Bioneers Conference - ICIS Report

San Rafael, California, October 15-17, 2004
(part I)

Text and photographs by Henning Wettendorff

Part II

The farming battles

Bill Joy was indeed quoted by speakers for his analysis in Wired magazine that we're seeing a shift from WMD to TMD - Techniques of Mass Destruction, including bio- and nano-technologies. But otherwise the biotech theme was surprisingly absent at the conference, despite Kenny Ausubel's remarks in a pre-conference newsletter, on the importance of biology and biotech in the future.
The biotech agenda became mostly a farming issue and was rather set by those local Marin voter booth activists outside the building - urging attendees to sign up for a ban on GMO crops in Marin County north of San Francisco, and just south of Mendocino County which has imposed the first ban on GM crops in the United States. Small Mendocino farmers have teamed up with major wine growers like Fetzer Vineyards in order to raise the local ban on GMO.
Jason Clay, vice president of WWF's Center for Conservation Innovation, offered a world tour of "better farming practices" (www.wwfus.org), whereas attorney Thomas Linzey brought the conferences attention to legal battles fought by farmers in various parts of the US - fighting to prevent the agro-business from owning farms, something which South Dakota among others, have already written into the state constitution.
Thomas Linzey suggested that if nature had its own rights made constitutional, the agrobusiness would be able to act much less aggressively. The roof lifted when Linzey hammered home his point: "There once was a time when people in this country were property!"
The issue sheds interesting light on the situation in e.g. Denmark where farmers traditionally tend to own the agrobusiness in farming cooperatives that look more like corporations than cooperatives these days.

Beaming Bioneers

Bioneers ultimately aim at combining the personal level, the individual, with the global challenges - it really doesn't help us to have all these great alternative designs and technologies available, if the individual isn't willing to change habits and look to new solutions, and perhaps pay a little more and make some sacrifices.
The Bioneers conference is a vitamin shot to individuals and networks set up during the conferences. The conference also seems to be a communication tool of growing importance - more than a hundred cities throughout the world have asked for satellite-beaming of next year's conference. It is easy to imagine a much larger audience for the Bioneers and its very diverse conference program, in itself an illustration of the basic concerns of the Bioneers - biodiversity and sustainability, taking into account a wide array of themes in a program that was impossible for any single individual to take in, with its many subjects, parallel sessions, film screenings, etc.
On a critical note, some of the largest among current challenges received little attention at the conference. As a European, the question eventually arises: with all that energy, imagination and enthusiasm, why is it that it was not the US but rather its old proponent, Russia, that signed the Kyoto protocol in October?
One of the answers was given by Martha Arguella (www.psrla.org), when she pointed out the dilemmas of difficult priorities and hard decisions when she talked about her community-centred work in southern California, not least in fighting air pollution in impoverished urban areas. Arguella's message to a still applauding audience was the following: "It's not readable that a local community should sacrifice its air quality so that we can say we're part of a global emissions program."