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.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?