Un-making Environmental Activism

Beyond Modern/Colonial Binaries in the GMO Controversy

Doerthe Rosenow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138652279
• eBook ISBN: 9781317228844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze fisiche
• Subtopic: Geografia

Much environmental activism is caught in a logic that plays science against emotion, objective evidence against partisan aims, and human interest against a nature that has intrinsic value. Radical activists, by contrast, play down the role of science in determining environmental politics, but read their solutions to environmental problems off fixed theories of domination and oppression. Both of these approaches are based in a modern epistemology grounded in the fundamental dichotomy between the human and the natural. This binary has historically come about through the colonial oppression of other, non-Western and often non-binary ways of knowing nature and living in the world. There is an urgent need for a different, decolonised environmental activist strategy that moves away from this epistemology, recognises its colonial heritage and finds a different ground for environmental beliefs and politics. This book analyses the arguments and practices of anti-GMO activists at three different sites – the site of science, the site of the Bt cotton controversy in India, and the site of global environmental protest – to show how we can move beyond modern/colonial binaries. It will do so in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, María Lugones, and Gayatri C. Spivak, as well as a broader range of postcolonial and decolonial bodies of thought.

1
Un-making environmental activism

Tucked away in the countryside of Northern Germany lies the Wendland, which is a region that to the outsider does not stand out in any particular way. But over the past 40 years the Wendland has become a significant location for German anti-nuclear power activists, after a salt dome in one of its small villages – Gorleben – was chosen to be the Zwischenlager (intermediate storage facility) for Germany’s nuclear waste in the 1970s. Today the Wendland means a lot to Germans like me who have undergone their initiation into environmental activism by participating in the protests against nuclear waste transports that make their way to Gorleben on a yearly basis. In these protests, Greenpeace activists join anarchists as well as local farmers to occupy rail tracks and roads. In fact, the whole Wend-land population participates, with the anti-nuclear symbol ‘X’ being exhibited in many windows. I still vividly remember my own 2003 Gorleben protest in which I was given a lesson on the merits of the former Socialist German Democratic Republic at the booth of the Marxist-Leninist Party and learned about the dangers of nuclear power at the Greenpeace stall, while my partner – a Greenpeace activist – danced with a fiddler and his children on the occupied rail tracks. At the time, being a German environmentalist for sure meant to be ‘anti’: anti-nuclear power, anti-biotechnology, anti-rainforest logging and, already looming on the horizon, anti-man-made climate change.

Since that time the once clear waters of my environmental beliefs have become muddied. Environmentalists have started to prominently discuss whether some environmental issues are more significant than others, and whether there are even outright contradictions between the various ‘anti’-positions. In the UK, where I have been living at the time of writing for more than a decade, the renewed commitment to nuclear power is (among other things) justified by pointing at the need to protect the climate, based on the argument that the nuclear industry is allegedly low carbon. This is an argument not just made by the UK government (see e.g. Leadsom, 2016), but also by some prominent environmentalists. George Monbiot, for example, argues that the fighting of nuclear power is counterproductive for environmentalists insofar that it distracts them from the problems that really matter, such as the CO2 emissions of the coal industry (which, Monbiot (2013) suggests, can only be tackled by advocating an energy mix that includes nuclear power). Similarly, some argue that the issue of climate change should make us environmentalists change our attitude towards agricultural bio-technology, the activism around which lies at the heart of this book. Environ-mentalist and popular writer Mark Lynas, for example, publicly ‘converted’ to a pro-genetically modified organisms (GMO) position based on the argument that he has to be consistently ‘pro’- or ‘anti’-science. He cannot, so his reasoning, be ‘anti-science’ in relation to agricultural biotechnology, whilst being ‘pro-science’ in relation to climate change (Lynas, 2015). There is, he (ibid.) maintains, a scientific consensus for both the actuality of man-made climate change and the safety of GMOs.

What are the reasons for this professed desire to organise into a hierarchy and/or play against each other environmental beliefs, with agricultural biotechnology and nuclear power being two of the most prominent issues losing support among at least some environmentalists?¹ As Lynas’s comments make clear, the distinction between ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ environmental beliefs is often grounded in science as the decisive site for verifying claims about how nature needs to be protected best. Indeed, those environmentalists who continue to be concerned about agricultural biotechnology often counter pro-biotech arguments with the same logic: they point out that the ‘evidence’ for a pro-position is either not there or that it is inconclusive; in other words, they contest the idea that there really is a scientific consensus. This is often related to the allegation that those in favour of biotechnology are not independent scientists, but are compromised by their ties to industry (see e.g. Robinson, 2015). In fact, as I was writing the first version of this introduction, Riverford veg box scheme owner Guy Watson responded in the newsletter that accompanied my box for that week to a pro-GMO BBC Panorama episode that had just been aired in the following way (Watson, 2015; emphasis added):

I remain open-minded about the benefits that GM might bring in the future… but… bombarding us with emotive messages driven more by a PR agenda than by fact is unforgivable. We need, rather, a cool headed evaluation of the scientific evidence and the commercial interests at play.

One of the most interesting features of this quote is the binaries that it invokes, which also (at least implicitly) structure the arguments of those in favour of biotech: the ‘cool’ scientific versus the ‘emotive’ other, ‘pro’ versus ‘anti’-science, (objective) ‘evidence’ versus (commercial or otherwise partisan) ‘interests’.

In this book I will argue that this urge towards binarisation is grounded in a taken-for-granted modern epistemology that is delimiting our understanding of nature, reality and political transformation. Crucially, this epistemology has historically come about through oppressing and annihilating other, non-Western and often non-binary ways of knowing nature and living in the world, which is why I call previously mentioned binaries not just modern, but also colonial. What interests me in this book is what sort of environmental politics and activist strategy could emerge if we moved away from this epistemology and dropped this urge towards binary categorisation, if we acknowledged its colonial heritage and (consequently) found a different ground for environmental beliefs, values and politics more generally (cf. Braun, 2002)?

There are of course other, more radical forms and arguments of/in environmental activism. Indeed, the approach outlined so far could be called a mainstream, ‘pacified’, evidence-based one that usually complies with paradigms such as ecological modernisation, sustainable development and green growth. Such an approach sees effective governmental regulation as the best response to enduring environmental problems, instead of trying to change the fundamental oppressive socioeconomic structure of society. This institutional approach to ‘saving’ the environment has always stood in ‘historical tension’ with more radical environmental Marxist or anarcho-autonomist branches (Reitan and Gibson, 2012: 396–7). However, one of the contributions of this book lies in the argument that it is not only mainstream environmentalists that sign up to a modern/colonial epistemology, but also, as I will outline in one of the following sections of this introduction, many radical activists and scholars. Drawing on decolonial thought (e.g. Quijano, 2007; Mignolo, 2000), I will argue that radicals, while acknowledging that other, non-Western ways of making sense of nature have been ignored and suppressed in political and socioeconomic practice, often neglect the way that Marxist, anarchist, deconstructivist or otherwise radical Eurocentric concepts and categories continue to suppress alternative bodies of knowledge about the world.

This book engages with a particular environmental issue and the activism against it: agricultural biotechnology/GMOs. This issue is interesting because two of the rationales that underlie activists’ fight against GMOs have in themselves the potential to disrupt modern/colonial binaries. First, anti-GMO activists who continue to argue against biotechnology do so, as Lynas rightly points out, against the scientific consensus. However, that does not mean that they altogether abandon the scientific argument: drawing on complexity science they maintain, against mainstream molecular biology, that the organism (and/or nature as such) is a complex, self-coordinating entity that cannot be externally controlled. As I will show in Chapter 2, they contest the traditional binary between the scientist as subject and the organism as object and instead depict observer and observed as intermingled. With this they at least implicitly go against the crucial modern mind/matter dichotomy as well as related understandings of cause and effect working in a linear manner, and the possibility of predictability and control. Some anti-GMO activists see the latter as being the outcome of a human chauvinistic attitude towards nature that needs to be overcome. At least at a first glance, this argument seems to be close to many non-Western cosmologies in which the human and the nonhuman have never been as clearly distinguishable as they have been for the modern subject. However, as I will also show in Chapter 2, when it comes to the concrete political argument that activists make about GMOs, modern/colonial binaries re-enter the picture, particularly when a strong distinction is made between the ‘natural’ organism and the ‘unnatural’ GMO. Paradoxically, this distinction is based on the assumption that the GMO is a bounded entity the identity of which can yet again be described on the basis of inherent, fixed and stable properties (rendering it ‘unnatural’). This too easily leads to a call for excluding and destroying the ‘unnatural’ or ‘monstrous’, as well as a collapsing of the true and good into the ‘natural’. As I will show particularly in Chapter 4, both moves have very problematic implications for the way that non-Western cultures, societies and bodies of knowledge are perceived, judged, appreciated and/or excluded.

The second rationale of anti-GMO argument and practice that makes it interesting for challenging and overcoming modern/colonial binaries in environmental activism explicitly builds on a critique of neocolonial/neoliberal structures of domination. Prominent Indian intellectual Vandana Shiva, for example, calls Western environmental science ‘masculine’, instrumental and exploitative (see e.g. Shiva, 1989). Shiva makes a link between this understanding and the developmental and economic agenda advanced by multinational corporations (MNCs) and Western-led international organisations in relation to agriculture (see e.g. Shiva, Emani and Jafri, 1999). Shiva argues that this Western understanding should be replaced by an approach towards agriculture and development that draws on non-Western, Indigenous, nurturing ways of engaging with land and nature. As I will show in Chapter 3, agriculture is indeed a prime site for making visible what some scholars have called ‘ontological incompatibility’ (Carro-Ripalda and Astier, 2014). This means that the modern understanding of what it means to be human, of how the human relates to the nonhuman, and what the general place of humans and nonhumans is in the cosmos (all of which is significant for doing agriculture) not only clashes with non-modern understandings, but is incomprehensible to the latter (and vice versa).² However, based on an analysis of the Indian controversy around Bt cotton, I will argue in Chapter 3 that the continuous invocation of the ‘external’ (Western states, Western ways of doing agriculture, MNCs, international organisations) versus the ‘internal’ (traditional, Indigenous, democratic, local ways of doing agriculture) reinforces modern/colonial binaries at the same time as it challenges them. As the case of the Indian Bt cotton controversy manifests, the distinction that anti-GMO activists make between the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’ does not only refer to the GMO as opposed to the ‘natural’ organism, but also to agriculture as a whole: the ‘unnatural’ is linked to the industrial approach, which follows the ideas of the Green Revolution, whereas the ‘natural’ is embodied in the traditional, authentic, Indigenous approach. As I will argue, anti-GMO activists need to understand and challenge modernity/coloniality at a much deeper epistemological and ontological level; tracing it back to particular colonial and postcolonial trajectories. In the case of Indian agriculture, for example, activists need to understand how colonial approaches towards state and economic development that have wholesale swallowed colonial ontologies and rationales make it very difficult – if not even impossible – to hark back to an ‘authentically’ different ontology and agricultural practice. As I will show in Chapter 4, the continuous upholding of the modern=bad/traditional =good binary also has profound implications for the activist attempt to join forces across diverse geographical, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds – i.e. the attempt to make environmental protest global – which too easily leads to a reproduction of colonial oppression through reading protest rationales, strategies and activist identities through one particular (modern) epistemic frame.

In sum, this book studies the problem of modern/colonial binaries in relation to anti-GMO activism at altogether three sites: the site of science (Chapter 2), the site of India’s controversy around Bt cotton (Chapter 3) and the site of global environmental protest (Chapter 4). It does so by analysing the activists’ arguments and practices that we find at these sites, as well as by using certain conceptual and ontological resources to both understand and move beyond the taken-for-granted (colonial) ‘common sense’ of existing positions. The resources that I will use are in particular Bruno Latour’s (2004) attempt to overcome the modern society/nature binary by assembling humans and nonhumans in a new political collective, Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) foundational essay on coloniality, Gayatri C. Spivak’s (1988) famous questioning of the subaltern’s voice and her general take on power and representation, Gilles Deleuze’s non-binary metaphysics of transformation, and María Lugones’s decolonial approach. Some of what I have described above, particularly in relation to the Indian Bt cotton controversy, sounds close to a traditional postcolonial approach, insofar that I question how colonialism has in itself created understandings of the ‘natural’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘authentic’ from which the ‘postcolonial’ is unable to get away. Relating this interrogation to the question of how to pursue a postcolonial environmentalism brings this book close to Bruce Braun’s work on conceptualisations of and activism around the temperate rainforest in British Columbia. In his seminal book The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture and Power on Canada’s West Coast (2002) Braun aims ‘to strive towards a new set of concepts that might inform a radical environmentalism that is attuned… to the relations of power and domination that infuse our environmental ideas and imaginations’, with particular attention being paid ‘to the subjugated histories and buried epistemologies – often colonial epistemologies – that are hidden by, or within, the terms and identities through which forest politic… is organized and understood’ (ibid., x; emphasis in original). However, in addition, the aim of my book is a decolonial one. Indeed, I aim to use some of the mentioned conceptual and ontological resources to not just analyse the debates, but to pinpoint how the exclusion of non-modern ontologies and epistemologies that has become cemented in much anti-GMO argument and practice has been central to the rise of the modern project as such. In other words, I aim to show how modernity and coloniality have to be understood as co-constituted (Quijano, 2007).

Due to its transitional nature (cf. Preface), the book does not substantially engage with non-modern bodies of thought and practice, as the decolonial approach encourages us to do. However, it aims to use previously mentioned conceptual and ontological resources in dialogue with anti-GMO rationales and arguments to open up space for sensing the existence of ontological difference and incompatibility. As I will show throughout the chapters to come, this will make the book in itself become a means of disrupting modern/colonial binaries. Finally, the book will attempt to provide practical suggestions for how to concretely move anti-GMO activism beyond modern/colonial binaries. As the subsequent chapters and particularly the conclusion of this book will show, these suggestions are often (though not always) counter-intuitive to common environmentalist belief. For example, I will make a case for the need to respect the rights of GMOs for ontological self-definition, the need to let go of an ‘anti’-attitude at specific sites, and the need to understand and come to terms with the ‘unnatural’ monstrosity of nature.

Anti-GMO activism past and present

About 12 percent of arable land worldwide is currently cultivated with GM crops. In 2013, 27 countries used the technology of genetic engineering (GE) in their agricultural production, though most GMOs were grown in just five: the US, Brazil, Argentina, Canada and India (Macnaghten, Carro-Ripalda and Burity, 2015: 8–9). Biotechnological research and its application had begun in the US in the 1970s and had been initially accompanied by US public concern. But this concern waned after scientists had managed to convince the US public that the risks were both ‘marginal and manageable’ if certain guidelines were followed (Torgersen et al., 2002: 35). By contrast, due to strong public opposition, the Western European market has remained virtually closed to GM-products until very recently (Schurman and Munro, 2009: 156). Established NGOs such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth had taken up the fight against GM technology, as had more radical organisations and social movements such as ‘Gendreck Weg!’ or ‘Earth First!’.

In the so-called Global South there has been a rapid growth in the planting and selling of GMOs in the last decade. In 2011 more land was cultivated with GMO crops in the Global South than in the Global North (Macnaghten, Carro-Ripalda and Burity, 2015: 9). While the US, Canadian and Argentinian markets have become saturated, Brazil and India (as ‘late adopters’) have continued to expand (ibid.). However, both Brazil and India have also featured some of the strongest farmer-based anti-GMO movements in the world. In the late 1990s and early 2000s campaigns against transnational agribusiness in the Global South were coordinated by the People’s Global Action network, which included hundreds of Indian farmers and members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (Kousis, 2010: 230). While worries about safety have for a long time constituted the core of concerns in the Western world – particularly in Scandinavian and German-speaking countries, which became the stronghold of European anti-GMO activism in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Torgersen et al., 2002: 60) – campaigns in the Global South have been dominated by issues such as corporate control over seeds and the neoliberal context of the implementation of the technology (Kinchy, 2012: 14; cf. Schurman and Munro, 2010: 57; Jasanoff, 2005: 38).

Although contemporary expressions of protest around agricultural biotechnology remain in many ways wedded to earlier arguments (Kinchy, 2012: 14), more recently the rhetoric has globally shifted towards a suggested need to maintain the right to choose which way to farm, and the socioeconomic consequences that infringing on those rights might entail (ibid., 133; cf. Alessandrini, 2010: 9; Kousis, 2010: 236). In March 2014, for example, Mexico rendered a verdict against agricultural giant Monsanto banning the planting of GE maize in the state of Campeche on the grounds of protecting local Indigenous communities. Growing GMOs, it was argued, would go against ‘the local communities’ right to decide on what grows on their land’ (Dîaz Pérez, 2014).

The debate on rights is closely related to discussions about the possibility of the coexistence of GM- and other ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ products, and the potential danger of the former...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Un-making environmental activism
• 2 ‘No one knows what an environment can do’: from facts to concerns in the GMO controversy
• 3 Voices and visibilities: the Indian Bt cotton controversy
• 4 Travelling ‘worlds’: the protest of the Intercontinental Caravan
• Conclusion
• References
• Index