PIRATES, PATENTS, AND PLANTS
Global warming is hardly the only environmental issue around which the United States has run afoul of its counterparts in Europe and the Third World. Another major recent source of conflict has centered on the emerging field of biotechnology.
In 1973, two U.S. biologists, Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer, combined genetic material from two different species of living organisms that, on their own, would not normally reproduce with each other. The new biotechnology, as it was called, allowed scientists to manipulate genes and to introduce new and potentially valuable traits into plants and animals.
It was not until the 1980s, however, that the commercial value of biotechnology—which some have compared to the discovery of fire—began to be realized. Investor interest awaited the development of a brave new legal world, one where living organisms could be patented and owned, giving corporations an incentive to finance research and development in this promising field. At the time Cohen and Boyer made their discovery, a patent could be secured for plants such as fruit trees and strawberries (under federal legislation passed in 1930) and for crops bred with seeds such as wheat and soybeans (under the 1970 Plant Variety Protection Act). Then in 1972, a scientist from General Electric tried to expand the reach of the law by patenting a microscopic organism, a type of bacteria that broke down crude oil and mopped up tanker spills. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office turned down his request. In 1980, however, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a five-to-four decision, ruled that the oil-eating bacterium was “patentable subject matter.” Wall Street was elated. New public offerings of biotechnology stocks surged.46
The Supreme Court’s decision was among the more far-reaching attempts to commodify nature in American history. The decision marked the culmination of several hundred years spent forcing the natural world into the straitjacket of private property, a process that began as far back as the seventeenth century when the colonists arrived and put up fences in an attempt to exclusively own the land.
Armed with the legal tools necessary to fully capitalize on their investment, biotechnology firms set about researching and developing new plant and animal species. They justified such endeavors as part of the long-standing effort to feed a hungry world. With the Green Revolution having run its course, they argued, an opportunity existed to boost agricultural yields and help impoverished children worldwide. “Worrying about starving future generations won’t feed them. Food biotechnology will,” read one advertisement by Monsanto, a leader in the field.47
But, in truth, feeding the malnourished has never been the driving force behind biotechnology. Profits, more than people, motivated this bold new science. Giant multinational corporations such as Monsanto and Du Pont have tried to cater to consumption-driven economic imperatives, while hooking farmers on pesticides and other chemicals sold by these very same companies. Early efforts focused on products that would ship well and appeal to consumers, such as tomatoes genetically programmed to ripen more slowly and taste better. More profitable has been the effort to develop genetically modified crops such as soybeans, which are mainly fed, not to people, but to livestock. The soybeans are engineered to survive in the face of large pesticide applications. (In the United States, pesticide use on animal feed is not as strictly regulated as it is on crops meant for direct human consumption.)
Monsanto introduced an entire line of crops designed to tolerate heavy doses of the company’s most popular pesticide product. Farmers can funnel the pesticide into sprinkler systems and spray far and wide, killing weeds without worrying about harming the crops. In return, the company requires customers to sign an agreement forbidding them from saving any genetically modified seeds produced for replanting, from sharing the company’s patented seeds with neighbors, and from using any pesticide except the one sold by the company itself. It has even hired Pinkerton detectives in the United States and retired Canadian Mounted Police across the border to handle those who break the rules.48
In the United States, biotechnology’s ecological impact has been limited, mainly because the Ice Age deprived much of the continent of biodiversity already. But history shows that introducing new, nonnative species, while potentially highly advantageous from an economic perspective, can also have unpredictable, at times devastating, results. The chestnut blight, gypsy moths, and other problematic fungi and insects have demonstrated the risks associated with introducing new plants and animals into nonnative U.S. habitats.
To date, nearly all of the newly patented biotech crops have been planted in the United States, Canada, and Argentina. But developing countries, many of which are far more biologically diverse than the industrialized nations, are also feeling the effects. Realizing the genetic gold mine still to be found in Third World countries, “bioprospectors” from the United States have set off to strike it rich abroad. Consider, for example, the neem tree found in India. Various parts of the tree have long been used there to treat a variety of medical ailments, as well as to fend off locusts, boll weevils, and other pests. In the early 1970s, a U.S. citizen imported neem seeds in an attempt to use them to develop a pesticide. He eventually sold his patents on the tree to W. R. Grace, the multinational corporation, which went on to patent a number of solutions derived from the tree’s seeds. Although Indian farmers have long been aware of the tree’s valuable uses, one Grace executive characterized such local, nonscientific efforts as an exercise in “folk medicine.”49
From corporate America’s perspective, Third World genetic material is often thought of as part of the “common heritage of mankind,” a gift of nature. In reality, the thousands of plant species once found in these nations (prior to the Green Revolution’s narrowing of seed stock) did not evolve on their own; they were the product of countless hours of labor, much of it conducted by peasant women who used kitchen gardens to breed and manage plant and animal life for domestic uses. “God didn’t give us ‘rice’ or ‘wheat’ or ‘potato,’” Suman Sahai, an Indian opponent of bioprospecting, has observed. Peasants did, working diligently over thousands of years to develop domesticated species from wild ones.50
Unwilling to credit such labors, U.S. corporations have sought to make the entire globe yield before the force of American patent law, with its predilection for private property in nature. In 1984, one Du Pont biotechnology executive called for “international conventions that would provide greater uniformity with respect to patentability.” By the 1990s, the United States had largely succeeded, through a world trade agreement, in forcing other nations to grant at least some protection to patented plant species. Vandana Shiva, a prominent Indian environmental activist, has been one of the most outspoken critics of this trend. She observes that the word patent derives from the letters patent granted to Columbus and other explorers as they set off to conquer and colonize the “New World.” The parallel she draws with the colonization process is especially apt. Recall that the European colonists found what they took to be vast stretches of empty lands when they first settled North America in the seventeenth century. That assumption allowed them to justify the conquest of Native American soil by assuming they were “improving” what had formerly been “waste.” Such a view overlooked the ways in which native peoples made use of these lands, outside the private property framework. Now U.S. multinational companies are seeking, following in the footsteps of their colonial ancestors, to define Third World genetic material—the product of countless hours spent domesticating—as just another wasted resource in need of improvement. International conventions confirming this outlook, according to Shiva, amount to little more than “biopiracy.”51
People in developing countries are not acquiescing to this assault on the fruits of their labor. In 1993, some half million Indian farmers gathered on Gandhi’s birthday to protest the patenting of the neem seed by U.S. multinationals. Five years later, an Indian farm association, which claimed 10 million members, kicked off its “Cremate Monsanto” campaign. Nor is the opposition limited to India alone. Farmers
in Brazil have destroyed fields filled with genetically modified soybeans, and the Mexican government has banned the importation of biotech corn altogether.
In Europe, where the opposition to genetically modified food has emerged the strongest, José Bové, the leader of a French farmers union, a man who in 1999 rammed his tractor into a McDonald’s to symbolize his opposition to corporate America’s takeover of the food supply, called genetically modified food “the symbol of a system of agriculture and a type of society that I refuse to accept.” Bové makes clear that his opposition to “progress” in agriculture is not based on some romantic notion that life was better in the past. He objects, instead, he says, “because of concern for the future, and because of a will to have a say in future developments.” In principle, he is not against research. Indeed, those who want to end biotechnology because they are seeking to preserve the integrity and purity of various organisms are in denial about the long-standing efforts to domesticate life forms for survival’s sake. Bové rejects such starry-eyed and ahistorical notions as these. His concern is that by applying laboratory research at the ground level willy-nilly, without fully contemplating the tradeoffs, corporations risk leading us all down a one-way street, making it impossible to back up and respond to new ecological challenges as they arise.52
THE FUTURE
In 1994, when McDonald’s opened up a restaurant in Kuwait, the line at the drive-up window stretched some seven miles down the road. In a country whose name is synonymous with oil, perhaps no one felt all that concerned about the traffic tie-up.
By the time it reached Kuwait, the American-based McDonald’s Corporation had been exporting its stores abroad for almost three decades. In 1967, the fast food giant took its first steps in the direction of globalization, opening restaurants in Canada and Puerto Rico. By the late 1970s, the company had 5,000 stores in operation across the world, from Asia to Europe. A generation later, the number reached 21,000, as the chain sold hamburgers and French fries to people in over 100 countries. Noting the fabulous popularity of the Golden Arches outside the United States, the company’s president for international operations observed that the hamburger franchises served “as a symbol of something—an economic maturity.” It might also be said that the company signified the very embodiment of American consumer capitalism and the thorough commercialization of the world’s food supply, with all its attendant social and ecological consequences.53
The amount of waste generated by this one corporation is sobering. According to the company’s director of environmental affairs, by the 1990s each McDonald’s restaurant disposed of 140 pounds of packaging waste each day, not counting the material used to wrap its burgers and fries and thrown out by customers themselves. Globally, that adds up to a total of a billion pounds of garbage per year.54
On the one hand, McDonald’s added to the world’s garbage woes; on the other, it put pressure on the planet’s already stressed forest reserves. It takes, according to one calculation, 800 square miles of forest—that is, not woodland chopped down, but the amount of land in trees, some harvested, some still maturing—to supply the company’s paper needs. That is an area equivalent in size to more than 450,000 football fields, all to supply paper to just one corporation. As it is, however, the company tapped forests across the globe from North America to Scandinavia to the Czech Republic, embattled woodlands all of them.55
It is one thing for people in a small country like Kuwait—population approximately two million—to pile into their cars and wait in line at a fast food restaurant. A more serious concern is what would happen, say, if the majority of the Chinese population—in excess of a billion—decided that they too want a chance at the American dream.
In fact, to a large extent, the Chinese are already headed down this path. The free market reforms put in place by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s openly encouraged people to embrace American-style consumerism with its cars, refrigerators, and air conditioners. In the decade following 1986, Chinese consumption of substances damaging to the ozone layer increased from 3 to 18 percent of the worldwide total. The frenetic pace of economic growth over the last two decades is transforming China into one of the greatest polluters on the face of the earth. In 1995 alone, the burning of coal—the country’s number one energy source—spewed more than 800 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. One Chinese energy researcher no doubt spoke for many of his compatriots when he said: “It is just as hot in Beijing as it is in Washington DC. You try to tell the people of Beijing that they can’t buy a car or an air-conditioner because of the global climate-change issue.”56
But the news from overseas is not all gloom and doom. In 2001, U.S. researchers reported that since the mid-1990s, while China’s gross domestic product surged 36 percent, its carbon dioxide emissions actually declined a full 17 percent. “There is good basis to argue,” reads a report by one U.S. environmental group, “that China has done more to combat climate change over the past decade than has the United States.”57 The Chinese example is living proof that the royal road to consumption—for all its ecological problems—does not necessarily have to be paved with disaster.
CONCLUSION
DISNEY TAKES ON THE ANIMAL KINGDOM
On April 22, 1998, Earth Day, the Walt Disney Company, the same corporation that created Mickey Mouse, Bambi, and Dumbo, took a plunge into the real live world of nature. On 500 acres of erstwhile cow pasture in central Florida, the company opened Animal Kingdom, a nature theme park that transformed a landscape of palmettos and scrub into African savanna and other exotic terrains, replete with nearly four million new plants, including 1,800 different species of mosses, ferns, and perennials, hundreds of different kinds of grasses, plus more types of animals than most people encounter on a vacation to Africa, from antelopes to zebras. Indeed, Animal Kingdom offers such a realistic rendering of Africa’s terrain that when South African ambassador Franklin Sonn visited it in 1998, he exclaimed, “This is the bush veldt. This is my home.”1
Disney’s Animal Kingdom is perhaps the logical end point of a culture that has been transforming various aspects of the natural world into commodities for some 400 years. The process began with the early American colonists who used the institution of private property, unknown in North America before then, to place a price on the land. In the centuries that followed, everything from beavers, trees, and pigeons to water, buffaloes, and garbage was drawn into the world of exchange. To a culture so bent on commodification, even the very concept of nature can be packaged up and sold to anyone with the 44 dollars that it takes to buy admission to the Disney wildlife park.
But do not for even a moment imagine that nature has come to an end in this supercharged commodity culture. The point of this book has been to show the ways in which nature figures as a force in American history. Even such a thoroughly contrived and artificial environment as the Animal Kingdom cannot escape the constraints imposed by nonhuman nature. Visitors pay to see animals, but Disney, try as it might, cannot guarantee its guests that the creatures will always perform on cue. The company may even be its own worst enemy, creating such a lush expanse of vegetation that the animals now have more places to hide. Worse still, local birds such as vultures and crows—not ones to turn down the offer of a free meal on Disney’s tab—often horn in on the food that attendants spread liberally around the park. And what to do with all the animal droppings has proved a major headache. In one 18-month period, the park’s wildlife produced 1,680 tons of manure. Gardeners carried off some for use as fertilizer, but Disney had to pay to have the remainder hauled away to a county landfill.2 The Disney company has plenty of tricks up its sleeve for entertaining parkgoers, but it has yet to figure out a way to toilet train an elephant.
In a sense, the travails of Disney’s Animal Kingdom are not all that different from the problems faced long ago by Indians practicing agriculture in New England, as they fended off crows and blackbirds, or the dilemmas that nineteenth-century southern rice planters encountered with bobol
inks, or those of the suburban homeowner today, who awakens to find that a rabbit has eaten the leaves off a newly planted shrub. No culture is in complete control of its ecological destiny.
One of the central concerns of historians over the last two generations has involved the issue of agency, that is, the question of how much efficacy human beings have had in shaping their lives and that of society around them. Some of the best historical writing has shown that despite powerful social and economic forces—from the institution of slavery to the modern corporation—Americans have improvised in ways that have allowed them to make history on their own terms while reshaping, at least to some extent, the very same economic structures that constrained them in the first place. Examples of how Americans have dealt with larger structural forces in innovative ways range all the way from slaves singing songs in the fields to inspire community and combat racial oppression to modern-day wage workers doubling-up jobs to give themselves a brief respite from the monotony of the assembly line.3
But even these more sophisticated efforts at describing human agency have ignored the environment and implicitly conveyed the idea that people have always had their way with the natural world. For the last century, most historians have written books as if natural forces simply did not matter. Our journey here, from the Jamestown colonists blundering ashore in a time of severe drought to the wet spell that initially prompted droves of pioneers to take up farming in the American West to Henry Ford’s failed Brazilian rubber project, suggests that, in fact, we need to rethink our assumptions about the role of nature in history. The stories that have unfolded across these pages demonstrate that it is quite simply wrong to view the natural world as an unchanging backdrop to the past. Nature can upset even the best-laid, most thoroughly orchestrated plans.
Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History Page 38
