Meeting notice: The 99.12.21 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of Main St. and Mass Ave. If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the manager. He'll probably know where we are. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Suggested topic: Enviro NT (2) If you believe both that green values are positively associated with prosperity and that the next few decades are going to see significant wealth creation effects, it follows that we should expect steadily more emphasis on green issues and the missions of environmental organizations. At this moment, at least, it looks as though this influence might include a steadily developing hostility to biotechnology, or at least genetic engineering. This trend is of concern to anyone who believes that social and technological change is a measure of life and especially those with an interest in NT, since cellular or ribosomal engineering is one very plausible route to that technology. One approach to reversing this trend is to find applications, first for biotechnology and later for NT itself, that promote green values. A simple example might be airborne viruses custom-built to infect alien or exotic species, like kudzu or the zebra mussel. Another would be sensor plants that would monitor changes in the chemical or physical environment, perhaps fluorescing when something interesting happened. (There are in fact several projects exploring this application underway right now.) As the technology improved, a full-blown ecological immune system would gradually take shape -- bots that would wander through the biota, checking genomes, and taking action when one was found that was not on the approved list. (No doubt there would be the equivalent of auto- immune diseases that would need to be dealt with.) The ecological immune system would be a prime gardening tool, programmable as it would be any ecological ideology: nature as it existed in 1900, on another longitude, etc. A somewhat more radical application would be engineering the ecology directly. References are often made in the green literature to genetic and ecological diversity as though biota that were more diverse were "better" than those that were not. To the degree that this is true -- and such landscapes do seem at least more satisfying to experience -- biotech/NT can be used to design and release organisms with the idea of packing the largest possible number of self- sustaining ecological links into a region's nutrient flow. Both these ideas assume some form of top-down, centralized, ecological 'governance'. The most far-out application would be 'Open Source Ecology,' in which the best or most natural biota is defined as the one that gives natural selection the richest range of material to work with. In this vision people would feel free to develop and release life forms at will. These forms would be tracked (see above) and their creators gain status according to how well, and how ingeniously, these forms endured, prospered, and contributed to the biota. While the idea sounds implausible today, it is easy to imagine it emerging at least in protected spaces or areas, such as very large terraria, perhaps the size of Central Park. It is of course a long step to imagining this natural selection- centric definition of nature taking over our management philosophy of the general outdoors, but cultures take some funny bounces. This perspective would guarantee a nature that would dynamic, unpredictable, and uncontrollable. It would be constitute the return of wilderness in the old sense, and the time might come when we will decide that there is no act of restoration more in keeping with green values than letting nature be wild again. Not that I'm not holding my breath. Fred Hapgood <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html. <-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-><-> If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg' to majordomo@world.std.com. Unsubs follow the same model. Discussion should be sent to nsg-d@world.std.com, which must be subscribed to separately. You must be subscribed to nsg-d to post to it and you must post from the address from which you subscribed (An anti-spam thing). Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to: nsg@pobox.com