Dearth of Ink, but some: Big geoengineering meeting dubbed Asilomar 2.0
The deliberate depiction of the recent thinkfest on throttling climate change with huge artificial works, held at the Asilomar Conference Center along Monterey Bay, as modeled on the historic meeting 35 years ago on recombinant DNA may have been off base. For one thing, the DNA meeting got fairly heavy, high-level attention in the press. For another thing, and probably the reason for the first thing, genetic engineering was already stirring frenzied interest in working laboratories. Save for a few dustings of iron on the sea and such, hacking the planet remains largely untested arm-waving. It may be coming, but it’s not here yet.
Still, you’d think more reporters would have been there even in this time of no-budget bloggers posing as news hounds and a struggling remnant of what was once mainstream media.
Leave it to a non-profit, Yale University’s Environment 360 program of science journalism + scientists’ stabs at science writing, to have produced a good first-whack at the meeting’s meaning. Writer Jeff Goodell, a contributor to Rolling Stone and author of an upcoming book on geoengineering, was there and took an insightful look. He puts it into context, including with the 1975 meeting on genetic science and fears of genetic mischief. And he gives it a decent narrative arc, depicting an initially unfocussed and incoherent meeting that eventually got around to solid discussion. It’s not so much a log of what went on, but it does provide a set of bins, or categories of worry, to help sort it out.
Grist for the Mill: Climate Response Fund (via Earthtimes) Press Release ;
Pic from Nov. 30 Indypendent on line newspaper and its polemical but essentially well-informed article by Arun Gupta: Hacking the Planet .
- Charlie Petit
