Dis/continuities of Extractivism in Conservationism: The Case of Seed Banking (original) (raw)

Berliner Gazette, 2022

Abstract

Conservation measures secure not only a wealth of natural resources that are in danger of being lost, but also the world and the way the world is produced. Hence, structures and mechanisms are being secured that caused the very loss in the first place, Franziska von Verschuer argues in her contribution to the BG text series “After Extractivism,” exploring the case of seed banking. *** A multiplicity of socio-ecological crises currently challenges the foundations and conditions of human and more-than-human life on Earth. While climate change today is ubiquitous in the public discourse, the accelerating loss of an ever-greater diversity of life forms is only recently (again) beginning to attract a similar amount and quality of attention. This is due, not least, to an increasing number of projects in species and ecosystem conservation taking on the responsibility to care for the persistence of more-than-human life on Earth. There are many forms of conservation corresponding to the many forms of ecological loss we are now witnessing. Here, losses of species in the animal and plant world as well as losses of habitats and ecosystems on which these species depend attract most attention, whereas another layer of ecological loss that proves to be increasingly existential is conspicuously underrecognized: loss of genetic diversity within species. This kind of ecological loss has grave consequences, especially for agriculturally relevant plants and their adaptation to changing environmental conditions – an issue that becomes ever more critical in light of the rapid ecological changes of the present. ...

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