The Human Genome and the Human-altered Environment.

• Author: Ayres, Ed
• Position: Brief Article

When the sequencing of the human genome was published in Science and Nature last winter, it was greeted by the mainstream media as an historic achievement. Much attention was given to what this could mean for medical intervention--for the eradication of many diseases and, ultimately, for the creation of taller, stronger, more long-lived humans who would never again be vulnerable to inherited afflictions. The mood of the moment was perhaps like that of 15th or 16th century explorers who had just discovered a new territory and were trying to assess the assets they were about to claim--the taller, stronger New World trees they could cut for ships' masts, or the shiploads of West African slaves or Aztec gold they could seize, or the exotic California firs or Florida egret plumes with which they could fill their holds.

History tells us that the thrall of discovery tended to blind such explorers to the long-term consequences of such plunder--or "resource extraction," as it would come to be called. Those who cut trees, whether for masts or for firewood, were probably quite unaware that they were contributing to a process that would eventually decimate half the world's forests. The Conquistadors who marched across Mexico with Cortez were probably unaware that the sneezes and skin sores they carried from Europe--to which they were themselves somewhat inured--would soon kill off a large portion of the indigenous population.

Over the millennia, it seems, human explorers have rarely understood, or in any case worried about, the range of impacts their intrusions would eventually have. Paleontologists tell us it was likely the human expansion over the planet, long before the beginning of recorded history, that wiped out the Pleistocene mammals--the woolly mammoths, scimitar cats, and Ice Age bison--that were common across North America, Europe, and Asia. Later, when the settling of farmers and herders led to the rise of cities and civilizations, it also brought about an extensive desertification of once forested land, and a progressive salinization and erosion of the once fertile soil.

There's no indication that early explorers or farmers--or, later, those economic adventurers who built the first cars, container ships, and computers--ever worried that the kind of global commerce and homogeneity they were bringing might eventually begin to erode not only the bio-logical diversity of the planet's other life, but the cultural diversity of the human species...