In the last quarter-century many scientific, environmental, and popular publications have used a metaphor comparing species extinction and the loss of biodiversity in the modern era to the destruction of the ancient Library of Alexandria in Egypt more than 1,500 years ago. The rhetorical figure is characteristic of the environmental humanities, for it invokes the value of cultural and literary treasures to reinforce the importance of biological diversity. This article traces the origins of the metaphor to related figures of The Book of Life and to the figure of genetic information as a textual code. The Alexandrian Library of Life caught hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about biodiversity and the destruction of tropical rainforests coincided with developments in gene sequencing, the Human Genome Project, and the growth of Internet communications and electronic library collections. Scientists and environmentalists at that time sensed both the promise of unprecedented access to bio-information and the threat of lost knowledge through species extinction. The popularity of the metaphor conceals several weaknesses, however. Living species, even using the methods of gene sequencing, cannot be archived or copied like texts, and the impulse to do so reflects imperialist efforts to appropriate and control knowledge, as several empires attempted to do at Alexandria during the library’s long history. The metaphor of a species as a book, represented in the library by one specimen or copy, obscures the fact that the Alexandrian library consisted of manuscripts, not print books. In essence, species may be more like manuscripts than books after all.

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亚历山大生命图书馆

在过去的25个世纪中，许多科学，环境和大众出版物都使用比喻来比较物种灭绝和现代生物多样性的丧失与1500年前埃及古代亚历山大图书馆的破坏。修辞格是环境人文学科的特征，因为它唤起了文化和文学宝藏的价值，从而增强了生物多样性的重要性。本文将隐喻的起源追溯到《生命之书》的相关人物以及作为文本代码的遗传信息人物。亚历山大生命图书馆于1980年代末和1990年代初建立起来，当时人们对生物多样性和热带雨林的破坏与基因测序的发展相吻合，人类基因组计划 以及互联网通讯和电子图书馆馆藏的增长。当时的科学家和环保主义者既感受到了前所未有的获取生物信息的希望，也感受到了物种灭绝带来的知识损失的威胁。但是，隐喻的流行掩盖了一些弱点。即使使用基因测序的方法，也无法像文本一样对活体物种进行存档或复制，而这样做的冲动反映了帝国主义对适当和控制知识的努力，就像几个帝国在图书馆悠久的历史中试图在亚历山大大帝做的那样。在图书馆中用一个标本或一个副本来代表一个物种的书籍的隐喻掩盖了亚历山大图书馆由手稿而不是印刷书籍组成的事实。从本质上讲，物种毕竟可能更像手稿而不是书。