GEO Watch | Colonialism and Genetically-Engineered Trees
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Moderator’s Note: This being the first week after Seattle declared Columbus Day to be
re-designated as Indigenous Peoples Day, it seems timely to bring this
particular report to my readers about the Indigenous Environmental Network
(IEN) and its campaign against genetically-engineered (GE) trees. Writing from
North Carolina, Rachel Smolker, co-director of Biofuelwatch (UK), reports on the U.S.-based
IEN campaign against deregulation of GE eucalyptus
developed by Arborgen, a South Carolina biotechnology startup company.
Smolker locates the anti-GE
tree campaign in the context of enduring anti-colonialist struggles waged by
Native Americans, which have most recently taken place as part of the broader environmental
justice movement. Smolker’s short and pithy piece reminds us that colonial
domination is inscribed in the environmental history of places and the deep
South makes for an exemplary case study: Europeans introduced industrial
monoculture pine plantations that displaced the vast and incredibly diverse
native forests of the Deep South in a pattern we see repeated in every
bioregion transformed by the violence of white settler colonialism.
This report first
appeared in the Huffington
Post (October 13) and is reposted here with permission of the author.
Columbus
Day and the Colonization of Land, Trees and Genes
Rachel
Smolker | Co-director, Biofuelwatch | October 15, 2014
I spent the past
several days participating in the Indigenous
Environmental Network Campaign to Stop GE Trees
Action Camp in the Qualla Boundary, homelands of the Eastern Band Cherokee in
North Carolina. Participants included members of tribes across the Southeast,
who came to learn about plans for growing genetically engineered trees on
and/or adjacent to their territories.
The event was spurred
by the fact that the USDA is due any day to release a draft Environmental
Impact Statement on the proposed deregulation of GE eucalyptus that has been
developed by South Carolina based company, Arborgen. Arborgen’s trees are
engineered for cold tolerance, with the intent to extend the range of
eucalyptus so they can be grown across the southern states from South Carolina
to Texas. Test plots are already in place with over 200,000 GE eucalyptus trees
planted.
Meanwhile the American
Chestnut Foundation is moving to engineer blight-resistant chestnuts. Using the
rhetoric of “species restoration,” the project appears aimed largely to win
over the hearts and minds of the public to overcome resistance to the concept
of GE trees, in hopes it will open the floodgates to deregulation of other
varieties.
Much of the Southeast,
first colonized by European settlers, has since been colonized by industrial
monoculture pine plantations that have displaced vast areas of the formerly
biodiverse native forests.
The Eastern Band
Cherokee, like most indigenous peoples, have a deep historical and spiritual
relationship to, and dependence on, their lands. Chestnuts remain a staple part
of their diet. They are famous for their basket-making. Their history, culture
and survival is intimately tied to their relationship to the trees native to
their lands.
When the European
colonists claimed their lands, the descendants of current Eastern Band Cherokee
escaped the dislocation that led to the infamous Trail of Tears by hiding out
among the trees and within the dense foliage of rhododendrons.
Retaining control over
their lands has been an ongoing struggle. The people were made to purchase
their own lands from the government -- and in fact raised the funds to do so
three separate times before they were finally granted control over the Qualla
Boundary lands. Forced to finance their own land, the Cherokee did so in part
by cultivating mulberry trees and silkworms.
Indigenous Peoples the
world over have faced oppression and targeting of their lands for industrial tree plantations. In the global
south, eucalyptus plantations have displaced peoples from their lands, depleted
waterways, contaminated them with herbicides and pesticides, and increased fire
risks. They are referred to as “green deserts” and viewed as a new form of
colonization.
The push to create and
cultivate engineered trees is driven by escalating and unsustainable demand for
wood for pulp, timber and now, increasingly, for biomass. Presented as a “solution”
to climate change, using trees and crops to produce biofuels and chemicals, or
to burn alongside coal for commercial and industrial scale electricity and heat
is far from environmentally or climate friendly. But the subsidies and supports
continue to flow.
To meet the burgeoning
demand, trees are being engineered to grow faster, or to have altered lignin
(lignin is the structural material in wood that lends strength, but it also
interferes with refining wood into fuels and chemicals).
Besides engineering
trees, biotechnologists are deploying new synthetic
biology techniques, oft referred to as “extreme genetic engineering,”
to create microbes that can digest and convert wood -- overcoming the “lignin
barrier” -- into fuels and chemicals. Risky, unregulated and by many accounts
unethical, synthetic biology is the subject of a big push at the currently
ongoing Convention on Biological Diversity Council of Parties meeting in Korea.
A coalition of groups is pushing the convention to adopt a moratorium
on the environmental release and commercial use of synthetic biology.
Like GE trees,
synthetic biology involves a “rewriting” of the genetic code of life, a code
that evolved over a long and shared history common to all of life. Such
manipulation is deeply objectionable, and antithetical to indigenous and many
other worldviews. In Qualla Boundary, consensus was overwhelmingly against GE
trees. Danny Billie of the Independent Traditional Seminole Nation in Florida
stated, “The forest gives life to The People, but these GE trees mean death.
They are not for The People, they are only to make money for a few rich people.”
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| Danny Billie. Photo credit Orin Langelle |
On Columbus Day we can
sadly reflect on the brutal history of colonization that American Indians faced
when Europeans “discovered” and then claimed their lands. Now, centuries later,
the ongoing colonization process threatens to colonize not only their lands,
but even the genetics of the trees in their forests that are central to their
history and livelihoods.
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