Biomonotony

Etienne Turpin
Published 21 June 2016

If the key to the current situation cannot be found in a lack of cognitive abilities, it has to be sought in the form of the world to which those very abilities are applied.

—Bruno Latour, Down to Earth, 2018 ¹

Meal Plan
Everywhere I go, things are beginning to taste the same. Or, they are radically depreciating in taste altogether. At first I suspected this flavorless flattening of my palate's capacities was the accidental but still egregious outcome of mass consumption as it was indexed to and organized by a food supply chain both globalized and monopolized. In a word: McFood. Or, was I just eating so frequently in airport bars and train restaurant cars that I forgot the taste of real food? Staring from the Deutsche Bahn window as endless fields of generic cereals flickered past outside, I wondered: Am I really eating a tomato right now, or is this just some 3D-printed interpretation of a sultry, acidic nightshade overcompensating nutritionally for what can't be delivered by way of terroir flavor? Still, if it tasted like this, I couldn't help but think it was probably the nutritional equivalent of eating the copy of Der Spiegel lying beside the train-size dinner plate on the train-size micro-table. Or, at times even more bluntly, though consumed on a different mode of transit and from the sad launchpad of a tray table in turbulence: How can the Dutch even eat this shit? In my work as a curator, these questions began to arise more and more frequently during conversations with both artists and scientists: Was food losing its taste? How are we to make sense of, let alone swallow, the planetary meal plan of global capitalism?

Lesson Plan
During a recent guest seminar, while discussing the politics of respiratory dependencies, a graduate student abruptly interrupted my remarks on the so-called insect apocalypse to ask: "Does biodiversity even really matter anyway?" (Although it was decidedly not a rhetorical question, I hereby report the incident in italics because I want you, dear reader, to focus on it rather intently.) 

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Perhaps he thought my concerted plea for attention to the entomoafaunal extinction crisis—which follows from decades of human-insect extermination fantasies, while anticipating numerous other kingdoms, including that imagined kingdom of human dominion over all others, collapsing into oblivion—was simply some kind of granola-infused, herbal-minded moralizing about how students in the graduate school of design ought to care, or care more, about what we so often and so casually call nature. Whatever the real cause for this iconoclastic bravado, I was admittedly quite startled. I don't teach often, but when I do, I'm ready; yet I was not in the least prepared for this do-all-lives-really-matter positioning. Astonished, I tried to comprehend this performative anthroposupremacy while also wanting to determine how such a privileged and otherwise extremely perceptive group of students could somehow not look alarmed at the question. But the group stared at me, "the guest," curiously. Could I convincingly defend the importance of biodiversity against such a pugnacious, irreverent challenge? The pluckiness of the provocation threatened to eclipse my efforts to convey the consequences of a biological catastrophe throttling on outside the seminar. What's the lesson plan for such a question?

Terroir
I continued my presentation, moving on to the topic of floral micropropagation, after somewhat dismissively promising that I'd come back to his concern regarding biodiversity. In all honesty, I just wanted to walk out of the classroom--what was the use of explaining ecosystemic dependencies to students daydreaming about becoming the next Rem or Bjarke? Instead, I recalled to the class that even The Guardian, only a few months before, stated that the biodiversity crisis was at least as dangerous for future life on Earth as climate change.² Do Americans now deny that crisis, too? Should I have explained that the story from The Guardian was based on an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) report, written over three years by more than five hundred scientists? Would a more thorough understanding of this knowledge infrastructure change how the report is received or appreciated?

I didn't plead with the students about the importance of knowledge co-production though; instead I thought about grad school, food, and hunger. I thought about cheap meals made and missed before reviews and exams and chapter deadlines, and how I had struggled to make ends meet so that I could still eat something interesting once in a while as I was completing my PhD. Was taste anything other than an expression of wealth? Had I forgotten the discount supermarket, which also sustained among its crowded aisles a day care for the neighborhood children, that kept me fed at a price point I could afford, if not savor, during my time in graduate school? These questions initiated some good conversation with the students: Why does all our food taste the same? How can we really begin to understand the consequences of standardized and sanitized food products when they betray no sense of place, no flavor suggesting their origin? For a moment, we all wondered together: If we can't even taste biodiversity, at least as an approximation, how can we be expected to concern ourselves with the consequences of its loss? I retold what may be an apocryphal story about my paternal grandmother: Nana could tell, simply by the taste of the flesh, which local lake a walleye

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(Sander vitreus, although she never used the Latin name) had come from, and she thereby judged the efforts of her angling offspring and the palatability of their respective catch. The students admitted without protest that they knew little if anything about the origins of the "fish" served with French fries at various local diners, although they still believed they could judge those deep-fried morsels with some degree of discretion.

Micropropagation
Upon my return to Berlin, while in a conversation with the Italian photographer Martina Pozzan, I was at first amused by her charming riposte: "But what do you expect when the whole plantation, the whole orchard, is made from a single plant?" I was only amused because I didn't understand what she was getting at; now that I do, I hope to relay some especially urgent issues that arise from her research with Vitroplant, a micropropagation company based in Cesena, Italy. She showed me some of her photographs from a recent visit. Women workers sat in sanitized office spaces—their hair under nets, faces behind masks-among countless rows of glass jars containing tiny green plants, which they seemed to be picking apart with medical tweezers. According to Pozzan, who had interviewed the workers, micropropagation (also known as in-vitro propagation, the technique itself being the company's namesake) is a means by which vegetative shoots are manually separated from a genetically selected "mother plant" and then subjected to hormonal stimulation in order to produce secondary buds ad infinitum. According to a terrifying logic of "genetic-health purity certification," these techniques allow Vitroplant to offer industrial quantities of exact genetic copies of desirable species to major plantations and orchards around the world. This, in turn, allows growers to produce mass-identical harvests that conform to the desiring-consumption models of the capitalist food supply chain. While the uniformity of characteristics expressed by these productions of nature may serve this supply chain well by satisfying the programmatic expectations of consumers, did anyone other than Pozzan, of course—fully realize why all the apples and almonds were starting to look and taste the same?

Biomonotony
In Edward O. Wilson's 1988 publication Biodiversity, readers got a comprehensive introduction to a term intended to describe the efflorescence of life on Earth just as it was about to enter a steep and disturbing decline. In the years since, the concept became a watchword for conservationists worldwide; yet there is no biome that has not witnessed severe forms of degradation and loss. This crisis is now referred to as the Sixth Mass Extinction, which, unlike the previous extinction events that have occurred on this planet, is caused by the aggregate activity of a single species-ours. Which is not to say that it is being caused by all members of our species equally.

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In fact, far from it. The flagrant asymmetries of contemporary capitalism ensure that a company like Vitroplant can micropropagate vast swaths of biomonotony and accumulate vast sums of wealth for shareholders by doing so; yet when the true cost of this anthropogenically expedited loss in genetic diversity appears in the form of a pestilential annihilation of the food supply, complete ecosystem collapse, and global famine, the Vitroplant shareholders won't be footing the bill. We are left to ask: Who will pay for such wanton recklessness?

Extinction
I have been writing this text while simultaneously deinstalling an exhibition that I co-curated with Anna-Sophie Springer for the Museum of Natural History in Halle, Germany.³ As with previous iterations of the show that appeared in Hamburg and Berlin, during deinstall I left one artwork, created by Julian Oliver and Crystelle Vu, to the last. Comprised primarily of a Chinese-made chao gong and an internet connected modem, the Extinction Gong programmatically calls the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN) List of Threatened Species in order to relay the biodiversity crisis in real time to museum visitors.⁴ When a new species is added to the list, the gong rings with a sobering, low tone as a small speaker announces the Latin name of the species that has been lost forever. 

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Most disturbingly, the gong also rings its haunting memorial on a nineteen-minute rhythm to represent the current rate of extinction twenty-seven thousand species per year, or an average of one every nineteen minutes, according to E. O. Wilson. It is important to me that while I work, I also try to bear witness to this catastrophic event. The peculiar uniformity of the apples or almonds in your own grocery store will have to suffice as local memorials, as I now need to disconnect the gong.

Most disturbingly, the gong also rings its haunting memorial on a nineteen-minute rhythm to represent the current rate of extinction twenty-seven thousand species per year, or an average of one every nineteen minutes, according to E. O. Wilson. It is important to me that while I work, I also try to bear witness to this catastrophic event. The peculiar uniformity of the apples or almonds in your own grocery store will have to suffice as local memorials, as I now need to disconnect the gong.

1 Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, England: Polity, 2018), 25.

2 Jonathan Watts, “Destruction of Nature as Dangerous as Climate Change, Scientists Warn, “The Gaurdian, March 23, 2018, https://www.thegaurdian.com/environment/2018/mar/23/destruction-of-nature-as-dangerous-as-climate-change-scientists-warn.

3 See http://reassemblingnature.org/verschwindende-vermaechtnisse-3/.

4 ExtinctionGong.com; for the IUCN Red List, see https://www.iucnredlist.org/.