Pepper Trail | Essays | Stolen Spring

STOLEN SPRING

Sunken in the white depths of winter, a green fire is smoldering. Sometime soon, this viridian spark will flare forth, igniting our valleys with a bedazzling emerald flame. Spreading from the edges of the creeks up the hills and into the mountains, leaving behind glowing fields of flowers, this is Spring herself, awakening the living earth, spreading her word through the media of roots, of spores, of bulbs, and above all, of seeds.

In the palm of my hand lies a seed, a black bean: a hard, dense, fiercely stubborn bead of life. When I close my fist around it, I can feel its adamantine vitality answering the warmth of my skin. What is more perfect than a seed? It contains all the tasks of life within it: to travel, to endure, to take root, to open, to grow, to connect, to produce, and to die. Like birds’ eggs, sleeping babies, and our fondest dreams, seeds have the piercing beauty of perfect potential, and it is impossible not to love them.

At least, that’s how it seems to me. But for a different perspective, we can turn, for example, to the Monsanto Corporation. For this biotechnology conglomerate, seeds are gene delivery systems, and their potential is a little too perfect, thank you very much.

Like many other corporations and the U.S. government itself, Monsanto is working on a set of technologies called “gene protection systems”. According to a company statement, the purpose of these technologies is “to protect the investment companies make in developing genetically-improved crops… some would work by rendering seeds from such crops sterile, while others would work by other means, such as deactivating only the value-added biotech trait.”

In other words, biotech companies are researching ways to patent and then to sterilize or disable genetically-altered crops. These actions would protect corporate interests by preventing farmers from saving seeds for replanting in the next season, or alternatively by forcing farmers to buy chemicals from the biotech company that are needed to “turn on” the desired trait. After being subjected to “gene protection” technology, seeds cease to be seeds and become merely capsules of starches and amino acids, no more animate than a corn flake.

		STOLEN SPRING Sunken in the white depths of winter, a green fire is smoldering. Sometime soon, this viridian spark will flare forth, igniting our valleys with a bedazzling emerald flame. Spreading from the edges of the creeks up the hills and into the mountains, leaving behind glowing fields of flowers, this is Spring herself, awakening the living earth, spreading her word through the media of roots, of spores, of bulbs, and above all, of seeds. In the palm of my hand lies a seed, a black bean: a hard, dense, fiercely stubborn bead of life. When I close my fist around it, I can feel its adamantine vitality answering the warmth of my skin. What is more perfect than a seed? It contains all the tasks of life within it: to travel, to endure, to take root, to open, to grow, to connect, to produce, and to die. Like birds’ eggs, sleeping babies, and our fondest dreams, seeds have the piercing beauty of perfect potential, and it is impossible not to love them. At least, that’s how it seems to me. But for a different perspective, we can turn, for example, to the Monsanto Corporation. For this biotechnology conglomerate, seeds are gene delivery systems, and their potential is a little too perfect, thank you very much. Like many other corporations and the U.S. government itself, Monsanto is working on a set of technologies called “gene protection systems”. According to a company statement, the purpose of these technologies is “to protect the investment companies make in developing genetically-improved crops… some would work by rendering seeds from such crops sterile, while others would work by other means, such as deactivating only the value-added biotech trait.” In other words, biotech companies are researching ways to patent and then to sterilize or disable genetically-altered crops. These actions would protect corporate interests by preventing farmers from saving seeds for replanting in the next season, or alternatively by forcing farmers to buy chemicals from the biotech company that are needed to “turn on” the desired trait. After being subjected to “gene protection” technology, seeds cease to be seeds and become merely capsules of starches and amino acids, no more animate than a corn flake.