From ark to bank: extinction, proxies and biocapitals in ex-situ biodiversity conservation practices

ABSTRACT

This paper takes a critical approach to understanding the social and cultural ‘work’ of natural heritage conservation, focussing specifically on ex-situ biodiversity cryopreservation practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with the Frozen Ark, a UK-based ‘frozen zoo’ aiming to preserve the DNA of endangered animal species, the paper situates the development of non-human animal biobanks in relation to current anxieties regarding the anticipated loss of biodiversity. These developments are seeding new global futures by driving advances in technologies, techniques and practices of cloning, de-extinction, re-wilding and potential species re-introduction. While this provides impetus to rethink the nature of ‘nature’ itself, as something which is actively made by such conservation practices, we also aim to make a contribution to the development of a series of critical concepts for analysis of ex-situ and in-situ natural heritage preservation practices, which further illuminates their roles in building distinctive futures, through discussion of the relationship between conservation proxies, biobanking and biocapitals. We suggest that questions of value and the role of future making in relation to heritage cannot be disassociated from an analysis of economic issues, and, therefore, the paper is framed within a broader discussion of the place of ex-situ biodiversity cryopreservation in the late capitalist global economy.

KEYWORDS:

• Biobanking
• biocapital
• biodiversity
• proxies
• futures

Acknowledgments

The research presented in this article draws on field visits, interviews and ongoing collaborations with Frozen Ark undertaken by the authors and Sefryn Penrose as part of a broader comparative study of natural and cultural diversity conservation practices, one of four major areas of thematic foci for the Heritage Futures research program. We thank Mike Bruford, Mafalda Costa, Jude Smith and the researchers at the School of Biosciences, Cardiff University, for their assistance and contributions to the fieldwork on which this paper draws. Heritage Futures is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) ‘Care for the Future: Thinking Forward through the Past’ Theme Large Grant (AH/M004376/1), awarded to Rodney Harrison (principal investigator), Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon Macdonald (co-investigators), Antony Lyons (senior creative fellow), and Nadia Bartolini, Sarah May, Jennie Morgan, and Sefryn Penrose (postdoctoral researchers), and assisted by Esther Breithoff, Harald Fredheim (postdoctoral researchers), Hannah Williams and Kyle Lee-Crossett. It receives generous additional support from its host universities and partner organisations. See www.heritage-futures.org for further information. RH’s work on this project is also supported by his AHRC Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellowship Grant (AH/P009719/1). See www.heritage-research.org for further information.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The work presented here draws on a 6-week intensive placement during which Esther Breithoff worked with Frozen Ark team members and conservation biologists based in the research lab in Biomedical Sciences at Cardiff University, and a number of additional interviews and laboratory visits to Frozen Ark team members based at the University of Nottingham and with affiliated researchers at the London Zoo and Natural History Museum undertaken by both Esther Breithoff and Sefryn Penrose. During the Cardiff placement, Breithoff shadowed staff and students in the laboratory, interviewed them about their work, and completed desktop research tasks in support of the production of a report on ethics of non-human biobanking. Further, the Frozen Ark are one of twenty-four partner organisations of the Heritage Futures research programme, whose staff have participated in a series of intensive, week long collaborative knowledge exchange events throughout the project which have aimed at understanding the work of each of the partner organisations and co-designing research to address common issues for the sector. The paper also draws on these more experimental ‘para-ethnographic’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 2006, 2008; see Harrison et al. 2016) engagements with the organisation as part of the research programme over a longer 3-year period.

2. The zoo also owns a patent on Frozen Zoo®.

3. These terms have specific technical definitions which relate to the categories established by the IUCN Red List of Endangered Species.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/M004376/1, AH/P009719/1].

Notes on contributors

Esther Breithoff

Esther Breithoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow on the Norwegian Research Council funded Unruly Heritage research programme based at the Department of Archaeology, History, Religious Studies and Theology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Prior to this, she was a postdoctoral research associate on the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Heritage Futures research programme and the AHRC/GCRF-funded Restricted Access Pilot Project on nuclear heritage landscapes in South America, both based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology. She has a background in conflict archaeology and anthropology, with a special focus on the heritage of armed violence within a 20th century South American context. Her PhD focused on the conflict landscapes and material culture of the Chaco War. Her research interests include conflict heritage, archaeologies of the contemporary world, human-thing relationships, posthumanism and future-making practices. Her monograph War at the End of World: Conflict Heritage and the Chaco will be published by Routledge in 2019.

Rodney Harrison

Rodney Harrison is Professor of Heritage Studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology and Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area Leadership Fellow. He is Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Heritage Futures Research Programme; Director of the Heritage Futures Laboratory at UCL; and leads the Work Package on ‘Theorizing heritage futures in Europe: heritage scenarios’ as part of the European Commission-funded Marie Sklodowska-Curie action [MSCA] Doctoral Training Network CHEurope: Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe. He is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Contemporary Archaeology and was a founding executive committee member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. He is the (co)author or (co)editor of more than a dozen books and guest edited journal volumes and over 70 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters. In addition to the AHRC his research has been funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund, British Academy, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Australian Research Council, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the European Commission.