The appeal of bioregionalism helps explain why trade and free markets are anathema to neo-Luddites: Trade, after all, brings far-flung goods and people together, across "natural" boundaries. In his Teach-In comments, Sale referred to the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, as setting up the "next round of world rape." Protectionism is a priority item on the neo-Luddite agenda. Tom Clarke, the chair of the IFG Committee on Corporations, insists on the "right of any country to regulate inflow and outflow of goods and services." Vandana Shiva asserts, "A healthy society decides what it will export and import, just like healthy plants decide what they will take up and what they will release."
Neo-Luddites believe that if trade can be halted, then low-tech jobs in the developing world will not be threatened and there will be less ecological damage. They’re wrong on both counts.
In terms of jobs, they embrace wholeheartedly what’s known as the candlemaker fallacy: One must oppose electric lighting because it will put candlemakers out of business. The neo-Luddites point to chronic "underemployment" in the developing world. It’s true that many people there are "underemployed" in the sense that they do not have access to the machinery, the infrastructure, or even basic sanitation that would allow them to build better lives for themselves and their families. The causes for this sorry state of affairs are many, and corrupt authoritarian governments pursuing bad social and economic policies are at the top of the list. But it is certainly not the result of globalization or modernization of traditional methods of production.
To neo-Luddites, inefficiency creates more jobs -- just think how many more jobs there would be if bricks were still made by hand, clothes sewn by hand, coal mined by hand, and on and on. Neo-Luddites also believe that one has an unconditional right to continue one’s "livelihood" regardless of changed economic circumstances. Vandana Shiva is an especially strong proponent of protecting livelihoods from competition, arguing that if you were once a farmer, you have a right to remain one for your entire life. Similarly, if one’s family has produced cooking oil through small press mills for generations, then no one (especially not a corporation) should be allowed to sell cheaper, competing cooking oils.
There’s no question that technological progress and the expansion of markets do oblige people to change jobs and professions on a regular basis. But the result is hardly bleak: In the developed world, overall employment continues to go up, as do average wage rates and standards of living.
When it comes to sparing the natural world from human disturbance, trade and technology are in fact the environment’s best friends. In high-tech countries, forests are expanding, air and water pollution are abating, less land is being used for agriculture, and fertility rates are falling. It is in low-tech countries where poor people continue to cut down their forests for farmland, can’t afford pollution control measures, and have high fertility rates. Why? Poor people have more important things to worry about than environmental amenities. (Getting enough to eat is at the top of the list.)
The neo-Luddites are similarly mistaken when they implicate modern notions of private property in the destruction of the natural environment. What neo-Luddites fail to understand is that much of the ecological destruction they see occurs in open-access commons. Fisheries, tropical forests, airsheds, rivers, and lakes effectively belong to no one and are open to anyone. This means that everyone has incentive to take as much as possible of the common resource before others beat him to it. Yet neo-Luddites want to expand the commons.
"Air, genes, bulk water belong to the earth and no one has a right to profit from them," said the Institute for Policy Studies’ John Cavanagh. Vandana Shiva expresses a similar notion when she argues that property rights cause the "conversion from the abundance of life to the scarcity of the marketplace." This line of thinking descends from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality that, "You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!"
Yet if the global commons is expanded as the neo-Luddites hope, much more of the earth will look like the blasted, barren landscape of the Sahel. The Sahel is the once-productive savanna region south of the Sahara that has been devastated by overgrazing herds of the indigenous peoples who hold its pasturages in common. As troubling, trying to manage a commons via political means requires centralized authority administering increasingly detailed regulations, with a cadre of bureaucrats to monitor and enforce them. True decentralization is possible only by abolishing the commons, enclosing it, and assigning property rights to people. This harnesses the incentives of private property, which encourages people to protect and preserve their property. This has been done in the case of fisheries in New Zealand and Iceland. And private temperate forests are expanding in developed countries. Even the half-hearted sulfur dioxide emissions market in the United States has achieved remarkable reductions in air pollution. Between 1995 and 1999, for instance, emissions have fallen some 22 percent below federally set targets -- and at a cost more than 40 percent below the initial projections.
Inaction Plan
From what wellspring does the neo-Luddite hatred of modern technology flow? Though thoroughly secularized, neo-Luddites evince a yearning for a world filled with self-evident revelation. They imagine such a world existed in traditional cultures before they came in contact with the West. They hanker after a contemporary version of the medieval Great Chain of Being, in which everyone -- from the king to the meanest peasant -- had his or her place and did not doubt the rightness of the cosmic order.
Neo-Luddites believe that traditional, primitive cultures were more egalitarian. They’re generally right about that, but history shows that the truly egalitarian cultures are desperately impoverished ones. The neo-Luddites would evidently exchange what they regard as the tyranny of corporations and technology for the more amenable tyrannies of small-town life and of kinship obligations that low-tech living necessarily imposes.
To achieve those ends, the neo-Luddite movement is pursuing particular political action. First, they are organizing to stall any and all international negotiations over free trade agreements. "We must lobby for a moratorium or freeze on any new trade agreements or trade deregulation," declared Helena Norberg-Hodge of the International Society for Ecology and Culture.
Second, they are organizing to stop new technologies in their tracks, especially biotechnology and nanotechnology. Many speakers at the Teach-In wholeheartedly endorsed Sun Microsystem’s chief scientist Bill Joy’s call for humanity to relinquish biotech, nanotech, and robotics as simply too dangerous to use. Rich Hayes, coordinator of the Exploratory Initiative on the New Human Genetic Technologies, demanded "an immediate global ban on human reproductive cloning, an immediate global ban on manipulating genes that we pass on to our children, and accountable and effective regulation of all other human genetic technologies."
Longtime anti-biotech fanatic Jeremy Rifkin called for "a strict global moratorium, no release of GMOs [genetically modified organisms] into the environment." Rifkin argued that "the gene pool is a shared commons which should be administered as a trust for all humanity." He would "prohibit any patents on genes, tissues, cells, organs, organisms," and advocates a global tax on human gene therapies and biotech drugs, the proceeds of which would be distributed to the developing world.
The neo-Luddites would like countries to adopt domestic bans on biotechnology and other suspect technologies. And they want countries to incorporate similar bans into international treaties. Already, in 1997, the General Conference of UNESCO adopted, unanimously and by acclamation, the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights which prohibits human reproductive cloning. Global taxes would be distributed by appropriate United Nations agencies. And as noted earlier, the neo-Luddites have already been successful in getting the precautionary principle incorporated in both the United Nations Biosafety Protocol and its new Persistent Organics Pollution Treaty.
"This is the big wrestling match of the 21st century," declared Rifkin. For once, the man who predicted in 1979 that the world was entering a "new age of scarcity" in which we would run out of resources such as oil and timber, and who in 1995 predicted that technological innovation would soon cause massive unemployment, is indisputably correct. The hopeful future of humanity freed from disease, disability, hunger, ignorance, poverty, and inequity depends on beating back the forces of neo-Luddite reaction that were assembled so successfully at the International Forum on Globalization’s Teach-In. The struggle for that future begins now.
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Commented on these issues several years ago in my book, Bike&Chain;, free on-line at...
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Humanity wants neither frankensteins nor science moratoriums, rather a balanced approach to progress, which, in fact, demands even greater dedication than corporate profit motives.