The relation between islands as non spaces and designed places is a convoluted one, but it is a relation that must be kept in mind in the discussion that follows. I will take this section of the introduction to explain my use of the concept of design as it relates to the scientific and social construction of islands and the themes of visitation, vulnerability, and biocomplexity. As mentioned above, the phrase itself, “islands by design,” is the name of a Bahamian environmental assessment and design consultation firm whose projects have included the design plans and use concepts for large marinas and planned developments on several islands. Much like “living laboratory,” I have borrowed this idea and redefined it to suit my purposes. I also borrow here from the History of Science including the history of Anthropology, and I pick examples from Island Archeology, Island Ecology, Tourism Studies and Urban Studies to talk about the power of design and the way it can engender various forms of experience.A columnist in one of The Bahamas’ national papers stated in print in 2007 that, “planning is the key to sustainability,” and notions of design and planning were conspicuous throughout my work with field researchers, conservation managers, and government officials. Conservation and management organizations are currently going through the process of designing and developing science based management plans for everything from individual protected areas to national protected area master plans with guidance and design models from international conservation organizations and consultants; The design of scientific field research projects is often as important a product as the research results when it comes to forms of knowledge created by research scientists and students; Design for the curricula and scope of a new degree program in “Small Island Sustainability” at the College of The Bahamas is currently underway; The newly created Ministry of Environment is redesigning the roles of its own governmental institutions,u planting gutter becoming a central player in the planning processes for projected social and economic development in the country; the Department of Sustainable Tourism is redesigning the ways in which the islands of The Bahamas should be marketed to foreign visitors and reconceptualizing the form tourism infrastructure should take in various locations; The Ministry of Tourism is considering how to redesign its “tourism product” to not only mitigate and adapt to threats of climate change but to discover ways in which to profit from a newly climate aware target traveler.
This is to name only a few examples of the rootedness of design schemes in the Bahamian milieu. I note that design processes come prior to planning, that planning is an aspect of the enactment of thought and design, and the newspaper quote could more accurately say, “design is the key to sustainability.”“Design,” as a term, implies the creation of plan, an intention, a pattern, a contrivance, and productive work to “create the form or structure of something.” This last implication is one of the most important for me, in that I would like to make the creative and formative aspects of field science, sustainable development, and environmental management explicit. Islands by design, then, references the multiple ways in which nature and natures, life and lives, matter and materials, places, spaces, and objects, etc. become conceptually and aesthetically formed and reformed as part of the work of science-based environmental, touristic, and sustainable planning in The Bahamas. The point is not only that natural science and scientific expertise is touted as the position of authority from whence ecological problems can be diagnosed and framed in certain circles- the point is also that natural science and scientific expertise is in the position to influence and set the terms for how solutions will be studied, formed, and enacted. Experts, albeit a somewhat motley crew with disparate backgrounds when it comes to nationality, discipline, realm of experience and outlook, can be considered the designers of the living laboratory. I see the living laboratory as a site of great productivity in the development of the conditions of possibility. With the notion of islands by design, I am in essence proposing another direction for political ecology or environmental anthropology to take, or perhaps another set of tools to add to the rich set which this unruly sub-discipline already possesses. I think that focusing on and conceptualizing design is one way to attempt to describe the work, The study of scientific laboratories as special spaces for social production became a characteristic of the sociology of science beginning in the 1970’s. Ethnographers of science sought to decentralize the analytic focus on human agency through the study of lab practices with an attention to the ways non human substances have a “material agency” in the production of scientific facts.Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory Life introduced readers to the daily lives of scientists involved in the construction of such facts. Famously using the trope of an anthropologist in the field attending to “science in the making” they noted that all new laboratory activity hinges on previously constructed and accepted facts embodied in lab instruments and that laboratories undergo continual “micro-processes” of negotiation in their operation as a system of fact construction.
The vast amount of literature, documents, and “material dictionaries” produced by labs become important as part of the fact making process and the material arrangements of the lab produce a reality that would not exist without it.They write, “It is not simply that phenomena depend on certain material instrumentation; rather, the phenomena are thoroughly constituted by the material setting of the laboratory.” The laboratory is therefore a space which embodies the work of other fields, reified in its arrangement and equipment, to legitimate the reality it produces; reality and nature are the byproducts of the scientific stabilization of facts in the lab, rather than the cause. In an important observation, Mol and Law note that laboratory experiments are “simplificatory devices: they seek to tame the many erratically changing variables that exist in the world, keeping some stable and excluding others from the argument.”Their point is that simplifications are used to justify action, yet they qualify this by stating that simplification should not be denounced off-hand as it is a productive force, especially when it comes to knowledge practices. As mentioned above, the notion of The Bahamas as a living laboratory for certain sciences and disciplines is a framing concept for this dissertation. The phrase itself, “living laboratory,” originated from an interview with a Bahamian government official who hoped that the international research community might increasingly come to see The Bahamas as a living laboratory for environmental research,planting gutter and it is a concept I have borrowed and stretched to fit my own interests. This can be differentiated from Harre’s use of the term “living laboratory” to describe how living things become crucial aspects of scientific laboratory experiments.For Harre, living things are transformed, in the space of the lab, into instruments and apparatus for measurement, detection, simulation, and experimentation. An important part of the lab “has always been organic, apparatus and instruments constructed from living materials or materials that were once alive.” He provides the example of the fly, Drosophilia, and genetics research: the fly became a piece of lab equipment in that it was a means of producing specific kinds of knowledge as a standardized organism in a system of production; the fly was a designed artifact. Harre writes, “glass must be skillfully blown to become a flask.So too the living material must beshaped and transformed into devices in the living instrumarium.”
It is this experimentation with living things that he calls the living laboratory and he thus uses the phrase in a slightly different valence and for different purposes. My use of the term is also about living things, but as I will show below, it is about the production and manipulation of ideas framing life and living as much as it is about the scientific use of living things in The Bahamas today. His focus is on animal bodies and individuated organisms, while mine is on the way in which processes and systems are identified and designed as sites for experiments or environmental management and the way these “natural” processes are conceptually linked to other enterprises. Following Latour and Woolgar, but taking them into the living laboratory of The Bahamas, this dissertation starts from the point that nature and its scientific forms, i.e. habitats, ecosystems, biodiversity, etc. are not at all given. These are the reified form of past scientific theories and practices made in other laboratory situations at other times. My research in The Bahamas has been centered around contemporary laboratory situations which can be very generally referred to as social science, ecological and environmental research, and sustainable economic development- processes of human life and living, non-human life and living, and economies of visitation and investment. A focus on current events in The Bahamas could very well entail investigating any one of these arenas, and these realms are discursively separate in that they are often discussed as separate categories of inquiry which can be related post facto. But an investigation of The Bahamas as a living laboratory, as a site for active experimentation and exemplification, requires the recognition that these categories are interrelated and coconstitutional. Therefore, I should say at this point that I am working within my own laboratory situation with this dissertation in that I am, as mentioned above, conducting a sort of experiment by bringing a host of scholarly angles to bear on the situations and events I was and continue to be part of and witness to.For my purposes here, I will define a laboratory as a physical, conceptual, and designed space in which ideas can be tested and processes evaluated through experimentation. A laboratory implies scientific research. A laboratory space also implies that matter and materials are manipulated as part of the process of experimentation to achieve a desired outcome or to discover what comes out of a given design process. A living laboratory extends the notion of the physical and conceptual space for scientific research into “the field”- into “real” time and “real” life processes in situ, though this is importantly no less designed. Manipulation can then become the act of influencing pre-existing components and factors and even creating the possibility for the existence of those very factors. The living laboratory is thus a frame in which I call to attention the shifting relationship between fieldwork and the lab, which “traditionally” are separate physical and conceptual spaces- data in various forms is discovered, collected, and removed from the field, in which scientists are explorers and adventurers, and taken to the lab to be analyzed. A living lab merges the processes of exploration, discovery, collection, and analysis and alters what forms are acceptable and accessible as data. Field ecologists, biologists, and social scientists develop contingent relationships to fields based on specific forms of presence and practice. I have developed this observation in contrast to recent observations about the changing science of genomics in which the active presence of science in the field is said to have lessened and where scientists and students can “get in and out” with their data and samples without caring about the particular relationships and socialities of their field site.I argue that today, the field and the lab are synonymous and “the island is a laboratory” takes on a holistic and socialized meaning for the field life sciences- the what counts as experimental material or the subject of field research is increasingly designed as an amalgam of natural and social systemic processes. As I describe below, this has implications for defining what manner and matter of “life” the life sciences produce knowledge about.The panelists prescribed a form of research for a biocomplexity paradigm, stating that biocomplexity questions needed to be approached in an interdisciplinary manner and that they were different from typical research questions. The complex interactions that occur in the “real world” on multiple scales can only be understood through “combined efforts of scientists” from many disciplines who are allowed to work at the relevant “temporal and spatial scales.”