Set some time aside to read Monsato’s Harvest of Fear in this month’s Vanity Fair. It’s a mainstream media magazine article covering the history of Monsanto, their legal and political tactics, Roundup and GM Roundup Ready seed, PCBs and bovine growth hormone. It’s a good overview and a good place to start if you’re not already familiar with this story.
Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
That is scary!
Thanks Steph – that’s a really great article. I hope it will provoke lots more discussion and thought about patenting living things. There is a huge danger in allowing our genetic heritage of domestic plants and animals to be controlled by the insanity and short-sightedness of the economy of multinational corporations. Patenting plants, for instance, could be a good thing if it made it possible for plant breeders (people, not multinationals) to make a reasonable living, and encouraged a wider base of plant breeding activity. However, it has opened a Pandora’s box in the context of a Monsanto. Their use of intellectual property law is outrageously abusive, and a danger to human life on the planet.
Maybe life is too sacred to permit it to be controlled by economic concerns…
Rumours seems to be true about Monsanto. I’ve never heard anybody speak up for that company, unless they were payed to do so!
They are allways used as the example of how wrong part of the industries deal with our environment. Wouldn’t that be a case for the FBI to solve? Why are only the small crooks caught, never the big ones?
Now I am torn.
On limited funds I was thinking of buying The New Scientist (for an article on the intelligence of cuttlefish).
But perhaps I should buy Vanity Fair instead.
Ah well.
Esther Montgomery
ESTHER IN THE GARDEN
Me, I’d buy the New Scientist and read the Vanity Fair article online. But I think the only time I ever buy paper magazines anymore is when I’m travelling.
It’s interesting but I have picked up what would be considered contraversial books by radical writers in very mainstream locations. Green is hot at the moment, it seems.