ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the idea that new taxonomic knowledge, in the form of DNA barcoding under the Barcoding of Life Initiative (BOLI) / the International Barcoding of Life Initiative, becomes an example of therapeutic and salvationary science for humans and nature both suffering the consequences of their disconnection. It provides the different ways in which BOLI holds closely together a range of mundane achievements and more profligate promises of transformative futures-to-come. The chapter talks about the ways in which BOLI operates within a space which connects mundane achievement with redemptive promise, in subtly interesting and multivalent ways. It explores how human and cosmic frailty is and always has been a vital resource for technoscientific research. The chapter argues that we cannot attend to BOLI as ambitious innovation without carefully teasing apart its entangled pragmatic aims from those more secular-theological promises of human and planetary redemption.
