How to Read Wild Biodiversity: Barcode It
Daniel H. Janzen
Thomas G. and Louise E. DiMaura Endowed Term Professor in
Conservation Biology
If you can’t read, that big library over there is just a stone cave full of firewood. I think you all understand what I just said. There are five and a half billion people in the world who can’t read this. Where we’re headed, and this is no longer science fiction, that in five to 10 years you’ll be able to pull out of your back pocket something this size, something this cost, which will allow you to take a little chip of this leaf, stick it in the top, and two seconds later you know what the name is of the thing that you have in front of you. It could be a piece of meat in a supermarket. It could be a feather off the pavement. It could be an insect that’s in your daughter’s eye. It could be a plant that’s in your hand. Anything, anywhere in the world.
Now, you might say, well, what’s the point of knowing the names of everything? Well, if you would tap an 11th-century French farmer, as he’s plowing his field, on the shoulder and say, “Would you like to know how to read? Would you like your children to be able to read?” he would say to you, “No. What’s the point of learning how to read? That’s what those people in the monastery up on the top of the hill do, and they’re worthless.” He’s not envisioning the Internet, books, letters, legal documents, newspapers and all the other stuff we do with reading.
If, and this is no longer a real “if,” this is only a whim now, the world will be able to put a name on anything, anytime, and then get all we know about that thing in a matter of seconds, whether by Google or via some other means, when we get to that point, it will change human relationships to wild things and the domestic things in your garden, just like reading has changed the world we live in today. Thank you.