PermaLiv.MyPortfolio.com / LeveVeg.MyPortfolio.com: Corporate Biopiracy

Friday, January 4, 2013

Corporate Biopiracy

The only reason crops have been genetically engineered is to take patents on seeds, and collect royalties. If during colonialism the concept of Terra Nullius, empty land, allowed the takeover of land and territories by the colonizer, a new concept of Bio Nullius, empty life, is being used to claim “intellectual property rights” on seeds, biodiversity and life forms. But life is not empty. Seeds are not an invention. They embody millions of years of biological evolution, and thousands of years of cultural evolution and farmers breeding. When corporations claim patents, they basically “pirate” traits that nature and farmers have evolved. They pirate and patent the aroma of basmati, the low gluten qualities of our native wheat, the salt tolerant, drought tolerant, flood tolerant traits of climate resilience our farmers have bred. This is not innovation and invention, it is Biopiracy. - Vandana Shiva

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What it Means to be an Alexandrian

Of course, there exists a fundamental disagreement between my group of architect/philosopher friends, many of them Alexandrians (after Christopher Alexander), and most contemporary architects and academics. We believe that architecture is an extension of human cognition and symbiotic interaction with the environment. The latter group, on the contrary, believe in severing this millennial connection so as to create a hostile inhuman environment that expresses certain human psychoses. Contemporary architects don’t quite put it in this way, but either they are being dishonest, or they are fooling themselves. - Nikos A. Salingaros

Menneskeatferd er ikke tilpasset store samfunn!

Framtida er usikker og svært sannsynlig farlig. Vi bestemmer i dag ikke over egen framtid: Ingen av de å stemme på har gode løsninger. Økonomien lever sitt eget liv og har penger som verdimål, dette tømmer ressursene fortere enn de gjendannes fordi økt forbruk gir økt pengeoverskudd. Menneskeatferd er ikke tilpasset å gjøre noe med dette i store samfunn: Vi må organisere oss for å få fram evnene til samarbeid og bærekraft; for å holde igjen lysta på mer; som også er medfødt. - Terje Bongard

The Commons

Alain Lipietz, a French political figure and student of the commons, traces the word "commons" to William the Conquerer and the Normans - not the English, interestingly. The term "commons" supposedly comes from the Norman word commun, which comes from the word munus, which means both "gift" and "counter-gift", which is to say, a duty.

I think this etymology gets to the nub of the commons. We need to recover a world in which we all receive gifts and we all have duties. This is a very important way of being human. The expansion of centralized political and market structures has tragically eclipsed our need for gifts and duties. We rely on the institutions of the Market and the State for everything, leaving little room for personal agency or moral commitment. And so we have largely lost confidence in what Ivan Illich called the vernacular domain, the spaces in our everyday life in which we can create and shape and negotiate our lives. - David Bollier

The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle Between Two World-Systems

"The builders of Florence, especially those building from about the year 1000 A.D. to 1500 A.D., lived and worked with an unshakable belief in God. As one looks at the works that came from their hands, God is everywhere: in the paintings now hanging in the Uffizi, in the Baptistery, in San Miniato, in the life and death of Beato Angelico living in his cell in the monastery of San Marco. For them, every stone was a gift to that unshakable belief in God they shared. It is the belief, the unshakable nature of the belief, its authenticity, and above all its solidity, which made it work effectively for them. We, in our time, need an authentic belief, a certainty, connected with the ultimate reaches of space and time -- which does the same for us." - Christopher Alexander

PermaLiv.MyPortfolio.com / LeveVeg.MyPortfolio.com

Friday, January 4, 2013

Corporate Biopiracy

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