A Brave, but Maddening New World 
by Mumia Abu-Jamal, 1999 

"The more powerful the technology is at expropriating and controlling the forces of nature, the more exacting the price we will be forced to pay in terms of disruption and destruction wreaked on the ecosystems and social systems that sustain life. Certainly our recent experience with both the nuclear and petrochemical revolutions bears out this most ancient truth." 

 --Jeremy Rifkin, _The Biotech Century_ (1998) 

 Every single day, it seems, the major news media flashes with some new development that promises a "new and improved" or "miracle" cure for some ancient ailment that afflicts humankind. We are truly living in an age when all of the prior rules that seemed to govern understanding of the natural world are being radically rewritten, seemingly hourly. 

 In previous so-called scientific understanding, the world was separated into various kinds of species, and never would (nor could) one species interact or interbreed with another. 

 Welcome to the brave, but maddening new world, where anything is mixed with anything else; where plastic-bearing plants are being bred; where plants are seeded with a malevolent death gene, that turns off its life-bearing function after the first flowering, and kills the plant. Thus, anyone who wants to utilize this plant, say, a farmer, must buy new seeds every planting season! 

 Life, the sacred and special seed which bears the germ of life and sprouts living things for generations after generations, and feeds all other life forms, now gives birth to death! 

 What a life where every single seed must be bought and sold for every planting! There is a special kind of madness at work here, where the very cellular universe seems to be nothing, but another mere commodity--for sale! 

 Many decades ago, when the so-called Green Revolution was sweeping the planet (and especially, the so-called Third World), there were then promises of the New Golden Age of Plenty, when Hunger would be no more, and the Poor of the World would be filled. Clearly, that age has never arrived. The Green Revolution has left thousands of African, Latin American and Asian hectares of land as dry, sere dustbowls, contributing to desertification, renewed hunger and hopelessness. The only ones who truly benefited from this so-called 'Revolution' were the multinational fertilizer and petrochemical companies. The hungry, and the poor, as the old biblical injunction reminds us, are still with us. 

 If that was the case, why should we feel differently about the 'new and improved' biotechnical and biochemical companies that are racing to place a registered trademark on life itself? 

 Rifkin warns of the very real threat of 'bio-pollution': 

 "Genetically engineered organisms differ from petrochemical products in several important ways. Because they are alive, genetically engineered organisms are inherently more unpredictable than petrochemicals in the way they interact with other living things in the environment. Consequently, it is much more difficult to assess all of the potential impacts that a genetically engineered organism might have on the Earth's ecosystems. 

 "Genetically engineered products also reproduce. They grow and they migrate. Unlike many petrochemical products, it is difficult to constrain them within a given geographical locale. Once released, it is virtually impossible to recall genetically engineered organisms back to the laboratory, especially those organisms that are microscopic in nature. For all these reasons, genetically engineered organisms may pose far greater long-term potential risks to the environment than petrochemicals. [Rifkin, _The Biotech Century_ (1998), pp. 72-73] 

 In an age when corporationism is the ruling ideal of the day, every single facet of life is but a commodity, and merely something to be sold. The earth, rather than being to common human, animal and natural inheritance, is but a factory; Earth, Inc., and thus yet another megacorp in this new, perverse vision. 

 For those outside of the biotechnical loop, for the poor, and for the vast majority of men and women in this world, this capitalist vision is a killer. A new vision is required. 

 copyright 1999 Mumia Abu-Jamal