The World Bank: Biotechnology and the “Next Green Revolution”
– From Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade and the Globalization of Hunger, Burlington, VT: Toward Freedom, 2004. Chapter 3 The World Bank, which celebrates its sixtieth anniversary in 2004, has underwritten several of the most environmentally devastating projects ever undertaken in the name of progress and economic “development.” Wherever people are displaced and communities are […]
Indigenous Chiapans Challenge Biopiracy and GMOs
Sidebar to “Control through Contamination” by S’ra Desantis For ISE Biotechnology Project and ACERCA June 2003 A recent delegation to the rainforest of southeastern Mexico discovered that issues of biopiracy and GMOs are very much on the minds of campesinos, activists and traditional healers in the highlands of Chiapas and beyond. The delegation investigated the […]
Harbinger Vol. 3 No. 1 — Social Ecology and Social Movements: From the 1960s to the Present
Social ecologists have played an important catalytic role in many of the pivotal social and ecological movements of the past four decades. The discussion that follows will focus on events that staff, students and volunteers around the ISE in Plainfield have been most directly involved with. We hope that subsequent issues of Harbinger will include […]
Agribusiness, Biotechnology and War
This article originally appeared in Z Magazine, September 2002. Virtually all of the new, technology-based industries of the past century have been products of wartime. World War I ushered in the widespread use of mechanization and the beginnings of aviation. World War II brought us nuclear power, modern rocketry and cybernetics. The corporate giants of […]
Vermont Towns Vote Against Biotech Foods
Once again, Vermont’s local town meetings have taken an ethical stand on issues of compelling national and international significance. Vermont’s annual town meetings, held every year on the first Tuesday in March, are among the oldest surviving institutions of direct democracy in the United States. Dating to well before the American Revolution, these annual face-to-face […]
Harbinger Vol. 2 No. 1 — Biotechnology: Radicalizing the Debate
by Brian Tokar
The more that officials of the U.S. government, and of global institutions such as the WTO, insist that only known, quantifiable risks are legitimate areas for public policy, the more imperative it becomes for activists and other concerned citizens to insist upon raising the larger questions: What does this new technology mean for our society, for the exercise of political and economic power and for the possibilities of actualizing a genuinely free society? How can we fully comprehend all the disturbing
social consequences of the new genetic technologies?
Biotechnology: Enlarging the debate
This article originally appeared in Z Magazine, June 2001. Later this month, thousands of people will converge on San Diego, California for what may be the largest protest against the biotechnology industry in the United States. Coinciding once again with the annual convention of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), this year’s Biodevastation events are intended […]
Biohazards: The Next Generation?
This article orignially appeared in Synthesis/Regeneration 25, Summer 2001. With the worldwide rejection of genetically engineered foods, the biotechnology industry is scrambling to develop a new generation of products that can might someday be seen as advantageous for consumers and beneficial to humanity. This is the primary motivation, of course, behind the massive PR campaign […]
Redesigning Life? Introduction: Challenging Biotechnology
This article is the introduction to the book Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books), edited by Brian Tokar. Perhaps once in a decade, a compelling new social or environmental concern will come to the forefront of public debate in the West, raising profound consequences for all life on earth, while thoroughly […]
Resisting the Engineering of Life
From: Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering, edited by Brian Tokar (London: Zed Books, February 2001). For more than a quarter century — since the first successful attempts at splicing and recombining DNA in the laboratory — people knowledgeable about genetics, ecology, agricultural science and numerous related subjects have voiced concerns about the […]
