By Liam Shaw, University of Oxford and Nicola C. Sugden, University of Manchester*

The Democratic Republic of Congo is battling an Ebola outbreak. As is the case with any disease caused by pathogenic viruses – like Zika or influenza – Ebola spreads dangerously and unpredictably. This makes tracking the movement of viruses around the world a major challenge.

Researchers have increasingly turned to DNA sequencing to help identify and track these sorts of diseases. They use portable DNA sequencers, which are the size of a USB and can be easily carried for use in the field. One such sequencer, the MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies was used during the 2016 Zika virus epidemic in Brazil. It’s also being used to track the DRC’s Ebola outbreak.

Some researchers hope it will soon be possible to combine sequencing data collected in this way with other information to tell us even more about disease outbreaks. Integrating different kinds of data into a global infectious disease surveillance system that continuously scans for new epidemics might make it possible to detect outbreaks and sequence viruses as they emerge, allowing public health responses to be suggested in real time.

There’s no doubt these efforts are driven by good intentions. But, as we argue in our new research, this technology – which supporters hope will become increasingly available to members of the public – could have serious privacy implications.

Metagenomic data – the kind that could be collected on a sequencer such as MinION or others such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s new platform IDSeq – contains an enormous amount of information about who we are and how we live. In combination with other widely available information someone could potentially use that data to work out where you live, or with whom you have a close relationship.

The reality is that, as improvements in data analysis methods allow us to extract new insights from old data (or de-anonymise anonymised data), it’s impossible to be absolutely sure what the potential uses of data will be.

Signing away your data

Imagine having an app on your smart phone that allows you to analyse samples from the world around you. You could use it to sequence your pet cat’s DNA, or to figure out whether the mould growing in your shower is dangerous.

Sound far-fetched? It’s not. The technology required is already here. For example, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative recently announced IDSeq, a new platform and database for infectious disease surveillance where registered users can upload their metagenomic sequencing data to have it analysed for free.

There’s just one catch, as there would be with any sequencing app: you have to sign over permissions to the data. Most people will do this unthinkingly. Author Jamie Susskind has called this pervasive and common arrangement “the data deal”: people accept whatever a company asks so they can use an app or product, and worry about the implications later.

This is the case with IDSeq. Initially enthusiastic researchers became concerned when they realised the platform’s terms and conditions contained a clause granting the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative “perpetual” permission to “use”, reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works” from the data.

The current justification given for this clause is that it’s intended to permit users’ research data to be used for improving IDSeq. However, in principle the data could later be shared with “any third party that purchases” part of the assets or organisation.

A world of information

So why does it matter if you share metagenomic data from your everyday life? Quite simply, because the data from that cat hair or mould sample might contain more information than you realise – and far more than you intended to sign away.

It could contain not only the DNA you wanted to sequence, but also DNA from your fingers when you loaded the sample, from the bacteria on your skin from the last person you hugged, or from the gardens your cat visited last night. In short, that data contains vital information about your microbiome – the vast collection of microorganisms that live on and in our bodies. And your microbiome can tell someone an awful lot about you.

As we learn more about our microbiomes, we are beginning to understand how much they are personalised. Even if we could filter out the human DNA sequences from datasets, our microbiomes could theoretically still be used to identify us.

The microbiome contains information not only about our lifestyles, like our diet and drug intake, but also our social relationships, such as who we live with. That’s a lot of information to work with, in a world where we already share a great deal of data about ourselves via platforms like Facebook and Instagram, or personal fitness trackers. This data could feasibly be merged with metagenomic data, making it even more powerful.

There are ever more surprising examples of incidental data being used in dramatic and unexpected ways that are far removed from the original reasons for collecting it. Data from a murder victim’s Fitbit was used to convict her killer. And data from users of the fitness app Strava inadvertently revealed the location of secret US army bases.

There is every reason to believe that data from portable sequencers collected primarily for disease surveillance would contain information that could be used in similarly surprising, and concerning, ways. Metagenomic sequencing data is highly personalised. It contains implicit information about who we interact with and where we go, which makes it commercially valuable.

These concerns shouldn’t (and won’t) stop portable sequencers being used for infectious disease surveillance. Corporations and governments will promise great benefits from the use of this technology. For example, the IDSeq privacy notice justifies data collection by appealing to “legitimate interest in investigating and stopping the spread of infectious diseases and promoting global health”.

We need to continue scrutinising these organisations to make sure we understand exactly what’s being done with our data. The consequences of widespread portable sequencing, like emerging infectious diseases themselves, will be highly predictable.

*This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. Liam Shaw and Nicola Sugden’s full article is available open access in Geo: Geography and Environment via https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/geo2.66

By Peter Kraftl, University of Birmingham, UK 

Photo credit: Peter Kraftl

The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the UK’s National Trust had been criticised for halting access to one of its properties by a Forest School. The Trust – which is a large landowner and preserves historic sites – has been a regular and ardent promoter of ‘natural childhoods’. As they state, ‘our mission is to reconnect a generation of children with nature and the outdoors’. Nevertheless, the Trust took this decision following concerns that the Forest School’s outdoor education activities had been endangering ancient trees and wildlife.

Discussion around the Trust’s decision was replete with a range of widespread assumptions about the need to (re)connect children – and especially urban children – with natures. Indeed, the Forest School’s response was to claim that the decision countered the National Trust’s own campaign to get children outdoors. Yet missing from this debate was a discussion about the relative merits of the idea that (re)connecting children with natures will be an unequivocally and universally good thing. Indeed, wider, and often powerful calls for children to play and learn outside tend to make assumptions about what ‘nature’ is (very often, apparently ‘pristine’ woodland) and about how children will respond to and experience those environments (which can vary significantly depending on a number of social and cultural factors).

In our recent paper for Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, we offer a different perspective on the idea that children should be (re)connected with natures. We also question related arguments that they should be better connected to ‘natural’ resources, like food, water, and energy. Our approach is different for two reasons. Firstly, we foreground critiques of the idea of (re)connection, but equally acknowledge that some forms of outdoor play and learning can be beneficial. Secondly, our paper is based on research outside the Minority Global North (and especially Anglophone countries), where ideas of (re)connection are particularly strong.

Our research focused on young people’s experiences of and learning about the food-water-energy nexus in São Paulo State, Brazil. It was therefore concerned with the many ways in which young people (aged 10-24) sourced, produced, prepared, consumed and talked about food, water, and energy (and much more besides). Our paper draws on detailed qualitative research with a range of key professionals and with 48 young people. Key to our approach was the integration of recent forms of ‘nexus thinking’ into our methods – enabling us to trace connections and disconnections between different resources in people’s lives and across spatial scales.

Our work complements, challenges and extends calls to (re)connect children with nature in a range of ways. On the one hand, it highlights how food, water, and energy are not simply resources whose provenance one may either know or not know but are intimately entangled within everyday concerns. For instance, one boy was able to visualise the infrastructures and journeys of water at a scale ranging over hundreds of kilometres – but only because he had picked up these knowledges through everyday interactions with water pipes, pumps, and ditches in his local community. On the other hand, young people in our research connected discussions of ‘natural’ resources with a keen awareness of social injustices in Brazil, particularly during the ongoing political-financial crisis. They highlighted that not only were they ‘connected’ with the sources of food, water, and energy, but that in turn questions of ‘resources’ were intimately connected with inequalities in accessing those resources, and about which they felt very strongly.

Our paper does not suggest completely dismissing the idea of (re)connecting children with nature. Rather it asks geographers, childhood studies scholars and educators to acknowledge that children and young people are connected with ‘natures’ and with ‘natural resources’ – albeit in ways that might go beyond certain assumptions in some Anglophone contexts. Therefore, we pose the question: what might Forest Schools and other nature-based, environmental or outdoor forms of education learn from contexts like Brazil about the multiple ways that children already are, and could, be (re)connected with nature(s)?

About the author: Peter Kraftl is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Birmingham, UK, and led a team of UK and Brazilian academics researching young Brazilians’ experiences of, and learning about, the food-water-energy nexus in Brazil. Further information about the project, and the rest of the research team, is available at the project’s website: http://www.foodwaterenergynexus.com/

Barkham, P. 2018. National Trust criticised for evicting a forest school from its woods. The Guardian. Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/13/national-trust-criticised-for-evicting-a-forest-school-from-its-woods

Glum, J. 2017. Origin of Food: Children say cheese comes from plants, pasta from animals. Newsweek. Retrieved from: https://www.newsweek.com/kids-food-nutrition-misconceptions-survey-624337

The National Trust https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/children-and-nature

By Frances Darlington-Pollock (University of Liverpool), Nik Lomax, and Paul Norman (University of Leeds)

Image credit: Jamie Sarner CC-BY 2.0

Many of us will move house multiple times. Some moves may be international, but many more will be within the boundaries of the country in which we currently live. The majority will be across short distances – within or between local neighbourhoods and towns. The reasons why we move house vary: we may (want to) move to a particular school catchment area or our housing requirements change. Some move seeking employment opportunities or for higher education. We may later move upon retirement, to release equity, downsize, or to provide or seek care. While it is highly likely that at some point in our lives we will be faced with the decision of when and where to move, the factors influencing that decision will vary. This variation in the circumstances surrounding our decision to move means that different groups of the population have different probabilities of moving, and the nature of that move (e.g. in terms of distance) varies.

In a socially, economically and ethnically diverse population, the possible factors or circumstances governing individual moves can vary greatly. The government’s racial disparity audit reveals the extent of this possible variation, recording stark differences across a range of factors including health, employment rates and access to social housing. Given these contrasting experiences, it is important to understand whether and how far different groups of the population are likely to move. This has implications for how we provide for the population. Resource-allocation, from schooling to healthcare provision, is complicated by the fact that the population is selectively mobile. This selectivity is recorded in the literature in terms of documenting the array of socio-economic and demographic factors associated with the likelihood of a move, and how these factors vary over the lifecourse.

However, less is known about whether factors influencing migration vary within an ethnically diverse population, some of whom were born overseas and immigrated to the UK, while others are second+ generation migrants born in the UK. This matters in the context of debates around community cohesion and integration. Are some groups more able to move, and perhaps less constrained than others? Are preferences for remaining in the same place or moving over short distances born out of attachment to an area or community, or the result of constrained circumstances? These sorts of questions are key to understanding the changing ethnic composition of our towns and communities, and become increasingly important given recent reports of the spatial variation to everyday perceptions of immigration and integration.

In England and Wales, the Census of population is an invaluable resource with which to examine patterns of ethnic internal migration. The richness of the data enables the study of the factors associated with the likelihood of moving house, how far people move, and whether these vary between ethnic groups by age, and within ethnic groups depending on where they were born. We can ask questions such as: Are some ethnic groups (e.g. White British) with particular characteristics (e.g. educational attainment, social class) more or less likely than another ethnic group to move shorter distances? Does this pattern vary by age, or between UK-born and foreign-born groups?

Key to our analytical strategy was differentiating between age groups, and by country of birth. This entailed sub-setting our sample from the 2011 Census into different age groups and by UK-born or foreign-born status. Sub-setting the data and running a series of models allows us to estimate the probability of a move over a particular distance for different groups. We can examine whether the relationship between moving house for an individual of a given ethnic group born in the UK varies to that of an individual of the same ethnic group either of a different age or born overseas. Within these models, we control for a broad array of factors known to influence the probability of moving.

Our results contrast with previous research. It has been suggested that minority ethnic groups are more mobile than the White British population, but that these differences are to some extent explained by different socio-economic profiles. In other words, higher rates of migration in a particular ethnic group are explained by a concentration of factors known to be associated with a higher likelihood of migrating (e.g. higher levels of educational attainment, or being single). Controlling for these factors in the model should then reduce differences between ethnic groups in the likelihood of moving house. This is not the case, and it is particularly apparent when sub-setting the population by age and by country of birth. There are also differences within and between ethnic groups in terms of the distance moved. This is important as we must ask why some groups are more or less likely to move across particular distances.

We also made use of a new question introduced in the 2011 Census asking foreign-born individuals when they arrived in the UK. For our foreign-born sample, we ran an additional set of models for each age group including a variable controlling for year of arrival. As the population was subset by age, we essentially ‘fixed’ age which helps to separate the effect of time spent in the UK from increasing age—each may differently influence the likelihood of moving house. Time spent in the UK explained more of the differences between ethnic groups in the probability of moving house than the socioeconomic and demographic factors we controlled for in our models.

There is a need to integrate discussions of international and internal migration given the complexity of the dynamics shaping differences in ethnic internal migration. More research into the nature of different migration events might reveal whether the remaining unexplained differences between ethnic groups reflect barriers to integration, a lack of rootedness in the local community, or a preference for mobility either as an individual or as a household.

About the authors: Frances Darlington-Pollock is a Lecturer in Population Geography at the University of Liverpool. Nik Lomax is a University Academic Fellow and Paul Norman is a Lecturer in Human Geography, both at the University of Leeds.

Darlington‐Pollock F, Lomax N, Norman P. Ethnic internal migration: The importance of age and migrant status. Geogr J. 2018;00:1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12286 (open access)

The Guardian. (2017). Audit lays bare racial disparities in UK schools, courts and workplaces. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/oct/09/audit-lays-bare-racial-disparities-in-uk-schools-courts-and-workplaces

The Independent. (2018). We’ve just completed the largest ever survey into British attitudes to immigration – and this is what we found. Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/uk-immigration-british-people-racism-xenophobia-multiculturalism-a8540951.html

By Ben Garlick, York St John University

Loch an Eilean Castle, where ospreys reportedly nested from at least 1808 until 1898. Photo by the Ben Garlick, July 2014.

The International Union for the Conservation of nature (IUCN) recently announced that nearly a third of all species surveyed are threatened with extinction. Such alarming extinction levels add weight to the thesis that we have entered a new epoch in our planet’s history – the age of humans, or the ‘Anthropocene’.

Mounting realisation and anxiety around the scale of biodiversity loss infuse conservation projects with palpable urgency. Ever more creative, experimental and open-ended strategies are proposed to reverse human damage (Lorimer and Driessen, 2014). Talk of eco-restoration, re-wilding, even ‘de-extinction’ offer sci-fi-tinged solutions.

For example, earlier this summer, sea eagles (Haliaetus albicilla) bred on Orkney for the first time in 95 years following reintroduction in 2013. Rendered extinct in Britain in 1918 following persecution, these birds have been the subject of several successful twentieth-century re-introduction schemes since the 1970s. A healthy population now nests on Scotland’s west coast.

Such an example is interesting because it raises questions about what extinction involves and objectives of conservation. What, in this case, are trying to save or restore? Are the eagles breeding on Orkney today equivalent to those of the past? Furthermore, if a species can return from extinction, then what did we actually lose when they disappeared? Are there some registers in which their loss can still be felt, and made to matter?

In my own research (Garlick, 2018), I explore such questions through the history of conserving another once-lost British raptor: the osprey (Pandion haliaetus). Like sea eagles, ospreys have returned to the UK – albeit under their own agency – despite having been wiped out at the hands of Victorian naturalist-collectors and gamekeepers by 1916. Attempts to nest in the latter 1950s were stewarded by the RSPB, most famously at Loch Garten, Speyside, where the public can still visit them today.

Though a success story of practical and dedicated conservation efforts, considering the birds’ existence prior to their eradication can complicate this triumphant narrative of return. The ospreys which exist in Britain today might be biologically near-identical to those of before, but they are not the same birds. Something remains lost.

Victorian naturalists’ describing the ospreys resident during the nineteenth century recall a tendency to nest on rocky crags and ruined human structures, such as the castle at Loch an Eilein, Speyside (Image). Some accounts even assert that these birds always nested on such structures, ignoring trees in the vicinity. Today, it is clear that ospreys the world over demonstrate a variable tolerance for different nest sites. Despite an increasing tendency to nest on human structures (like pylons), and tolerate human disturbance, British birds overwhelmingly nest in trees. Their former rock and ruin haunts sit empty. Why?

Male ospreys have a strong tendency to return to their birth-region upon maturity. Young ospreys often colonise sites that resemble the situation of their own fledging and prefer to inherit an existing nest rather than build from scratch (Dennis, 2008). All of this means that ospreys have the capacity to develop an affinity for particular kinds of places. Pair monogamy and faith to successful nests see structures maintained and used for generations. I argue that we might understand such nesting traditions as osprey ‘culture’: an inherited, communally shared, characteristic ‘way of life’ (Anderson et al, 2002). Nesting preferences, accruing over time, mark these ospreys as different to others: a distinct expression of osprey life, with a particular orientation towards the geography of nesting.

Ecological restoration, re-wilding, and de-extinction are increasingly championed as viable strategies for repairing, perhaps reversing, the damage done by humans. But such strategies also tend to identify and declare the survival of species at the genetic level. Some animals are sacrificed, killed or kept as captive breeders, to ensure the health of an abstract ‘population’ of creatures, with particular averaged characteristics and shared attributes.

Yet elsewhere, a concern with nonhuman ‘cultural life’ that challenges the notion of interchangeable biological beings does permeate conservation practice. There is a desire to conserve ‘authentic beings’, and ensure that captively bred animals obtain the necessary life experiences, behaviours, and learned ‘knowledge’ to survive a way of life in the wild (van Dooren, 2016). Conservation strategies can be designed to account for the cultural dimensions of animal life.

You can visit Loch an Eilein today (see the image at the beginning of this post) and see the empty castle for yourself. Does this emptiness matter? I think so. It suggests that the losses of extinction echo beyond the absence or presence of particular biological bodies. It suggests today’s birds are, even if only in a small way, qualitatively different.

We should not become accustomed to thinking that the ability to re-introduce, or re-create, past biological species means that all environmental damage can be undone. This slippery slope, as geographers have recognised (Lorimer 2015), leads to the evocation of fungible natures, justifying unbridled development on the condition that degradation is ‘made good’ elsewhere. Alternatively, realising that no return is clean, and that some things remain lost, might encourage us to reckon with what is truly at stake in the contemporary environmental crisis.

About the author: Ben Garlick is a lecturer in Human Geography with the School of Humanities, Religion, and Philosophy at York St John University. 

References

Anderson, K., Domosh, M., Pile, S., & Thrift, N. (Eds.) (2002). Handbook of cultural geography. London, UK: Sage.

Dennis, R. (2008). A life of ospreys. Cathness, UK: Whittles Publishing.

van Dooren, T. (2016). Authentic crows: Identity, captivity and emergent forms of life. Theory, Culture & Society, 33, 29–52.

Garlick, B. (2018) Cultural geographies of extinction: Animal culture among Scottish ospreys. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12268. 1-16.

Lorimer, J. (2015). Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after nature. London, UK: University of Minnesota Press.

Lorimer, J., & Driessen, C. (2014). Wild experiments at the Oostvaardersplassen: Rethinking environmentalism in the Anthropocene. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39, 169–181.