London’s Kew Gardens digitizes 7M specimens: Colonial extraction meets AI’s biodiversity promise—what’s lost and who benefits?
Original framing: “‘Every box has been opened’: London botanic gardens digitizes 7 million specimens” — Nature
Scientists from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are underrepresented in the narrative, despite their regions holding most of the world’s biodiversity. Local communities whose lands produced the specimens are rarely consulted on digitization policies. The Global South’s intellectual property concerns are sidelined in favor of Western-led ‘solutions’.
Kew Gardens’ digitization of 7 million specimens is a microcosm of the colonial-scientific-industrial complex, where the extraction of biological and cultural knowledge is repackaged as a benevolent, AI-driven solution.
The narrative’s blind spots—its erasure of indigenous epistemologies, its silence on historical violence, and its uncritical faith in AI—reveal how biodiversity conservation remains tethered to the same power structures that created the collections. Yet the tools to disrupt this cycle exist: community data sovereignty, decolonial cataloging, and ethical AI could transform digitization from a new form of extraction into a mechanism for reparative justice. The trickster’s insight is that the same systems that stole biodiversity can be co-opted to restore it—but only if the beneficiaries of empire cede control. The path forward demands not just technological innovation, but a reckoning with who gets to define ‘biodiversity’ and for whose benefit.