Biotechnology, Design and Story, and the Persistence of the Plastics Problem

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Well might you ask, why is there a BioDesign Challenge?

For one thing, at such an event, you notice something about young people: how impressively organized and thoughtful they are.

There’s no app for solving our bigger problems, climate change amongst them but not alone. Today, we rarely sweat the small stuff, but we are bedeviled by the big concerns and how to percolate solutions throughout the economy. The storytellers are never grounded enough in the science, the scientists are never grounded enough in the story.

It’s been observed elsewhere, or should have been, that if you want optimization, build silos,

So, we turn to the breaking of silos. This work is necessary, messy, and heartbreaking. Along the way, one discovers that people want change, but don’t want to change. People are more invested in their habits than their values, I find.

The only way to solve our problems, in the end, is to start with the young. It is a hard road. The young have innocent ideas and imperfect understanding. Also, persuading quilters to think outside the quilt, persuading scientists to work within the culture of quilting, is something that back in Australia we would have called hard yakka, tough work.

So, I turn again to this year’s winning effort at the BioDesign Challenge, the satire of our plastics dilemma.

We tussle over plastics, not because we misunderstand the problem. Rather, we have no effective way to replace plastics at the same price and performance. They hold a monopoly not by predation and disinformation but by efficacy. They are, in a sense, natural’ monopolies, as we have with some utilities. They sit atop vast, efficient supply-chains that suffocate every attempt to replace these pesky polymers. Odi et amor, I love and I hate, and I do not know what to do about it. Catullus well understood our problem.

The fact that modern supply-chains break down from time to time — famously, in the pandemic — shows just how pervasive, complex and impactful they really are.

Their purpose is to serve incumbents — hey deliver what you need today and not what is needed tomorrow. So, they are the companions of silos, and the same old same old.

The alternatives are too damn costly, or involve impacts on infrastructure that are hard for people who want change, but don’t want to change. To mention that again.

It is the same for all commodities, then as now. No one can “see” the entire supply-chain. A fog descends upon the mind of the consumer and the retailer. Not dissimilar to the fog that clouds the mind on a hard bench in a joss house, smoking opium, gaining distance from troubling thoughts, lost in the bodily pleasures that the smoke brings.

We smoke the opium of distance, by which we tolerate practices we would never tolerate at home, we strip commodities from consequences and look only at performance and price.

Only the microbes have acquired the skills of indifference to us, and to their misfortune.

For, now, we aim to rule over microbes, too. They are our new serfs, we seize them in the name of better living for ourselves and our like kind. The microbes are tiny and feel inconsequential, but we are seizing them without permission and altering their future without consent, or regard except to our own advantage.

We comfort ourselves in thinking microbes dumb and incapable of care or distress. We are left to guess, because we do not know, because we do not ask. Despite our machines, our technologies, we know very little about the world around us, the inner life of plants or animals, much less microbes.

What we are learning is how to yoke microbes to the harness and drive them with the carrot and the stick. Dance, microbe. Serve, microbe. Give up to me, microbe, Always the criteria is human need, human fulfillment, human want. These are important things, but they are not the only things.

What is a civilization to do, when it knows so much of exploitation and so little of the exploited? A civilization must carry on, that’s what it must do. It serves human needs. IIt is all we are, it is all we know.

There is nothing wrong with interpreting the world from one’s corner, being all in for humanity above all others, as long as one acknowledges that it is a perspective from a corner.

As long as one does not complain when the yoke is placed on our shouldersPandemic — that’s nature’s way of evening the score.

So, no, sorry my matey, we are not fighting for Nature, We are fighting for the narrow ecological niche that supports us.

Yes, the niche is at risk, and woe betide us when it collapses, because the tsunami that follows will spare few, and none on the basis of merit.

Worry not! goes the say-so, and it has currency because, as I observed earlier, people love their habits more than their values, and listen to the smoothies who preach inaction.

Story will not save us, because technology gets in the way — there’s no actual Ironman suit, and the Marvel Cinematuic Universe is powered by Unobtnaium. Some of the dreams of unlimited clean energy too.

Where technology meets story, that’s where the BioDesign Challenge sits, and it travels on a noble road.

This is us: we watch, adapt, speak, assay, grab, yoke, dominate. The hour calls for all our skills in the cause of transformation. Can we break the silos and find a new language for our civilization, a new story to tell?