As The New York Times indicated in an editorial on June 22, 1997,  the time has passed when the industrialized nations can avoid the need for mandatory restrictions on the production of greenhouse gases by saying that, since scientists can’t agree on whether or not human-made emissions contributed to the planet’s temperature increase during the last one hundred years, placing mandatory restrictions on such emissions isn’t necessary.  According to the Times, this argument was laid to rest in 1995 when 2,500 scientists signed a report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  In a brief summary of the report, the Times’ editorial said the scientists’ “forecasts were gloomy” for the future, if present trends continue. 

 

At the time of the report, it was estimated that the average temperature in Alaska, northern Siberia and Canada had  increased by around 5°F (3° C) in the previous 30 years.  Although such facts instigated world-wide debate over the need for an international treaty (the Kyoto Protocol) to limit production of greenhouse gases, the ferocity of the protocol’s opponents often hid the fact that the protocol was viewed by many experts as mild rather than radical in its proposed restrictions. As the German Advisory Council on Global Change argued in 2003 after the controversy persisted into the new millennium, even if  the Kyoto agreement was “fully implemented, the protocol will only have a ‘marginal attenuating effect’ on the climate change.”  

 

Meanwhile, as the debate continues to rage, the earth’s temperature continues to rise.  According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2005 was the hottest year planet-wide since the late 1800s when instruments were first used to record temperatures. 

 

But how do we change these trends?  That’s the question.  As the Times pointed out, answering this question is no easy feat. 

 

What we are talking about here is not just altering people’s living habits.  We are talking about the transformation of key sectors of the U.S. and world economies.  Unfortunately, such a transformation is likely to meet with continued resistance from the corporate elites who control those sectors.  If the Nestles Corp. wouldn’t stop selling baby formula in the third world even after evidence showed the formula created health problems for the infants who took it, and if the tobacco companies were willing to let people die rather than reveal what they (the companies) knew about the relationship between smoking and cancer, there is no reason to believe the prime industries involved in the production of greenhouse gases will correct the problem without resistance.  Proof: in early 1998, secret meetings were held at the American Petroleum Institute’s Washington office to develop a plan of action for disrupting the growing national consensus on the need to support international treaties for limiting the production of greenhouse gases.  The plan, which suggested spending $5 million dollars over a 2-year period to lobby congress and saturate the media with the plan-makers’ views against greenhouse treaties, included input from Chevron Corporation, Exxon Corporation and the Southern Company.  (John H. Cushman Jr.,  “Industrial Group Plans to Battle Climate Treaty,” The New York Times, April 26, 1998, p. A1)

 

Such corporate attempts to influence the greenhouse gases debate are not new.  The pressure on government officials to side with the companies is enormous.  This was evident within days of June 1997 New York Times editorial cited above. 

 

Three days later, while speaking at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, President Clinton took a “tough” stand against air pollution by proclaiming his support for stricter measures for controlling air problems caused by smog-causing ozone and microscopic particles of soot. (“Clinton Backs New Air Pollution Rules,” The News Journal, June 26, 1997, p. A10)  Yet as it turned out, Clinton’s tough stand was a mirage, a carefully orchestrated public relations tactic designed to make him appear “serious” on environmental matters so that the next day, when he attended a UN Earth Summit Conference in New York, he would have something to fall back on when he rejected world-wide calls for greater restrictions on the production of greenhouse gases.  At the summit, Clinton’s rejected as unrealistic the European Union’s proposal that by the year 2010 the world should reduce its production of greenhouse gases by 15% below 1990 levels.  Following the lead of corporate lobbyists who argued that such limits would not be good for the U.S. economy, Clinton refused to commit the U.S. to any specific actions with regard to fighting global warming.  At the rhetorical level, however, the president grandstanded, saying the planet’s populations could depend on “a strong American commitment” to cutting the production of gases that cause global warming. 

 

Neither the European Union nor many underdeveloped countries were impressed by Clinton’s posturing.  A lot of summit participants were less interested in discussing how a strong global warming policy might complicate the lives of the world’s economic elites than they were in focusing on the human cost of not developing such a policy.  Syeda Sajeda Chowdhury, Bangladesh’s environmental minister, described to the summit’s attendees how millions of Bangladesh citizens could be displaced by floods if the Indian Ocean rises, as some forecasters predict, two feet because of global warming.  “We do not want sterile speeches here,” Chowdhury insisted at the summit.  “We want action.” (Ron Fournier, “Clinton Put on Defensive over Global Warming,” The News Journal, June 27, 1997, p. A6)

 

I agree: we need action.  Still the question remains: what kind of action?  And what kind of mindset is required to produce that action? 

 

Although global warming is a serious problem, my approach to the issue isn’t apocalyptic.  I believe that overemphasizing the issue’s apocalyptic aspect (i.e., famines and other disasters) runs the risk of making a global warming critique so millennial in tone that the issue’s connection to other problems becomes obscured.  For instance, the possibility that global warming could cause a swelling of the Indian Ocean that results in floods in Bangladesh that displace millions of people is horrifying.  Yet it is no more horrifying than the fact that the same oil companies which experiment with the planet’s well-being by resisting a reduction of humanity’s production of greenhouse gases have also damaged the lives of millions of people in the Mideast by supporting a variety of violent regimes and anti-democratic policies there in order to retain control of the area’s oil.  Example:  The 1954 CIA-sponsored overthrow of Muhammed Mossadegh’s government in Iran and the replacement of that government with the Shah of Iran’s terrorist regime, which brutalized and killed tens of thousands of citizens over the next 20 years, was motivated by Mossadegh’s plans to take Iran’s oil resources out of western hands and place them under Iranese control. 

 

Oil companies have been equally disdainful of human life in other parts of the world.  In India in 1966 there was a disagreement between Standard Oil of Indiana and the Indian government.  Standard Oil, which had received permission from the Indian government to sell fertilizers in India, caused the dispute by trying to back out of the original terms of their contract with the government. Although, in order to gain access to the Indian market, Standard Oil  initially agreed to let India set the prices at which the fertilizers would be sold on the subcontinent, once the company set up operations there it reneged on its agreement and demanded the right to determine the prices at which the fertilizers would be marketed.  When the Indian government refused, Standard Oil used its influence with the U.S. government to stop food shipments that were destined for India under the auspices of the Agency for International Development (AID).  The holding-up of the food shipments occurred at a disastrous moment for the Indian people, since the nation was suffering from a famine as the result of insufficient rainfall.  (Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism, Monthly Review, New York, 1969, pp. 128-29)  Knowing this, and fully aware that halting the food shipments would add to the human suffering and death already caused by the famine, Standard Oil persisted in its strategy until the Indian government capitulated.  Although Standard Oil of Indiana’s 1966 earnings in India were dutifully recorded at the time with the IRS and therefore became a matter of public record, what wasn’t recorded was the number of Indians who died, or developed permanent health problems because of malnutrition, as the result of the oil company’s delaying of the AID’s food shipments to the subcontinent.   

 

A critique of the global warming problem must point out that global warming is not an isolated issue, but is rather connected to a variety of equally important issues like the ones just mentioned.  Yet some environmentalists are not comfortable doing this.  They are less comfortable talking about how the world’s economic elites destroy people’s lives than they are quoting statistics about how weak environmental policies wreck the land and seas and atmosphere.  Such environmentalists are more inclined to stress the crime against nature that is committed when natural springs and streams are contaminated by modern chemical fertilizers than they are to explore the links between U.S. racism and the fact that a disproportionate number of the California women who give birth to babies with defects as the result of pesticide exposure are Mexican farmworkers. 

 

We do not want to make this type of mistake when analyzing global warming; we do not want to bury its connections to other aspects of the nation’s social-economic life.  To deal honestly with global warming entails wrestling with a series of disturbing questions.  These questions are not just about how to slow the production of greenhouse gases.  They are also about the relationship of capitalism to science, the meaning of progress, and the general social-economic context in which the global warming issue has arisen. 

 

Below I will detail some of my concerns in these areas.  I will do this not by discussing global warming, but by discussing issues I believe are connected to it. 

 

 

 

In May 1997 President Clinton made what Newsweek (May 26, 1997, p. 33) called “an emotional apology on behalf of the nation” to victims of  the Tuskegee experiment in which black men were used as guinea pigs in a four-decades-long government study of syphilis.  During the experiment, government technicians told the African-Americans that the medications they were receiving were part of a long-term syphilis treatment, whereas in fact the “medications” possessed no curative powers.  The experiment was born of the medical community’s interest in studying the physiological consequences of untreated syphilis. 

 

Clinton’s apology was made for the purpose of distancing the country not only from its white supremacist history but also from its participation in industrial capitalism’s tradition of using unwitting or unwilling humans in scientific experiments.  The Tuskegee incident wasn’t, therefore, just an example of the United States’ anti-black racism; it was also an example of the connection between that racism and, for instance, the worldview which fueled Nazi science during WWII.    When Joseph Mengele, the most feared physician in Auschwitz, used the concentration camp not only to purify the German population by ridding it of contaminants (i.e., Jews, the handicapped, etc.) but also as a laboratory from which he could select subjects for medical experiments, his Nazi mindset was not different from the “democratic” mindset of the U.S. organizers of the Tuskegee experiment.  That mindset’s essence, its conviction in its own ethnic or racial superiority and the freedom over outsiders that supposedly springs from this superiority, was evidenced in Mengele’s behavior at Auschwitz, as in the case when he was studying the presence of syphilis in identical girl twins.  When one of the twins developed diphtheria and died before his study’s conclusion, “he was attentive to and provided special care and medications for the surviving twin, who also developed diphtheria and who he was said to like very much -- until she recovered, at which time he had her killed so that her syphilis could be confirmed at a post-mortem examination.”  (Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, Basic Books, 1986, p. 355)

 

The Tuskegee experiment has not been the only U.S. foray into reducing individuals or even a whole population into an object of experimentation.  Clarence J. Gamble, the Ivory Soap heir, was a pioneer in the art of scientifically controlling supposedly inferior communities.  His belief that civilization was threatened by the uncontrolled reproduction of the lower classes (Thomas M. Shapiro, Population Control Politics, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1985, p. 51) led him to fund a population control effort in Puerto Rico during the 1930s and 40s.  Over 20 clinics were set up, ostensibly for the purpose of providing women with contraception information.  In reality, however, the clinics promoted the use of experimental drugs and procedures (ibid, p. 53) for the purpose of controlling the island’s population size.  Gamble’s mission to save civilization from the darkskinned islanders was part of a continuum that led to the U.S. medical industry’s use of the island as a laboratory during the 1950s and 60s for testing birth control technologies like the contraceptive pill and the IUD that had not yet been approved by the FDA for commercial use. (Harriet B. Presser, Sterilization and Fertility Decline in Puerto Rico, Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1973, p. 31) Just as certainly as Puerto Rico had been taken over by the U.S. military in 1898, now the Puerto Rican woman’s womb was being taken over by the original colonizers’ offspring, who saw the female body’s interior as a new zone to be monopolized and experimented upon by the superior race.  Not only were birth control technologies tested on the women, so were sterilization techniques.  By the late 1960s, 35.3% of the women of childbearing age on the island had been sterilized.  (Shapiro, p. 54) This phenomenally high sterilization rate suited the needs of U.S. industries like oil and petrochemical, which increasingly dominated the island’s economy.  Since those industries were more capital intensive than labor intensive and therefore not dependent on a large labor force, many economic planners considered population control a viable long-term way of keeping the island’s population small, which, they hoped , would minimize future unemployment problems and the social unrest that flows from those problems.  Just as the Third Reich sterilized cripples, alcoholics, gypsies and Jews in order to “purify” Germany and lay the basis for a future Aryan utopia, so the population control advocates who designed the U.S.’s sterilization programs in Puerto Rico also attempted to engineer the future by tinkering with women’s wombs. 

 

The transformation of people into objects experimented upon by other people is characteristic of capitalism’s development.  In the 1980s the Industrial Biotest laboratory in Illinois provided the EPA with falsified data concerning a study of the effects of pesticides on animals. (Robert D. Bullard, ed., Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, South End Press, Boston, 1993, p. 170)  The study was supposed to indicate the potential effects of pesticides on humans.  Biotest’s falsified the data in order to prevent restrictions on the marketing of the tested pesticides.   The company was in effect saying that if the pesticide business needed the freedom to test its chemicals on real people -- farmworkers , pesticide applicators, and consumers -- then the pesticide manufacturers should be given that freedom, regardless of the fact that health problems and even death might result.

 

General Motors has displayed a similar attitude toward its employees.  In 1985 it commissioned Harvard University to do a study of the side effects on workers of the cutting fluids that are used in its tool and die departments to cool and lubricate pieces of metal that are being cut for car parts.  However, when GM didn’t approve of the study’s disturbing findings, it attempted to alter the report, thereby angering the researchers who did the study.  Dr. Ian Grieves lambasted GM for trying to falsify the report by pressuring the study team to delete negative conclusions.   In the end, GM buried the report and continued to experiment on its own with how much of the cutting fluids’ toxicity its uninformed workers could endure. 

 

As it turned out, there was a limit to that endurance.  In autumn 1995 when an accidental spill of 6,000 gallons of the fluids occurred in a V8 engine plant in Flint, Michigan, the company didn’t inform its workers of the spill’s dangers and chose not to evacuate the plant, in spite of the fact that because of the accident the concentration level one of the fluids’ most hazardous ingredients (Comstar 50) had increased from a recommended 4%-7% to a dangerously high 57%.  Two days later George Block, a worker with an impeccable attendance record, developed breathing problems.  He called out sick.  A year and a half later he was dead from hypersensitivity pneumonitis, or scarring of the lungs.  Dozens of other workers in the rod and head department where Block worked have experienced similar respiratory problems. 

 

One of them was Alvin Davis, an employee with 37 years seniority, who developed lung cancer.  Before his death, Davis said that whoever the GM executive was who decided not to inform workers about the health risks related to the cutting fluids “is really a sick son of a bitch.” 

 

George Block’s son agrees.  He abhors GM’s experimentation with human lives as part of the company’s quest for profits.  Block says GM didn’t warn workers about the spill because it wasn’t in GM’s financial interests to do so.  “It was more than negligence,” Block comments with understandable indignation, “I think we’re talking about . . . a coldblooded analysis that it was too expensive a proposition to stop production or delay production.”

 

Workers in the engine plant weren’t the only ones damaged by the cutting fluids spill.  Barbara Offerstetter, one of the researchers who worked on the Harvard study and who reported that her findings showed “a significant decrease” in workers’ breathing ability, became sick in the midst of the study and was placed in a critical care unit with respiratory failure.  She has not yet regained her health.  (Channel 7 News, Detroit, Nov. 26, 1996)

 

GM’s experimentation with workers’ capacity to endure adverse work conditions on the job isn’t limited to cutting fluids; it permeates the totality of the work process.  In concert with Ford and Chrysler, GM has aggressively sought out ways to maximize the amount of physical labor performed per minute by its workers, even when increased workloads have caused health and safety problems.  In the fifteen year period from 1979 through 1994, productivity in U.S. autoplants rose by 105% while injury rates skyrocketed by more than 400%.(Elly Leary, Back to the Future: Workers and the New ‘American Plan’, New Directions Education Fund, St. Louis, Missouri, 1994, p. 23.)  Such numbers are shocking, and would be in any industry.  Yet most disputes between labor and management regarding the relationship between work pace and injury rates are downplayed by industrial relations experts as a normal part of the give and take between bosses and workers.  Such a relaxed attitude obscures a simple fact:  giant corporations callously experiment with new ways to increase productivity even when the evidence shows that those ways dramatically increase the number of injured, maimed and crippled workers.  It is no accident that as work is redesigned in the auto industry and in other workplaces and the pressure mounts to get more done per minute than ever before, health problems like carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive stress injury, have burgeoned.  This syndrome is caused when repetitive wrist movements over an extended period of time put pressure on the median nerve, which is located in a channel called the carpal tunnel in the wrist.  Hand numbness, loss of finger flexibility, and a wasting away of the muscles at the base of the thumb are some of carpal tunnel syndrome’s symptoms.  From 1983-1992, such injuries increased by 770%.(ibid., p. 19). 

 

In those workplaces hardest hit by carpal tunnel problems, there is no record of companies voluntarily reducing workloads or slowing down production in an effort to  avoid repetitive stress injuries.  Instead, the companies persist in experimenting with ways to increase “efficiency” (i.e., making employees work as much as possible during a given period of time).  While pursuing this aim, some companies have set up ergonomics programs and education workshops in order to teach workers how to work "right" and avoid job-related injuries.  The assumption behind these efforts is that job-related injuries are not caused by management strategies for working employees as hard as possible, but rather by employees’ ignorance and lack of self-disciplined work habits.  The existing evidence does not suggest a significant reduction of repetitive motion injuries in the near future. 

 

Only a thin line separates this corporate readiness to inflict pain on human beings in the name of a higher good (i.e., corporate profits) and experiments performed by helmet manufacturers on animals in order to determine the degree of shock resistance their products must provide to protect riders’ heads.  One such experiment is routinely performed on monkeys.  In the experiment, a monkey is strapped into place while two metal plates apply pressure to its neck in such a way as to twist the animal’s spinal cord and eventually crack its skull. (Saritha Rai with Sayantan Chakravarty, “Torture Chambers,” India Today International, June 30, 1997, p. 62) The willingness to condone the torture of monkeys in the name of industrial experimentation and the willingness to tolerate “acceptable” levels of pain and injury in the workplace are both premised on the idea that certain people possess the right to damage the powerless (workers, monkeys, etc.) for the benefit of society in general.

 

Some analysts have suggested this tendency to experiment with the lives of other people and other species and also with nature itself, without regard to the effects of such experimentation, is not just a matter of exploitation for profit, but is built into the scientific worldview. 

 

Carolyn Merchant, in The Death of Nature (Harper, New York, 1983), points out that, during the scientific method’s formative period in the west in the 17th century, a variety of social-economic forces injected into so-called “impartial science” questionable preconceptions about the meaning of scientific enquiry.  Merchant highlights how the scientific goal of understanding nature was from the beginning related to another quest: the desire to establish power over nature by conquering nature.  Merchant uses the thinking of Frances Bacon (p. 164-190), the 17th century empiricist who is today renowned as one of the fathers of the modern scientific method, as an example of how these two goals were intertwined. 

 

Bacon rose to prominence in the court of King James I of England in the early 1600s by propounding a scientific worldview that drew on non-scientific sources popular with the king.  Aware of James’ obsession with wiping out all hints of masculine behavior in women and of introducing harsher measures for combating witchcraft, Bacon depicted nature as a witch-like female who would only reveal her secrets to humankind if she were placed in bondage and tortured with the aid of mechanical devices.  For Bacon, such language wasn’t ornamental; it clarified that the struggle to comprehend nature was simultaneously a struggle against nature: to extract knowledge from nature one had to first enslave nature.  Bacon’s vision also contained a sexual dimension.  His view of the scientific method resonated with a conception of power based on the notion of male supremacy over women.  According to Bacon, who held the position of Attorney General under James I, the scientific method was a combination of two processes: (1) a relentless interrogation of a suspected criminal by someone in authority and (2) a sexual-like conquest in which the scientific mind (i.e., the male mind) should have no scruples about “entering and penetrating these holes and corners” of the natural world, even if the natural world resisted such probings and therefore one’s search for knowledge assumed a rape quality.  In Bacon’s view, knowledge of nature was inseparable from power over nature.   

 

This 17th century notion of scientific knowledge as a form of power over a subdued, enslaved or raped object (i.e., the material world, a woman, etc.) has survived into the world of 20th century science.  In 1977 the director of the U.S. Office of Population made this clear when he spoke of the need for the nation to train foreign doctors in “advanced fertility management techniques” so they could sterilize millions of women from the poorer countries in order to reduce the globe’s poverty population.  According to the director, the purpose of this effort to shrink the world’s poorer populations was to make sure these  populations didn’t, out of frustration with the lack of a fair distribution of the globe’s wealth, rebel against American policies and attempt to disrupt “the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world.” (Paul Wagman, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 22, 1977) Just as Bacon fathered a scientific worldview that was in its most fundamental assumptions bound up with the interests of England’s growing mercantile class and emerging industrialism (Merchant, Death of Nature, p. 179), so the director of the U.S. Office of Population did not question the premise that advances in medical science existed for the purpose of manipulating overseas populations in an effort to protect U.S. business interests. 

 

Although it is possible to dismiss such examples as side issues that do not shed light on “real” science or the “essence” of science, doing so damages our ability to ask some of the hard questions we must answer before we can determine what kind of future we want for the planet.  It is not in our interests to ignore the question posed by Sandra Harding, a philosophy professor at the University of California: “Could the uses of science to create ecological disaster, support militarism, turn human labor into physically and mentally mutilating work, develop ways of controlling ‘others’ — the colonized, women, the poor — be just misuses of applied science?  Or does this kind of conceptualization of the character and purposes of experimental method ensure that what is called bad science or misused science” is science?  (Sandra Harding, The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1986, p. 116-17) 

 

As Harding suggests, in the contemporary world it is increasingly difficult for scientists or science advocates to argue that in spite of the way the world's military industrial complexes have abused science by distorting it to suit the special interests of the world’s economic elites, there nonetheless exists a “pure science” which is beyond reproach.  Science is too institutionally bound up with world-wide capitalism’s power structures for us to easily accept anymore the idea that science now or in the past existed independently of the industrial revolution and the worldview and economic systems which that revolution spawned. 

 

Although there are certainly scientists (e.g., David Colton, Andrei Sakarov, Michiu Kaku) and scientific organizations (Physicians for Social Responsibility) whose humanism is unquestionable, science as an institution, as a set of relationships between scientists and big business and the economies they help to create, has been inextricably bound up with the evolution and promotion of military industrial economies.  In doing this, science has not transcended its original vision of knowledge-gathering as a violent act in which the natural world (and its inhabitants) must be dominated and manipulated in order to conquer chaos and understand reality.   

 

Rene Descartes, the French philosopher, summed up this mindset (i.e., to know nature we must dominate nature) in 1636 when he wrote in his Discourse on Method that, if humanity’s aim is to unearth the truth and to develop a “practical philosophy” that will help people to harness the material universe’s resources, we must first “render ourselves the masters and possessors of nature.” (Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, edited and translated by George, Heffernan, University of Notre Dame Press, Indiana, 1994, p. 87) Descartes not only believed  that in general the human attainment of knowledge was connected to the enslavement of nature, he also promoted a glorified view of the professional thinker as a someone whose quest for knowledge entails a series of mental “battles” (ibid., p. 93) in which the thinker, like a lone intellectual soldier, surmounts philosophical difficulties, subjugates confusion and discovers clarity.  According to such a view, knowledge is not just an awareness of facts; it is a sign of the knower’s victory over that which initially resisted his (or her) probings.  Knowledge is, in other words, an indication of power.  

 

Descartes’ vision of the grandness of the struggle for clarity was related to his sense that, in general “all excess usually being bad” (ibid., p. 41), it was the thinker’s role to promote orderliness and to do so by adopting an above-the-fray attitude toward the chaotic and/or foolish character of everyday life.   For Descartes, orderliness was everything.  Consequently, he supported a type of philosophical reasoning that was modeled on the supposed precision of the mathematical sciences:  “I delighted, above all, in mathematics, because of the certitude and evidence of its reasonings,” (Ibid., p. 21) The search for such certitude led Descartes to view the quest for knowledge as requiring a certain detachment from, as opposed to immersion in, the world, so that one could study, and subsequently control, the world more effectively by avoiding over-involvement in the world’s distractions.  In this spirit, Descartes said about one of his career’s more fruitful intellectual periods, “I did nothing else but roam here and there in the world, trying to be rather a spectator than an actor in all the comedies that are played out there.” 

 

Descartes’ emphasis on the intellectual as an observer whose productivity depends on his ability to aloofly (i.e., “objectively”) study the apparent chaos all around him without being overwhelmed by that chaos prefigured a view of the intellectual that, during the centuries following Descartes’ death, came to dominate western society.  That view stressed the intellectual’s -- particularly the scientific intellectual’s -- role as the leader of humanity’s effort to triumph over nature so the planet’s resources could be harnessed and controlled for humankind’s benefit.  This view of the intellectual as a member of an elite cadre of thinkers who stand at the cutting edge of history reinforced, in Descartes’ personality, his idolatry of other elites, especially the upper classes who dominated society.  Like the world of modern science to which he helped give birth, Descartes was a timid devotee of the social-economic status quo who was happy just as long as the powers that be let him pursue his private interests.  To the idea that society was flawed, Descartes’ responded

 

 

Although Descartes was an unadventurous supporter of the social-economic status quo, he possessed, like many intellectuals of our own day, a cocky sense of self-importance when it came to his supposed area of expertise (i.e., the mind’s workings) and those whom he believed were lower than himself in the intellectual hierarchy.  He sarcastically described his supposed intellectual inferiors as people who made “fine suggestions none of which ever results in any success.” (Ibid., p. 99)  He further claimed that these inferiors were a drag on a real thinker’s high purpose because they tried to involve such a thinker in “useless conversations, which could only cost him so much of his time that he would thereby lose” valuable hours which could be more profitably spent privately reflecting on the nature of truth. (Ibid., p. 99)  For Descartes, such reflection, such an effort “to distinguish the true from the false,” was a lofty occupation that made the successful philosopher or scientist an expert in reasoning, the one human characteristic that “distinguishes us from the beasts.” (Ibid., p. 15) Since Descartes saw reason as the sole method for triumphing over humanity’s lower nature or animality, and since Descartes viewed  professional thinkers (those with a mathematical orientation) as the midwives of such reason within history, he celebrated such professional thinkers as a vanguard in whose hands lay the power to liberate humankind from ignorance. 

 

Although Descartes was only one thinker, his views hinted at what was to come: a society in which conquering nature was viewed as the prelude to understanding nature, and in which those who orchestrated that conquering came to believe (like Descartes had believed) that it was in their interest to defend the governments that gave them the leeway to pursue their activities. 

 

In the 450 years since Descartes linked knowledge to the mastery and ownership of nature, the evidence has mounted that such an attitude, far from being peripheral to “real science,” is the very heart of the scientific worldview and has consequently played a major role in alienating humankind from our natural environment.  By promoting a vision of knowledge as the product of a power relationship in which the knower has power over the thing (i.e., the natural world) from which the knower extracts her/his knowledge, the scientific worldview, as it evolved, not only drew a skewed portrait of humanity ‘s relationship to the planet, it also took its toll on relationships within the human family.  Just as Christianity’s vision of Jews as the killers of Christ provided the ideological basis for the Third Reich’s anti-Semitism, and just as early America’s belief that it was the destiny of European settlers to take over the continent led to a policy of mass murder against the continent’s native inhabitants, so science’s vision of human progress as a phenomenon organized by scientific elites whose expertise entitles them to experiment with the world and its inhabitants as part of their quest for knowledge has laid the basis for the objectification (by those elites) of the very humanity that science is supposed to liberate from want. In the course of doing this, science has also waged war against the globe’s ecology and curtailed our ability to see ourselves as part of a complicated web of being that we should celebrate, not destroy.  If there ever was a time when science was distinguishable from capitalism, that time is now long past.  Whether in the realms of technological development, social organization or human relationships, science reinforces and propagates the interests of the world’s economic elites without regard to the impact of those interests on ordinary citizens. Of course, sometimes those citizens fight back.

 

In the early 1980s in Karnataka in southern India, the World Bank and other global agencies encouraged a massive eucalyptus planting project in the name of reforestation and “scientific planning.”  The project was a curious one in that the eucalyptus possessed no particular value for the inhabitants of the areas in which the trees were planted.  Nonetheless the project went forward, since in the language of international capital scientific planning had nothing to do with managing forestry for the purpose of serving local people’s needs, but rather had to do with reorganizing the environment to suit the need of economic elites.  In this instance, that meant the local forestry department placing its resources at the disposal of the paper pulp and rayon industries which needed eucalyptus wood for their production processes.  This was done in spite of the fact that even a minimal amount of “scientific” investigation would have shown the project’s planners what the area’s farmers already knew: excessive eucalyptus planting dehydrates soil and destroys it for more traditional agricultural uses.   Because of this problem with the eucalyptus project, hordes of angry peasants defied the power of the Karnataka forestry department as well as the dictates of global capital by destroying thousands of eucalyptus seedlings and replacing many of them with trees that were more useful to the area’s inhabitants.  (J. K. Suresh, “Response to Technology in the Karnataka Peasant Movement” in The Peasant Movement Today, Sunil Sahasrabudhey, ed., Ashish Publishing House, New Delhi, 1986, p. 168)

 

Unfortunately, while people gallantly resist the encroachment of powerful elites into their everyday lives, those elites are constantly updating their capacity to increase their economic and political power through the domination of others.

 

In early August 1997, the DuPont Co. spent $1.7 billion to purchase 20 percent of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, Inc., an Iowa company that supplies seeds and genetically engineered agricultural products.  The alliance between DuPont and Pioneer joins together the planet’s largest chemical company and the world’s largest seed corn company.  The purchase positioned DuPont to take advantage of an emerging economic trend in which chemical companies that produce pesticides and herbicides broaden their profit-making base by expanding their product line to include seeds that have been genetically altered to resist the side effects of the companies’ own pesticides and herbicides.  Months before DuPont purchased Pioneer, DuPont’s rival the Monsanto Co. bought Holden Foundation Seeds, Inc. for $1 billion — a deal which enabled Monsanto to supply farmers with soybeans and corn that had been genetically altered to resist Monsanto’s powerful weedkiller, Roundup.  Not surprisingly, DuPont followed in its rival’s footsteps by making its own deal. 

 

The immediate impact of DuPont’s purchase of part of Pioneer will be the creation of Optimum Quality Grains, a joint venture equally owned by DuPont and Pioneer.  Optimum will produce seeds genetically changed to provide more nutritious corn for animal feed.  The two companies will also create one of the world’s largest private agricultural research projects; the project will spend $400 million yearly to explore  the growing field of biotechnology, a “science” which entails the use of genetic engineering to improve agriculture. (Chris Aregood, “Chemical Companies See Gold in Engineered Seeds,” The News Journal, August 8, 1997, p. B12; also: Christ Aregood, “DuPont Co. To Buy Part of Seed Firm,” The News Journal, August 8, 1997, p. A1) As a “science,” biotechnology is interesting in that it has no life that is in any practical way independent of the corporations and government agencies that fund its research.  Consequently, its vision of the future is the economic and political elites’ vision if the future:  as giant chemical companies increasingly involve themselves in seed distribution and the use of biotechnology, individual farmers will have less and less to do with the mechanics of farming and instead become, if they survive as farmers at all, more enslaved to the dictates of corporate powerhouses that combine agribusiness and agriscience in one giant enterprise. 

 

The U.S.-sponsored Green Revolution in India is another example of the indistinguishability of science from the business projects that science serves.

 

India is a poor country.  More than 70 percent of its population, many of them living below poverty level, dwell in the countryside and earn their livelihood from agriculture.  By the late 1950s, only a decade after India won its independence from Britain, the Indian government’s concern with the sluggish pace of agricultural development caused the government to relax its suspicions about the possible negative consequences of western intervention its in economy.  As a result of this relaxation, Indian officials agreed to accept U.S. leadership in developing the agrarian sector. The result was the Green Revolution, launched in the early 1960s.

 

Theoretically, the purpose of the Green Revolution was fourfold.  Scientific innovations in agriculture were to be introduced into India in order to (1) make India less dependent on food imports; (2) combat malnutrition and starvation in rural areas by increasing per capita food consumption; (3) boost the economy by making the countryside wealthier; and (4) diminish tensions between rich and poor in non-urban areas by uplifting the poor. 

 

Although the Green Revolution did result in a reduction in India’s reliance on food imports, the project was a failure in all other respects.  From 1954-1983, per capita consumption of foodgrains remained static (Ranjit Sau, “The Green Revolution and Industrial Growth in India” in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXIII, No. 16, April 16, 1988, p.789) in spite of the Green Revolution’s proponents’ claims that technological breakthroughs would play a major role in increasing food intake.  Also, the predicted economic boost that was to result from science-driven improvements in agriculture did not occur — too few farmers benefited economically from the Green Revolution’s experiments, and those who did tended, for a variety of reasons, to spend their extra money on consumer goods and luxury items, as opposed to making economy-stimulating investments. (Ibid., p. 791-792) 

 

The Green Revolution’s biggest failure, however, resided in the fact that not only did it fail to reduce the dramatic disparity between rich and poor in India’s rural areas, it worsened those disparities.

 

From the beginning, the U.S.-designed Green Revolution did little to address the most noticeable problem in the Indian countryside: the fact that the vast majority of India’s rural inhabitants lived in terrible economic deprivation while a relatively small class of landowners, wallowing in luxury, dominated agrarian life.  The Green Revolution’s rationale for not directly confronting this problem was that scientifically stimulated economic growth in the agricultural sector would automatically rectify the poverty problem and therefore there was no need to rely on other methods (i.e., legislation, the formation of farm workers’ unions, etc.) for healing the countryside’s economic wounds.  At best, this was a naive view.  However, underlying this apparent naiveté was a vision of the Green Revolution’s ultimate significance that, far from being naive, made sure that the Green Revolution operated as a vehicle for increasing the wealth and expanding the power of those people whose products and expertise were indispensable to Green Revolution activities.  This meant that in spite of its humanitarian rhetoric, the Green Revolution’s overseers prime commitment was economic:  selling the latest (and most expensive) agricultural technologies to India’s already socially powerful landowners, who were the only Indians wealthy enough to buy the new pesticides, fertilizers, hybrid seeds, tractors, etc. that were crucial to the Green Revolution.  The Indian government, following the advice of international monetary agencies, even helped out wealthy farmers by setting up special credit-giving agencies to lend additional funds to these farmers when necessary.  The less fortunate were left out in the cold.

 

The idea that the economically powerless would be uplifted as the rural elites, benefiting economically from the new agricultural technologies, spread their new wealth around the countryside proved to be a pipedream.  Instead, rich farmers used their increased power to tighten their grip on the economy.  During two major famines in 1966-67 and 1971-72, these peasant elites insisted on selling their produce at high prices in spite of the fact that millions of poverty-stricken Indians were starving.  Having profited from U.S. assistance, the rich farmers had apparently also adopted their tutor’s unsentimental pragmatism: emotions of the moment must not stand in the way of maintaining price stability (i.e., high profits), even if the less powerful must suffer in the process.  During the Green Revolution’s key initial years (1960-68), the percentage of the Indian population living below poverty level increased from 38 percent to 52 percent, with the increase even higher in the rural areas.  As the alliance between U.S. agriscience and well-off Indian landowners grew, the average Indian’s plight deteriorated.  Meanwhile, a portion of the profits raked in by the U.S.-based companies who supplied the Green Revolution’s ingredients (pesticides, etc.) was reinvested in research and development, thereby deepening the west’s commitment to agriscience, biotechnology and so on. 

 

Unfortunately, not only was the Green Revolution as a program structured in such a way as to worsen economic disparities in the countryside, the “scientific breakthroughs” that were its centerpiece did not always live up to their billing.  The use of a variety of scientific inputs --chemical products, hybrid seeds, “advanced” planning methods, etc. -- ruined some soils, turning them into salinated deserts. (Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Zed Books, New Jersey, 1993, 113).  There were also other unforeseen consequences to Green Revolution innovations.  For instance, although wheat yields in general increased, yields for pulses (lentils, etc.) and oilseeds declined for reasons directly related to the Green Revolution strategy for upping production of crops like wheat and rice.  Whereas pre-Green Revolution farming entailed planting multiple crops in a farmer’s fields, the Green Revolution stressed devoting fields to a single crop -- for instance, wheat.  This had a negative effect on pulses and oilseeds, both of which are particularly vulnerable to pests.  Prior to the Green Revolution, pulses and oilseeds were frequently grown in the same fields as wheat and other foodgrains and were therefore protected by the covering provided by the other crops.  In the absence of that covering their vulnerability to decimation by pests increased.  Consequently, while wheat and rice production increased because of Green Revolution strategies, the production of pulses and oilseeds stagnated. (Dietmar Rothermund, An Economic History of India: From Pre-Colonial Times to 1991, Routledge, New York, 1993, p. 141) Another problem with single-crop farming was that, although from the perspective of agriscience and agribusiness it was an interesting experiment in increasing “efficiency,” it was simultaneously an assault on local farm people’s way of tending the earth.  Example: bathua, a nutritious green leafy vegetable that grows in wheatfields, was once harvested by women as they weeded the wheatfields: they then used the bathua to satisfy part of their families’ dietary needs.  Now, however, after the introduction of the Green Revolution’s vision of farming, agriscience has targeted bathua as a weed that, because it competes with wheat for soil space, must be killed with herbicides.  Consequently, as “efficient” single-crop (i.e., cash crop) farming moves forward and subsistence farming is destroyed, a free nutrition source like bathua is eliminated, thereby aggravating one of the problems the Green Revolution was supposedly designed to cure:  India’s already critical levels of malnutrition. (Mies and Shiva, p. 81)

 

 

 

Power and domination do not go unnoticed in the world.  They leave their mark.  Above I have given some examples of what these marks look like in our society.  Although the examples I gave are specific to the world of U.S. influence, they reflect a larger problem.  That problem, which has to do with science’s relationship to capitalism and how this relationship impacts on the struggle to expand democracy not only domestically but also world-wide, is a tormenting one that calls into question some of the left’s assumptions about the meaning of progress.  However, unless we wade through this murky zone, we will not be able to define what kind of democracy we want in the 21st century or indeed what the meaning is of the phrase “left revolutionary.” 

 

I think we can already be clear on one thing: for the progressive, democracy cannot mean an extension into the future of the logic and institutions that made it seem right to trick African-American men into thinking they were being cured of their syphilis, when in fact their disease was left untreated so medical technicians could gather data on their “patients’” health for a secret scientific experiment.  Neither can we condone a continuation of the worldview that resulted in the sterilization of 35% of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age because a smaller island population suited the interests of the capital-intensive petrochemical industry, which had set up shop there.  Nor can we support using the U.S.-designed agrarian development program in India, a program which enriched U.S. agriscience while depleting India’s soil of its nutrients and aggravating tensions between the subcontinent’s rich and poor, as a model for development programs in other countries. 

 

Each of these issues on its own symbolizes the corporate-scientific class’s commitment to exploit and experiment with target populations in the name of what is good for the world’s elites.  Taken together, these issues (and related ones) provide a beginning context for analyzing the corporate-scientific class’s willingness to play Russian roulette with the planet’s health rather than curtail profits by mandating heavy restrictions on the production of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. 

 

Neither the left in general nor the environmental movement in particular can afford leaders who are incapable of comprehending the connections between science as an institution, capitalism’s economic exploitation of workers and the poor, white supremacy’s objectification of people of color, and the moneyed elite’s view of the environment and everything else on the planet (including humankind) as resources to be conquered and used as part of their quest for absolute power. 

 

As this quest for power continues, somewhere in the background, in a small laboratory someplace, a lab technician puts a monkey’s head in a metal brace, then tightens the brace until the monkey’s spinal cord snaps.  The sound of that snapping, like the sound of the silence in the mouths of those GM officials who did not warn their employees of the health dangers of the cutting fluids that are used in the company’s tool and die departments, is the sound of our civilization falling apart. 

Global warming is one more part of this dead-end track that our society is pursuing.  Viewing global warning in this way -- i.e., as part of a society-wide process of self-mutilation rather than as some sort of “mistake” -- does not diminish the significance of the global warming problem; if anything, it makes the problem even worse: a group of people is experimenting with the planet’s future not out of ignorance, but because their obsession with power and profits is more important to them than society’s or the planet’s health.

 

The only sane answer to this attitude is rebellion against it.