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Harbinger Vol. 2 No. 1 — Radicalizing the Debate

Brian Tokar Over the past year, news of the hazards of genetically engineered foods has finally broken into the U.S. mainstream media. The contamination of taco shells and other products with a variety of engineered corn not approved for human consumption, the gathering of 4000 people last March to demonstrate against the biotechnology industry convention […]

Butterfly Experiment Highlights Biotech Hazards

This article originally appeared in Synthesis/Regeneration 21, Winter 2000. Genetically engineered crops threaten monarch butterflies. The headlines spread worldwide this past May, after three researchers at Cornell University published a study confirming what critics of biotechnology have been saying for a decade: that the environmental consequences of genetic engineering would prove to be widespread and […]

Stop the Biotech Assault on Earth and Humanity!

This article originally apeared in Earth First! Journal, Spring 1999. It used to be possible for some activists to dismiss genetic engineering and other biotechnologies as ideas recently emerged from science fiction, as problems that could safely be put on the back burner. Compared to the rapid loss of species and habitat, global climate changes, […]

Gathering RAGE: Resistance Against Genetic Engineering

This article originally appeared in Z Magazine, January 1999. One important feature of the actions in Seattle and Washington, DC was many activists’ focus on a serious new threat to our food and health: The rise of genetic engineering as the technology-of-choice in countless new areas of corporate activity; the imposition of new biotechnologies on […]

Mining Humanity: Genetic Research, Indigenous Resistance and the Human Genome Diversity Project

As originally published in Toward Freedom, Winter 1998/99 Recent opposition to biotechnology and genetic engineering has focused on these technologies’ implications for food and agriculture. This is entirely necessary, as tens of millions of acres of U.S. farm land are being planted with genetically engineered crops that have serious consequences for our health, and for […]

The Texas-Vermont-Maine Nuclear Dump: Bringing Environmental Racism Home

Brian Tokar and Gary Oliver The Green Mountains of Vermont evoke an image of rolling hills as far as the eye can see, snow-covered mountain peaks and sparkling clear rivers, rough hewn farmsteads and a unique variety of down-home progressive politics. In April of 1994, the Vermont legislature passed a bill establishing an unprecedented compact […]

Monsanto: A Checkered History

This article orignially appeard in The Ecologist, September/October 1998 and translated and reprinted in Courrier International (France), Global Økologi (Denmark) and other international publications. Monsanto’s high-profile advertisements in Britain and the U.S. depict the corporation as a visionary, world-historical force, working to bring state-of-the-art science and an environmentally responsible outlook to the solution of humanity’s […]

Greenhouse Politics

The Clinton Administration is counting on the “free market” to forestall global climate change without challenging the energy industry. Originally published in Z Magazine, December 1997. This December, heads of state from some 180 countries will convene in Kyoto, Japan in an attempt to negotiate the first internationally binding treaty to control levels of carbon […]

Third World Ecologists Challenge Development, “Progress”

This article originally apeared in Toward Freedom, May 1997. Environmental awareness in the industrialized world is still often seen as a product of affluence and economic security. Despite the very real and immediate consequences of air and water pollution, habitat destruction, and the disproportionate siting of toxic industrial facilities in the most impoverished communities, environmental […]

Send in the Clones?

This article originally appeared in Food & Water Journal, Spring 1997 This past winter, a group of scientists in Edinburgh, Scotland accomplished a feat that has long been speculated about but never before realized: they produced the first living clone of an adult mammal. The world’s media were saturated with photos of this unique newborn […]