Saving evolutionary time: Conflicting planetary temporalities in the genetic diversity debate,1967–1980

Abstract

This paper examines the temporalities at play in the issue of plant genetic resources in the 1960s and through the 1970s. The issue emerged as concerned scientists, especially Erna Bennett and Otto Frankel, plant scientists affiliated with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Biological Program, drew attention to the loss of biological variety in the wake of the “Green Revolution” and global industrialization of agriculture. The scientists advocated efforts to collect and store seeds to safeguard genetic resources for the agricultural sector, but also to protect genetic diversity in the wild. Importantly, genetic erosion was understood as a deeply temporal issue where, ultimately, the future of evolution itself was at stake. Frankel and Bennett framed genetic erosion as a matter of temporal dissonance between the time scales of industrial society and environmental processes, especially evolution. Their notion of evolutionary time was in turn embedded in competing temporalities of development. Their descriptions of genetic erosion thus negotiated the grand temporalities of development and evolution in different ways, in the sense that they advocated different solutions to the threat of discontinued evolution. Furthermore, Frankel and Bennett's respective visions were decisively political in the sense that they involved ideas of the social organization needed to safeguard evolutionary time, including politics of labor, intellectual property, and the design of international institutions, but also profound questions of the political such as who creates wealth and value in society, and what set of humans and institutions might harbor the possibility for a resolution of the contradiction between the future of development and the future of evolution. In conclusion, the article discusses Frankel and Bennett's renderings of evolutionary time as relevant for the ongoing scholarly discussion of planetary habitability as a new framework for environmentalism and historicization of current environmental crises.

By the late 1960s, a group of scientists in United Nations (UN) circles voiced their concern that the diversity of agricultural crops in the world was immense but in rapid decline in the wake of what is now known as the Green Revolution, causing the genetic underpinnings of the global food system to erode. The scientists, especially Erna Bennett, who worked for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and Otto Frankel, who worked for the International Biological Program (IBP) as well as the FAO, warned that the loss of genetic variety was a serious and underestimated global threat. They explained that the higher yield of genetically improved Green Revolution varieties of crops came at the price of homogenization of agricultural practices, and thus of a dramatic narrowing of the range of crops in the world. When genetically engineered varieties increased yields, it was because they drew on the vast genetic diversity of the global agricultural system, but as the new crops became successful and used broadly, that diversity quickly dwindled, and this dynamic threatened the possibility to create new varieties in the future (Bonneuil, 2019; Busch et al., 1996: 47; Curry, 2022: 108–109; Farnham, 2007: 114–117; Fenzi and Bonneuil, 2016; Frankel, 1973a; Frankel and Bennett, 1970; Pistourius, 1997). The scientists thus described a contradiction inside the temporality of modernization by which it increasingly undermined itself as it moved forward. Modern crop breeding appeared as a process that fed on itself, destroying its very conditions of existence as it proceeded; one scientist later likened it to picking bricks from the foundation of a house to construct its roof (Garrison Wilkes quoted in Shiva, 2011 (1993): 71; Bennett, 1968; Farnham, 2007: 115). Frankel and Bennett articulated the issue in an elaborate way that revealed the problem of plant genetic resources as a profoundly temporal problem where, ultimately, the future of evolution itself was at stake.

Frankel and Bennett's early articulation of the problem of genetic erosion constitutes an important prehistory to the issue now known as biodiversity loss. It is also important to the growing body of scholarship that studies environmental problems as temporal problems. In this field, environmental problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss are typically understood as expressions of a temporal mismatch between Western societies and their systems of production on the one hand and of the natural systems that make up their conditions of existence on the other. From this perspective, climate change and dwindling biodiversity are crises for our conceptions of time, and demonstrate our societal shortcomings in understanding, institutionalizing and enforcing the time scales at play in the climate system and in the natural world (see, e.g. Bastian and Bayliss Hawitt, 2023; Bjornerud, 2018; Huebener, 2020). In the last decade, issues of environmental temporalities have also taken a prominent place in the discussions of the planetary as a new framework in environmental history and humanities that centers on the processes that make the earth habitable, spurred by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's reinvigoration of the concept in a series of essays (collected in Chakrabarty, 2021).

It is in a sense quite obvious that evolution is a global-scale temporal concept, and yet it has been curiously little examined in temporality studies as well as in the discussion about the planetary. This article therefore examines the temporal aspects of the notion of evolution as it was elaborated in the early genetic diversity discussion by focusing on the contributions of two pioneers in the discussion about plant genetic diversity, the two plant scientists Erna Bennett and Otto Frankel (see also Bjærke, 2025 in this special issue for a discussion of evolutionary time). Bennett and Frankel framed genetic erosion as a matter of temporal dissonance between the time scales of industrial society and environmental systems, especially the time scales of evolution, and their notion of evolutionary time was in turn embedded in competing temporalities of development. Although Bennett and Frankel's central role in the formation of the issue is well known in the literature on the issue of plant genetic resources, this article explores the temporal ideas that the two plant scientists elaborated of evolution as a vital societal temporality under threat. The article proceeds by first providing an overview of the question of plant genetic diversity, and then moves on to examining the temporal ideas that Frankel and Bennett elaborated in their published work, reports for the FAO, as well as in their correspondence. It then discusses the complex relationships between the different temporalities evoked by Frankel and Bennett, temporalities of evolution and development, and temporalities of the different solutions that they suggested such as seed banks and protection for small farmers against corporate interest in agriculture. In the last sections the article pays closer attention to the political dimensions of the evolutionary temporalities that Frankel and Bennett articulated. As a conclusion, it presents the case that although the early discussions of genetic diversity and the future of evolution have been overlooked in the so-called planetary turn in the humanities, they make a critical contribution to the intellectual history of the planetary that expands the planetary as a theoretical concept of potential political importance.

The plant genetic resources question

The plant genetic resources discussion emerged in the 1960s as a discourse on the Green Revolution that ranged from the pointing out of adverse side-effects that could be addressed by technological means, to a fundamental challenge to the very project of agricultural intensification and industrialization. In the following decades, this discussion developed into multiple projects of diversity conservation mainly through the collection and storage of genetic material in a network of seed banks (Curry, 2022; Pistourius, 1997). The plant genetic resources discussion is today known to scholars both as a precursor to the biodiversity loss discussion and as the beginning of international seed banking practices. Importantly, it is also the arena of a decades-long struggle over patents and intellectual property rights in agriculture, a thorny issue in the international system of a decolonizing world, where a recurring critique was that the Global North robbed the Global South of genetic resources in a neocolonial power dynamic (Curry, 2022; Pistourius, 1997).

Like many environmental issues in the postwar era, genetic diversity loss was a question brought to the public arena by scientists, and required specialized knowledge to be discernable, let alone properly understood. Two people played central roles in the formation of the issue of genetic diversity, Otto Frankel and Erna Bennett, both plant geneticists. Otto Frankel (1900–1998) was a Jewish Austrian who emigrated to New Zealand early on in his life, and it was there and in Australia that he pursued a long and successful career as a plant geneticist, an influential affiliate in international organizations such as the FAO and the IBP, and eventually a member of illustrious organizations such as the Royal Society and the Australian Academy of Science (Evans, 1999). Erna Bennett (1925–2012), 25 years Frankel's junior, grew up in Northern Ireland, and came to lead a rather dramatic life and become a controversial figure in many of the contexts she worked within. Together Frankel and Bennett organized the 1967 Technical Conference on the Exploitation, Utilization, and Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources supported by the FAO and the IBP. This event was decisive for the formation and publicization of the issue of genetic resource loss: Bennett and Frankel coined the terms genetic erosion and genetic resources in the run-up to the event, the proceedings from the conference quickly became a well-cited volume in diversity discussions, and the group of scientists participating in it afterward formed an informal “Panel of Experts on plant Genetic Resources” that would continue to advocate on the matter (Evans, 1999; Pistourius, 1997: 20). In 1974 the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources was established to coordinate efforts to collect and preserve some of the at-risk genetic diversity in seed banks. The infrastructure of gene banks has continued to be developed, and there are today some 1750 of them, including institutions such as the famous Svalbard seed vault which is intended to work as a backup storage for national seed banks (Khoury et al., 2022: 85, 87).

The initial effort supported by the FAO to collect a wide range of genetic material on a global scale for the benefit of humanity as a whole was soon refashioned by commercial actors who streamlined both crop collection, breeding, research, as well as agricultural assistance in accordance with business interest, but framed it as a philanthropically motivated effort to, as it were, fight world hunger. ¹ Subsequently, a new international body, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), funded and run by nine Global North countries alongside the FAO, the World Bank, and the UN Development Programme, promoted a specific type of agricultural modernization that included new methods, seeds, and use of pesticides and fertilizers. The organization enacted this specific understanding of modernization through the conditioning of access to loans and international aid, as well as research funding and agricultural counseling (Curry, 2022: 118). In the coming years, more interested parties formed around it, ranging from industrial interests as well as anti-corporation NGOs. ² What followed was a gradual and conflicted institutionalization of plant genetic resources in an international system regulating the storage of genes in seed banks and the rights to use these (Curry, 2022).

Frankel and Bennet's early formulation of the problem became influential for the formation of the issue now known as biodiversity loss, and for environmental discourse and the institutionalization of international environmental politics more broadly. The phrase and frame of genetic resources appeared in several major strategy documents and international treaties such as the recommendations issued by the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (where Frankel held a speech), the 1980 IUCN World Conservation Strategy, and the report from the Brundtland commission (World Conservation Strategy, 1980: 24; Our Common Future, 1987). Importantly, the influence of the plant genetic resources discussion also included some of its temporalities, especially the intergenerational framing and notion of responsibility toward future generations, and the duty to protect genetic diversity as a way of keeping options open for the future.

The threat to evolutionary time

In Frankel and Bennett's articulation of the problem of genetic diversity loss, the evolutionary past had generated biological variety and protecting that variety thus meant protecting evolutionary time as it was stored in nature. But biological variety was also what held the potential for continued future evolution. To protect diversity was therefore a way of protecting both the past and the future of evolution. Genetic erosion was in this way a profoundly temporal issue; time was key to understanding the problem and forging solutions. Frankel elaborated this perspective in detail in his writings, and he developed a temporal vocabulary centered on the vastly different “time scales of concern” that structured and exacerbated the problem of genetic diversity loss (Frankel, 1970).

Crucially, Frankel and Bennett both saw evolution as happening in two different domains producing two distinct temporalities: first, in agricultural crops shaped by human practices in the field since the beginning of agriculture some 10,000 years ago (increasingly also by ex situ science and technology). Plant breeding was “evolution at the will of man,” as they phrased it in 1967, paraphrasing the Soviet plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov whom they both admired greatly (Frankel and Bennett, 1970: 7). This type of evolution was anthropogenic and could be very quick. Second, evolution also played out in the wilderness, where it proceeded without human interference and had a deep time scale. Evolution in the wild was nevertheless of profound importance for agriculture since genes from wild species could be useful in the development of new crops. Frankel and Bennett's respective accounts can thus be divided into wild and domestic evolutionary time, both of which were imagined as endangered by the temporality of development. In his discussion of genetic diversity, Frankel often returned to what he called “time scales of concern” in genetic diversity conservation (in his correspondence with a scientific director at the IUCN he referred to it as a “hobby of mine”; Frankel, 1977). He used the term to designate the vastly different temporal horizons that were implied in the two domains of genetic diversity conservation and public life. Although politics was normally limited to the time horizon of the next election, genetic conservation in agriculture was a project ranging from 50–100 years, and genetic conservation in the wild stretched into the indeterminate future (Frankel, 1974: 59).

There was however more to the temporal structure of the issue of genetic diversity than the mere differences in time scale. That biological variety held both the evolutionary deep past and future was a temporal dimension that Frankel understood in intergenerational and ethical terms. The quest for protecting evolution meant protecting the conditions for a flow of evolutionary time from the deep past into the deep future, for the benefit of future generations. The ongoing rapid and continuing destruction of natural habitats in effect meant that humans became “arbiters of evolution” in the sense that only the species humans currently found of use (and those which humans could not suppress) would continue their existence into the evolutionary future (Frankel, 1974: 62–63). Accelerating technological and societal change made the future very difficult to predict, more so than in any previous moment in history. The needs and wishes of future people simply could not be known in advance. For Frankel, the impossibility to know the needs of future generations made it unethical to wield the power over evolution by causing vast genetic erosion. Instead, a broad range of species and populations should be preserved, to provide future generations with alternatives—and allow evolution to continue.

Managing genetic diversity therefore had to be thought of in terms of maintaining potential in a time of reduction of genetic diversity, “at this point of decision-making it may be our evolutionary responsibility to keep evolutionary options open so far as we can without undue deprivations for those least able to bear them” (Frankel, 1974: 63). Frankel proposed the concept of a genetic estate, a parallel to the national estate, to conceptualize “the biological heritage, the genetic endowment of organisms now living” (Frankel, 1974: 53). The genetic estate was characterized by its temporality, Frankel argued, which made it “a more sophisticated concept than the national estate. Whereas the national estate is conservative and static, the genetic estate is forward-looking and dynamic: its essence is its evolutionary potential” (Frankel, 1974: 53). Frankel's idea of protecting evolutionary time was in this way an argument for preserving conditions for adaptation to an unknowable future by protecting the process that surpassed human knowledge and control and generated newness.

Frankel also developed this view in a book he wrote during the latter part of the 1970s together with the conservation biologist Michael Soulé. Conservation and Evolution (1981) offered practical advice on how conservation efforts could be designed to favor continued evolution. Maintaining evolutionary processes played a critical role in long-term human survival by providing the possibility of adaptation to new circumstances (Frankel and Soulé, 1981: 78). To make this point, they redefined the classical environmentalist distinction between conservation and preservation. This terminology, often dated back to late nineteenth-century US-American debates on the proper rationale for protection of natural areas, is usually deployed to denote a difference between protection of nature for human needs contra protection of nature from humans (for a critical historical discussion of the distinction see Banzhaf, 2019: 29). Frankel and Soulé redescribed the distinction as a difference between on the one hand preserving genetic material that can be of use to humans directly—immediately or potentially—and on the other the conservation of natural communities of species that could continue their evolution into the distant future. The complexity and self-regulation of nature in the wild could never be reconstructed artificially, and its like probably didn’t exist anywhere in the universe. The essence of conservation was therefore “for some forms of life to remain in existence in their natural state, to continue to evolve as have their ancestors before them throughout evolutionary time” (Frankel and Soulé, 1981: 6). In short, Frankel and Soulé redescribed conservation and preservation to represent two different temporalities, where conservation was the protection of evolutionary time as a flow of potential for newness in a historical situation of unprecedented unpredictability.

The temporal conflict between evolution and development

Despite describing the consequences of genetic erosion as grave, if not existential, and identifying the current historical moment as decisive in the effort to stop it, Frankel did not dedicate much of his writings to the question of what would make a successful concrete politics of conservation of evolutionary time in the wilderness. Instead, he relied on an expectation of historical progress in the form of rising environmental awareness in advanced societies. Frankel's notion of evolutionary time was in this way intertwined with an idea that societal development encompassed social mores such as environmental sensibility. He assumed that in advanced societies a shared environmental consciousness would emerge that included the realization that nature underpinned society by providing a stable climate, a breathable atmosphere and drinkable water, but also providing opportunity for “aesthetic delight” and “emotional attachment.” A developed country's wise use of natural resources could also provide social cohesion in the form of “a link between the sciences, the nations—and even between the generations” (Frankel, 1970: 163). In an industrial and increasingly urban world, people would eventually come to value nature as a space where “the mass-produced human can recover a sense of his individuality as a unique variant of homo sapiens” (Frankel, 1970: 163). In wordings vaguely reminiscent of the new left of the time, Frankel argued that nature emerged as a cure for the alienated subjectivities produced by modern societies. ³ Science was central to the environmental societal consciousness, and Frankel saw genetics as a key discipline for a future society in which it would both plan “the biological system of conservation so as to establish the highest possible evolutionary potential,” and “help in establishing an evolutionary ethic, as part of our social ethics, which will make it acceptable and indeed inevitable for civilized man to regard the continuing existence of other species as an integral part of his own existence” (Frankel, 1974: 54).

A temporal paradox sits at the heart of this framing of the issue of genetic diversity loss in the sense that it was only at a late historical stage of industrialization and urbanization, that is, on the verge of the total disappearance of natural areas, that such spaces could be properly appreciated among the broader public. Frankel argued that an important reason for the “rapidly growing interest in wilderness and wildlife is the widespread realization that all too little is left, and that what remains is in danger of erosion or extinction” (Frankel, 1970: 163). Frankel in this way embraced two conflicting historical temporalities of environmental decline and progress. In Frankel's eyes, his own historical present was on the cusp of the disappearance of wild nature. “Never before,” he declared, “have a mere one or two generations faced such responsibility” (Frankel, 1970: 168). The historical situation was new because it meant that present people exercised power over all future generations on earth as “most of the changes which are taking place are irreversible. They are there for all time. Our decision involves the distant future” (Frankel, 1970: 168, emphasis in original). Whether the emerging environmental consciousness was transformed into actual conservation of variety, domestic or wild, was however still an open question. What was at stake was “the fate of all forms of life, of wild and domesticated plants and animals and doubtless of our own species.” Whether or not genetic estate was dispersed and “an irreparable loss” was inflicted on future generations hinged on rather vaguely described historical factors such as “economic, social and political pressures and on the direction and strength of public consciousness” (Frankel and Bennett, 1970: 8; Frankel, 1970: 164, 168). Notably, Frankel didn’t seem to view the decisive moment for the future as playing out as a political conflict, but rather as a race between two competing temporalities, one of material development and the other of the emerging enlightenment and “joint efforts of scientists, technologists, economists, statesmen, administrators,” as it was put by the Australian philosopher John Passmore in a contemporary book that Frankel repeatedly quoted in his publications (Passmore, 1974: 173).

Frankel's historical account thus suggested that at the cusp of an eclipse of evolutionary time was a moment of contingency when (vaguely defined) societal institutions and sensibilities could achieve control over the material development that had given rise to them but now threatened their future. Environmental consciousness, and the thoughtful governance of planetary time, was in this way constructed as the child of imminent crisis, but also as pertaining exclusively to what was conventionally described as the developed world. This historical temporality thus automatically preempted the prospect that any relevant environmentalist political vision could come from the Global South.

Seed bank time and development time

If Frankel saw that evolutionary time as stored in the wild could only be safeguarded through the long-term protection of vast areas of relatively undisturbed nature with rich genetic diversity, he held a different vision of evolutionary time in the agricultural domain. Here, the only hope for countering genetic diversity loss was large-scale coordinated collection and storage of seeds for future use. ⁴ The variety of “primitive” landraces of crops that were used in pre-industrial agriculture was destined to disappear in a developing world. As in the case of wild evolutionary time, domestic evolutionary time was overtaken and suffocated by the temporality of development. Frankel argued that the genetic variety—and evolutionary time—held by “primitive” crops could only be preserved by technological means. The alternative would be to preserve them in situ through “the retention of the ecosystem as a whole, including the cultivator,” that is, maintaining diverse but low-yielding traditional agricultural practices. Conserving nonmodern farming systems simply was not an option as it was “impracticable on social, economic and technical grounds” (Frankel, 1970: 162). For Frankel, and many others within the plant genetic resources circuit, it was therefore “inevitable to remove the material from the areas in which it was cultivated to places of safe-keeping in scientific institutions” (Frankel, 1970: 162). To keep their genetic resource within reach for future development of agricultural crops, “the only practicable method of conservation is to ‘freeze’ variation in a steady state, to be ‘unfrozen’ for use in plant breeding or research when required” (Frankel, 1970: 162). In sum, the flow of evolutionary time as a generator of newness and possibility for adaptation in an unknown future could no longer be maintained in agricultural practice. At this developmental stage evolutionary time had to be completely managed by internationally coordinated societal institutions. The flow of wild evolutionary time required nature reserves where evolutionary time could spontaneously run its course, and domestic evolutionary time had to be preserved as discrete pieces of frozen evolution, collected and stored for future human-controlled use. In his 1981 book, Frankel elaborated this view by playing down the change that seed banking represented. Genetic resources in agricultural crops were in effect already in a static state, and “their evolutionary potential is enormous, but it needs to be realized through recombination, mutation and selection” by the breeders (Frankel and Soulé, 1981: 6).

For Frankel, development in agriculture was playing out according to a single, fixed, and unstoppable script of conventional industrial modernization that inevitably entailed the adoption of homogenized crop varieties and as a consequence caused genetic reduction. Modernity in agriculture had “high production and uniformity” at its very core (Frankel, 1973a: ix, emphasis in original). Loss of diversity was thus “an inevitable part of economic and social development. But it is having the side effect of extending a serious threat to the genetic resources on which not only the further improvement, but possibly the very existence of our crop plants depend” (Frankel, 1973a: ix). Frankel in this way conceptualized the evolutionary potential to be protected for future generations as entangled in an unalterable historical trajectory of development. In his view, there was no room for alternative trajectories of development where genetic diversity and thus the flow of anthropogenic evolutionary time could be maintained in agriculture. Genetic diversity could therefore only be maintained for future evolutionary potential and the gain of future generations through artificial storage of genetic material in seed banks. In this way, Frankel articulated the rationale for a development in which, as phrased by historian Helen Anne Curry, “diversity in the bank and uniformity in the field have gone hand in hand” (Curry, 2022: 229; see also Bowker, 2005: chapter 3). The only solution was to embrace the temporality of development and embark on a project to collect and store domestic evolutionary time artificially, through coordinated and large-scale seed banking—itself a project dense with temporalities.

It has not been lost on scholars that seed banking entails particular, if not unique, temporalities, many have indeed explored the subject (Bowker, 2005; Heise, 2016; Kowal and Radin, 2017; Peres, 2016; van Dooren, 2017; Wolff, 2021). To start with, the seeds themselves are extraordinary bundles of time. Sara Peres argues that seeds are to be seen as “temporal proxies” for plants and that the idea of banking them meant that the seed's “capacity for dormancy and reproduction was harnessed” as “a way to create a stable record of the evolutionary past of crops” (Peres, 2016: 97). Courtney Fullilove has stressed the human history of labor, agricultural skill and knowledge, and technological choices that are also stored in the seeds with the result that they “compress future potential and deep past into objects both minuscule and abundant” (Fullilove, 2017: 209, 219). Furthermore, modern seed banking has been described as a specific politics of time which seeks to alter temporal flows in the sociomaterial world by introducing a specific type of reversibility and thereby extending the present (Wolff, 2021: 81). In broader terms, it has been emphasized that seed banks constitute an important part of a broader historical trend toward archiving biodiversity as data, all as a form of reconceptualized conservation (Bowker, 2005: 110; Curry, 2022: 122; Peres, 2016; Waterton et al., 2013: 106–111). It is also worth noting that although the term seed bank suggests a smooth practice without much waste and friction, large-scale seed banking is in reality a complicated and labor-intensive practice, encompassing many difficulties that aren’t captured by the metaphor of the bank, or the idea of freezing and unfreezing time (Curry, 2022; Waterton et al., 2013: 106–111). As an example, the stored seeds typically have to be germinated and grown, and new seeds collected on a regular basis to maintain the quality of the genetic material (FAO, 1997: 111–117). These practical circumstances were known already by the time Frankel and Bennett organized the concern for genetic erosion (Peres, 2016: 101). The temporalities of the seed bank, such as the freezing, reversibility, or back-up storage of time are thus best understood as parts of a temporal imaginary that helps legitimize the practice of seed banking, and thus also the simultaneous erosion of diversity in the field.

The practical difficulties aside, the very notion of freezing and unfreezing evolutionary time was itself the target of criticism already at the moment of formation of the issue of genetic diversity preservation. Erna Bennett, Frankel's close collaborator, challenged his preferred solution of ex situ conservation of variation, to be “frozen and unfrozen” at will. Her point of criticism was precisely that with such a practice, the evolutionary flow would be halted, which would make a “museum” of the whole issue of genetic diversity. Storing seeds was a convenient approach, but also an unsatisfying one as it kept the evolutionary process in a “steady state.” Such was not the point of conservation, quite the contrary, “the purpose of conservation is not to capture the present moment of evolutionary time, in which there is no special virtue, but to conserve material so that it will continue to evolve” (Bennett, 1968: 63). The continued generation of new evolutionary forms of crops could only be achieved if agricultural areas where genetic diversity was particularly high were protected, including the surrounding natural areas that provided continuous genetic input from wild relatives of the agricultural crops. In this way, it was possible to “preserve the evolutionary potential of local population-environment complexes” (Bennett, 1965: 91). In other words, at the very moment of formation of the issue of genetic erosion, Bennett articulated dissent—she described herself as a “parting shot”—in relation to the feasibility and desirability of banking evolutionary time (Bennett, 1968: 63). Doing so, she also articulated the position of a simmering green counter-revolution, a critique of industrial agriculture and its agents that existed from the beginning of the Green Revolution in the 1950s, for example in the agricultural university of Chapingo, in Chiapas, Mexico (Curry, 2022: 127–134).

Certainly, Erna Bennett was a person of strong political convictions that guided her actions and life choices. During World War Two, she served in the British intelligence service in Greece, but defected to join and fight in a partisan group—a crime she later described had been punishable by execution. She was eventually caught and court-martialed by the British, but was acquitted (Bennett and Borschmann, 1994: tape 1). She came out of the war a firm communist and remained true to this conviction throughout her life, and was at different points a member of the British, Italian, and Australian communist parties (Hanelt et al., 2012). After the war she earned a degree in botany in Britain, and for a while pursued a career in plant breeding science before she joined the FAO in Rome in 1967. Her role within the organization was to coordinate national and international efforts to collect and store plant material, and in this capacity she was also directly involved in the collection work, especially in countries around the Mediterranean Basin and in southwest and central Asia. She was increasingly critical of what she saw as growing influence of corporate interest within the organization and the network around it, and her outspokenness caused repeated conflicts within the organization. (However, it should be noted that Frankel thought that gender prejudice was contributing to her being marginalized within the organization; Frankel, 1973b.) After almost two decades she resigned from the FAO in protest (Bennett, 2002: biographical note).

Compared to Frankel's understanding that development time was on a single and unstoppable track to overtake domestic evolutionary time that could only be salvaged through technological means, Bennett's vision of development and evolution suggested a different constellation of the temporalities involved. Frankel reserved for the domain of wilderness his vision for the continued flow of evolution as a process that needed protection so that societies’ future adaptability could be guaranteed. But Bennett extended this vision to the agricultural arena, and saw it as communicating with evolutionary time in the wild. Where Frankel made a clear difference between the protection of the spontaneous flow of wild evolutionary time in nature reserves and the itemization and freezing of domestic evolutionary time, Bennett argued for the spontaneous in situ flow of evolutionary time in both domains, and the beneficial mixing between them. And where Frankel centered the present both as a locus for the potential decisive recognition of evolutionary responsibility in developed societies, and as a moment in domestic evolutionary time to be frozen for future use, Bennett underlined that it was the continued temporal flow that should be protected, not just the variety. She thereby decentered the present, and stressed the continued flow of evolutionary time as that which was worthy of protection.

Bennett's rather small comment against the freezing of evolutionary time in the record of the 1967 FAO/IBP Technical Conference on plant genetic resources in effect reveals a profound challenge to what would become the dominant idea of how evolutionary time should be governed. Protecting the genetic diversity that underpinned the global food system was for her a matter of cultivating the evolutionary flow of diversity in everyday low-tech and distributed practices rather than through a high-tech and resource-intensive system where information and thus power were centralized. Bennett thereby suggested a distributed responsibility for continued anthropogenic agricultural evolution and thus the spontaneous current of domestic evolutionary time to the farmers themselves, by letting them keep their traditional crop varieties (Bennett and Borschmann, 1994: tape 3). In contrast to Frankel, she was deeply suspicious of what powers would control an international system of gene banks. He, on the other hand, was optimistic about the possibility to govern such a system as an international commons: “once they are assembled, safely stored and adequately documented, genetic resources become available to the scientific community and through it to society, for the benefit of this and future generations, for as long as crops are grown” (Frankel, 1974: 58). ⁵ In this vision, Bennett instead saw the emergence of an international system of governance of genetic diversity where state-backed coordinated corporate interests were in charge, resulting in continued genetic erosion. In this way, Bennett took a stance against the technologically enabled privatization of evolutionary time.

Erna Bennett's dissent went beyond the governance of evolutionary time however, it included the whole temporality of development, with its notion of a geopolitically distributed past, present, and future. From her perspective, the fundamental characteristic of history was not progress but rather a continuous struggle between interests, and what played out in the name of development was no exception. Throughout her career Bennett remained critical of the development model that caused genetic erosion, despite the many efforts undertaken to frame the Green Revolution as a victory over hunger in poor countries. Her position was that the new crop varieties, since they required large amounts of pesticides and fertilizers that were in turn controlled by organized corporate interest, were not to the benefit of farmers in the developing world (Bennett and Borschmann, 1994). Effectively, in the current international agricultural system the erosion of crop variety was already a fact for farmers in many parts of the world: “the erosion of our biological resources may gravely affect future generations, but, as the conference pointed out, our own generation is no less threatened, because most of the remaining genetic resources are no longer available to plant breeders, agronomists, foresters and horticulturalists” (Frankel et al., 1970: 20). In this way she portrayed the present not as a geography of different stages of development, implied in Frankel's discussions and common at the time, where developed regions used advanced crops and underdeveloped ones still used primitive crops. Bennett instead identified a geographically uneven arrival of genetic erosion and precarity of the conditions for subsistence in society caused by corporate-controlled modernity. This diagnosis is reminiscent of current scholarly discussions of a geographically distributed time line of environmental damage and climate change (Alt, 2022; Nixon, 2011: chapter 6). In accordance with this, her view of the future diverged significantly from the technooptimism of many others in UN circles, as expressed for example at the opening speech at the 1967 conference where an FAO official described the collection of genetic variety as intended to support “the breeding of productive varieties, adapted to a wider range of environments than ever before” which would allow “the developing countries to achieve high productivity from intensive agricultural and forestry systems” (Fischnich, 1968: 8). In contrast, a calamitous future seemed a real possibility in Bennett's view. For her, technoscientific advancements didn’t necessarily bring societal progress: “in the midst of his technological achievements it would be ironical indeed if man were to create disaster by his failure to master his oldest activity—the production of food for his species.” In her view, the resolution of this issue, and thus the future course for mankind, hinged not on technological progress per se, but on the success of human organization and cooperation, such as the one she and Frankel tried to set up within the FAO and IBP structures (Bennett, 1968: 3).

The contested idea of development within the formation of the genetic diversity issue also held conflicting ideas of the past. Frankel and Bennett shared an understanding of the evolutionary past as a generator of diversity, and thus of wealth. But their opinions differed on the issue of where this specific kind of wealth of nations came from, and who produced and maintained it. As a result, their views also diverged on the political meaning of anthropogenic diversity as holder of domestic evolutionary time. Frankel saw primitive crop varieties as a result of farming practices rather than as active acts of creation, since farming in the Global South had not been done in a systematic and conscious manner. Furthermore, land races, local varieties of crops, weren’t of any particular value in themselves, but only as genetic material for ex situ plant breeding. It took advanced scientific breeding methods only available in the developed world to put the genetic estate to value, and thereby helping Third World countries to modernize (Bonneuil, 2019: 12; Frankel, 1991; Frankel and Soulé, 1981: 182; Pistourius, 1997: 74–75). For Bennett in contrast, farmers had for generations accelerated and directed evolution though careful selection of crops, and should therefore be considered the producers of the genetic estate. Nonindustrial farmers were the central historical actors in this process, “the anonymous generations whose labour through the centuries created genetic variation in the first place” (Bennett, 2002). This view, shared by a growing number of activists engaged in the issue, was that genetic diversity was provided from the Global South to the Global North as opposed to primary resources that First World high-tech industries graciously refined so that Third World farmers could use them and modernize; “should anything happen to severely reduce the genetic diversity of the Third World, or make it impossible for the First World to obtain vital germ plasm, the potential for a world-wide food crisis would be very real” (Mooney, 1979: 9). This disagreement over conservation of genetic diversity in this way also concerned the understanding of the anthropogenic evolutionary past as cultivated and developed by nonindustrial farmers, or as a sleeping value actualized by modern technology.

Conflicting temporal politics of evolution

The issue of genetic diversity loss emerged in a formative period for the languages and issues that still make up environmental discussions and politics today. The half decade between 1968 and 1972 saw the publication of environmentalist classics like the Limits to Growth Report, Garrett Hardin's “Tragedy of the Commons,” Paul and Anne Ehrlich's The Population Bomb, as well as the execution of the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and the subsequent foundation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Despite remaining mostly out of sight in the broader public environmentalist vocabulary today, the plant genetic resources issue figures as a central influence in other seminal concepts, such as biodiversity, and key policy documents, such as the Brundtland report. Furthermore, it brought questions that are still ongoing in academic as well as political debates, such as the character and historical significance of the Green Revolution, the meaning of conservation in the Anthropocene, the possibility to introduce more sustainable agricultural practices, the character of a post-growth society, and so on. Furthermore, the use of evolutionary time as a guideline for conservation is also a current scholarly discussion in evolutionary biology (Khoury et al., 2022). I argue that in addition to the above, the plant genetic resources discussion is relevant today as it provides an articulation of the ecological problem as a contested issue of planetary temporalities. As such, it can be understood as a consequential episode in the history of planetary political thought.

The conflicts over evolutionary time and development time within the plant genetic resources discussion can be placed within a larger context of a struggle in the 1970s between experts and nations within international organizations, especially UNEP, over how to reconcile conservation and development (Macekura, 2015: 221; Schleper, 2019; Schouwenburg, 2017). By paying attention to the temporal aspects of the genetic diversity issue, we discern a different understanding of this problem articulated from another corner of the UN system, whereby the future of development depended on the deep past and future of diverse nature, both wild and domestic. Frankel and Bennett's warnings about genetic erosion thus let the future of evolution destabilize the temporality of development.

Frankel and Bennett, the two main characters in the early articulation and institutionalization of the issue, shared an idea of evolutionary time as a temporal flow that needed protection in the form of nature reserves, spaces where evolutionary time could proceed spontaneously and bring the genetic estate from the deep past into the deep future while adapting it and generating unforeseeable newness. However, Frankel and Bennett's early discussions about evolutionary time and its relation to development time also show that at the moment of formulation of the issue there was dissent on a fundamental level. Where Frankel expected environmental insight and temporal responsibility as a late stage in a predetermined development, Erna Bennett instead viewed the threat to genetic diversity and evolutionary time as coming from the type of modernization promoted by state-backed corporate interest that had to be actively fought back by way of international cooperation. In line with this, she was also skeptical of the large-scale seed-banking venture as the solution to the problem of genetic erosion, and instead envisioned a distributed management of domestic evolutionary time through the preservation of local varieties in crops and agricultural practices as well as their natural surroundings. Where Frankel envisioned evolutionary time to be governed according to two different logics, centralized international governance of domestic evolutionary time and nationally governed in situ protection of wild evolutionary time, Bennett rather recommended decentralized governance of both kinds of evolutionary time. Their diverging ideas of governance resonated with their conflicting understandings of the present from an historical perspective. Frankel relied on an expectation of emerging environmental insight and acceptance for conservation in advanced societies. He outlined a historical temporality where a sense of responsibility for planetary time could emerge at a stage of development where the destruction of natural diversity and thus the evolutionary future was imminent. At the cusp of evolutionary eclipse was a moment of contingency where liberal institutions and sensibilities could achieve control over the material development that had given rise to them, but simultaneously undermined its own future. Environmental consciousness, and the conscious governance of planetary time, was in this way constructed as the child of imminent crisis. This stands in contrast to Bennett's understanding of Global South peasantry as creators of diversity and multiplication of evolutionary time, and thus harboring a different temporality of development that could coexist with the temporality of evolution.

Frankel and Bennett's respective renderings of the issue of genetic diversity involve ideas of the social organization needed to safeguard evolutionary time, including politics of labor, intellectual property, and the design of international institutions, but also more profound issues of the political such as who creates wealth and value in society, and what set of humans and institutions might harbor the possibility for a resolution of the contradiction between the future of development and the future of evolution. In this way, the formation of the genetic diversity issue in the late 1960s and 1970s exemplifies explicitly political articulations of planetary temporalities.

The planetary is political

The way in which Bennett and Frankel's respective views on the genetic erosion problem entailed profoundly conflicting politics not only expands our understanding of environmental intellectual history and its temporal aspects, but it also provides a challenge and a contribution to the ongoing discussions within the so-called planetary turn (Chakrabarty, 2021; see also Blake and Gilman, 2024; Bonneuil, 2020; Clark and Szerszynski, 2020; Heise, 2008; Marsili, 2020; Spivak, 2003). In this discussion, the planetary is defined in contrast to the global, and denotes earthly forces and processes such as the climate system, and the large-scale ocean circulation. The global is instead a mode of connection that emerges out of human institutions and technology, such as economic and political globalization (Chakrabarty, 2021: 70, 85–86). Furthermore, Chakrabarty identifies two environmental concepts as characteristic of the global and the planetary respectively: sustainability and habitability. Although sustainability poses the core environmental question how nature's productivity can be maintained over time, habitability instead starts from the planetary question “what makes a planet friendly to the continuous existence of complex life” (Chakrabarty, 2021: 81–83). Importantly, Chakrabarty identifies as the key difference between habitability and sustainability the temporalities they entail, where planetary temporalities are on a different order of magnitude than those of the global.

The literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was one of the first to discuss the concept of the planetary as relevant for humanists. She stressed the planet's inherent radical alterity which turned the planetary into a paradox as any attempt to conceptualize it would deny the planet's otherness, and thereby miss its essence (Spivak, 2003: 72–73). Chakrabarty's rendering of the planetary and its temporalities seems to have inherited the notion of it as inherently other to human affairs, which render attempts to conceptualize it a quality of self-contradiction as they necessarily draw the planetary into the human sphere and temporal realm, and thereby negate (displace, in Chakrabarty's terms) its alterity. Chakrabarty devotes extensive discussion to the impossibility to truly escape the human-focused time frames and see things from a planetary perspective (Chakrabarty, 2021: 85–92, 173–174). Yet it seems to be of much greater weight that important insights can be gained from bringing the planetary into the political realm (an endeavor Chakrabarty also seems to support; Chakrabarty, 2021: 179). Whether or not it is possible to truly comprehend the planetary on its own terms, the consequential point is that planetary habitability and its temporalities can indeed be intelligibly articulated in so far as they matter to human affairs. Understanding and articulating planetary time scales from within a political perspective seems a useful exercise if the goal is to better understand and address our predicament of accelerating environmental crises. And the intellectual history of planetary time scales, including Bennett and Frankel's contributions, can inform that exercise. As theorists of evolution in society, they suggest ways to think about planetary forces that are conceivable enough to be conceptualized, negotiated, deliberated, fought over, and even institutionalized as political temporalities.

Historical studies of the planetary have hitherto concentrated on disciplines like geology and earth system science as makers of planetary frameworks (Blake and Gilman, 2024: 75–91; Isberg, 2023), but as the case discussed in this article makes evident, planetary aspects were also treated in disciplines and institutions dealing with the biosphere. An important source of planetary thought can be found in the discussions and practices around the notion of biodiversity, of which the issue of plant genetic resources in the 1960s is an early instance. ⁶ Evolution provides an example of a temporality that both extends into the unfathomably deep past and is directly enmeshed in human affairs. Notably, Frankel and Bennett elaborated how the planetary evolutionary deep past and future were entangled in (for many and for long) everyday laborious practices of agriculture. One of the consequences of this entanglement was that extreme temporal power sat concentrated in the technoscientific and agro-industrial present.

Bennett and Frankel presented genetic erosion as a crisis of human habitability in the sense that they pointed to the endangerment of the planetary forces that underpin human subsistence through agriculture. They described the complex tensions between on the one hand planetary temporalities of biological evolution, and on the other societal temporalities of modernization and technoscientific progress, and the development of social mores and norms in relation to nature. Development in its conventional form threatened the natural world (in the wild as well as in agriculture) where the wealth created by the unfathomably long evolutionary past and the potential for the unforeseeable evolutionary future were stored. In this way, they articulated a self-destructive characteristic of the temporality of development where modernity assembled its own inner ecological contradiction as it progressed. Furthermore, Frankel and Bennett exemplify that there are indeed different versions of planetary temporalities that imagine the entanglements between the social and the planetary differently, and thus end up promoting distinctive politics for amending diversity loss and saving evolution. For Frankel, the solution lay within the temporality of development. Modern technology could be used to replace the storage of evolutionary time in the “primitive” agriculture, and progressive norms could emerge that would achieve protection of wild evolutionary time in the natural world. For Bennett in contrast, development was not the only possible historical trajectory, but a particular historical process driven by economic and political interest. Her vision of how evolutionary time should be protected was to let it be decentralized in varied agricultural practices shielded from corporate interest that would otherwise quickly drive diversity down and eclipse the evolutionary temporal horizon. For her, capitalism was the great monoculturalizing force, but other developmental temporalities were possible. In planetary terms, what Bennett promoted was a kind of collective ownership of the temporal means of habitability production.

Frankel and Bennett elaborated different solutions to the threat of disrupted evolution, and in doing so they suggested deeply political visions of how the environmental underpinnings of society could be governed. Taken together, their visions suggest that if we wish to learn to think politically about the planetary, there is a rich intellectual history to draw on.