Categories in the making at the European Commission. How to classify nature, demarcate diversity and permit circulation of that which grows in the forest

Series : Conservation

Résumé :
“To classify is human,” Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star wrote in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999), but as they rightly point out, not all classifications are built the same nor have the same effects. This presentation is an exploration of what happens when experts classify something very concrete in a very concrete setting: Forest Reproductive Material (FRM) at the European Commission. Seeds to sow, plant parts to propagate, clones and hybrids needed order. Experts from different Members States debated since the 1960s how to categorise FRMs, draw relations between genetic and phenotypic quality, and importantly, how to keep FRM circulating within the European Community. Taking official Commission documentation, and reports written by the Spanish representatives at the Working Group on on Seeds and Forest Reproductive Material, as well as oral history accounts, I describe how the complicated relationship between standarisation, genetic diversity and circulation has been discussed and built, and how categorical vagueness was polished. Legislative categories such as ‘tested’, ‘classified’, ‘source-identified’, but also ‘marketing’ and ‘forestry uses’ were categories up for grabs, with economic, scientific, and jurisdictional factors coming into the foreground to do classifactory work. After the classification is made, as Bowker and Star point out, those factors recede into the background, making classifications invisible. One could see this presentation as an exercise that follows the motivations of Sorting Things Out: I want to explore the “moral weight” of something so technical and seemingly “ethically neutral,” such as the classification of forest seeds – that which grows in the forest.