04w11:1 Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva Posted March 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 1 (Patrick Moore vs. Vandana Shiva) ——————————————————————— Eco-Traitor | Drake Bennett http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/moore_pr.html “Patrick Moore has been called a sellout, traitor, parasite, and prostitute […] Moore helped found Greenpeace and devoted 15 years to waging the organization’s flamboyant brand of environmental warfare. […] He derides today’s activists as philosophically unmoored and blindly technophobic, and he offers an alternative philosophy that not only accepts but celebrates humankind’s growing ability to alter the planet. […] ‘As I like to say, maybe it’s time to figure out what the solutions are, rather than just focusing on problems.’ […] When I understood sustainable development,’ he recalls, ‘I realized that the challenge was to take these new environmental values that we had forged and incorporate them into the traditional social and economic values that drive public policy. In other words, it was a job of synthesis.’ ” Battle for Biotech Progress | Patrick Moore http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17889/article_detail.asp “The campaign of fear now waged against genetic modification is based largely on fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic. In the balance it is clear that the real benefits of genetic modification far outweigh the hypothetical and sometimes contrived risks claimed by its detractors. […] For six years, anti-biotech activists managed to prevent the introduction of G.M. crops in India. This was largely the work of Vandana Shiva, the Oxford-educated daughter of a wealthy Indian family, who has campaigned relentlessly to ‘protect’ poor farmers from the ravages of multinational seed companies. In 2002, she was given the Hero of the Planet award by Time magazine for ‘defending traditional agricultural practices.’ Read: poverty and ignorance. It looked like Shiva would win the G.M. debate until 2001, when unknown persons illegally planted 25,000 acres of Bt cotton in Gujarat. The cotton bollworm infestation was particularly bad that year, and there was soon a 25,000 acre plot of beautiful green cotton in a sea of brown. The local authorities were notified and decided that the illegal cotton must be burned. This was too much for the farmers, who could now clearly see the benefits of the Bt variety. In a classic march to city hall with pitchforks in hand, the farmers protested and won the day. Bt cotton was approved for planting in March 2002. One hopes the poverty-stricken cotton farmers of India will become wealthier and deprive Vandana Shiva of her parasitical practice. ” Poverty & Globalisation | Vandana Shiva http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/reith_2000/lecture5.stm “Who feeds the world? My answer is very different to that given by most people. It is women and small farmers working with biodiversity who are the primary food providers in the Third World, and contrary to the dominant assumption, their biodiversity based small farms are more productive than industrial monocultures. This deliberate blindness to diversity, the blindness to nature’s production, production by women, production by Third World farmers allows destruction and appropriation to be projected as creation. Take the case of the much flouted ‘golden rice’ or genetically engineered Vitamin A rice as a cure for blindness. It is assumed that without genetic engineering we cannot remove Vitamin A deficiency. However, nature gives us abundant and diverse sources of vitamin A. If rice was not polished, rice itself would provide Vitamin A. If herbicides were not sprayed on our wheat fields, we would have bathua, amaranth, mustard leaves as delicious and nutritious greens that provide Vitamin A. The devaluation and invisibility of sustainable, regenerative production is most glaring in the area of food. While patriarchal division of labour has assigned women the role of feeding their families and communities, patriarchal economics and patriarchal views of science and technology magically make women’s work in providing food disappear. ‘Feeding the World’ becomes disassociated from the women who actually do it and is projected as dependent on global agribusiness and biotechnology corporations. ” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 07 March 2004 @ 12:48 PM
