On Civil Disobedience and Genetic Engineering

By Marc Lappé

In the last week of August, 1999, one of the first formal acts of civil disobedience directed at genetically engineered food crops was initiated in the United States. According to press reports, the perpetrators allegedly broke into a University of Maine research facility and destroyed a half acre test plot containing new varieties of genetically engineered Roundup Ready maize. According to police, about 1000 stalks of the corn were hacked with what appeared to be a machete. In response, the police searched and seized the computer files of an apparently unrelated biotechnology activist and threatened her with arrest. While many researchers and public officials excoriated the act and its perpetrators as cowardly and criminal, others, particularly those in the biotechnology activist movement criticized the police overreaction and hailed the anti-biotech activists as heroes in the United States' first formal act of resistance against a burgeoning threat to our national food base.

Those of us who are involved in this movement, and especially those who claim some ethical sensibilities, are both alarmed and concerned about this turn of events. Should we be endorsing this form of “civil disobedience”? We might do well to remember the roots of this movement. It began with the satyagraha of Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi believed that violence against the body or the spirit could best be met with passive resistance in which non-violence and steadfast resistance would be used to force the hands of an oppressor. When violence would escalate on the side of the oppressors, the world would see them for their evil intentions and truth would prevail. These tactics, used throughout Gandhi's struggles against British rule in India and apartheid in South Africa, were ultimately victorious. When Martin Luther King used Gandhi's techniques in the struggle against segregation in the American south a half century later, he too prevailed. In the process, many heads were bloodied. Yet, much violence was also ultimately averted.

The key ingredients to these struggles were an unshakable commitment against intrinsic evil and insistence on non-violence and passive resistance and taking personal responsibility for the consequences. Is it appropriate to see the present acts against genetically modified foods in the same light?

Consider the targets of this newest incarnation of civil disobedience: plants and property belonging to a university cooperative extension agent. Consider what these commodities represent: genetically modified corn, a plant with the capacity to spread its altered pollen across the landscape, potentially threatening ecologist stability. And consider the acts themselves: the sabotage destroys the plants and renders the plot of soil unusable. When similar actions were taken by the “genetiX snowball” group in Great Britain, they dressed in white decontamination suits, "harvested" the offending plants, placed them in sealed biohazard bags for collection by the environmental health authorities, and allowed themselves to be arrested. In contrast, the American perpetrators of the alleged crop destruction remain at large.

When acts of civil disobedience are directed not at political entities or nation states but at property, the argument has been made that the justification for destruction must turn on risks the property poses to the general public. Acts of disobedience directed at thwarting the use of particularly dangerous products are justified on the grounds that those acts represent the only morally tenable method available to stem an imminent threat to public welfare or safety. The legal argument justifying destruction of dangerous materials or property on the basis of public safety generally requires a proving that the materials do in fact pose a serious risk of harm not abatable by other means. As far as we know, in the case of the gene-tainted corn plants, no such direct risk presents itself.

What then of the argument that these acts of destruction are symbolic acts intended to direct public opinion and moral suasion against something that poses a dramatic threat to our way of life, our diet or the ecosystem as a whole? Similar arguments were used by the Luddites in late nineteenth century England who opposed the then burgeoning textile industrial revolution by throwing wrenches into and destroying machinery. Whether or not such acts were morally justified turned on the cogency and moral legitimacy of the Luddite cause. In hindsight, we can all point to perils of trying to thwart inevitable industrialization, yet few would question the moral basis for the destructive acts themselves since thousands of jobs were perceived as being at stake. But, Gandhi's own resistance to industrialization of India's home-based spinning industry, conducted without overt destruction or self-initiated violence, was in the end a greater moral victory because it championed human values over material things. The same cannot yet be said about resistance to genetic engineering.

That a philosophical objection to genetic engineering could reasonably lead to some form of active opposition is hardly questionable. It is also unassailable that when the actions are congruent and proportional to the nature of the threat being opposed, they are justifiable. In the case of the University of Maine corn, we question whether this was the case: unlike their British counterparts, no efforts were made to contain the threat of dispersing pollen (no bags were used) and no alternative message was left at the site. More critically, the perpetrators of the Maine action chose to remain anonymous. When civil disobedience “works”, it works in large part because the actors are willing to take personal responsibility for the results of their actions. This apparently was not the case in Maine.

The extensive police response to this relatively minor act of vandalism bespeaks a larger issue. Anti-research sentiment particularly from the animal rights groups in this country threatens one of the basic threads in the fabric of a scientific meritocracy. We reward researchers with public and private funds to the extent they generate salable goods and products which benefit the economy and public health. When this research base is threatened, the whole edifice of the scientific establishment is in jeopardy. This is precisely what the “big stakes” are in the symbolic destruction of genetically engineered corn. If this act was seen as justified and its perpetrators elevated to hero status, the entire research base for genetically engineered food crops might be jeopardized here in the United States. This in fact is the situation in Germany, Scotland, and perhaps England where concerted resistance in the form of civil disobedience and crop destruction has thwarted all but the most committed researchers. I for one remain unconvinced this is a good thing.

The irony of the situation is that testing is just what activist groups have demanded as a precondition to widespread release of genetically engineered crops. It seems to me that opposition to the test plots (as compared, lets say, to the finished products reaching commercial sources) is wrong-headed and morally questionable. If we don't like genetically engineered crops for health reasons, we should encourage health testing of the crops themselves. If we object in theory to the trans-species movement of genes themselves, then wholesale opposition to genetically engineered programs which ignore the ecological consequences of unfettered gene spread is certainly proper. However, the ends do not justify the means. No one endorses the Unibomber's actions to destroy targeted “representatives” of the computer, genetic and lumbering industry simply because they represent the forces hell-bent (in his view) on transforming a gentle human nature into a mechanized, industrialized monster. Similarly, no one can justify harm to persons who themselves pose no imminent threat of harm to others. Some would say plants are a different matter: if destruction of genetically engineered plants serves as a message that their presence is neither warranted nor ecologically safe, then we say destroy them and take the personal consequences.

But to hit and run and not to accept moral responsibility for ones actions violates the fundamental axiom of satyagraha: that the proponent of activist steps to oppose evil accepts whatever consequences his resistance to evil generates. And by so doing, he demonstrates further the evil intrinsic in the system of abuse itself. In the case of the University of Maine corn, we are not seeing actions taken at this high moral plain. In the future, we can hope to see actions based more securely on fundamental moral principles. If not, we might well see an escalation of violence especially if police-state tactics which compromise free expression proliferate as fast as the crops themselves.