January 24th, 1998

I NEVER THOUGHT IT WOULD HAPPEN
By Jackie Giuliano

I really never thought this would happen. Oh, many of the science fiction books I had grown up with and continued to read as an adult dwelled on the subject, creating entire civilizations built on the premise. But somehow, even with my daily awareness of our environmental and social crisis, I really never thought it would happen so fast or on such a grand scale. But I have underestimated the vast, uncontrollable power of greed to erode the human spirit and cloud the soul.

Clones (copyright 1998 by Jackie Giuliano)

But it is happening. And we all have to do something about it. It is arguably our greatest environmental crisis. And the greatest crisis of our souls.

For years, "scientists," and I use quotes intentionally because these people are not investigators of the human condition and healers of our relationship with the natural world, have been working on manipulating the very genetic structure of nature. It started out innocently enough after the discovery of DNA, our genetic code, with maps being made of what gene goes where. But then, corporate science manipulators discovered that serious bucks were to be made if they could figure out how to combine things.

Now, a sheep has been cloned, grown from an adult seed. Experiments continue that will enable creatures to be grown outside of the womb completely.

Let's explore some of the implications.

We place little value on our natural resources because they are so relatively cheap. Water is so cheap that we still wash our cars with it and flush our toilets with it. Yet only 1 percent of all the water on planet Earth is fresh water and of that, much is already poisoned with industrial chemicals. But why worry? All you have to do is turn on the faucet and out it comes.

We place so little value on our atmosphere, the very air we breathe, that we continue to drive polluting vehicles and purchase goods manufactured by companies that put tens of thousands of pounds of pollutants in the air each day. Seventy-eight million tons of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and 1,800 tons of ozone-depleting chloroflourocarbons are added to our atmosphere every day worldwide. But why worry? All you have to do is go outside and breathe and it seems OK.

We place so little value on our food resources that we fill our plates, eat what we want, and throw the rest away. Each day in the United States alone, we throw out 200,000 tons of edible food. But why worry? The supermarkets stay full and there seems to be no shortage of food.

We place so little value on the earth beneath our feet, the very soil that grows our food that we tear it out and replace it with concrete and buildings. Seventy-three tons of topsoil is eroded away every day in the world, and 180 square miles of tropical forests are cleared away. But why worry? There still appears to be plenty of food, right?

The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into character.
So watch the thought and its way with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.
-- The Buddha

Our culture places so little value on life itself, whether it be human or animal, that we obscenely torture animals in the name of profitable food production. Human life has so little value that it is acceptable that 120,000 children die worldwide each year just from diarrhea from bad drinking water. It is considered a cost of doing business that 6,000 people each year die from tainted meat products. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration will not force an airline to implement a safety feature unless the cost of doing so is less than the cost of paying a wrongful death lawsuit to survivors of the passenger that could be killed. Average lawsuit = $3.4 million = 1 human life.

It is already a challenge to shift our mindsets toward a different value system in our world with all the cultural messages to the contrary. We are not given the tools to add up the real costs of an item. When you buy a pound of hamburger, it may cost a couple of bucks. But what about other costs that are never included in the price:

1. The cost to the atmosphere: air pollution from the fossil fuels used in the growing of the grain to feed the animal, to produce the drugs that are fed to it every day, to power the slaughterhouses and processing plants, to transport the meat to market, and the pollution from the stoves and barbecues.
   
   
2. The cost of the water: for every pound of meat you get on the table, it takes nearly 10,000 gallons of water to make it - water is needed to grow the grain that is fed to the animal and thousands of gallons are used in the processing of the meat.
   
   
3. Other costs to the environment: billions of tons of animal waste, containing nitrates and other harmful chemicals, goes into our water table, soil, and air every day. Nitrates have polluted the ground water of many regions and caused birth defects in many children.
   
   
4. The cost to our souls from the inhumane, obscene way the animals are treated - the horror and fear they experience every day of their short lives right up until the end when many are cut into while they are still alive.

And the list goes on and on. If all the real costs were added into that pound of meat, or car or stereo or new pair of shoes, each would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead, we let the environment - and our souls - subsidize our lives.

How will our challenges intensify if cloning continues? The first profitable application being developed for cloning will be to make "custom" farm animals. The industry, responding to consumer's demand for cheap meat, will, I predict, want:

• chickens without beaks (they fight in the close quarters of factory farms)
  
• chickens without feet might be even better - then they would stay in one place.
  
• In fact, why not grow a chicken with no legs at all and grow the legs out of the shoulders.
  
• And let's add four more wings per bird.
  
• And while we're at it, lets get rid of the head all together, put the mouth on the underside of the belly so it will be easier to feed, and put the brain in a small sack on the side.

In fact, let's first remove the vocal cords from all farm animals so we don't have to hear them scream...

Malidoma Patrice Some, a West African medicine man with three masters degrees and two Ph.D.s, in his book Ritual, Power, Healing, and Community (Swan Raven and Co., 1993), gives us some clues to our confusion. He says,

"Industrial cultures live with the essence of two extremely dangerous phenomena. One is the good side of production; the other is the danger of what happens to the tools for production when they are devoid of any spiritual strength...The spirit liberates the person to work with the things of the soul. Because this reaching out to the spiritual is not happening, the Machine has overthrown the spirit and, as it sits in its place, is being worshiped as spiritual. This is simply an error of human judgement. Anyone who worships his own creation, something of his own making, is someone in a state of confusion.

He says that Western technology "is being put into the hands of people who have lost touch with the spiritual." What he says next sends a chill up my spine:

Western Machine technology is the spirit of death made to look like life. It makes life seem easier, comfortable, cozy, but the price we pay includes the dehumanization of the self. To sleep in a cozy home, a good bed and eat great, chemically produced food you must rhyme your life with speed, rapid motion, and time. The clock tells you everything and keeps you busy enough to forget that there could be another way of living in your life. It has made the natural way of living look primitive, full of famine, disease, ignorance and poverty so that we can appreciate our enslavement to the Machine and, further, make those who are not enslaved by it feel sorry for themselves.

We are entering troubling times, probably the most troubling in human history. We are on the threshold of being able to create life from non-life, life without nature, life without woman - which many would suggest has been the patriarchy's desire all along. What will the souls of these pitiful creatures be like? How will the value of life be reduced even more? How will it be possible to value some animal or person that you can create in a tube, in a dish, and grow like a plant? How much easier will it be to torture and kill such a creation because it was so "easy" to create? How will our disconnection from the natural world increase if we create beings that are not born connected to that which has connected life from the beginning of time - a mother's womb?

Now is the time,
To climb up the mountain
And reason against habit,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
to renew the barren soil of nature
Ruined by the winds of tyranny,
Now is the time.

Now is the time,
To commence the litany of hope,
Now is the time . . .

Now is the time,
To give me roses, not to keep them
For my grave to come,
Give them to me while my heart beats,
Give them today
While my heart yearns for jubilee,
Now is the time . . .
-- Mzwakhe Mbuli

RESOURCES

1. Look for the books of Malidoma Some and others at Powells new and used on-line bookstore at http://www.powells.com

2. Contact your elected representatives regularly. E-mail them your thoughts. Tell them that cloning research on humans AND animals must be stopped. Find out who they are at http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/

3. Learn more about the plight of farm animals from Compassion in World Farming at http://www.pcug.co.uk/~ciwf/

4. Learn some of the details of the cloning issue from the Scientific American site at http://www.sciam.com/explorations/030397clone/030397beards.html

5. Indian physicist and environmentalist Vandana Shiva has written much on the concept of environmental subsidies. Get her latest book, Biopiracy (South End Press, 1996) and read about her at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~fiatlux/td/vandana/vs-eng.html

6. Read some thoughts on ethics and genetics at http://www.med.upenn.edu/~bioethic/genetics/articles.html

7. Learn about society's campaign against women and the Earth that began long ago. Learn of the times of the witch burnings when the Catholic Church tried to extinguish the last vestige of our connections with the Earth. The film, the Burning Times (National Film Board of Canada) will open your eyes. Learn about it at http://www.onf.ca/FMT/E/MSN/19/19994.html

8. Get plugged in to alternative information sources. In Los Angeles, the Changelinks publication tells of events and happenings in town that you would never hear about in the mainstream media. Check out their web site for ideas no matter where you live at http://members.labridge.com/applepi/laamn/default.html

9. Image components for my visual piece at the beginning of this article came from literature of the Humane Farming Association. Please support their efforts at P.O. Box 3577, San Rafael, California, 94912. The egg image in the piece came from the cover of Living Laboratories - Women and Reproductive Technologies, by Robyn Rowland (Indiana University Press, 1992).

10. Learn more about the environmental costs of our food choices from Earthsave at http://www.earthsave.org/

{Jackie Giuliano can be found trying to understand what is really of value in his life (and finishing his Ph.D. dissertation) in Venice, California. He is a Professor of Environmental Studies for Antioch University, Los Angeles, and the University of Phoenix Southern California Campuses. He is also the Educational Outreach Manager for the Ice and Fire Preprojects, a NASA program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to send space probes to Jupiter's moon Europa, the planet Pluto, and the Sun. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at jackieg@jps.net}