The promise of ELSI: coproducing the future of life on earth

Abstract

Scientific knowledge and authority are central to dire warnings of biodiversity loss and climate change, as well as corollary visions of pathways for environmental repair and the provision of future human wellbeing. Such articulations of futures possible through the advance of science and technology, and especially genetics, have been extensively studied by STS scholars concerned with the ways society, government, and capital are ordered in relation to these expectations. In the Human Genome Project, projections of future benefit reached almost mythical–for some alarming–proportions, and initiated the now familiar model of institutional funding of Ethical, Legal and Social Implications (ELSI) research. Following this model, the Earth Biogenome Project seeks to sequence the genomes of all life on earth, with expansive promises about the good that will follow. While the inclusion of an ELSI committee is treated as the application of a known model of social ordering, and as routine and natural for such a project, its remit and role in negotiating right modes of relationality between humans and the environment are neither straightforward nor well institutionalized. In so doing, the project contributes to the stabilization of a particular set of concepts and practices as constitutive of environmental ethics while at the same time constructing biodiversity in distinct ways that align with its vision of the scientific pursuit of good human futures. As such, the constructions of environmental ethics and biodiversity that the project advances are coproduced, contributing to the shared articulations of right human-environment relationships, and institutionalized practices for ordering the world accordingly.