Resistance is Fertile: The Commodification of Life and Environmental Protest in the 21 st Century 1 Debora Halbert 2 The environmental movement has a long and rich history of social protest. In fact, it could be argued that social protest is one of the more important reasons the movement has been so successful. Early actors brought environmental issues to the attention of the broader public and ultimately created a climate where legislation to protect the environment became possible. A major factor behind environmental legislation, at least in the United States, was the transformation of public consciousness regarding environmental issues and a growing awareness of the negative impact humans were having on the natural world. Without social protest it is doubtful politicians would have responded to the environmental crisis brought to public attention in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 3 Despite many successes, environmentalism suffered from a corporate backlash during the 1980s as they recovered from their earlier losses in the face of general social opposition. Environmental progress has been more difficult in the 1990s and there have recently been calls marking the death of the environmental movement. 4 While the environmental movement, especially in the United States, may be loosing its effectiveness, this paper joins the chorus of voices rising to counter the argument that environmental resistance is dead. Instead, I argue that environmental resistance is evolving to confront a substantively different world than the one in which early social protest emerged. As part of the evolution of environmental protest, it is important to frame contemporary environmental issues within the technologically constructed and consumption oriented environment that constitutes the lives of much of the developed world – a world that is invading the global south through the assertion of patent rights over knowledge and agricultural products. I wish to investigate the resistance to intellectual property, specifically the interplay between patents and environmental exploitation, growing at a global level. This (relatively) new permutation of the global environmental problem focuses on the privatization of the natural world through the ownership of genes, seeds and genetically modified plants and animals and the appropriation of traditional knowledge. Anxiety over the privatization of the natural world is the foundation for a global environmentalism seeking to resist the commodification of life as we know it. In this paper I will examine the death of environmentalism thesis and use it as a starting point for rethinking what we mean when we talk about the environment and about environmental resistance. Second, I’ll argue that the resistance to the commodification of life in all its permutations is a key form of environmental resistance, a new environmentalism for the 21 st century. To make this argument I would like to draw upon Habermas’ theory of new social movements and assess the applicability of Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude. Finally, I would like to illustrate the importance of this battle. Resisting the expansion of patent rights to seeds, plants and animals is key to formulating a future where environmental and social justice prevails. 1. The Death of Environmentalism The modern environmental movement has gone mainstream with the primary American environmental organizations now staffing offices in Washington D.C. and having some access to power. 5 Environmental activists are now also lobbyists and fundraisers. Some would argue moving to the mainstream means these environmental organizations have been co-opted by the system they initially sought to change. 6 The transformation from its grassroots beginnings to insider status suggests that the context in which contemporary environmental battles are being fought is substantially different from the early years of the movement. The success of the environmental movement in getting legislation passed during the 1970s and the resulting backlash during the 1980s and 1990s create the conditions for a decidedly different environmental movement today. 7 Once legislation was in place to protect the environment, attention shifted to litigation as a protective strategy and policy formation. 8 While social protest remained important, a professionalized group of actors was necessary to fight these more complex environmental battles. Furthermore, as hostility to the environment was institutionalized in the administrations of numerous American Presidents from Regan to the current Bush, environmental organizations had to spend more time defending the gains made in early decades. Whereas the major US environmental legislation emerged in a matter of years, the politics of reaction have been mounting for the past two and ½ decades with funding from resource extraction industries and petroleum based outdoor adventure industries.