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A GIFT OF ECONOMIC GROWTH: = A DARKER BIOWEAPONS FUTURE By Peter Montague
In this series, we are summarizing what seem to us the top 10 developments of 2005.
Last week we described the rush to commercialize nanotechnology without any realistic hope of regulating it. . This week we describe genetic engineering on steroids -- a new field called "synthetic biology" in which scientists are setting out to create new forms of life that have never existed before. In "genetic engineering," natural genes from one species are inserted by force into a different species, hoping to transfer the properties or characteristics of one species into another. Trout can live in cold water, so maybe a trout gene blasted into a tomato will help tomatoes withstand cold weather. The limitation on this system is the characteristics that nature has built into the genes of species.
Now scientists have overcome that limitation. They are learning to develop entirely new species, new forms of life. Awareness of this new scientific specialty -- called "synthetic biology" -- began to appear in the press in 2005.
The construction of living things from raw chemicals was first demonstrated in 2002 when scientists created a polio virus from scratch. They found the polio virus genome on the internet, and within 2 years had created a virus from raw chemicals. The synthetic virus could reproduce and, when injected into mice, paralyzed them just as a natural polio virus would do. They said they chose the polio virus to demonstrate what a bioterrorist could accomplish.
"It is a little sobering to see that folks in the chemistry laboratory can basically create a virus from scratch," James LeDuc of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said at the time.
A year later, in 2003 Craig Venter and colleagues at the Institute for Biological Energy Alternatives in Rockville, Md., took only 3 weeks to create a virus from scratch.
Later that same year the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) published a short paper called "The Darker Bioweapons Future," reporting the conclusions of a panel of life science experts convened by the National Academy of Sciences. The CIA paper said, in part, "The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man." And the CIA said, "The same science that may cure some of our worst diseases could be used to create the world's most frightening weapons." The CIA offered one example: "For example, one panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could cripple a large portion of people in their forties with severe arthritis, concealing its hostile origin and leaving a country with massive health and economic problems."
Nature= magazine -- England's most prestigious science journal -- said in 2004 that synthetic biology "carries potential dangers that could eclipse the concerns already raised about genetic engineering and nanotechnology."
Last month, the British journal New Scientist said in and editorial, "Let us hope that tomorrow's terrorists don't include people with PhDs in molecular genetics." The editorial went on to explain why the technology cannot regulated: "The underlying technology has already proliferated worldwide, and some gene-synthesis companies that are ostensibly based in the west are thought to manufacture their DNA in China and other countries in the far east where skilled labour is cheap."
The editorial was written in response to an investigation conducted by the editors of New Scientist. They wondered if they could special- order DNA over the internet and have it shipped to them by mail (which the Brits call "post," not mail). Their report is titled, The bioweapon is in the post," and they concluded that it would be doable, and that commerce in such things would be difficult -- or impossible -- to control. "But with gene synthesis firms springing up all over the world, and the underlying technology becoming cheaper and more widely available, it is unclear whether regulations enacted in any one country will be enough."
"It's going to be virtually impossible to control," predicts David Magnus of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics.
The New Scientist editorial ends by saying, "If there ever was a case for scientists around the world to engage in sensible self-regulation before a nightmare becomes reality, this is it."
Unfortunately, scientists are ill-equipped by their training to grapple with the ethical and moral dimensions of their work. Scientists have no equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath -- "First do no harm" -- that guides the behavior of physicians. The Hippocratic oath counsels restraint, humility, and caution. In science, on the other hand, wherever your curiosity takes you is the right place to go, even if it takes you into "a darker bioweapons future."
Small wonder that so many people have lost faith in science, scientific progress, and the promise of America. As the editors of Nature said in 2004, "Controversies over genetically engineered crops and embryo research are leading people to question how carefully scientists consider the possible consequences of their work before barreling ahead. This is no small concern for science, as it has already led to restrictions."
But of course it isn't just scientists who are responsible for speeding the deployment of ill-considered technologies onto the world market. The underlying engine for all this reckless behavior is an economic system that requires economic growth year after year.
Our society has grown dependent upon economic growth for achieving "liberty and justice for all." You say your slice of the pie is unacceptably small and you're having to sleep under a bridge? Don't worry -- economic growth will make the whole pie larger, so your tiny slice will grow too. Thus domestic tranquility, justice, fairness, and fulfilling the promise of America are all dependent upon economic growth. We don't have any other widely-approved way to distribute the benefits of the economy, except through economic growth. We have forgotten the alternative, which is sharing.
But decade after decade since World War II, economic= growth rates have been stagnant or declining, not just in the U.S. but throug= hout the "developed" world.
Slow growth derives from at least two sources -productive capacity exceeds consumer demand and we have a glut of capital, so it is getting harder to find good investments.
These two features of the modern economy force investors to constantly search for "the next big thing" -- in hopes of returning to historical rates of return on investment. As a consequence, corporations (which have limited liability, by law) engage in reckless behavior -- including behavior that may threaten the well being of everyone. They create new biotech crops and deploy them across the nation's agricultural landscape before thorough tests have been completed. They put nano particles into baby lotion before they have any idea whether the nano particles can penetrate a baby's skin, and before they have asked where those nano particle will go after they are thrown out with the bath water.
So now we have synthetic biology -- the "next big thing" -- genetic engineering on steroids -- the manufacture of living organisms unlike any that have appeared on earth before. Investors are lining up to support new firms that are willing to sell the building blocks of new forms of life to anyone who can come up with a few hundred thousand dollars. This may in fact produce the next big thing, but it may not be quite the thing investors are hoping for.
Until we devise a steady-state economy that does not require perpetual growth, investors will keep us on this awful "next big thing" merry- go-round, our quality of life continually threatened anew by the ill- considered products and unanticipated by-products of feral science.
THE SOUL OF ENVIRONMENTALIS
Rediscovering transformational politics in the 21st century
By Michel Gelobter, Michael Dorsey, Leslie Fields, Tom Goldtooth, Anuja Mendiratta, Richard Moore, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Peggy M. Shepard, and Gerald Torres
An Introduction to the "Soul" of Movements
Someday I hope you get the chance, To live like you were dyin' -- Tim McGraw, 2004
Can a Movement Really Die?
In 1991, Dana Gioia, the poet who now heads the National Endowment for the Arts, published a magazine article proclaiming the death of poetry. He looked at a multitude of small-circulation 'zines and academic reviews that published nothing but verse and said, "The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage." A few months later, another writer argued that poetry had become irrelevant and attacked "preening" work by an anonymous, but ethnically specified, "Hawaiian of Japanese ancestry."
Poetry as a movement was afloat, vital, and most definitely not dead. Immigration and ethnicity aside, Rap was Def by 1991. Today, the live club performance series "Def Poetry Jam" attracts television viewers "in the upper millions," according to co-founder Bruce George. Def means "death" in the lingo of the Rap genre, and its blossoming was just one symptom of the life that words in rhyme have to this day.
We thought of "Def Poetry" while reading The Death of Environmentalism," an essay released by two activist communicati= ons consultants last fall. The furious debat= e that erupted around that essay is a sign that the environmental movement is still alive and kicking. And just as in the debate over poetry, we should thank the medical examiners for their premature autopsies. Their first incisions have jolted the still body to new life. The lively corpse is now reacting thoughtfully and with vigor.
We have discussed "The Death of Environmentalism" with environmental justice and sustainability activists, leaders from the reproductive and gay rights movements, members of the faith community, labor organizers, philanthropists, business executives, and people in the military. Like us, they have saluted the essay for jump-starting a debate over our shared strategic challenges. Leaders of the environmental justice movement welcome the essay because it echoes concerns they've been working on for well over two decades.
We want to be sure that the crux of the critique stays at the fore and moves forward. We want to be sure that environmentalism's true strengths, as embodied in Environmental Justice, Sustainability, and a number of other movements, increase to scale. We are also writing to bring the broader perspectives we've encountered into the debate. We have a few myths to bust about contemporary activism and a few points to add about the environmental movement's true heritage.
In the '90s, the declaration that "poetry is dead" was an attempt to deny and to marginalize a rich array of new anti-establishment forms of poetry. Back then, the writers ignored rap, performance art, and poetry slams. The debate over "The Death of Environmentalism" feels like a similar exercise in its omissions.
This reaction follows from a point Wendell Berry made in a 1970 essay titled "The Hidden Wound": "The crucial difference, I think, between our society and others that have been divided, by class if not by race, is that in our self-protective silence up to now about the whole problem, we have not developed the language by which to recognize the extent or the implications of the division, and we have not developed either the language or the necessary social forms by which to recognize across the division our common interest and our common humanity."
Environmentalism and other progressive movements in the United States are not dead, but they are crippled by denial. Right-wing extremists are not any closer to the truth than progressives, but their political agenda thrives to the extent racial and class inequality is denied. "The Death of Environmentalism" does an admirable job of starting a debate over how environmental organizations should change their strategies. But what we really need is a death of denial.
Environmentalism, like poetry, has a soul deeper and more eternal than the one described by its examiners. It's a soul tied deeply to human rights and social justice, and this tie has been nurtured by the Environmental Justice and Sustainability movements for the past 20 years. We are writing to explore this soul, to break the unwritten gag rule about race and class, and to examine the intermingled roots of social change movements. These roots, these rules, and this soul together hold the key to environmentalism's new life.
I got two white horses following me, waiting on my burying ground -- Blind Lemon Jefferson, 1927
As we move through George W. Bush's second term, it might seem as though progressive and liberal ideas are almost wholly out of fashion. War and security dominated the Democratic Party's agenda in 2004, even as it tried to win the election on health care and the economy. Right after the election, the Bush Administration freed publicly funded clinics from the obligation to provide abortion services, and no one seemed to pay much attention.
It is fashionable to explain Bush's strength by saying that "frames trump facts." George Lakoff, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, has gained some notoriety by pointing out that ideas have physical, cultural, and political manifestations, called "frames," that rarely depend on the facts. You can't necessarily change someone's frame of reference simply by stating a new one, even if your frame wins on the facts.
Frames can trump facts, but UC Berkeley sociologist Tom Medvetz points out that Lakoff's cognitive science is limited to analyzing what goes on in people's brains. What's happening to environmentalism has a lot to do also with history and with institutions, and a singular focus on framing can also be a form of denial.
Frames emerge from history, and they are connected with institutions. To win, we must take on all of it -- the frames, the history, and the institutions. We must have the courage to name what is right and plot a course that connects to everyday lives and transforms them. If we do this, we can re-frame our movements in ways that astonish, delight, and liberate. The debate surrounding "The Death of Environmentalism" is really an opening to re-examine modern political strategy in general, and environmentalism in particular. In the next few pages, we're going to widen that opening and blaze a trail through it.
Why Race and Class Matter to the Environmental Movement
El costo de la vida sube otra vez. El peso que baja ya ni se ve, Y las habichuelas, no se pueden comer, ni una libra de arroz, ni una cuarta de cafe. A nadie le importa que piensa usted. Sera porque aqui No hablamos ingles -- Juan Luis Guerra, 1996*
Environmentalism in the United States has always been as diverse as our country itself. In the 19th century, for example, African American abolitionists fought slavery as well as the use of arsenic in tobacco fields. Later, Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King, Jr., were only two of thousands of people of color whose movements for justice set the template for Earth Day. These leaders are part of our soul as environmentalists. The rebirth of the movement depends on being clear about that lineage.
The authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" begin by invoking their ancestors. "Those of us who are children of the environmental movement must never forget that we are standing on the shoulders of all those who came before us," they write. They cite John Muir and David Brower -- and Martin Luther King, too. They quote from interviews they did with 25 senior executives at mainstream environmental groups. History seems duly respected. But we need to stop the music here and make two big points before we leave the subject of ancestry.
First, many environmentalists would rather not stand on the shoulders of certain early conservation heroes. Muir developed his conservation ethic during the Civil War and the expropriation of Native American lands, the two great racial struggles of the 19th century. He pretty much ignored both of them, according to Carl Anthony, an historian and urban planner. After dodging the Civil War draft by going to Canada, Muir walked the occupied lands of the West and the South and saw nothing more sinister than "forest walls vine-draped and flowery as Eden." Before we sanctify Muir, we need to understand how his racial attitudes affected his commitments to conservation. If the environmental movement is ever going to revive, it must first confront the many ways in which the U.S. has reserved open space for the exclusive use of whites.
John Muir's racism is about more than just history. It's about building a new frame for a bigger environmental movement. There are better shoulders for us to stand on. In 1849, Henry Thoreau explained that he was refusing to pay taxes to a government "which buys and sells men, women, and children like cattle at the door of its senate- house." In 1914, Louis Marshall made the critical argument that saved the Adirondack wilderness, despite the fact that he was a Jew and many of his neighbors in the North Country were rabid anti-Semites. In the 1930s, Marshall's son Robert founded the modern wilderness protection movement. Around the same time, Zora Neale Hurston documented multiethnic America in her many books about people and nature. In the 1960s, Henry Dumas wrote of the healing role of nature in even the most viciously segregated rural areas of the South.
"The Death of Environmentalism" refers often to America's "core values" and cites surveys that show how those values have changed in the last decade. But when people talk about their core values their words don't always match their meaning. For much of American history, the values of "freedom" and "progress" have been code words for a system that profits by oppressing the poor and communities of color. U.S. rhetoric is taking this charade to new heights globally while masking an agenda that actually celebrates authoritarian control and the decay of civic life.
Denying the racial content of the "values" debate in the U.S. today only deepens the predicament of environmentalism. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson reminds us how the idea of freedom has been intertwined with the practice of slavery. From ancient Greece to the United States of 1776, he says, cultures that have theorized and celebrated "freedom" have simultaneously excluded huge swaths of their populations from any shred of it. At the same time, nations through history that profess to love "freedom" have been relentless in promoting heartless geopolitical agendas outside their borders.
Freedom is an important value, and its meaning is an important debate. Denying the links between "freedom" and oppression makes it harder for progressives to articulate a broader vision. The death of this denial is liberating because it links us more fully to our rough and glorious pasts. It also points the way to new choices and a more hopeful future.
Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me... -- Public Enemy, 1989
Giving a nod to your ancestors when you start talking is a good oratorical trick. It establishes that your ancestors are dead, so you're in charge now. But the authors of "The Death of Environmentalism" completely ignore a second set of ancestors who need to be included in our deliberations. We're talking about the people who brought you the Civil Rights Movement.
Modern environmentalism was, after all, the Elvis of Sixties activism. It was a radical and innovative departure from the conservation movement that preceded it. And in almost every way, the politics and innovations of the early environmental movement derived directly from the same era's fight for black power and racial justice.
Norm Collins, the Ford Foundation program officer who first funded the Natural Resources Defense Council, Environmental Defense, and others, wrote in his decision memos that what was needed was "an NAACP for the environment." National legislative victories for the environment depended heavily on a re-jiggering of states' rights. This strategy copied one that had already been used successfully by the Civil Rights Movement. A critical factor in the passage of the Clean Air Act, for example, was to unify and to supersede the patchwork of existing air quality standards that states had promulgated on their own. And mass mobilizations for the environment depend heavily on nonviolent civil disobedience as popularized by African American advocates in the 1960s.
Just as the courts were fertile ground for black liberation, environmental organizations sought standing for nature and human health in ways that deeply challenged business as usual. As historian Roderick Nash pointed out in The Rights of Nature, environmental activists attempted to extend the 1960s legal focus on the rights of oppressed individuals to nature and to people facing environmental risks. Boycotts, consumer campaigns, and labor-environment alliances -- where would these be without the models established by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers?
The environmental justice movement emerged in the 1980s as a way to revitalize the grassroots activism started by the Civil Rights Movement. It also offered a home for activists who weren't comfortable separating their concern over the state of the planet from their concerns about social justice. Twenty years later, the mainstream environmental movement has been unable to racially integrate its senior staff, not because of overt discrimination but because of differences in vision. Many environmentalists of color admire the mainstream movement's goals, but they also know firsthand that social justice is routinely ignored in the mainstream movement's decision- making.
Despite its limitations, environmentalism as we know it today wasn't just the marriage of liberalism and conservation. It was committed activists, engaged in struggle and riffing on every tool they could see around them. Like Elvis, the environmental movement had soul -- and soul is one thing you can't kill.
The Lessons We Haven't Learned from the Struggles for Civil Rights
Don't nobody know my troubles but God. -- Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall, 1937
Millions of us went into the 1960s burning for the right to eat, drink, ride, work, play, and pray anywhere we wanted to. We sought a right to a job, to due process, to health care, to a good education, to fair housing, to live in the suburbs, to play in parks, and to love whom we chose. Among the rights we sought, we left the 1970s with rights to clean air, clean water, and our day in court on questions of environmental impacts. The Civil Rights Movement didn't fare as well. After an astonishing string of successes in the 1960s, it lost steam. The Civil Rights Movement wasn't dead by 1979, but the techniques it had deployed -- mass mobilization, litigation, policy advocacy, and moral appeals -- had started to run dry. That ought to sound familiar.
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