Un-making environmental activism: beyond modern/colonial binaries in the GMO Controversy, by Doerthe Rosenow

In the context of accelerating climate change and a growing world population, the issue of genetic modification is set to be at the centre of debates on the future of food production. While the proponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) argue that it will be impossible to feed the growing population of the planet without it, its critics rely on a variety of counter-claims that draw on scientific, political, economic, social, spiritual, and environmental reasons for rejecting the use of GMOs. This book’s empirical remit is the forms of environmental activism that have been directed against the adoption of GMOs from the 1990s to the present, particularly in Europe and India. Beyond the issue of genetic engineering, the book’s main contribution is located in its critical engagement with contemporary new materialist and decolonial political thought.

Rosenow identifies three sites where the anti-GMO struggle is played out: the debates concerning the science of genetic engineering taking place especially in Europe, the anti-Bt cotton activism in India, and the globalisation of environmental protest through the Intercontinental Caravan (ICC) that took place in Europe in 1999. Throughout these chapters, Rosenow is concerned with unpacking the various modern/colonial binary forms of thought upon which anti-GMO activism is based. This, however, is a sympathetic critique as the book finally ends with ‘an anti-GMO activist manifesto’, the purpose of which is to offer practical proposals on how anti-GMO activism can move forward in a way that does not reproduce the binaries the book problematises.

In tackling these modern/colonial binaries, Rosenow identifies several dichotomies, such as scientific/emotive, Western/traditional, and evidence/interests, that have their roots in the modern and colonial oppression of non-Western ways of knowing and being in the world. The main target of Rosenow’s critique, however, is the natural/unnatural dichotomy that she finds at the heart of much environmental activism. Although Rosenow frequently recognises that anti-GMO activism in the global South tends to be directed at the corporate control of seed and the neoliberal economic policies in the context of which biotechnology is implemented, these issues in themselves do not have a central role in the book. While Rosenow seems sympathetic to critiques of genetic engineering informed by political economy, and calls for socio-economic justice, the book takes issue with the demand for purity and uniformity in resisting neoliberal globalisation. Overall, Rosenow approaches anti-GMO activism primarily in terms of its ‘ongoing fixation on the ontological properties of the GMO’ (p. 84). As such, the book is of particular interest to readers who are engaging with the so-called ontological turn in social theory. The book’s central contribution lies in the way in which it problematises and reworks new materialist renditions of this turn. Relying on ontologies of ‘abundance’ that conceive of reality as open, vibrant, and in constant flux, new materialist approaches often fail to account for the actual lack of agency on the side of the oppressed. Yet, instead of rejecting new materialist ontologies, Rosenow puts them in a productive dialogue with postcolonial and decolonial thought in order to develop an approach to environmental activism that is not only attuned to nonhuman agency and the fluid character of reality but also attentive to domination, inequality, and internal hierarchies.

Beyond its problematisation of the above-mentioned binaries, the book is admirable in its aim to explicitly engage with the practical implications of its critique. The anti-GMO activist manifesto at the end of the book is a refreshing alternative to the usually rather cautious ways in which those working within and through the poststructuralist tradition tend to approach the issue of prescriptive politics. Nevertheless, some of the claims made here could have been better justified for readers less inclined to accept statements concerning nonhuman, material agency. For example, what does it mean that we should recognise ‘the rights of GMOs for ontological self-definition’ (p. 6)? Critics of GMOs are often concerned about the unexpected, emergent properties that GMOs may have when they interact with other living organisms. As such, GMOs may have agency beyond what was intended by their human creators, but in what sense are we to think that GMOs have ‘rights’ or that they practice ‘self-definition’? For those readers who are either less familiar with or less convinced by new materialist thought, such claims require more extensive unpacking.

Finally, the book deserves credit for the explicit way in which it is ‘a work of transition’ (p. 113). Rosenow admits that her approach to the issue of environmental activism transformed significantly as a consequence of her encounter with the work of decolonial thinkers. Nevertheless, the book does not offer an extensive engagement with non-modern cosmologies vis-à-vis GMOs or an actual encounter with the experiences of the people with whose oppression Rosenow is concerned. And yet, instead of trying to hide these contradictions and omissions that followed from the shift in approach, Rosenow puts these at the centre of the book in a way that is remarkably productive and honest. In fact, the book’s transparency regarding its own incoherence is not a limitation but rather becomes an integral part of Rosenow’s overall argument. It is the desire and demand for coherence, consistency, uniformity, and unity that enables domination, whereas admitting to perplexity, uncertainty, and incoherence can help to destabilise the logic of oppression. As such, the book both puts forward a compelling critique of the practice of environmental activism in terms of the modern/colonial ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin it and, in doing so, practices what it preaches by refusing to conform to the reproduction of the logic of coherence that sustains these assumptions.