

• Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Ecole Normale Supérieure/Curtin University