I learned about some of the ways that GMO’s were threatening the biodiversity of the planet and destabilizing our food supply back in 2000 when I went to my first protests and started networking with activists of all sorts. To be sure, there’s at least as much inconsistency, hypocrisy, abuse, and dysfunction within activist groups as without. In no way am I trying to elevate the moral standing of any particular group. What all of these people had in common– or at least the ones who weren’t poseurs– and what makes them exceptional in our society, is simply their recognition that there are huge problems with the way we live and that because we can not live this way forever, it’s imperative to find other ways to live. I don’t apply the label ‘activist’ to myself, which I think is a fairly pretentious, polarizing term to begin with since it implies that if you aren’t championing some specific cause that you must be inactive, which is both condescending and inaccurate because everyone is changing every day and so is the world around them. All life is affecting all life and the important question is how we relate to each other, not ‘if’ we act because action is inevitable. Something more like ‘social justice advocate’ is a better label if you must have labels since it clearly identifies a purpose that I can identify with: stand up for what’s good and right in the world.

One thing that seems wrong to me is the way biotechnology is being pushed onto people who neither desire nor need it, and that the companies doing the pushing aren’t afraid to do great harm to the world if it means that they can make a quick buck. Hardly seems like the kind of hands you’d want one of the most powerful inventions in the world to fall into. If you’ve ever wondered why people are so worried over genetic modification, you should start with the 2008 documentary “The World According to Monsanto”:

First off, the movie talks about accountability, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Monsanto knew that one of the chemicals it manufactured called polychlorinated biphenyl, or PCB, was harmful to human health but continued to dump excess waste from its factory into the surrounding community of Snow Creek for decades. They finally lost a related civil lawsuit to the tune of $700 million, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize how many tens of thousands of lives were impacted or destroyed by Monsanto. It’s also important to note that even though people died of cancer that was almost certainly linked to these pollutants, no criminal charges were ever brought against Monsanto.

This isn’t just bad in the way that the tobacco corporations can get away with saying that smoking cigarettes doesn’t ’cause’ cancer because it affects different people differently, even if in the overwhelming majority of cases it does in fact create cancerous conditions including heart and lung disease which is the #1 cause of death in the States, but it’s even worse because in the case of environmental pollution people are not choosing to engage in risky behavior. These people are simply drinking the water or eating food grown within their own communities. If you or I poisoned someone and they died from it we’d be up for murder charges, but corporations can poison people’s food and water for profit with criminal impunity.

When genetically modified, or GM, food was first brought before the Food and Drug Association, or FDA, it was approved as safe on the argument that all they’re doing is inserting DNA, and people already regularly consume DNA. This argument is completely disingenuous because what they’re doing by manipulating DNA is unleashing new lifeforms that the planet has never seen before, and the long-term effects of this on a human that consumes this new organism or on the global ecosystems that become invaded by it are completely unknown.

Did you know that in most FDA rulings, the majority of people deciding if the product is safe have money personally invested in what they’re reviewing? It’s a bit like letting the foxes guard the hen-house(with apologies to real foxes who appear to me to be superior to bureaucrats in every conceivable way). In the case of the approval of GM food, Deputy Commissioner of the FDA Michael Taylor was a former attorney for Monsanto. So the risk of GM food to public health was evaluated by a man whose previous job it was to protect the special interest of Monsanto.

Bovine Growth Hormone, or BGH, is perhaps the most well-known example of a genetically-engineered product created by Monsanto to increase the milk yield from cows. Veterinarian Richard Burroughs was studying the effects of this artificial hormone for the FDA. He was fired when he asked too many questions, and the FDA approved it as safe citing incomplete and manipulated studies. Later private investigations revealed that cows treated with BGH suffered problems with their reproductive and mammary glands, had increased rates of infection resulting in extra amounts of puss and also antibiotics in the end product, and contained elevated levels of the hormone igf-1 which has been correlated to increased breast and prostate cancer risk. When Monsanto sought approval from Canadian government, they attempted to bribe officials resulting in a nationwide ban that was soon followed by most of Europe.

Many of the GMO’s Monsanto produces are engineered to withstand the toxic pesticide Roundup, or glyphosate. The long-term effects of this are unknown, but because these food crops can not be contained they spread to surrounding areas and contaminate all other varieties with their transgenic modifications, destroying untold generations of work by selective breeding, and exposing farmers to lawsuits for intellectual property rights violations because Monsanto ‘owns’ the modified DNA and all derivative works. Industrial agriculture is bankrupting farmers and the planet just so a few people can get rich quick, while monocropping is setting up our food supply for an inevitable collapse. Without a variety of genetic diversity, our crops will not be robust enough to survive in the future.

So we have corrupt government using shoddy science to help prop up greedy corporations. That’s nothing new; it’s been going on for centuries. But what’s the larger picture here? Where is all of this leading? Even if we had a government without glaring conflicts of interest, if we could hold people who make corporate policy decisions accountable for the lives they take, and if we cultivated the kind of real transparency and skepticism that good science flourishes under, could we look forward to a bright future? Probably not.

Monsanto is not alone. There’s no shortage of pollution in today’s world: once you start looking around you’ll notice that so many of the things our culture makes are full of some nasty pollutants. The relevant term is “toxification of the environment” which includes not only the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, but many household products as well. There are studies showing that mothers’ breast milk is now full of toxic pollutants picked up from the environment and passed on to their children, which is particularly disconcerting considering the high degree of both vulnerability and helplessness that comes with being a newborn baby, infant, or toddler. Take dioxins for example, which are being produced by a whole spectrum of industries that have nothing to do with GMO’s. This is one of an uncountable number of ways in which the costs of doing business are externalized to a vulnerable population to turn a profit and so that those in positions of wealth and power can yield more wealth and power.

Almost everything industrialized civilization does degrades the environment, and as ever more powerful technologies are monopolized by the power elite, with the tacit or explicit approval of both capitalist and communist governments, these effects are multiplied. I’m not saying technology is bad– I’m no Luddite– but when the way we live creates an imbalance in the world, i.e. taking from the natural environment while giving nothing back, it creates a serious problem for the longevity of our species. To the extent that technology is not used to right this imbalance it simply makes the problem worse.

The unsustainability of industrial civilization is systemic: you simply can not indefinitely maintain an extractive economy based on the infinite exploitation of finite resources. In other words, because we are utterly and hopelessly dependent upon mining more and more minerals for production, on over-harvesting our forests(increasingly the forests of Asia and South America rather than within US borders), on taking too many fish from the seas, on dumping our by-products of manufacturing wherever we please, and taking everything we want from the world without giving anything back to help the non-human community(or even the human communities which don’t personally lick the boots of the 1%), we are courting self-destruction on a global scale because sooner or later, maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday, we’re going to run out.

I guess my point is this: widespread ecological collapse is already a reality, and if the destruction of life as we know it isn’t going to convince people to change their ways, then what is? I don’t have an answer to that. People are very set in their ways. But what does it mean that we live in a culture which accepts the death of most life as we know it as inevitable? That I can answer with some degree of certainty: it means that people are unwilling or unable to imagine an alternative to the climate of self-destruction that they’ve been brought up in. So if you care at all about your health or the health of others, and especially if you have the insight to realize the inseparability of the two, it becomes important to not only point out the injustices of the world, whether they’re social, environmental, physical or spiritual, but to spend your energy cultivating and considering alternative ways of being.

When the masses of this culture are finally forced to confront the reality of what the dominant culture has done to this planet, as opposed to being pacified by status quo delusions of ‘progress’, they’re going to need alternatives. When we start running out of oil and coal, when we start running out of space to live or clean water to drink, we’re going to need new ways to live. And the damnable promise of hope that our generation has been given is that we’re still early enough in this process of civilized self-destruction to have the luxury of contemplating better ways to live, but we’re in all probability too late to stop the current anthropocentric lifestyle from collapsing in on itself and taking a sizable amount of life on the planet with it.

And for the record I don’t believe in religious prophecies of apocalypse or of returning to some idyllic neolithic or even agrarian lifestyle. To me, the most horrifying thing about the destruction of so much of the world, which is self-evident if you have the time and eyes to look, is that we’re going to live through it and that we’re going to be forced to take part in it: that when our role in history is remembered, we will stand as witnesses to the total deforestation of continents just so that they can be converted into disposable chopsticks or pulped to make toilet paper and copies of celebrity magazines.

We can’t go ‘back’ to living in a world as it was before being radically changed by human hands, but neither can we go ‘forward’ to a world where our lives come at the expense of all other life without being caught in the same ripples of death that are drowning out more and more species every day. Our planet deserves better. People deserve better. You deserve better. If nothing else I am convinced of that. Every time I find myself working to make the world a better place somehow whether it’s by planting a tree, tending a garden, lending an ear to someone in trouble, writing a song, or even reading a challenging book, I am immediately relieved of any depressing thoughts because I can feel that I am a part of something bigger than myself and that my life has meaning because it’s a part of other lives. This relationship is what real community is about: it’s precisely what civilization has taken from us, and it’s precisely what we need to put back.