Wednesday, November 6, 2002

Reposted from the website of Sean Scheiderer. The following is an excerpt from the transcript of the imaginary proceedings of The Advisory Committee On Ecological Catastrophe, charged with producing three policy recommendations. Members of the committee are Gary Kamiya, Sean Scheiderer, Mira Shiva, Vandana Shiva, Alistair Smith, and Shiv Visvanathan.

The following statements portrayed as being part of a hypothetical dialogue were taken from the published works cited at the end of the imaginary dialogue, and were quoted as directly as possible, usually verbatim, exceptions being made only for continuity's sake. The compiling author's skill--if any--is that of an arranger, manifest as a coherent and cogent whole made from previously disparate parts.

SS:  The destruction of the rain forests is one of the most serious and notorious of the world's environmental problems. The forests of Brazil, Indonesia, and Zaire have already been reduced to half of their original size. One hundred acres of rainforest are destroyed every minute. Fifty species are being driven into extinction every day. Future medicines and crossbreeds are tragically being lost forever. (Kamiya, 18-19)

GK:  Loss itself is the greatest tragedy. Extinction cannot be quantified. It is difficult to imagine a greater sin than extinguishing the unknown. (19)

SS:  Then why is it happening? Why are we letting our planet be mutilated?

GK:  The root of the problem is the unequal distribution of wealth between North and South. (20)

AS:  And the value that is reaped by the corporate players who span that North-South divide. (598)

GK:  The most glaring manifestation of this schism is the world debt crisis. The developing world owes trillions of dollars to its creditors. Developing countries have to raise cash fast to service this debt. The easiest way to raise cash is to export, and most developing countries don't have much to export except agricultural commodities. Those are most quickly created by short-term policies that are often environmentally disastrous: slash-and-burn, logging, cattle, mono-cropping. (20-21)

SS:  So, in order to remove the impetus for these developing nations to ravage their own lands, we should forgive their debt?

GK:  Yes. They should simply be written off. (21)

SS:  Because these countries can never repay these loans in full, and by insisting they try we are only forcing these countries to desperate measures and exacerbating the entire global situation?

GK:  Exactly. These debts are bad and the World Bank is just going to have to eat them. (21)

SS:  But how realistic is it to expect the banks to forgive trillions of dollars worth of debt? Wouldn't that be a dangerous blow to the economies of the rest of the world?

GK:  The environmental crisis is inseparable from the economic crisis. The scale of these problems is daunting, but their interrelated nature may help nations go beyond selfish nationalism and towards cooperation. (21)

SS:  Exactly! The world needs fewer corporations and more cooperation. In a global community, isolationism is not only egocentric but dangerously myopic.

GK:  We must remember that we all sleep under the same sky.

SS:  And breathe the same air.

VS:  And drink the same water.

GK:  See! The earth is truly shared. If we ever learn this, we might arouse that slumbering instinct called brotherhood. (21)

SV:  Fraternity has remained the silent term of western politics. (164)

SS:  We're all in it together, and by helping developing countries maintain their environment we are in fact helping ourselves, preserving natural resources needed by the entire planet.

GK:  Because when developing countries pursue environmentally destructive policies in order to meet their debt payments...

SS:  The entire planet suffers the loss.

GK:  And by what right can the wealthy North, unwilling to forgive those debts, censure them? After all, we've already had our slash-and-burn industrial revolution. We cut down our forests, polluted our rivers and air, killed off the bison and the carrier pigeons. (21)

SS:  And we, who have already raped and pillaged our own lands, and created powerful economies by doing so, are disguising hypocrisy with sanctimony.

MS:  Hypocrisy indeed! The U.S. considers the lack of patent protection as unfair trading practice, but does not consider the destruction of regulation for public safety and environmental protection as unfair for the Third World. The U.S. wants to limit and localize laws for the protection of people, while universalizing laws for the protection of profit. (79)

SS:  The developed countries have the skill, power, and luxury to define the terms in order to portray themselves, the aggressors, as the victims. But even if the rest of the world can see through this charade and the developing countries regain or retain control of their own destiny, what will they do with themselves?

CK:  That is the question and there is the watershed! Before these developing countries follow in our ignominious footsteps, we have an opportunity to atone for our sins by helping them find a better way. But "helping" developing countries has usually meant exploiting them, hence their resistance. (21)

SS:  So instead of simply using and abusing them, or merely warning or even threatening them, we must help them. And the best, maybe the only way to do that, is to cancel their debts. A starving man is predictable and blameless in his actions. He will steal, he might even kill, in order that he and his family might eat. The MLB debts should not be paid with dirty money ripped from our planet, but with nature's riches intact, able to be preserved by the poor in return for financial leniency from the rich.

SV:  We're also talking about preservation of future generations because the destruction of nature eventually involves the elimination of those communities associated with it. (163)

SS:  And a global community is dependent upon a global environment!

SV:  Right! But all models of development are anti-ecological. (164)

SS:  No matter whether you are the developer or the developed. Both suffer in a global community.

SV:  There is a need for a wider sense of communitas as related to ecology, encoding both nature and culture into a notion of plurality. (164)

MS:  And by widening the circle of control and decision-making, we can treat technology in its social and ecological context. By keeping human rights at the center of discourse and debate, we might be able to restrain the ultimate privatization of life itself. (80)

SV:  Within the imperialism of the west, liberty for any and all has fallen prey to atomism, reductionism, and individualism. (164)

SS:  Individualism? But isn't that the foundation of liberty?

SV:  The notion of individual equality has become mechanistic, connoting uniformity and standardization. (164)

SS:  A commodity.

SV:  And as a homogeneity we cannot understand the grammar of plurality. (164)

AS:  We must recognize the inherent value of diversity as a cultural and scientific good, and uniformity as its undesirable and life-threatening antonym. (594)

SS:  Reduction to the least common denominator for corporate convenience carries a heavy price. How can we estimate the expense of variety? Development can destroy people and their environment alike through obvious acts of aggression or transgression, but also insidiously by discouraging or preventing diversity, both social and biological.

VS:  Policies are introduced against the will and behind the backs of the people by by-passing the mechanism of democratic decision-making and public debate. (61)

AS:  For instance, breeding seeds for resistance to chemicals made by the same companies doing the research that results in a vicious cycle of dependence on those companies' products. (594)

VS:  The free import of genetically-engineered seeds and crop varieties will lead to a drastic increase in the reliance on chemical herbicides to use on herbicide-resistant crops developed by agricultural chemical companies and to overcome the super-weeds that genetic engineers inadvertently create. (76)

GK:  The syllogism is relentless. (21)

SS:  And thus agribusiness accretes into a self-perpetuated juggernaut whose existence after awhile is no longer questioned but a given in farming. How does his happen? Under a multi-million-dollar veil of deception, that's how. What's touted as high technology able to solve the world's food problems is actually just snake-oil with great marketing and a captive audience.

MS:  Selling false miracles. (70)

SS:  Slick magazines ads and research papers bamboozle and convert the unbelievers. And eventually, all farmers, commercial or traditional, are forced to become members of an incestuous system that ultimately results in record profits for agribusiness, a meager and precarious existence for farmers, and more people than ever dying hungry!

VS:  Absolutely! The consumption of agricultural chemicals associated with the Green Revolution has been an ecological and economic disaster for peasants, and increased use of pesticides and herbicides on crops engineered for tolerance will spell total doom. (76)

SV:  We must understand the right to life of other people, other ideologies and methods, and go beyond the market mechanisms of economics, cost benefit, and compensation. (164)

MS:  The words freedom and protection have been robbed of their humane meaning and are being absorbed into the double-speak of corporate jargon. With double-speak are associated double standards, one for citizens and one for corporations, one for corporate responsibility and one for corporate profits. (79)

AS:  The financial gains from virtually all plant transfers accrued to Europe and North America. The flow of capital resources has mirrored the flow of genetic resources. (597)

SS:  Imperialism intrudes physically, geographically. But capitalism infiltrates psychologically, into the mind and culture, entrenching itself and constantly seeking new inroads. Old values and standards of humanity disappear as the virulence eats away and establishes itself, first to existence, then prominence, then despotism.

VS:  In the Third World, the exclusion of human rights is brutal! People are being reduced to experimental objects, deprived of all rights to choose what is done to their lives, their bodies, their environments. India is an example ofa country where dramatic shifts in science and technology policy are taking place which give full freedom to the governments and corporations of industrialized countries to treat a vast subcontinent as a laboratory and its people as human guinea pigs for testing and marketing genetically engineered organisms. (60)

SV:  But disasters like Bhopal should challenge that, reminding us that our lifestyles determine other people's life chances. Opting for pesticides might mean opting for Bhopal. (164)

GK:  And opting for loan repayment might mean losing the rainforests.

MS:  There is a clear conflict of interest between those who want to protect profits and those who want to protect life. (79)

SV:  No, it's more complicated than that. Disasters, like triangles, have three sides. Too often the arguments only acknowledge the relationship between oppressor and victim. However, there is also the spectator as participant. The other to be accused is ourselves. (164)

SS:  Isolationism has trickled down from the conquerors into the mind and behaviors of their subjects, and eventually it will spread to the vanquished themselves.

SV:  Television and the Internet may have created an electronic village, but no one is rushing to help their neighbor. (164)

SS:  Whether across the street or across the world we need to care about each other's environments, realizing that the distinctions and boundaries of yesterday are no longer applicable, if they ever were, and that no place is far away.

MS:  Universalization of laws for the protection of life is an ethical imperative. All life is precious. It is equally precious to the rich and the poor, the white and the black, to men and women. Laws for the protection of private property rights should not be imposed globally. They need to be restrained. (80)

SS:  It is one thing to talk about a global community created by communications and transportation technologies, but it is quite another for individuals to act as citizens of a planet-wide society, and for corporations of any sort to act in the interests of anything but profit. Remember, we can't eat profit!

AS:  Nope! And unless food production is put on a socially, ecologically, and economically sustainable footing, we can hardly claim to be tackling urgent global problems. (601)

SS:  The only thing corporations will ever tackle is more profit and higher dividends for their shareholders. It is not realistic to expect otherwise. "Long-term" for a corporation is next quarter, or a fiscal year, not generations or centuries.

AS:  The future food security of the growing population is being severely handicapped by systematized corporate elimination of genetic diversity. Industrialized agriculture promotes uniformity in food crops all over the planet. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards, 6,000 of them are now extinct. Every broccoli variety offered in the seed catalogues in 1900 has now disappeared. As agrochemical companies absorb seed companies the trend towards concentration continues. (596, 600)

SS:  National government and international organizations must work now to control population growth, and through regulation assure that we have enough to eat by maintaining bio-diversity.

AS:  Bio-diversity is the new buzz-word, but what exactly does it mean? The term involves literally hundreds of components. Is the remaining diversity satisfactory for ensuring future food security or must we actually reverse the tide of genetic resource loss? How much diversity is necessary and how much is expendable. Are gene banks the best way of conserving the stock or is in situ [in the farmer's field] better? (593)

SS:  Those are indeed important questions, so complex that only scientists can answer them. But in order for their answers to serve the world, the scientists must be disinterested from corporate agendas.

AS:  Yes, you would think, or hope, that it would be one of the minimum basic tasks of science in any culture to generate the know-how to produce enough food. Yet much of so-called "hi-tech" bio-research is actually just running to catch up with the natural resistance which got left behind in the rush to get new varieties onto the market. (594, 600)

SS:  But natural resistance doesn't make agrochemical companies one dime. They reap what you sow.

AS:  It's been said that "seeds come with the genetic code of the society that produced them." That's surely an indictment of our society and its research priorities. (598)

SS:  We eat what they want us to eat. And we are what we eat. It's like Mother Nature gets to watch her smartest kid drop out of college and drink himself to death.

CK:  There is an old American Indian saying: "The earth alone endures." The human race is in the process of disproving it.

SS:  I think that's a bit anthropocentric! The ecological problems we have been discussing are potentially disastrous for us, not for all of nature or the entire planet. Not even the detonation of our entire nuclear arsenals or the deployment of every chemical weapon could end life on Earth. But we might extinguish our own race. We are a danger to ourselves. Let's remember that we humans are a part, but only a part, of nature. The earth will endure. Will we?

*

The committee on ecological catastrophe hereby makes these three policy recommendations:

(1) forgive World Bank debt to developing countries conditional to their preservation of ecologically important environments

(2) foster (through funding outside of corporate agendas) and protect (through regulation) global diversity, social and biological, for healthy and balanced systems (ecological, agricultural, economical, etc.) planet-wide; and

(3) provide complete disclosure and allow a major role in the debate and decision making to those people and communities most affected by specific technologies.

These three policies will work to (1) prevent catastrophes from occurring by removing the financial pressures and information blackouts that fuel devastating behavior which leads to them and (2) limit the immediate damage and minimize the long-term effects of those mishaps that do occur by allowing for the open exchange of pertinent information, both as urgency and maintenance, locally and globally.

Method

(1) The above statements portrayed as being part of a hypothetical dialogue were taken from the published works cited below, and were quoted as directly as possible, usually verbatim, exceptions being made only for continuity's sake. The compiling author's skill--if any--is that of an arranger, manifest as a coherent and cogent whole made from previously disparate parts.

(2) Those entries attributed to "SS," as well as un-attributed frame text, are the original words of  Sean Scheiderer unless otherwise noted.

(3) The article titled "India's Human Guinea Pigs: Human v. Property Rights," was of joint authorship by two sisters, Mira and Vandana Shiva. For the purposes of the above hypothetical dialogue, certain portions of their original published text was attributed to each as assigned arbitrarily by the current author.

Works Cited

Kamiya, Gary. "The Environmental Crisis in Developing Countries." Crisis 98.4 (1991): 18-21.

Shiva, Mira, and Vandana Shiva. "India's Human Guinea Pigs: Human v. Property Rights," Science as Culture 2.10 (1991): 59-81.

Smith, Alistair. "Biodiversity and Food Security," Science as Culture 2.4.3 (1991): 591-601.

Visvanathan, Shiv. "Bhopal: The Imagination of a Disaster." Alternatives 11 (1986): 147-165.

© Copyright 1998 by Sean Scheiderer