Saving evolutionary time: Conflicting planetary temporalities in the genetic diversity debate, 1967–1980

This paper examines the temporalities at play in the issue of plant genetic resources in the 1960s and through the 1970s. The issue emerged as concerned scientists, especially Erna Bennett and Otto Frankel, plant scientists affiliated with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Biological Program, drew attention to the loss of biological variety in the wake of the “Green Revolution” and global industrialization of agriculture. The scientists advocated efforts to collect and store seeds to safeguard genetic resources for the agricultural sector, but also to protect genetic diversity in the wild. Importantly, genetic erosion was understood as a deeply temporal issue where, ultimately, the future of evolution itself was at stake. Frankel and Bennett framed genetic erosion as a matter of temporal dissonance between the time scales of industrial society and environmental processes, especially evolution. Their notion of evolutionary time was in turn embedded in competing temporalities of development. Their descriptions of genetic erosion thus negotiated the grand temporalities of development and evolution in different ways, in the sense that they advocated different solutions to the threat of discontinued evolution. Furthermore, Frankel and Bennett's respective visions were decisively political in the sense that they involved ideas of the social organization needed to safeguard evolutionary time, including politics of labor, intellectual property, and the design of international institutions, but also profound questions of the political such as who creates wealth and value in society, and what set of humans and institutions might harbor the possibility for a resolution of the contradiction between the future of development and the future of evolution. In conclusion, the article discusses Frankel and Bennett's renderings of evolutionary time as relevant for the ongoing scholarly discussion of planetary habitability as a new framework for environmentalism and historicization of current environmental crises.