Climate Change

Abstract

Currently, the most important campaign priority for Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) overall, as for most major environmental NGOs, is climate change and energy. This is hardly surprising, as climate change, as a symbolic flag, towers over all other environmental issues in the opening stanzas of the twenty-first century. Interestingly, both campaigns we have chosen as case studies depend on science. The genetically modified (GM) element of the food sovereignty campaign questions elements of the Western scientific paradigm (Kuhn 1961), and argues that limits must be placed on scientific and technological endeavours, the unpredictable results of these pursuits threatening the fabric of the earth. Ultimately, science plus capitalism — unmediated by the state and civil society — produces unequal outcomes for the majority of those who inhabit the planet, human and nonhuman. Science, in this vein, is seen as pursuing the interests of elites, as another wave of imperialism, a primary value system or worldview, which colonizes the planet.