18

Big Science and the Curious Notion of “Progress”

The radical social movements of the 1960s blossomed into an emerging ecology movement. In the 1980s, the women’s liberation movement began issuing profound critiques of science. Previously, Marxists had endorsed Vladimir Lenin’s industrial-centered view that socialism equals workers’ councils (soviets) plus installation of electrical wiring—a view of socialism, and of science, that was not very different than liberal policy-makers in industrial capitalist countries. But in the 1970s, a number of scientists began to challenge not only the Marxian question of who owns and controls Science (with a capital “S,” what I call “Big Science”), but explored, questioned, and challenged the cultural and political assumptions embedded in the scientific method itself and its “search for objectivity,” which had been the goal of scientific inquiry since the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Radical scientists in the social movements produced magazines such as Science for the People, with the aim of demystifying science and re-examining science’s core notions. Richard Levins, Martha Herbert, Ivan Illich, and many others published sustained critiques of science, and created an El Niño of sorts that wound its way into the late 1980s. All during this time, anarchists, too, were issuing critique after critique of corporate environmentalism, which led to the school of thought known as social ecology.1 These incisive intellectual investigations, all occurring at the same time and feeding off of each other and the social and antiwar movements they were part of, revealed the capitalist ideological imperatives concentrated in the very essence of science. The currents cohered into mass-movements against nuclear power, genetic engineering, global warming, the globalization of capital, the robotization of work, the massive application of pesticides, and in favor of animal rights and alternatives to the pharmaceutical-industrial model of health care. And, dialectically, these movements inspired renewed interest in radical critiques of science and industrialization.

The movements to task the idea that science and technology are somehow “neutral” and “objective,” and challenged that framework as itself part of an ideological construct and a figment of capitalist mythology. So too with what they saw as capitalism’s similarly reified invention of a universal, greedy, and unchanging human nature, which “objective” science first posits and then finds wanting. Challenge everything! Once taken for granted by leftists as devoid of politics, the factory form of production became, under this new radical understanding, dripping with ideology. Capitalism makes the factory form of production seem necessary and also inevitable; it is a means for achieving a certain kind of rationalized efficiency, and of controlling nature, including human nature. We can’t think of any other ways to do things.

For the purposes of this book, we would do well to re-examine the things we take for granted pertaining to science, pesticides and politics, and especially those ways of thinking of which we are not aware, to better understand and to change our relationship to our natural environment. It’s tempting to not have to do any of that, to say, “The evidence speaks for itself.” But evidence rarely speaks for itself. Seemingly objective facts require interpretation. And the interpretations given by science, for the most part, are based on assumptions hidden even to honest scientists, despite their sometimes good intentions and brilliance—to say nothing of those scientists bought by Monsanto and other corporations.

Several generations prior to the critical re-assessments by the women’s liberation and ecology movements, physicist Werner Heisenberg (he of the Uncertainty Principle) observed: “Natural science does not simply describe or explain nature. It is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.”2

Where does “our method of questioning” come from? What does it consist of?

As the social movements of the 1960s thru mid-1980s receded, their philosophical contributions were de-fanged, assimilated, and turned into lucrative commodities by an expanding and triumphal capitalism, as was their music, graffiti, and other forms of once revolutionary critique. Heisenberg’s observations, consistent with his quantum observations, were barely understandable to most scientists (let alone everyone else). Science regrouped and regained its momentum under the prevailing Western notion that “objective” scientific facts exist somewhere “out there” waiting to be discovered, independent of our methods of questioning.

One who continued to challenge the dominant orthodoxy in observing the ways in which social conditions influenced and interacted with scientific thought was Stephen Jay Gould, a towering figure in late twentieth century science, who observed, “Science is no inexorable march to truth, mediated by the collection of objective information and the destruction of ancient superstition. Scientists, as ordinary human beings, unconsciously reflect in their theories the social and political constraints of their times. As privileged members of society, more often than not they end up defending existing social arrangements as biologically foreordained.”3

Consequently, scientists generally endorsed the development of expanded technological projects in capitalist as well as in self-described socialist countries. (Lenin was a big fan of Taylor’s “time and motion” studies, in which human movements were stripped of their holistic meaning and broken down into their parts, the better to get the most production out of an assembly-line worker.) They argued that the social good such projects would bring about outweighed whatever future negative ramifications they might have, and which, separated from social movements, they rarely bothered to consider.⁴ Far too many leftists, for example, failed to be critical of nuclear power plants in the 1950s and 60s, and the misnamed Green Revolution in agriculture, the massive misdiagnosis and drugging of “hyperactive” children, the return of electro-shock “therapy,” the mass-spraying of pesticides, and the genetic engineering of organisms and the development of biotechnology. All were rationalized by perceived social benefit, but their effects turned out to be environmentally and socially devastating.

Unasking the Question

Since we are not taught to unearth and to question basic assumptions of Western society, they generally go unnoticed until something—often a social and political movement—forces us to examine them. Biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin explain how this plays out on levels of consciousness that we almost never consider, such as when scientists construct their research from the “coming together of individual atomistic bits, each with its own intrinsic properties,” and expect it to cohere into or determine the behavior of the system as a whole. The methodology reflects the way they (and everyone) are taught to think, which is reinforced every day by the things we encounter in industrial capitalism.

For example, a chemical pesticide may appear to be needed to kill weeds in a field of genetically engineered soy. Levins and Lewontin criticize that way of seeing as “reductionist,” because it doesn’t consider the larger view of why the farm is monocropped and set up in such a way to begin with, which enables diseases to wash right through entire fields, and which thus require pesticides to keep the crops alive and intact. This method is very common in Western sciences today, in which “lines of causality run from part to whole, from atom to molecule, from molecule to organism, from organism to collectivity.”5 It is a way of finding out about the world that entails cutting it up into bits and pieces (conceptually, as well as in actuality) and attempts to reconstruct the properties of the system from the “parts of the parts” so produced, as they futilely try to put Humpty Dumpty together again by piecing together the individual fragments. Levins and Lewontin explain that “those problems that yield to [this kind of] attack are pursued most vigorously, precisely because the method works there. Other problems and other phenomena are left behind, walled off from understanding…. The harder problems are not tackled, if for no other reason than that brilliant scientific careers are not built on persistent failure.”⁶

Geneticist, cell biologist, and Nobel Prize recipient Barbara McClintock opined, similarly, that the scientific method cannot by itself provide real understanding. “It gives us relationships which are useful, valid, and technically marvelous; however, they are not the truth,” she says. Indeed, the doing of scientific work—even giving the benefit of the doubt to the chemical industry’s scientists and their enablers in government—has become more and more atomized, fragmented, broken down into specialized disciplines and subdisciplines that in many ways are sealed off from each other: Not just biology, chemistry, physics, ecology, for example, but molecular biology, evolutionary genetics, and developmental embryology. The narrowing scope of research allows scientists to focus more intently on particular areas of interest, but it has also inundated us with information concerning individual pieces studied in isolation such that, paradoxically, the more information we gather the less we understand. Examining smaller and smaller isolated parts more often than not hammers into place a way of examining the world that precludes the ability to see or understand the whole, and to construct a morality and sense of justice based on it.

One purpose of this book is to restore a more holistic vision that provides a framework for understanding the patterns beneath all the related “facts.” Once one accepts the negative categories “pests” and “weeds,” it’s but a small step to require pesticides to get rid of them. In rejecting the poisoning of living organisms, we’ve begun to shift the way we think of ourselves in the world around us. Such a revolution in consciousness is a prerequisite for completing a revolution in the social system dependent on the poisoning of other organisms—and ourselves.

The Atomization of Work

“You’re a very good worker,” said the efficiency expert schooled in the time-and-motion studies of Frederick Taylor, as he watched a carpenter plane a piece of wood. “Now if we can just stick a buffer on your elbow you could plane and buff the wood with the same motion.”

“Yeah,” the carpenter responded, “and if you’d stick a broomstick up your ass you could take your notes and sweep the floor at the same time.”

In the movie Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin plays an assembly-line worker whose job is to wrench bolts all day as they come flooding down the conveyor belt, faster, ever faster. Charlie has no idea why. He just gets paid for it, and it warps his mind as well as his body.

The film is a blistering indictment of industrial production under capitalism. Like other assembly-line workers, Charlie is a victim of the “science” of mass production. In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor introduced time-and-motion studies into industry, examining the fragmentary repetitive motions of the industrial labor process with the aim of increasing output and efficiency by subdividing each task and reducing each worker’s movements as much as possible to mimic the mechanical motions of a machine.

Harry Braverman, in Labor and Monopoly Capital, explains the significance of this qualitative change in the way things were being produced on society in general, and what makes it unique to industrial capitalism:

The division of labor in society is characteristic of all known societies; the division of labor in the workshop is the special product of capitalist society. The social division of labor divides society among occupations, each adequate to a branch of production; the detailed division of labor destroys occupations considered in this sense, and renders the worker inadequate to carry through any complete production process. In capitalism, the social division is enforced chaotically and anarchically by the market, while the workshop division of labor is imposed by planning and control. Again in capitalism, the products of the social division of labor are exchanged as commodities, while the results of the operation of the detail worker are not exchanged within the factory as within a marketplace, but are all owned by the same capital. While the social division of labor subdivides society, the detailed division of labor subdivides humans, and while the subdivision of society may enhance the individual and the species, the subdivision of the individual, when carried on without regard to human capabilities and needs, is a crime against the person and against humanity.7

While all societies have historically featured various divisions of labor—some people farming, others hunting, etc.—the atomization of work into repetitive mechanical motions within those occupational divisions (what I’m calling, the “parts”) was something new,⁸ ushering in an entirely new period described by Karl Marx as the transition from the “formal” domination of capital to “the real.”

Often lost in studying the specific mechanical function of a “part” is its relationship to other “parts” within the whole. It is not that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, but that by being parts of a particular whole, the parts acquire new properties, which they do not have in isolation or as parts of a different whole. And as the parts acquire new properties by virtue of their proximity to each other in the context of the whole, they impart new properties to the whole, which are reflected in changes to the parts, and so on.⁹ There are often surprising and unpredictable qualities of any whole (an organism, species, political era, set of numbers, musical notes, or industrial production). The “whole” shapes and defines the parts and their interactions as much as the parts shape and define the whole, which in turn affects the parts. For example, in the case of cellular differentiation, the position of each new cell with respect to the surrounding cells, and not its genetic component alone, defines what each cell becomes. This relation is always in motion. I use the term “dialectical” to encapsulate all of this continuous interaction between different levels of complexity.10

Levins and Lewontin point out that “part” and “whole” have a special relationship to each other, in that one cannot exist without the other, any more than “up” can exist without “down.” What constitutes the parts is defined by the whole that is being considered. Is something a “weed” or a plant? A “pest” or an insect? In what context? As already mentioned, what might be considered a “weed” in one context and marked for extinction could provide the medicines needed to cure the cancers caused by the very same chemicals deployed to exterminate them; what might be considered a “pest” in one context might, in another, serve as food for birds and frogs, pollinate plants, filter water, and remediate toxins in the soil.

On the human level, McClintock explained to her biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, “one must have the time to look, the patience to ‘hear what the material has to say to you,’ the openness to ‘let it come to you.’ Above all, one must have ‘a feeling for the organism.’” A revolution in consciousness requires more than rationality that just happens to be economically profitable; it requires, writes Keller, “a longing to embrace the world in its very being, through reason and beyond.” For McClintock, Keller continues, “reason—at least in the conventional sense of the word—is not by itself adequate to describe the vast complexity—even mystery—of living forms. Organisms have a life and order of their own that scientists can only partially fathom.”

Over the years, Fox Keller writes, “a special kind of sympathetic understanding grew in McClintock, heightening her powers of discernment, until finally, the objects of her study have become subjects in their own right; they claim from her a kind of attention that most of us experience only in relation to other persons. ‘Every component of the organism is as much of an organism as every other part.’” McClintock adds: “Every time I walk on grass I feel sorry because I know the grass is screaming at me.”¹¹

Biologist McClintock’s feelings for the world she studied led her to embrace a Buddhist perspective, with its affinities to the dialectical one I’ve outlined. There can be no independent observer standing outside and apart from what she is observing. There can be no “true” consciousness of any situation that doesn’t, at the same time, enter, become part of, and transform it, and thereby one’s consciousness of it. Consciousness is not a passive reflection of a static totality but an active engagement with that totality of which it, itself, is dynamically a part.

Evelyn Fox Keller and Barbara McClintock are an antidote to those numerous scientists who objectify organisms as “pests” and “weeds,” to be exterminated by the wonders of modern science, with its poisonous sprays fueling the economic profits of such corporations as Monsanto, Dow, and DuPont. Keller gives us McClintock’s view that “you need to have a feeling for every individual plant…. It is the overall organization, or orchestration, that enables the organism to meet its needs, whatever they might be, in ways that never cease to surprise us.12

That capacity for surprise gave McClintock, who died in 1992, “immense pleasure. She recalls, for example, the early post–World War II studies of the effect of radiation on Drosophila [fruit flies]: ‘It turned out that the flies that had been under constant radiation were more vigorous than those that were standard. Well, it was hilarious; it was absolutely against everything that had been thought about earlier. I thought it was terribly funny; I was utterly delighted. Our experience with DDT has been similar. It was thought that insects could be readily killed off with the spraying of DDT. But the insects began to thumb their noses at anything you tried to do to them.’”¹³ Could this same toxic assault lead to the rise of future generations of humans resistant to specific poisons (after it kills off most of us)? Perhaps, if one thinks in terms of the species-as-a-whole and ignores the suffering of individual people who are sickened or killed before they’re able to reproduce, preventing the process of natural selection from “weeding” our human communities and evolving a new form of humanity resistant to the toxins they’re spraying.

With the completion of the human genome project, more surprises were about to overturn the reductionist argument and restore a bit of humility. Stephen Jay Gould explains: “The fruit fly Drosophila, the staple of laboratory genetics, possesses between 13,000 and 14,000 genes. The roundworm C. elegans, the staple of laboratory studies in development, contains only 959 cells, looks like a tiny formless squib with virtually no complex anatomy beyond its genitalia, and possesses just over 19,000 genes.”

It turns out that Homo sapiens possess around nineteen thousand genes too,¹⁴ around the same quantity as the “lowly” roundworm! As Gould points out, under the old view of life human complexity could not be generated by nineteen thousand genes, with “one item of code (a gene) ultimately making one item of substance (a protein), and the congeries of proteins making a body,” and where “fixing” an aberrant gene, for example, would thus cure a specific human ailment. The old view was wrong, and Gould welcomes our liberation from “the simplistic and harmful idea, false for many other reasons as well, that each aspect of our being, either physical or behavioral, may be ascribed to the action of a particular gene ‘for’ the trait in question.” Gould continues:

But the deepest ramifications will be scientific or philosophical in the largest sense. From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts…. But once again—and when will we ever learn?—we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena…. Organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes…. Moreover, these noncoding regions, disrespectfully called “junk DNA,” also build a pool of potential for future use that, more than any other factor, may establish any lineage’s capacity for further evolutionary increase in complexity.15

Evelyn Fox Keller continues along a similar anti-reductionist path. She quotes Barbara McClintock:

Our surprise is a measure of our tendency to underestimate the flexibility of living organisms. The adaptability of plants tends to be especially unappreciated. Animals can walk around, but plants have to stay still to do the same things, with ingenious mechanisms…. Plants are extraordinary. For instance … if you pinch a leaf of a plant you set off electric pulses. You can’t touch a plant without setting off an electric pulse…. There is no question that plants have [all] kinds of sensitivities. They do a lot of responding to their environment. They can do almost anything you can think of. But just because they sit there, anybody walking down the road considers them just a plastic area to look at, [as if] they’re not really alive.16

Take the human or plant biological cell. Each cell (the part) contains the same genetic code as every other cell in the individual’s body (the whole). How is it that the genes “know” which sequence of chemical reactions to turn on and which to turn off so that the cell becomes a particular kind? The reductionists critiqued by other authors in this book attribute cell differentiation to special genes, called “regulator genes,” that tell the other genes what to do and when to do it. Well, one might wonder, what tells them?

One gets bogged down when trying to build up a picture of how a complex organism or ecosystem works by adding up and re-assembling the parts, as though they can be separated from each other, from the whole, from their development over time, and from environmental variables and function autonomously.

Take, for example, the Mississippi alligator, a reptile severely affected by the massive use of pesticides. Alligator eggs developing in the temperature range 26–30°C hatch females. Change nothing but the temperature, to 34–36°C, and the same eggs will hatch only males. Eggs that hatch in the range 31–33°C produce alligators of either sex, with the probabilities changing from female to male as the temperature rises. What causes the egg’s temperature to change? The macro temperature is important—global climate change may play a role here and cause more male alligators to be born. On the other hand, there are counteracting factors, such as cooling rains—also subject to global climate change—and the time of year in which the eggs are laid (which may be changing too). Temperatures vary in the microenvironment immediately surrounding the egg. It turns out that, under normal circumstances, the most important factor in whether the alligator will be male or female is the egg’s location within the nest. Eggs surrounded by other eggs tend to be slightly warmer and, thus, tend to hatch males. Eggs around the circumference tend to be slightly cooler and tend to hatch females.

Clearly, genes by themselves are not strict determiners as claimed by Richard Dawkins in his popular book The Selfish Gene. They depend upon and interact with the surrounding microenvironment—in this case, the temperature of the air in the immediate vicinity—which, in turn, influences environments at other levels, such as the chemistry of the cell, which is the genes’ immediate environment. The problem of where to draw the boundary of the immediate environment (its “community”)—in this case the gene’s—plays a critical role in determining what is “objectively” happening.

In addition, the three-dimensional double-helix configuration of DNA is guided by nontranscribed segments of the genome that geneticists until recently called “junk DNA.” How do these interact with the microenvironment in shaping the sequences of which they themselves are a part?

Reframing Everything We Take for Granted

The holistic basis for reframing the way we see pesticides should by now be coming into focus. It’s not just about outlining the dangers of pesticides but also how to think about them and their effects on the complex interactions of living organisms. Understanding an organism’s relationship to the ecosystem in which it lives (as well as the ecosystem within) requires ways of seeing that carry beyond the cause and effect linearity to which we are accustomed. The sex of individual alligators, as well as the sexual dispersal over the population, is not determined by one isolated gene but, at the very least, by environmental temperatures working in a sort of feedback loop with the full genetic complement; it is influenced by the interaction of variables from different levels of complexity: temperature, genes, location of the egg in the nest, environment within the eggs, and of course the gross destruction of the alligator’s natural habitat.

Stuart Newman, professor of cell biology at New York Medical College, points out that the position and relationship of each new cell with respect to the surrounding cells “bring out” specific qualities that define what each cell does. Will it be a muscle cell? A blood cell? A bone cell? A skin cell? Each kind of cell performs specific functions in the body that differ greatly from other kinds. And yet, within a given organism—indeed, within a given group of similar organisms, called a species—each cell is made up of the same number and sequence of chromosomes as every other cell in that species. The kind of cell each becomes is as strongly influenced by its context and location—its relationship to its surrounding environment—as by the type of parent cells it had.17

Interactions among organisms create complex environments that then feed back and reshape the very organisms said to have caused them, transforming the entire relationship. But such holistic thinking does not characterize Monsanto’s business model. And the company’s approach is reflected in the ways government officials and media think about and externalize the environment. Government officials are influenced by the chemical industry’s promises, and the industry’s monetary contributions to those politicians’ campaign chests grease the wheels in helping politicians accept the industry’s products with scant testing, even when the politicians on occasion express concern over the industry’s excessively effusive claims.

In the United States, it is common for we, the people, to think in terms of cause and effect, every effect being determined by one or a few causes, every trait being determined by and an expression of one or a few genes. Such was the case for early models of how DNA determines genes, genes determine chromosomes, which determine cells, which determine tissues, which determine organs, which determine organisms, and on out into the multi-layered cosmos. According to the original genetic models of the 1950s and 1960s—which still dominate most collegiate texts—the genetic information of a segment of DNA—a gene—is transcribed into messenger RNA that in turn is translated into a protein, one-to-one-to-one. But then a donkey upset the applecart. “Researchers made the surprising discovery that, in the cells of higher organisms, messenger RNA is altered by enzymes before its information is translated into protein.¹⁸ In the language of genetics, pieces of RNA are excised from the molecule and the remaining pieces are fused to make the functional RNA that then serves as the template for protein synthesis. There is no one-to-one correspondence between DNA sequence and proteins.”¹⁹ In fact, current research suggests that the subtle spatial relationships among parts of the genome may be as important as the actual sequence. And that previously misnamed “junk” DNA plays a major role in sustaining those relationships and geometries, which appear significantly to guide gene expression.

Rather than fitting together the pieces to describe the Whole as in Western philosophy, a holistic approach attempts to look at entire ecosystems as totalities, with their underlying unity as the starting point, inviting us to examine how the “whole” informs interactions of the “parts.” We need to do that with every issue. One important effect of that type of approach is the minimization of unintended consequences (which are rampant, as Edward Tenner informs us in his fascinating book Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences). But that’s not the only reason to look at things holistically.

Stuart Newman took the implicit critique of strict genetic determinism a step further and explicitly laid out multi-tiered mechanisms of development, cell morphogenesis, and pattern formation that relied on such non-reductionist factors as the position of a cell with respect to other cells: how position affects its internal chemistry, which in turn affects salt levels and other nutrients, which in turn affects the development of the body’s organs.20 According to Newman, genes are more repositories of development that has already happened than active determinants of what is going to happen, removing biology from its reductionist framework and bringing to it a powerful interactive or dialectical approach. Elsewhere, Newman writes:

Both cells and ecosystems can thus be analyzed as highly complex networks of large numbers of components undergoing mutually dependent changes in their relative abundances. But while this way of thinking is common among ecologists, it is not well suited to making precise predictions, and has failed to take hold to any significant extent in cell biology. Instead, the most common intellectual framework of cell and molecular biologists is a reductionist approach. The preferred objects of study are detailed interrelations among small numbers of relatively isolated components. In this paradigm, an understanding of the qualitative properties of the system as a whole, such as the conditions for stable, periodic, and chaotic behaviors, is sacrificed in favor of exact knowledge of a more limited set of phenomena.

Undoubtedly, many scientists, working in this reductionist tradition, were surprised to learn from recent studies of so-called oncogenes, or cancer-associated DNA, that the introduction into cells of the capability of making a normal cellular protein in slightly greater amounts, or in a slightly altered form than usual, could render that cell cancerous, with all the multifarious behavioral changes implied by that term. In spite of this, many molecular biologists, when asked to consider the impact of introducing new components into complex ecological systems, have remained within their reductionist framework and have dismissed the potential for ecological harm from the release of what they consider to be well-characterized entities.21

Recap

Reductionist science claims that our “sameness” over time is the result of genes, which predetermine and program each cell. It tries to explain each level of complexity by searching for ever-smaller determining factors. Reductionism is assumed without question in science and it is every bit as ideological at its core as religion.²² Few recognize that the very positing of the existence of scientific progress as value-free is itself value-laden; it is bound to ways of thinking that came to the fore in the West centuries ago during the Enlightenment, and which are reinforced in part by the instrumentalist worldview (which is what I mean when I use the word ideology) that came about with the development of capitalism. “The phrase ‘time is money’ dates from this period, as does the invention of the pocket watch, in which time, like money, could be held in the hand or pocket,” Morris Berman tells us in The Reenchantment of the World, his stunning critique of the relationship of how we think to the historical development of capitalism. “The mentality that seeks to grasp and control time was the same mentality that produced the world view of modern science…. Clearly, then, one can speak of a general ‘congruence’ between science and capitalism in early modern Europe. The rise of linear time and the mechanical thinking, the equating of time with money and the clock with the world order, were parts of the same transformation, and each part helped to reinforce the others.”²³

The general ways we categorize the world around us (and our own places in it) are part and parcel of the particular social conditions and history of our society. The questions we think to ask—or don’t ask—and the ways in which we try to solve them do not stand outside of politics and society. Just the opposite! Together, as “science,” they form the ideological bundle through which capitalism’s hidden philosophical assumptions reflect the production of commodities and utilitarian ways of seeing earth’s minerals and human labor. Those assumptions validate themselves and extend into ever-new reaches of our lives. Who owns the genetic sequences of one’s biological cell, one’s self? With the judicial allowance of corporations to privatize those sequences, where does the self begin and end? If democracy is based on the self-determination of each individual, where lies the boundaries of the self doing the determining?

Thinking about the Process of Thinking, Wherein Subject and Object Switch Places

Indeed, the observer’s ability to recognize that interconnection between observer and observed is itself an attribute of the totality—not of the isolated individual—at a certain point in its self-development. The ways we categorize the world around us, our own place in it, and our underlying assumptions that often go unseen and taken to be “natural” are part of the particular social conditions under investigation. Karl Marx addressed the intricacies of that difficult dialectic when he wrote, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.”24

The fight to protect life from herbicides and adulticides contains a similar triple edge. One set of people say, “We spray pesticides to protect the majority of the community from diseases and to vanquish weeds and mosquitoes.” Others say that spraying represents a backward way of thinking about both people and plants, recalling that one person’s weed is another’s dinner or medicinal source. And always, underlying both, is a history of oppression and exploitation that often goes unrecognized and is taken for granted.

Which way of thinking will prevail at any given time? This is the fight that Rachel Carson felt compelled to engage in and still very much with us today. Government and corporate lies run much deeper today, the issues are more profound, and their propagation is more effective. What we try to show in this book is how to reframe controversies in science, such as the mass use of pesticides, so they reveal a heretofore hidden set of politics and philosophies. Doing so can guide us in cohering an international movement against the use of pesticides, which are poisoning the planet.