War Against Ourselves. Jacklyn Cock

beer and yogurt. Combining genes from different organisms is known as recombinant DNA technology, and the resulting organism is said to be ‘genetically modified’, ‘genetically engineered’ or ‘transgenic’. Genetically modified (GM) products include medicines and vaccines, foods and food ingredients, feeds and fibres. Many million acres of farmland have been planted with GM crops that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. South Africa is one of the world’s largest producers of GM crops.

      The conquest and commodification of nature is dramatically illustrated by this process of genetic engineering. Certainly it means a massive increase in the human control of nature and a reordering of nature. Yet that achievement — human power over nature — comes at a price, namely in the case of agriculture, a dependence on expensive seed, chemical fertilisers, pesticides, machinery and fuel, often controlled by the multinational corporations. GM crops are patented, and by law the seeds cannot be saved and planted the following year, meaning farmers have to purchase new seed each season. Many of Africa’s subsistence farmers who rely on saved seed are too poor to do this. Controversies surrounding GM foods and crops commonly focus on human and environmental safety, labelling and consumer choice, intellectual property rights, ethics, food security, poverty reduction and environmental conservation (Keller, 2000).

      These are the priority issues for Vandana Shiva, who argues that small biodiverse farms produce more than chemically and genetically engineered monoculture. According to her, despite much talk about the control and regulation of the corporation, ten years after the Earth Summit at Rio, the emphasis is on the market and ‘profit is the only god’. Shiva calls genetic engineering, life patenting and free trade, ‘the unholy alliance’. She points to a ‘new colonialism’: people are being turned into slaves, not by governments, but by the corporations that control the seeds and the food supply. There is a ‘marketisation of the very sources we need to survive’ (Shiva, 2002: 6).

      The degree of control that life patents grant their owners is deeply worrying. Patents on food crops and cloned animals have a growing potential to cede control of the world’s food supply to biotech patent holders. More than 20 per cent of human genes have already been patented, and most of those patents are owned by corporations.

      Some warn that the new genetics could lead to a discriminatory new eugenic movement that compromises black and poor people. As one writer expresses it, the new human genetic technologies could facilitate a new kind of consumer eugenics that

      for the first time offers parents the opportunity to ‘design’ a baby, with certain properties, turning nature into an artefact. In the USA advertising has already begun to claim that ‘designer babies’ can be created, by selecting sex and other traits, on demand (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2006: 41).

      Sometimes this manipulation of life forms seems grotesque in the ways it violates the boundaries between species to produce what anti-GM foods activist Jeffrey Smith terms ‘frankenfoods’. For example, Pollan points out that ‘plant breeders have developed a luminescent tobacco plant by inserting a gene from a firefly’ (Pollan, 2001: 198). But it is difficult to overestimate the revolutionary nature of current research. Scientists warn of unanticipated consequences from bioengineering and from introducing new organisms into nature. The cloning of ‘Dolly’ the ewe in 1997 raises the stakes in the manipulation of animals and plants. The process of cloning, which could be called a breakthrough technology of biblical proportions, took an adult cell from the ewe’s mammary gland and created an embryo, reversing the process of ageing to one of birth. Scottish scientist Ian Wilmut was compared to God by Time magazine: ‘Not since God took Adam’s rib and fashioned a helpmate for him has anything so fantastic occurred’ (cited in Merchant, 2004: 175).

      Ironically, for many people reproductive cloning is ‘going against nature’. The most worrying aspect is that

      genetic manipulation is a concerted effort by biotech corporations to eliminate the randomness that is inherent to nature — whether the natural growth of plants and animals or the natural process of ... reproduction — and to reconfigure it as an industrial process (Heinrich Böll Foundation, 2006: 8).

      These industrial processes are driven by market forces. According to Keller,

      the new partnerships between science and commerce that are daily being forged by the promises of genomics bind genetics to the market with a strength and intimacy that is unprecedented in the annals of basic research in the life sciences (Keller, 2000: 143).

      The new genetic technologies are mostly owned by multinational corporations, and much of this manipulation of nature involves increasing corporate profits. For example, dairy cows produce more milk with less fat when cows are injected with a bovine growth hormone such as Posilac, marketed by Monsanto Chemicals. More milk per cow means more profit for the dairy farmer and for Monsanto. Every cow not treated with Posilac is considered by Monsanto a ‘lost income opportunity’ (cited in Merchant, 2004: 173).

      These industrial processes are part of the increasing neo-liberal commodification of nature. This involves not only converting seeds into commodities to be bought and sold, but also water, electricity and land. The burden of these costs is borne by the poor and the powerless.

      While the commodification of land goes back to the enclosure movement in eighteenth century Europe, the ‘newness’ of many of these practices has led some writers to focus on nature as a marker of social change. Our relationship to nature has been ‘socialised’: nature has been ‘denatured’; it has come to an end in what is variously conceptualised as ‘the risk society’ or ‘the network society’ or ‘post-modernity’.

      NATURE AS A MARKER OF SOCIAL CHANGE

      Most of the great social theorists were concerned with human relations with nature. For example, Karl Marx asserted that man is a ‘part of nature’, defined communism as ‘the unity of being of man with nature’, and ‘repeatedly emphasized the imperative for post-capitalist society to manage its use of natural resources responsibly’ (Burkett, 2005: 46). In his classic, The Great Transformation, Polanyi warned that the market threatened both land and the human species, using ‘land’ as ‘another name for nature’ (Polanyi, 1957: 72). Several social theorists, including Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, Fredric Jameson and Anthony Giddens, use our relationship to nature as a kind of marker of social change. Giddens, a British sociologist, maintains that the ‘major revolutions of our time are globalization, transformation in personal life and our relationship to nature’ (Giddens, 1990: 64). Giddens conceptualises this contemporary relationship as marked by the ‘socialization’ or ‘humanization of nature’. He points out that the protection of nature is routinely confused with the preservation — or reinvention — of social or cultural traditions:

      A ‘return to nature’ is assumed to provide a justification for preserving tradition ... yet there is no intrinsic relation between one and the other. ... It is assumed that those who live ‘close to nature’ are intrinsically more in harmony with it than are moderns — hence the admiration often expressed for hunting and gathering ... However … nature often only becomes a beneficent force once it has been largely subjected to human control; for many who live close to it, nature may be hostile and feared ... Mastery over nature means destroying it in the sense that socialised nature is by definition no longer natural ... Nature has come to an end in a parallel way to tradition. The point at which the denaturing of nature effectively ended our ‘natural environment’ cannot be fixed in an exact way; but somewhere over the last century or so the age-old relation between human beings and nature was broken through the reverse. Instead of being concerned above all with what nature could do to us, we have now to worry about what we have done to nature. To confront the problem of the humanization of nature means beginning from the existence of ‘plastic nature’ — nature as incorporated within a post-traditional order (Giddens, 1994: 234).

      In similar terms, Castells discusses historical transformations in terms of the changing pattern of relationships between ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’. Using this criterion, we are in a new era, what he calls ‘a globalised network society’. The first model of relationship between nature and culture, these

      two fundamental poles of human existence,