How distributed research networks and Indigenous knowledge could democratize forest biotechnology.
By Carrie Cantrell
Dr. Steven Strauss has spent forty years watching biotechnology evolve from laboratory curiosity to corporate commodity. His recent interview with Oregon State's In the Woods and BioTech Talks podcasts reveals a scientist grappling with a fundamental question: who controls the tools that could help forests survive climate change (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025)?
Listening to his reflections, I find myself wondering whether we're approaching this all wrong.
When Innovation Becomes Impossible
Strauss describes a system where developing something as straightforward as an emerald ash borer-resistant ash tree becomes nearly impossible due to regulatory and financial barriers. "There is not the money to overcome the regulatory hurdles in a timely manner. There's not the money to invest in the research in a timely manner," he explained to hosts Scott Leavengood and Teagan McElligott (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025).
The pattern seems intentional. Current regulations create what some economists call "innovation scarcity"—artificially limiting who can develop and deploy beneficial technologies. While conventional plant breeding faces no regulatory oversight ("you just plant it in the world and you don't got to file any reports or get permission or get sued by Greenpeace or anything like that"), genetic engineering requires years of testing and millions in compliance costs (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025).
The result? Strauss knows of only one forestry company globally making serious investments in tree biotechnology, because companies "don't see that these investments will pay off in a time frame that's relevant" (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025).
This raises uncomfortable questions about who benefits from such barriers. Large corporations can absorb regulatory costs while smaller innovators, universities, and communities find themselves effectively excluded from developing localized solutions.
What Nature Teaches About Networks
What if biotechnology followed different principles?
Strauss's research focuses on Agrobacterium, which he calls "a natural genetic engineer" that has been transferring genes between species for millions of years (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025). Studying this bacterium reveals something profound: nature operates through distributed networks, not centralized control.
This observation has me questioning our assumptions about how innovation should work.
Models That Already Exist
Looking beyond corporate biotechnology, I've discovered emerging examples that suggest alternatives:
Indigenous communities and agricultural researchers are developing alternative models of seed preservation and development that prioritize local knowledge and genetic diversity using modern tracing and analytic technology. These initiatives create living archives that document and protect genetic heritage, enabling communities to maintain control over their agricultural resources and categorical memory systems for future generations.
Open-source biotechnology initiatives, such as the Open-Source Seed Initiative and OpenMTA, are creating legal frameworks that allow communities to develop and share genetic resources without corporate restrictions. Participatory breeding programs, like these in Nepal, directly involve farmers in crop development, merging local ecological insights with scientific methodologies.
What strikes me about these efforts is that they represent more than agricultural innovation. They seem to be challenging fundamental assumptions about who gets to innovate and how. Rather than accepting corporate seed monopolies as inevitable, these movements emphasize community empowerment, environmental resilience, and democratic approaches to food systems. By protecting plant diversity, they safeguard cultural knowledge and create more adaptable agricultural practices for an increasingly unpredictable global environment.
The approach suggests that meaningful agricultural innovation might emerge not from corporate laboratories, but from the collaborative knowledge of local communities deeply connected to their ecological landscapes.
Ecosystem-Scale Thinking
Strauss's interview revealed how biotechnology could address climate-driven challenges like changing pest populations and heat stress in forests (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025). But I notice that current applications focus primarily on commercial timber production rather than ecosystem-scale adaptation.
This seems like a missed opportunity. What if we thought bigger?
Ecological scaffolding represents a different approach: using biotechnology to help entire ecosystems transition through climate change. This might involve engineering nurse species or trees that help establish native plant communities in degraded areas. Biotechnology could potentially enhance mycorrhizal relationships within ecosystems, improving forest resilience through building symbiotic networks that extend beyond plant and fungi populations into human health and well-being as our environment restores. The technology might also accelerate succession between generations of trees, creating specialized transitional species to aid in speedier ecosystem restoration.
Indigenous fire management practices in California demonstrate this ecosystem-thinking approach, using controlled burns to maintain forest health across landscapes rather than maximizing individual tree growth, an example of knowledge systems and practices that Western science find counter-intuitive yet is scientifically and historically proven successful for both humans and the ecosystem where it is practiced.
Beyond Environmental Opposition
The interview revealed how environmental opposition has evolved. Strauss described the "huge swing of the pendulum" from early optimism through backlash to current regulatory gridlock (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025).
The Earth Liberation Front's 2001 attacks on biotechnology facilities, including threats that led Strauss to scale back research, represented an earlier phase of technology opposition (Hanfords, 2001). Today's environmental movements increasingly focus on power structures rather than technologies themselves.
The Climate Tech Forward report shows this evolution: environmental organization supporters often favor technology-led climate solutions more than their organizations' official positions suggest, indicating a disconnect between activist leadership and grassroots sentiment (Glynn & Whitehead, 2025).
This gives me hope that we might find common ground.
The Speed Problem
Strauss emphasized the temporal challenge: "We need biological innovation, and we need social innovation. We need to do things smarter and faster, and more science based" (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025).
Current institutional frameworks operate too slowly for climate adaptation needs. I'm increasingly convinced that distributed research networks could accelerate innovation by fostering parallel development across multiple communities. These networks would enable localized solution design that respects specific ecological contexts while emphasizing collaborative innovation through open-source knowledge sharing.
College campuses and academic spaces offer intriguing opportunities for development due to their convergence of innovation and collaboration, research, and practical need for knowledge and resource-sharing across departments and teams. ARPANET, the precursor to today's internet, was created for exactly this reason—so that researchers at Stanford University and UCLA, and eventually the world, could successfully collaborate on simultaneous research projects for the combined benefit of humanity and collective communication capabilities. Because those scientists focused on strengthening mutualisms and sharing connections, and their willingness to participate in social reciprocity, we now have the internet, the world wide web, and our own patterns of utilizing information, streaming data, and creating mutual aid across divides.
With this capability, the limit seems to be our imagination.
Reimagining Ownership
I'm increasingly convinced that we might need to reimagine biotechnology as a commons rather than commodity. This would challenge current stakeholders in copyright-ownership models operating within the US Patent system.
Consider this: biotechnology represents a human legacy on this planet. Crop selection, seed dispersal and storage, irrigation, and other foundational blocks of human civilization are ancient forms of biotech. The Agrobacterium strain is probably more ancient than us all. How can entities formed this century claim ownership over methods of plant transformation that are essentially coded into nature's DNA?
Community ownership of research methods, priorities, and outcomes seems more logical, and more likely to promote successful outcomes because people support projects and innovation more when their sense of identity and belonging are attached. Indigenous leadership in projects affecting traditional territories appears necessary because Western science has often ignored Indigenous sources of knowledge, yet through traditional ways of gathering, storing, and transferring data, Indigenous communities over centuries have developed the precise specialized understanding of territories and their shared ecosystems that we seek to know. Regionally specific knowledge allows cultures to engage intricately with the environment, acknowledging and celebrating their participation and obligations to sustain natural systems.
Creating tools to be open-source and accessible to local researchers, combined with citizen-stakeholder participatory governance replacing corporate-regulatory capture, might be key to shifting society toward embracing our own abilities and legacy when it comes to biotechnology—and getting out of our own way to use this powerful knowledge to help address planetary challenges.
As Strauss noted about science communication, "scientists have to be there, but they really need a team" (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025). The same principle might apply to biotechnology development: scientific expertise could combine with community knowledge, regional Indigenous practices, and democratic governance.
What This Means for All of Us
Whether you're a student, teacher, or community member concerned about environmental issues, the biotechnology debate affects your future. Climate change will reshape the forests, farms, and ecosystems you depend on. The question becomes whether the tools to adapt will be controlled by corporations seeking profit or communities seeking resilience.
Strauss's advice to young scientists—"don't hesitate to contact the scientists or the lab and say, hey, how do I get involved"—applies beyond academia (Leavengood & McElligott, 2025). Communities might demand seats at the table where biotechnology priorities are set.
The choice may not be between technology and nature—it might be between corporate control and community empowerment. Nature itself, through Agrobacterium and countless other examples, shows us that the most resilient systems are distributed, diverse, and democratic.
The question becomes whether we choose to follow its lead.
This article is part of the NSF-funded BioTech Insights project at Oregon State University. For more educational content about Oregon's forests and sustainable forestry practices, visit the In The Woods podcast, which provides valuable resources for small forest landowners interested in learning about regulations and opportunities to engage with Oregon's forest ecosystems. What's in your woods?
To get in touch with Dr. Steven Strauss regarding his reasearch or BioTech insights regarding this project, please comment below or reach out to:
References
Glynn, S., & Whitehead, C. (2025). Climate tech forward: Popular support for the science and technologies that can help stop climate change. Zero Ideas. https://doi.org/10.70272/xsoh
Hanfords, M. (2001, December 21). Poplars: Join the growing resistance against genetic engineering. Earth First! Journal, 22(2). http://www.environmentandsociety.org/node/7065
Leavengood, S., & McElligott, T. (Hosts). (2025, May). Interview with Dr. Steve Strauss [Audio podcast episode]. In In The Woods and BioTech Talks. Oregon State University.
Carrie Cantrell is a student in Digital Communication Arts at Oregon State University, working on the NSF-funded BioTech Insights project focused on democratizing science communication around plant biotechnology.