Plant breeding as a form of gradual technological advancement is certainly a possible aveneu that we have neglected over recent centuries.
Selective breeding is good, but do you have any opinions on more direct genetic engineering, ie CRISPR or such? While GMO's have been a magnate for controversy and pseudoscience both pro and against, and a tool of capitalist expansion, modern CRISPR tools, for example, are *very* DIY freindly. I could see it also existing as a fringe niche in an eco-socialist environment, cooking up some of the really weird shit for the good of mankind. Thoughts?
Thanks for bringing this up, it's a big and important topic, and that's exactly why I deliberately avoided it in this piece! It really deserves its own discussion, for all the reasons you describe and more.
In brief, along the same lines I apply in this piece, I believe tools themselves do not have moral content. A frying pan can be a tool of life or death, depending on how it's wielded. GMOs are the same: they carry both the possibility of immense risk and reward. Wielded by capitalists in the service of industrial agriculture, they risk doing enormous damage to our ecosystem. Wielded by eco-socialists in the service of ecological restoration and improvement, they offer the opportunity to overcome otherwise insurmountable hurdles. An example of the latter is the GMO American chestnut currently awaiting approval: its safety has been researched exhaustively and its function is to restore habitat that has been badly degraded by disease.
We need much more of that, and much less Round Up Ready corn.
Thank you, I really enjoy how you articulate your ideas and what you choose to dissect in your writing. It really helps to inform my own writing and my work. Also cheers for putting me onto the land institute, incredible work, I’m now curious to see if anything in the same realm is going on in my neck of the world.
Great article, with many thought provoking ideas. Is the EFN predominantly an American organisation? I'm thinking about starting a more organised approach for my Common Silverweed domestication project, and would like to choose the right framework.
Thank you! I believe it is, but I can’t recall if I’ve seen any international projects on there. It’s certainly worth checking to see if they’re open to it.
Once you see how our income-based laborforce really works (the fact that high profits depend on low wages), then you’ll finally understand why a digital system matching people to jobs, resources to communities, and daily production, consumption, and waste management operations to personal and professional demands is actually more sustainable and ethical than today’s global political economy, mainly because, compared to scientific-capitalism, scientific-socialism is a lot more democratic; it values and views our very basic, very intuitive belief “universal protections for all” as both a human need and an environmental right.
I enjoyed reading this. However l, I think there's a need to expand our ethical world over the reality of plants, fungi, etc. We surely need to look forward in terms of "upgrading", as you would say, the plants we feed on. But this sort of instrumentalisation of everything -- be it living or not -- is precisely one of capitalism's hallmarks. I'm not sure to what extent the terminology used here serves the cause of more just world beyond that of humans.
In some ways I agree with you, which is why I opened this piece by saying, "Plants are organic technology. They are, of course, much more than just that..."
But I disagree with the implication that we should never think of plants in instrumental terms simply because capitalism takes that line of thinking to a ludicrous extreme. Applying different lenses to how we view plants is a necessary way of examining their many facets, and we should not deny ourselves a crucial perspective just because others abuse it. We can both critique capitalism for exclusively applying a single, extremely distorted lens to its view of plants, while simultaneously advancing an alternative vision that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree wholeheartedly. Again, there's a need, I think, of pinpointing this line of thinking prior to any arguments that has instrumental implications whatsoever, especially when there's an ideal for a life-after-capitalism in sight. The driving motive behind this, as I see it, is that within this system of massive exploitation of humans and non-humans entities alike, or nature, if you wish, which made any production, registration and consumption possible, there's a bigger system of production as its basis, hence preceding it. This system has its own relations, possibilites, actualities, spatiotemporal divisions and agreements, etc. Seeing it only as something of use to us, thus "technological," event though recognizing the fact that it (might be) more then that, is not just wrong, it's where the problem lies. Capitalism brakes the process(es) that dynamise it and in that sense it's coercive, building up <<structures>> of dominion in the place of all those already existent <<systems>> of dependencies and quasi-reciprocity.
We should breed, but being bred is as important, probably even more so.
Plant breeding as a form of gradual technological advancement is certainly a possible aveneu that we have neglected over recent centuries.
Selective breeding is good, but do you have any opinions on more direct genetic engineering, ie CRISPR or such? While GMO's have been a magnate for controversy and pseudoscience both pro and against, and a tool of capitalist expansion, modern CRISPR tools, for example, are *very* DIY freindly. I could see it also existing as a fringe niche in an eco-socialist environment, cooking up some of the really weird shit for the good of mankind. Thoughts?
Thanks for bringing this up, it's a big and important topic, and that's exactly why I deliberately avoided it in this piece! It really deserves its own discussion, for all the reasons you describe and more.
In brief, along the same lines I apply in this piece, I believe tools themselves do not have moral content. A frying pan can be a tool of life or death, depending on how it's wielded. GMOs are the same: they carry both the possibility of immense risk and reward. Wielded by capitalists in the service of industrial agriculture, they risk doing enormous damage to our ecosystem. Wielded by eco-socialists in the service of ecological restoration and improvement, they offer the opportunity to overcome otherwise insurmountable hurdles. An example of the latter is the GMO American chestnut currently awaiting approval: its safety has been researched exhaustively and its function is to restore habitat that has been badly degraded by disease.
We need much more of that, and much less Round Up Ready corn.
Thank you, I really enjoy how you articulate your ideas and what you choose to dissect in your writing. It really helps to inform my own writing and my work. Also cheers for putting me onto the land institute, incredible work, I’m now curious to see if anything in the same realm is going on in my neck of the world.
So happy to hear this! Thanks for the kind words!!
Another Substack worth checking out regarding plant breeding is zero input agriculture.
Great article, with many thought provoking ideas. Is the EFN predominantly an American organisation? I'm thinking about starting a more organised approach for my Common Silverweed domestication project, and would like to choose the right framework.
Thank you! I believe it is, but I can’t recall if I’ve seen any international projects on there. It’s certainly worth checking to see if they’re open to it.
Once you see how our income-based laborforce really works (the fact that high profits depend on low wages), then you’ll finally understand why a digital system matching people to jobs, resources to communities, and daily production, consumption, and waste management operations to personal and professional demands is actually more sustainable and ethical than today’s global political economy, mainly because, compared to scientific-capitalism, scientific-socialism is a lot more democratic; it values and views our very basic, very intuitive belief “universal protections for all” as both a human need and an environmental right.
I enjoyed reading this. However l, I think there's a need to expand our ethical world over the reality of plants, fungi, etc. We surely need to look forward in terms of "upgrading", as you would say, the plants we feed on. But this sort of instrumentalisation of everything -- be it living or not -- is precisely one of capitalism's hallmarks. I'm not sure to what extent the terminology used here serves the cause of more just world beyond that of humans.
In some ways I agree with you, which is why I opened this piece by saying, "Plants are organic technology. They are, of course, much more than just that..."
But I disagree with the implication that we should never think of plants in instrumental terms simply because capitalism takes that line of thinking to a ludicrous extreme. Applying different lenses to how we view plants is a necessary way of examining their many facets, and we should not deny ourselves a crucial perspective just because others abuse it. We can both critique capitalism for exclusively applying a single, extremely distorted lens to its view of plants, while simultaneously advancing an alternative vision that does not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I agree wholeheartedly. Again, there's a need, I think, of pinpointing this line of thinking prior to any arguments that has instrumental implications whatsoever, especially when there's an ideal for a life-after-capitalism in sight. The driving motive behind this, as I see it, is that within this system of massive exploitation of humans and non-humans entities alike, or nature, if you wish, which made any production, registration and consumption possible, there's a bigger system of production as its basis, hence preceding it. This system has its own relations, possibilites, actualities, spatiotemporal divisions and agreements, etc. Seeing it only as something of use to us, thus "technological," event though recognizing the fact that it (might be) more then that, is not just wrong, it's where the problem lies. Capitalism brakes the process(es) that dynamise it and in that sense it's coercive, building up <<structures>> of dominion in the place of all those already existent <<systems>> of dependencies and quasi-reciprocity.
We should breed, but being bred is as important, probably even more so.