Our guest this week is Brian Tokar, one of the founders of the movement in the United States against genetic engineering, and author of a number of key works on that subject published in Z Magazine, The Ecologist, Food & Water Journal, Synthesis/Regeneration, Toward Freedom, and numerous other publications. He was the recipient of a 1999 Project Censored award for his investigative history of the Monsanto company (The Ecologist, Sept./Oct. 1998).
This show will be broadcast on Thursday, December 13th at 11 am and repeated Tuesday, December 18th at 6 pm. Just go to tribecaradio.net at those times and click on "Listen Live". After that, you can hear it in the archives by clicking on Podcast, click again on Steal This Radio, and then on Show #25.
Brian Tokar has lectured throughout the U.S., as well as internationally, and served as a consultant on technical and political aspects of environmental issues for community-based organizations on both coasts. He has been the key organizer of national demonstrations and conventions against genetic engineering known as "BioDevastation" gatherings, and serves on the national boards of the Native Forest Network and the Edmonds Institute. Brian graduated from MIT in 1976 with degrees in biology and physics and received his Masters degree in biophysics from Harvard University in 1981.
Tokar's books include: - The Green Alternative: Creating an Ecological Future (R. & E. Miles, San Pedro, CA: 1992) - Earth for Sale: Reclaiming Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash (South End Press, Boston MA: 1997) - Redesigning Life? The Worldwide Challenge to Genetic Engineering (Zed Books, London & NY: 2001) - Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger (Toward Freedom, Burlington VT: 2004)
More information can be found at http://social-ecology.org , the website for the Institute for Social Ecology.
Each of these books was groundbreaking when published, exposing different aspects of the technology of Genetic Engineering and the global resistance to it. Brian Tokar's latest book, "Gene Traders," exposes the role of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in forcing countries, primarily in the global south, to plant genetically engineered crops or to accept g.e. crops to be dumped in their countries in exchange for desperately needed loans -- AND, the massive resistance that this has engendered.
Interviewed by Mitchel Cohen, Brian Tokar covers a lot of bases in this first of two shows. He starts by answering the basic question: Which foods contain genetically engineered products, and what will happen to us if we eat them?
He then takes us on a tour de force through the world of genetically engineered agriculture to the edge of resistance, which will be the primary subject in the follow-up show.
Music includes: -Mario Savio speaking at the "Free Speech Movement" in Berkeley, California in 1964. - Jefferson Airplane, "Volunteers" (new theme)
Tom Lehrer: "I'm Spending Chanukah in Santa Monica" Dave Lippmann: "12 Days of BushMas" Suzanne Vega: "Tom's Diner" Steve Martin: "The Dentist -- Leader of the Plaque" (from Little Shop of Horrors) Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen: "Forever Young"
Comments welcome, both here and on the website itself.