Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
In
Chapter 1
, when I discussed the meanings of nature, I talked about
'degrees of naturalness'. I argued that we tend, almost as a matter of
'common sense', to recognise that some phenomena are far less 'pure'
in their natural character than others (for instance a botanical garden as
opposed to a wild orchid in a remote forest). This recognition reflects the
varied extent to which human actors are seen to have modified the non-
human world, intentionally or otherwise. Farmed landscapes are, of course,
anthropogenic in significant measure, including those that are not the result
of chemical pesticides, herbicides, commercial seeds and mechanised culti-
vation. For most commercially significant crops the world over, the source
of new genetic characteristics (germplasm) is to be found in the tropics and
subtropics (notably Central and South America, and South Asia). Firms
like Monsanto routinely 'bioprospect' in these regions and use the seeds
harvested from 'wild' and 'native' strains of corn, etc. as resources for
their attempts to invent new varieties of the same. But are bioprospected
landscapes 'natural'?
According to the patent officials and lawyers involved in granting
Roundup Ready and similar patents, they are. Yet this judgement denies
claims made by peasant and indigenous farmers (and their representatives)
that the germplasm from which Monsanto and other agro-foods companies
benefit is, in fact, the product of generations of skill and effort on their part.
These farmers and their forebears have routinely crossbred strains of corn,
wheat and other crops by selecting from cultivated and 'wild' plants and
exchanging seeds between villages and communities. Does this not count as
'invention', even though there's no written record or single named inven-
tor? Should a firm like Monsanto be permitted to profit from the creations
of farmers in the developing world by claiming these creations are 'products
of nature'? Is a genetically modified seed different in kind from the bio-
prospected, genetically hybridised seed stock Monsanto scientists utilised to
create their Roundup brands?
In an insightful essay, Thom van Dooren (2008) has pointed out that con-
temporary biotechnology firms and their legal representatives answer these
questions by linking the 'product of nature'/invention distinction to the
notion of 'the human' (one of nature's collateral concepts) in a very self-
serving way. This involves dividing the realm of the human asymmetrically
and aligning this strategic distinction with the nature/not nature one. On
the one side, the humans who are classified as 'inventors' are those who
work
on
non-human nature, not
within
it. They take nature (seeds) as their
object and analyse and experiment with it systematically so as to alter it
in replicable ways. On the other hand, indigenous and peasant farmers in
tropical countries have '[t]heir labour classed as mere “evolution”, a part of
“nature”, [and] not genuinely inventive' (ibid.: 682). As I said in
Chapter 1
,
the concept of 'the human' has always been an ambivalent one, straddling
the family of antonyms arrayed in
Figure 1.5
. As van Dooren points out,
this creates possibilities for some actors to use this ambivalence by seeking
