From the Editor's Desk

Milo Minderbinder, the quintessential literary war profiteer, decrees what people must swallow. Too often, even when the food or the propaganda that spews from corporations, governments, and militaries is poisonous, if it's cloaked in a spoonful of sugar, a soupçon of coercion, and a dollop of patriotism, most of us swallow it.

Yet Moriah Arnold, a middle school student from Massachusetts, refuses to swallow the Bush Administration's lies. She circulated a petition at school against the US war in Iraq, and denounced the falsehoods from the stage of the big anti-war march in DC on January 27, 2007 (see article). Ted Glick critiques the speeches at that demonstration for being too narrowly focused on ending the US war in Iraq while neglecting the corporate motivations for the war. Glick asks us to work not only to end this war, but to save our over-heating biosphere and prevent wars for oil by transforming our economy (see article). Similarly, Joe Gerson asks us to widen our vision from Iraq and Iran in order to push for a grand diplomatic settlement in the Middle East (see article).

Lieutenant Ehren Watada, like Heller's Yossarian, decided to choose conscience over orders, life over death, and going AWOL over military discipline. The military's current Catch-22: you have the duty to disobey an illegal order, but if you disobey an order, you will be prosecuted, and forbidden from arguing in court that it's illegal (see article). As Heller's Doc Daneeka explains, "That's the catch. Even if the colonel were disobeying a[n]… order by making you fly more missions, you'd still have to fly them, or you'd be guilty of disobeying an order."

In another anti-war classic, The Butter Battle Book, Dr. Seuss challenged a different military paradox, the sad illogic of arms races. In the book, Yooks and Zooks threaten each other with ever-more-terrifying means of destruction in a futile quest for techno-supremacist security. Karl Grossman, in his article about anti-satellite weapons (see article), and Francis Boyle, in his exposé of US biowarfare plans (see article), implore us to become wiser than Yooks and Zooks.

Genewatch calls on the country to move away from the biowarfare abyss; to refuse to destroy our biological commons (see article). The organization Reclaim the Commons motivated us to focus this issue on bioactivism by issuing a call for a BioJustice 2007 mobilization to counter the Biotechnology Industry Organization conference to be held in Boston in May (see article).

Ronnie Cummins (see article) and Starhawk invite us to democratize decisions about eco-development and learn to create permacultural change (see article). Eric Holt Jimenez and Food First are implementing these principles by insisting that the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations listen to grassroots networks of African farmers in order to learn from the failures of previous capital-intensive agricultural "Green Revolutions (see article)." As if listening to Ted Glick's recommendations earlier in the issue, Brian Tokar rejects claims made by the Bush administration and corporate agribusinesses that biofuels are a clean energy panacea, warns us of the energy required to produce them, and underlines the danger of feeding cars instead of people (see article).

Richard Jefferson and CAMBIA are attempting to transform biotechnology, and biology itself, the way the free software movement is transforming software: by circumventing the corporate choke-holds of secrecy and profit (see article). Finally, though Milo Minderbinder didn't care that cottonseeds were poisonous, a new form of biotechnology, while speculative, holds out the potential for helping to feed 500 million people by making it nutritious to consume the seeds of one of the cash crops which today contributes to starvation: cotton itself (see article).