Aging in digital

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn British Columbia, Canada, aging forestry scientists struggle to pass on long‐term projects to younger colleagues who may never arrive. Thanks to the government of British Columbia's radical downsizing of its forestry research institutions, many of these scientists have been forced to reconceptualize the meaning of “succession.” Central to this process are computer‐based simulations of forest change, which have become critical sites of relationality for scientists struggling to sustain key experiments and their attending intellectual legacies. Digital simulations have increasingly come to mediate the expectations and shared dependencies that constitute scientific authorship. As a result, contemporary processes of institutional reproduction can depend less on deliberate enactments of agency than on subtler processes of detachment. To have their epistemic authority recognized by funders, apprentices, and collaborators, aging scientists must increasingly foreground their vulnerabilities and prepare for the possibility of their own erasure. [expertise, aging, simulation, forestry, environmental science, British Columbia, Canada, North America]