Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge

"Internationally renowned environmentalist Vandana Shiva argues that genetic engineering and the cloning of organisms are "the ultimate expression of the commercialization of science and the commodification of nature... life itself is being colonized." The resistance to this biopiracy--the use of intellectual property systems to legitimize the exclusive ownership and control over biological resource and biological products and processes that have been used over centuries in non-industrialized cultures--is the struggle to conserve both cultural and biological diversity. Since the land, the forests, the oceans, and the atmosphere have already been colonized, eroded, and polluted, Northern capital is now looking for new colonies to exploit and invade for further accumulation--in Shiva's view, the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals. Featuring a new introduction by the author, this edition of Biopiracy is a learned, clear, and passionately stated objection to the ways in which Western businesses are being allowed to expropriate natural processes and traditional forms of knowledge."--