Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't the concept of biopiracy imply that the products of millions of years of evolution belong to modern nation states? What if, instead, we either observe that they simply exist , or imbue them with their own rights, or consider them the birthright of all humanity? We've seen that attempts to consider them as intellectual property for the purposes of ensuring their conservation have failed. We can also see that i…
I don’t think it’s at all reasonable to accuse Kew of biopiracy - their collections were, in large part the product of pure exploration. However, there certainly are cases in the Amazon of folks visiting native communities, quizzing them to extract hard-won knowledge about the potential medical efficacy of local plants, collecting samples and then disappearing off to commercialise the results. It’s not the results of…
Re: The Kew Herbarium (2019)
#11I agree that indigenous knowledge is rightly the property of indigenous peoples themselves, but that wasn't my point. My comment referred specifically to the products of evolution: that's the genetic resources, not the knowledge of them.