Jim heartfield:
> On the contrary, being intrinsically a reactionary movement,
> environmental ideology very quickly gravitates towards national
> chauvinism and mysticism. (I just note in passing that the target of the
> animal rights protesters that Chrissie Hynde joined was directed
> specifically against Indian leather products.)
>
> Key figures in the British environmental movement include such
> aristocratic landlords as Prince Charles, Lord Melchett (Head of
> Greenpeace and inheritor to Lord Mond), Guardian journalist George
> Monbiot (whose family name was changed from Beaumont, when the Ducs de
> Coutard fled the French revolution) and Sir Crispin Tickell (Royal
> Guards and UN Ambassador, now head of the Gaia centre at the University
> of East London), and Teddy Goldsmith (editor of the Ecologist).
>
> The anti-GM campaign rests squarely on the defence of British organic
> farming against the foreign importation of American produce (as shown
> with Greenpeace's attack on a ship porting at Liverpool). Furthermore,
> environmentalists regularly mystify the relation of farmers to soil in
> the 'appropriate technology' discussion, which holds that high-yield
> seeds and fertilisers are 'not natural' for use by African peasant
> farmers (as though farming was a natural activity!). Finally the anti-GM
> campaign rests on a plainly non-scientific, and mystified objection to
> cross species gene transfer, summoning up the old fears of
> 'miscegenation'.
One forgets, doesn't one, that capitalism is generally dynamic and progressive; the problem for leftists, at least ones like me, is that once it gets out of the box it dynamically progresses in various directions I would prefer it didn't. The environment is a case in point: I once lived in an area of Canada where large tracts of wilderness were completely trashed almost overnight by Crown Zellerbach, at the time (and maybe still) a big lumber and paper concern. A desire not to see broad stretches of their world turned into a desert caused traditionalists, conservatives, and reactionaries as well as leftists to oppose such enterprises. Most people know of many such stories, and of course Uncle Karl himself intoned "All that is solid melts away...." for us in case we hadn't noticed.
Just so, genetic modification. Science, we know, marches on its sanctified and inexorable way, but even so it is not necessary to heedlessly shower every corner of the world with novel genetic material, or scheme to use the genes of plants to kill them or subject them to patent and copyright so as to own the works of every farmer from Sasketchewan to Sri Lanka. It is somewhat short of opposing miscenegation (whatever that is -- don't most people mate with someone other than themselves?) to wonder about whether it is a good thing to insert pig genes in tomatoes and tomato genes in insects, and set them all at large to wander upon the face of the earth.
There are forms of pollution, dynamic and progressive as pollution is, which are actually bad for you! One may deride "_Blut_und_Boden_" to one's heart's content, and yet one actually has to live somewhere!
As the "animal rights" thing, Nazi scheme though it may be, rests on ethical consideration for non-human animals rather than on practical or ethical concern for oneself and other humans, which is generally the case with environmental politics, I don't know exactly why it was dragged in, but it usually is. I suppose the ragged bands who seriously oppose the capitalist State in living practice as well as theory all look alike.
I'm wondering when some of the defenders of the conventional are going to deal with this sort of thing rationally. This week's _New_York_Press_ carries an article by an "assistant national editor" of the _Washington_Times_ (yes, indeed) whose main thesis seemed to be that people who campaigned against laboratory use of primates looked funny and smelled bad. He also took them to task for having extensive bodies of evidence and argument to back up their position, which he knew from habit, faith and dogma to be wrong. Sound familiar?
I also wonder how some of those who have been having fun slagging "animal rights" supporters and environmentalists as Nazis and fascists would react if the same sort of abuse were directed their way. What goes around comes around.
Gordon