Common Ground: Mind of the Commons

July 2004 | Editor’s Note

Mind of the Commons

Author Gore Vidal has compared George Bush to a crazy kid who marches through a dry forest lighting matches, dropping them, watching the fires start, and then dropping another. Reading through promo for BIO 2004, the Biotech industry’s convention at San Francisco’s Moscone Center, that image had a special resonance. Biotech apostles drop seeds, not matches, and do so with a boosterism that bills the industry as a panacea for world hunger, disease, and poverty.

There is hubris in the industry’s glib dismissals of risk. One press release for the BIO 2004 dog-and-pony show tries to rebut a litany of opponents’ “myths”: “Biotech Foods are Unsafe to Eat”; “Biotech Foods are Not Regulated or Tested”; “Biotech Crops Negatively Affect the Environment”; and “Biotech Crops Will Cause Superweeds to Develop” etc. Brief rejoinders refute these claims by citing such higher, unimpeachable authorities as the FDA and the AMA. Yet I wonder if there is a single Biotech corporation out there willing to guarantee consumers 100% certainty about the safety of genetically engineered (GE) crops and their environmental impacts. How many times in the past have FDA and AMA approvals been rescinded or recalibrated because of unintended consequences or unforeseen side-effects?

Biotech may indeed have promise in medical, pharmaceutical, and agricultural innovation. But as this month’s cover story by David Kupfer reveals, the dissonance between Biotech apologists and skeptics is more than cognitive and cannot be dismissed as confidently as the Gene Giants do. GE crops are opposed by most Third World countries and by increasing numbers of citizen activists and municipalities in Europe. Yet here at home, according to Food First’s Anuradha Mittal, less than one percent of the United States Department of Agriculture’s budget is allocated to risk assessment of GE fish, seeds, trees, and crops — less than a million dollars. If Biotech is to gain public credibility, industry and government officials should apply a tenet from the Hippocratic Oath: First, Do No Harm.

The protestors and activists on San Francisco streets rallied around the cry, “Reclaim the Commons.” They invoked an ancient sense of the Commons that refers to the health and wealth of our most vital resources: land, water, air, and food; and, more broadly, civil society, its goods, institutions, and services; as well as the cultural and spiritual manna needed to sustain our interdependent life. As poet Gary Snyder tells us, human history can be seen as a struggle to control the Commons, or, alternatively, to reclaim and protect them from misuse and short-term gain by unbridled private and state interests. Their seizure, he writes in The Practice of the Wild, by either a centralized government or robber barons, has led to the degradation of wilderness, ecosytems, and agricultures. It leads to the loss of individual freedom and local autonomy, and the tragic destruction of civil society. That is precisely what protestors understand is at stake.

While BIO 2004 touts San Francisco as the industry’s birthplace, the activists are part of a burgeoning world movement that finds common cause with seed-saver farmers like Percy Schmeiser (profiled this month by Liane Casten) and with the thesis of The Corporation, a courageous documentary that unmasks the psychopathology of today’s dominant global institution. This new protest is a movement without a name, but one whose emerging program encompasses what Anuradha Mittal calls issues of “social morality and, for many, survival.”

At this magazine, the search for sustainable, democratic paradigms preserving the Commons is implicit in our name and editorial content. This issue celebrates innovative politicians and visionaries like John Vasconcellos and community heroines like jazz educator Susan Muscarella. We believe the seeds they have planted are part of the Commons, too. They sustain and enrich community institutions in our care and trust, and, as leaders, they deserve our attention and respect.

—Carl Nagin

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