Jeremy Rifkin

Jeremy Rifkin
Jeremy Rifkinis an American economic and social theorist, writer, public speaker, political advisor, and activist. Rifkin is the author of 20 books about the impact of scientific and technological changes on the economy, the workforce, society, and the environment. His most recent books include The Zero Marginal Cost Society, The Third Industrial Revolution, The Empathic Civilization, The European Dream, The Hydrogen Economy, The Age of Access, The Biotech Century, and The End of Work...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEconomist
CountryUnited States of America
The 10 largest antitrust law firms in the United States have gone into the federal courts charging Monsanto with creating a global conspiracy in violation of the antitrust laws, to control the global market in seeds.
The electronic media introduced this idea to the larger audience very, very quickly. We spent years and years and years meeting with activists all over Europe to lay the groundwork for a political response, as we did here.
In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.
The greenhouse crisis is the bill coming due for the Industrial Revolution. It's not an accident. It's the logical outcome of our world view - the idea that we can control the forces of nature, that we can have short-term expedient gains without paying for them, that there are no limits to exploitation of the environment, that we can produce and consume faster than nature's ability to replenish.
A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won't stop insects from moving across boundaries. That's absurd.
One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.
The interesting thing is, while we die of diseases of affluence from eating all these fatty meats, our poor brethren in the developing world die of diseases of poverty, because the land is not used now to grow food grain for their families.
Companies that actually survive and flourish are going to change their business model from production to aggregating the networks and the network services and solutions. If you're a construction company or an IT company or a logistics company or an information data operation, to the extent that you can find ways to help build the commons, you can get some commercial value in that.
What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
The public should know that the liability issues here have yet to be resolved, or even raised. If you're a farmer and you're growing a genetically engineering food crop, those genes are going to flow to the other farm.
The American public is not aware that there might be potential allergenic and toxic reactions. With regular food, at least people know which foods they have an allergy to.
Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.
The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.
It is not uncommon to suppose that the free exchange of property in markets and capitalism are one and the same. They are not. While capitalism operates through the free market, free markets don't require capitalism.