Some of you will know (others will not) that last night I was privy to a workshop on GMOs. You did a great job Jess and should be commend for it – it certainly wasn’t easy.
The debate was framed in terms of the ‘Science of GMOs’ – not the social/political etc side of things which raised some interesting issues and I always love a heated debate. Too many people are too scared of a difference of opinion which just leads to apathy and pisses me off. If you’ve got an opinion then stand by it or change it but that will never happen unless you discuss it.
As opposed to saying “hell no, GMO” (I just made that up!) I was left thinking about the role of science in society, the revolution and the environment movement.
As a premise, progress is good. But can be blinding as we have seen with the blind faith that has lead to massive ecological disasters (think Damming rivers, DDT, the Atomic Bomb and much much more.) There is a great line in Amanda Lohrey’s Quarterly Essay (QE8 – Ground Swell) that is something along the lines of Science becoming the new religion and therefore blindly following it where ever it takes us – if we can do it, then why wouldn’t we. Such comments would lead you to believe that ‘Science’ is the natural enemy of the Environment/Environment Movement. Maybe this is simplistic but certainly it is very true of some parts of the environment movement (I won’t name names – we’re all friends here).
What some parts of the environment movement fail to recognise is that science is the only thing that will “emancipate” the environment. While all elements of the environment movement will acknowledge the importance of science, for a lot of them it is just rhetoric. My point being that a lot of the environment movement needs to get over its self, move on and acknowledge good science that discredits their arguments – GMO is perhaps one of these areas but I think the jury is still out on that one.
The flip side of this is that Science needs to pull it’s head out of it’s arse as well and stop taking the line of “science is amoral – I’m just doing my job you know.” Scientists – with rare exception – see their work in a vacuum. I think this is a product of the scientific method, which is not flawed in its self, but which encourages a modernist silo approach to most things. Science is probably the most “silo” academic discipline. There is a lack of interaction between science and other modes of inquiry.
Science exists in social and political environment that will have an enormous effect on so many things – more things that anyone can possible predict. And I’m not talking about the effects of GMOs on ecosystems here either. I’m talking about the fact that we live in a world where the majority world will be exploited, where things are determined by their commercial viability and governments are corrupt.
So the tendency has been to see the environment as separate from science. Not in the sense that science hasn’t studied nature, it is the foundation of much of our knowledge of it, but that when you dam a river science has a tendency to overlook the ecological damage that this may cause and concentrates on how much electricity it can produce (and relatively cleanly too).
So the environment movement must lead the revolution because scientific developments have been the catalysis for massive social change throughout history – often marking the turning of an era. So the environment movement needs to affect the consciousness of the population so that these mistakes aren’t repeated and so that science is used for ecological gain which in turn creates social gain. The environment movement needs to be the starting point, not the consideration tacked on at the end.
I feel I could write a lot more but I’m making too much of a habit of that. Got hug a tree – they smell nice.
