Related to the Earthshot Prize article I wrote earlier another item on the news caught my attention. It concerned Biodiversity and spoke of huge sums of money that were to be spent protecting Biodiversity, specifically if I recall correctly, in the Amazon and South American coastlands.
This money will go on creating a genome library of all the species to be found there. This was heralded by the news reader as a huge investment in biodiversity. Not, as I heard it, a huge investment into industry to perfect techniques of genetic analysis.
What is the purpose of genetic analysis? Could it be to ‘breed the perfect human’? Nothing more than Eugenics and the perpetuation of the Nazi dream of a race superior?
Such money will be wasted on the academics who carry out the study while they watch the landscape about them and the forest decimated. To what end? So that in 30 years time when the forest has gone they can hold up an exhibit and declare that once it held all these species? The exhibit itself of course will be a long encoded list, with no living example to be studied.
While humanity ignores the role of culture among species other than humans it will believe it can reintroduce species at will. What is needed is for that money to be spent, not on developing careers for budding scientists, but defending the very forests they seek to study. I despair at the ignorance that currently besmogs the human race.
