When we think of evil, we tend to think of cackling, swivel-eyed, hand-rubbing cartoon villains. But the worst evils are invariably perpetrated by sober, bland, minions and middle-management types. This is what Hannah Arendt called ‘the banality of evil’.
The middle-management guys are the ones who type up the orders but refuse to ever confront the reality of what those orders mean. Heinrich Himmler was so distressed by his first visit to a death camp that he never went near one again – he just kept issuing the death quotas from the safety of his office. That sort of airy detachment from reality lets the functionaries and middle-management people perpetrate the most grotesque enormities secure in the knowledge that they were just doing their job.
It’s not, needless to say, anywhere near the level of trying to exterminate an entire people, but the by-the-numbers destruction of irreplaceable scientific heritage is exactly the sort of evil your average government bureaucrat is entirely capable of without a second thought.
Last year, a precious collection of some of the oldest botanical specimens collected in Australia was destroyed by anonymous biosecurity officials. That’s right, a cache of 200-year-old Australian plants was summarily obliterated because it might have posed a threat to Australian plants.
Marc Jeanson […] director of the world's largest and oldest herbarium, the Jardin des Plantes at France’s Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle […] received a message from the director of the Queensland Herbarium in Australia that was abrupt to the point of being blunt. It told him that a package of 105 botanical specimens of Australian plants owned by the Jardin des Plantes – and gathered by an intrepid French botanist more than 200 years earlier – had been destroyed by Australian biosecurity officials.
The value of this collection is hard to overstate. The sheer enormity of what happened beggars belief. And those responsible are hiding behind a Great Wall of paperwork.
The specimens were both priceless and irreplaceable. How could anyone, let alone government officials, incinerate such artefacts? It was simply beyond Jeanson’s comprehension. It remains so, even after post-mortems and investigations conducted in both countries, by scientists and bureaucrats, after diplomats stepped in and compensation negotiations were undertaken.
All we know is that an Australian botanist – who has been instructed not to talk to the media – used a standard collaboration website used by museums to manage loans from their collections to researchers. Receiving a standard request from a qualified scientist from an accredited institution, the Jardin des Plantes promptly processed it.
They left the museum in a sturdy plain brown package, marked as museum specimens, the day after Christmas.
So far, says Jeanson, nothing was out of the ordinary. The Jardin des Plantes’ mission is not only to preserve its collection but to share it with the world, and to that end it lends about 10,000 specimens a year without incident.
He didn’t reckon with Australian bureaucrats.
Among the 105 specimens destroyed in Brisbane were six known as “type specimens”. These were the first examples of a new species ever collected and recorded, and against which all other new specimens must be compared if we are to be certain that a new species has or has not been discovered. It appears this is what Bean had hoped to do in Queensland […]
It gets worse. The museum believes that two or three of the specimens might have been species that were unidentified and new to science.
All lost. Thanks to bureaucratic intransigence.
They’d arrived promptly in January – and then the bureaucrats struck. The Quarantine Declaration wasn’t on official-enough letterhead. So, they sent the correct and proper paperwork. And got this reply:
It is with very deep regret and sadness that I write to inform you that your loan material of request number 71250 (Lagenophora) was inadvertently destroyed by the Australian Department of Agriculture and Water Resources. I have attached a letter with the relevant details.
If this was a one-off blunder, it might be excused, if deplored. But, shockingly, it’s very much not.
Jeanson himself contacted major institutions in London, New York and Geneva to ask if they’d had similar problems with Australia. It was soon revealed that at around the same time, a package of rare New Zealand lichens collected in the 1930s and sent from a herbarium in New Zealand was destroyed after its arrival in Canberra.
The department’s excuse:
The department released a dry and defensive statement that observed in part that the destruction served to “highlight the importance of the shared responsibility of Australia’s biosecurity system, and the need for adherence to import conditions”. In other words, it was not their fault […] the department’s statement appears to justify the destruction on the grounds that the customs declaration that eventually found its way to the box declared that the goods inside were worth just $2.
As Jeanson says:
When I heard about it I thought, “Gosh they destroyed our collection, but they destroyed their history.” This is the discovery of your country and you destroy it? It is absolutely crazy.
And sadly routine. Just look how many priceless archaeological specimens are being dumped in secret in the dirt, just to pander to stone-age superstitions.
Still, I’m sure they filled out the paperwork first.
