Coming Soon...

That "biopact" site ( http://biopact.com/ ) is a wealth of monumentally deranged ideas. We will definitely follow up some of those stories. What's this they say? Craig Venter, genome-research genius, promoting biofuels? With Norman Borlaug, "father of the Green Revolution"? Fantastic. Utterly fantastic, like the worst industrial-utopia monoculture ideas of H.G. Wells coming to pass. Now we'll refrain from making parallels with DNA discoverer James Watson's racism here, and let's leave conservationist E.O. Wilson's sociobiology debate out of this for the moment. Let us take a moment to think about what Venter and Borlaug, the Green Science vanguard, these great legitimizers of gene-manipulating hubris, have in common with old Joe Mengele and other eugenics-lovers...

Did Joe Mengele not think that he was doing what he did for the good of his people? By that logic, for the good of "all," at least the good of all beings that were "worth anything" in the Germany of his day? Mengele was in the Green Vanguard to be sure. These scientists need not be motivated by greed or sociopathic tendencies to do what some will call evil. "Progress" is a great motivator, a great excuse, something we can all get on board with, something we can all buy into. Take medical progress, which of course Venter promises (though his progress in this real may be more painless than Mengele's) -- doing experiments on living things no matter what pain or environmental destruction may come of such experiments -- can we not all agree that it's worth the costs and the risks, to make the world a better place for humanity (or at least "our" kind of humanity)?

Once we understand it's for our own good, won't we make our peace with the need for vivisection of cute little monkeys and with the violences of industrial animal "production"? It's tough love. It's necessary and even imperative for the future of humanity, the Green Vanguard say (as do those "on the frontlines of the Global War on Terror"), to torture answers out of living beings, so we can use the information so extracted to benefit ourselves and advance our interests.

Getting to the point now: We will manipulate all of life on this planet ("life forms," organisms, functioning ecosystems) to serve us and our grandiose ideas of what all of humanity should look like. Industrial civilization, the end-all be-all, will be justified in whatever it does to the non-industrialized peoples and non-industrialized environments of planet earth. A guy named Michael Novak wrote a book about this with surprisingly naked honesty ("with the cover left off," as Sam Clemens once wrote about the American imperial adventure during the Spanish-American war). We the developed are justified in undertaking any sort of manipulating and conniving to get at the resources under the feet of the "unreached people groups" (as the missionaries say), so that we can "help" them as we help ourselves to their wealth. How convenient, it works out for everybody! Everybody gets industrialized, now we're all in the same boat and have to do whatever the vanguard says we need to to get ourselves out of this ugliness.

Okay so this is digressing. Back to the parallels: If Mengele and his 1940's eugenicist buddies had the tools of Craig Venter and Norm Borlaug, what would they NOT have done with the all the unwanted humanity on planet earth? What would they have done to the humans that happened not to be "high-yielding," the humans that were not productive enough? The humans that did not serve the interests of the elite of that moment? For that matter, what would American scientists NOT have done? Patients at certain American hospitals were being sterilized in the name of eugenics even through the 1970's. Are we really actually over that phase of our hubris? Not at all.

Now for a modest proposal, and one that would have a certain familiar ring to Swift if he were around, except that the global elite's proposition is no joke at all: -(okay so this needs some refining, have mercy, it's a blog)-

We (the developed, the advanced, the saviors of humanity) are now undertaking what looks like a project to "retool" all of life on our planet to serve the ends and ideals of an ephemeral global elite. We are about to recklessly risk the continued existence of all the useful plants our ancestors so slowly adapted to feed us over thousands upon thousands of years (some landraces may survive in the doomsday vault at Longyearben, but we and our descendants will starve anyway due to either the greed of the life-technology patent-holders, or the total wipeout by super-pests of the weed-like monoculture we will have come to depend on thanks to life's patent-holders). We are about to risk the wholesale disruption of the ecosystems of this planet, entire "biomes," microclimates and all, so that we can plant plantations of engineered "fuel crops" to replace the existing "useless wilderness" and so continue to power our insane extraction and consumption. Don't worry, some of us will have jobs tending the plantations. We will be comforted with shiny baubles, the trinkets and beads and bread and circuses our employers provide us. The company will take care of us. The company = the economy = the all knowing, all-providing savior, the promise for tomorrow, Industrial Civilization and its most-contents (ok, bad pun on a Freud title, but it's staying). Of course we're in good hands. All will not be lost. We will only have lost our birthright of a living earth, an earth that was not a long arduous painful travail to live on (and we won't quite be able to put a finger on what's missing, we won't notice it's gone, just like we never noticed when we lost other birthrights we should have had as humans on earth, such as communities that were not defined by commercial transactions, or not having to trade our souls to earn our daily bread doing labor that was set up on someone else's terms [the terms of the owners of the planet], etc). And we will only have lost the poor losers that didn't have the foresight and wherewithal to patent life. Hey what can you say, the fit survive, yeah? Those losers will trouble our consciences no more when they're dead. Let's get on with it, what are we waiting for! Cut the dead weight, all that does not serve The Man and the Industrial Civilization he leads will be ancient history. Every thing under the sun shall be a commodity now, to be traded and profited from, for the good of Humanity of course. We'll all be "social entrepreneurs"! Everything is going to be okay.

Okay this is dumb, you get the picture. Swift did justice to this sort of grand vision the first time around:

http://emotionalliteracyeducation.com/classic_books_online/mdprp10.htm