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Modem science is projected as a universal, value-free system of knowledge, which by the logic of its method claims to arrive at objective conclusions about life, the universe and almost everything. This dominant stream of modem science, the reductionist or mechanical paradigm, is a specific projection of Western man that originated during the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries as the much acclaimed Scientific Revolution. Recently, however, Third World and feminist scholarship 1 has begun to recognize that this dominant system emerged as a liberating force not for humanity as a whole (though it legitimized itself in terms of universal benefit for all), but as a Western, male-oriented and patriarchal projection which necessarily entailed the subjugation of both nature and women. 2

Central to this domination and subjugation is an arbitrary barrier between 'knowledge' (the specialist) and 'ignorance' (the nonspecialist). This barrier operates effectively to exclude from the scientific domain consideration of certain vital questions relating to the subject matter of science, or certain forms of non-specialist knowledge. Two personal experiences exemplify this exclusion inherent in dominant knowledge. In the 1970s, while studying to be a nuclear physicist, I came home rejoicing in a summer training course, feeling 'high' at being part of a privileged minority: the atomic energy establishment. But my sister, a doctor, brought me down to earth by revealing my ignorance of the risks of nuclear hazards. As nuclear experts we knew how nuclear reactions occur, but not how radiation affects living systems. The radiation badges and overalls were merely the ritual garb signifying membership of an exclusive dub. This sudden exposure to my own ignorance as a budding nuclear physicist left me feeling shocked and cheated and led to my shifting to a study of theoretical physics. A decade later, when I was pregnant and already in labour, I again encountered this arbitrary boundary between expertise and ignorance. The doctor insisted that I needed to be delivered by Caesarean section because, she said, it would be a difficult birth. I had experienced no problems, had prepared myself for a natural childbirth and informed myself about the potential problems, including medical malpractices. As a mother, however, I was denied the status of 'expert' in child-bearing; that status was restricted to the doctor. I was the unknowing body; the doctor was the knowing mind. When I asked what were the indications for a Caesarean I was hesitantly told that I was too old, that is, I was 30 and apparently that was sufficient indication of the need for a Caesarean section. But I preferred to listen to my own good sense and walked out of the delivery room. My father drove me to a more modest hospital where they were willing to give my baby and me a chance to be natural. As expected, I had a smooth, untraumatic delivery. There seems to be a deception inherent in divided and fragmented knowledge, which treats non-specialist knowledge as ignorance and through the artificial divide, is able to conceal its own ignorance. I characterize modem, Western patriarchy's special epistemological tradition of the 'scientific revolution' as 'reductionist' because: 1) it reduced the capacity of humans to know nature both by excluding other knowers and other ways of knowing; and 2) by manipulating it as inert and fragmented matter, nature's capacity for creative regeneration and renewal was reduced. Reductionism has a set of distinctive characteristics which demarcates it from all other non-reductionist knowledge systems which it has subjugated and replaced. Primarily, the ontological and epistemological assumptions of reductionism are based on uniformity, perceiving all systems as comprising the same basic constituents, discrete, and atomistic, and assuming all basic processes to be mechanical The mechanistic metaphors of reductionism have socially reconstituted nature and society. In contrast to the organic metaphors, in which concepts of order and power were based on interdependence and reciprocity, the metaphor of nature as a machine was based on the assumption of divisibility and manipulability. As Carolyn Merchant has remarked: In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma and its connections to science, technology and the economy, we must re-examine the formation of a world-view and a science that, reconceptualising reality as a machine, rather than a living organism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women. 3 This domination is inherently violent, understood here as the violation of integrity. Reductionist science is a source of violence against nature and women, in so far as it subjugates and dispossesses them of their full productivity, power and potential. The epistemological assumptions of reductionism are related to its ontological assumptions: uniformity permits knowledge of parts of a system to stand for knowledge of the whole. Divisibility permits context-free abstraction of knowledge, and creates criteria of validity based on alienation and non-participation, which is then projected as 'objectivity'. 'Experts' and 'specialists' are thus projected as the only legitimate seekers after and producers of knowledge. Value and non-value Reductionism is protected not merely by its own mythology, but is also protected by the interests it serves. Far from being an epistemological accident, reductionism is a response to the needs of a particular form of economic and political organization. The reductionist world-view, the industrial revolution and the capitalist economy are the philosophical, technological and economic components of the same process. Individual firms and the fragmented sectors of the economy, whether privately or state owned, are concerned only with their own efficiency and profits; and every firm and sector measures its efficiency by the extent to which it maximizes its profits, regardless of the maximization of social and ecological costs. Reductionism has provided the logic of this efficiency. Only those properties of a resource system which generate profits through exploitation and extraction are taken into account; properties which stabilize ecological processes but are commercially non-profit generating are ignored and eventually destroyed. Commercial capitalism is based on specialized commodity production and therefore demands uniformity in production, and the uni-functional use of natural resources. Reductionism thus reduces complex ecosystems to a single component, and a single component to a single function. Further, it allows for the manipulation of the ecosystem in a way that maximizes the single-function, single-component exploitation. In the reductionist paradigm, a forest is reduced to commercial wood, and wood is reduced to cellulose fibre for the pulp and paper industry. Forests, land and genetic resources are then manipulated to increase the production of pulpwood. This distortion is legitimized scientifically as overall productivity increase, regardless of whether it might decrease the output of water from the forest, or destroy the diversity of life forms that constitute a forest community. 'Scientific' forestry and forestry 'development' thus violate and destroy the living and diverse ecosystem. In this way, reductionist science is at the root of the growing ecological crisis, because it entails a transformation of nature that destroys its organic processes and rhythms and regenerative capacities. The arbitrary boundaries between knowledge and ignorance are paralleled by arbitrary boundaries between value and nonvalue. The reductionist, mechanistic metaphor simultaneously creates the measure of value and the instruments for the annihilation of that which it considers non-value. It creates the possibility of colonizing and controlling that which is free and self-generative. Technological development proceeds from what it has already transformed and used up towards that which still remains untouched. It is in this sense that the seed and women's bodies as sites of regenerative power are, in the eyes of capitalist patriarchy, among the last colonies. 4 These sites of creative regeneration are transformed into 'passive' sites where the expert 'produces' and adds value. Nature, women and non-white people merely provide 'raw' material. The devaluation of contributions from women and nature goes hand-in-hand with the value assigned to acts of colonization as acts of development and improvement. Separation, which signifies alienation, becomes a means of ownership and control. Locke's second treatise on government states that: 'Whatsoever then he moves out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in he hath mixed his labour with and thereby makes it his property.' 5 The act of 'moving out' thus becomes the act of owning, and it is for the facilitation of the ability to 'move out', separate and fragment that capital depends on science and technology. Ownership procured through removal and 'mixing with labour', however, denies that prior to this, labour had been involved. There is no clear line between nature and human labour expended on the cultivated seed and nature and the human offspring. What the industrializing vision sees as nature is other people's social labour that it wants to denigrate by defining it as non-labour, as biology and nature, and defining both nature and women's work as passive. From the dominant standpoint, as Claudia von Werlhof 6 has pointed out, 'nature' is everything that should be available free, and/or as cheaply as possible. This includes products of social labour. 'The labour of these people is therefore pronounced to be non-labour, to be biology; their labour power — their ability to work — appears as a natural resource, and their products as akin to a natural deposit.' A number of artificial shifts are thus achieved through fragmenting knowledge. The sources of regeneration and renewal of life are transformed into inert and fragmented matter, mere 'raw material' to be processed into a finished product. The transformation of creativity into passivity relocates productivity in disruptive, coercive and exploitative acts, and defines it as a source of value; and simultaneously defines all other values as nonvalue. Through this relocation of production and value, external control over sites of regeneration becomes not just desirable but necessary for human survival and well-being. The destructive, ironically, emerges as the saviour. The many shifts of value into non-value, labour into non-labour, creativity into passivity, destruction into production are exemplified in the takeover of biological reproduction by capital and technology. The reduction of human reproduction The medicalization of childbirth has been linked to the mechanization of the female body into a set of fragmented, fetishized and replaceable parts, to be managed by professional experts. Pregnant women are viewed not so much as sources of human regeneration, as the 'raw material' from which the 'product' —the baby — is extracted. In these circumstances, the physician rather than the mother comes to be seen as having produced the baby. What seems significant is that the Caesarean section, which requires the most medical 'management' and the least 'labour' by the uterus and the woman, is often considered to provide the best products. In the case of in vitro fertilization (IVF), an expert committee saw doctors not only as 'enablers', but as 'taking part in the formation of the embryo itself'. 7 Formerly, the focus was on the mother, and the organic unity of mother and baby, now it is centred on the 'foetal outcome' controlled by doctors. Women's wombs have been reduced to inert containers, 8 and their passivity has been constructed along with their ignorance. A woman's direct organic bond with the foetus is replaced by knowledge mediated by men and machines which claims the monopoly of expertise to educate women to be good mothers. As Ann Oakley, quoting from a medical textbook, writes: When a mother undergoes ultrasound scanning of the fetus, this seems a great opportunity for her to meet her child socially and in this way, one hopes, to view him as a companion aboard rather than as a parasite . .. Doctors and technicians scanning mothers have a great opportunity to enable mothers to form an early affectionate bond to their child by demonstrating the child to the mother. This should help mothers to behave concernedly towards the fetus. 9 Not only has women's labour and knowledge been negated, but even their intimate link with and love for the child which emerges from their own body has to be demonstrated by doctors and technicians. The new reproductive technologies accentuate the shift in power from the mother to the doctor, from women to men, 10 suggest that the production of sperm is of greater value than the production of eggs. They conclude that sperm-vending places a greater strain on the man than does egg 'donation' on the woman, in spite of the chemical and mechanical invasion into her body necessarily associated with this process. Furthermore, IVF and other technologies are currently offered for 'abnormal' cases of infertility, but the boundary between normal and abnormal is as ambiguous as is the boundary between nature and non-nature. When pregnancy was first transformed into a medical condition, professional management was limited to abnormal cases, while normal cases continued to be cared for by the original professionals: the midwife. While in the 1930s, 70 per cent of child births were thought sufficiently normal for the woman to be delivered at home, in the 1950s 70 per cent were identified as sufficiently abnormal to warrant delivery in hospital. To quote Anne Oakley again: The wombs of women are containers to be captured by the ideologies and practises of those who do not believe that women are able to take care of themselves. The capturing of women's wombs is the domination of the physicalist and masculinist scientific paradigm, the ultimate logic, not merely of the medicalization of life, but of a Cartesian world-view, in which the behaviour of bodies can be explained and controlled independently of minds." A Time magazine article 12 — 'A Revolution in Making Babies' — describes techniques to cross the 'barrier' posed to pregnancy by menopause. The body's rhythms have been systematically interpreted as technological barriers — and crossing the barrier has involved fragmenting the organism, in the mind and materiality. Thus the Time’s article states that 'new findings suggest that these women may be infertile not because their uteruses are too old but because their ovaries are'. Reducing organic wholes to fragmented, separable and substitutable parts has been the reductionist method of going beyond nature's limits. The reduction of plant reproduction Since the scientific and industrial revolution, technology and economics have mutually reinforced the assumption that nature's limits must be overridden in order to create abundance and freedom. Agriculture and food production illustrate how overriding these limits has led to a breakdown of ecological and social systems. For centuries, agricultural societies operated in accordance with nature's limits in order to ensure the renew ability of plant life and soil fertility. But natural processes for this renewal became perceived of as a constraint which had to be overcome. Industrially produced seed and fertilizer were considered superior substitutes for nature's seeds and fertility; yet these substitutes rapidly transformed soil fertility and plant life into a non-renewable resource. Soil and seeds used as raw material and inputs for Green Revolution and industrial agriculture, created diseased soils, water-logged or salinized wastelands, and pest- and disease-infested crops. The ultimate step in converting nature into a resource is the conversion of 'seed' — the source from which plant life rises again — into a 'genetic resource' to be engineered, patented and owned for corporate profit. Nature's ways of renewing plants are dismissed as too slow and 'primitive'. Natural limits on reproduction of life — 'species barriers' — are now to be crossed by engineering transgenic life-forms, whose impact on life can be neither known nor imagined. The scientific revolution was to have rolled back the boundaries of ignorance. Instead, a tradition of knowledge that has viewed nature and women only as a resource, and nature's limits as constraints, has created unprecedented man-made ignorance — an ignorance which is becoming a new source of threat to life on this planet. Colonization of the seed, reflects the patterns of colonization of women's bodies. Profits and power become intimately linked to invasion into all biological organisms. Hybridization was an invasion into the seed; it fractured the unity of seed as grain (food) and as means of production. In doing so, it opened the space for capital accumulation needed by private industry in order to become firmly established in plant breeding and commercial seed production. As in the case of women's regenerative process, the first step in colonization of the seed is its reduction by means of a mechanistic metaphor. A book on high yielding crop varieties states: Plants are the primary factory of agriculture where seeds are like the 'machine', fertilizers and water are like the fuel; herbicides, pesticides, equipments, credits and technical know-how are accelerators, to increase the output of this industry. The output in the plant industry is directly correlated with the genetic potential of the seeds to make use of the cash and non-cash inputs. 13 Modem plant-breeding is primarily an attempt to eliminate the biological obstacle to the market in seed: its inherent ability to regenerate and multiply. Seed that reproduces itself stays free, a common resource and under the farmers' control. Corporate seed has a cost and is under the control of the corporate sector or agricultural research institutions. The transformation of a common source into a commodity, of a self-regenerative resource into a mere 'input' changes the nature of the seed and of agriculture itself. Peasants and farmers are thus robbed of their means of livelihood by the new technology which becomes an instrument of poverty and underdevelopment. Divorcing seed as a source from grain (food) also changes the seed's status. From being complete, self-regenerating products seeds become mere raw material for the production of a commodity. The cycle of regeneration, of biodiversity, is therefore supplanted by a linear flow of free germ plasm from farms and forests into laboratories and research stations, and of modified uniform products as cost-bearing commodities from corporations to farmers. Potential diversity is nullified by transforming it into mere raw material for industrial production based on uniformity, and this also necessarily displaces the diversity of local agricultural practise. To quote Claude Alvares: 'For the first time the human race has produced seed that cannot cope on its own, but needs to be placed within an artificial environment for growth and output.' 14 This change in the nature of seed is justified by creating a value and meaning system that treats self-regenerative seed as 'primitive', as 'raw' germ plasm, and the seed that, without inputs, is inert and non-reproducible as 'advanced' or 'improved'. The whole is rendered partial, the partial is rendered whole. The commoditized seed is ecologically crippled on two levels. (1) It does not reproduce itself while, by definition, seed is a regenerative resource. Genetic resources thus, through technological manipulation, transform a renewable source into a non-renewable source. (2) It cannot produce by itself, to do so it needs the help of artificial, manufactured inputs. As seed and chemical companies merge, dependence on inputs will increase. A chemical, whether externally or internally applied, remains an external input in the ecological cycle of the reproduction of seed. This shift from the ecological processes of reproduction to the technological processes of production underlies two crucial problems. 1) Dispossession of farmers, because their seeds are rendered incomplete and valueless by the process that makes corporate seeds the basis of wealth creation; 2) genetic erosion because the indigenous varieties or land races, evolved both through natural and human selection, and produced and used by Third World farmers worldwide are called 'primitive cultivars', while those varieties created by modem plant-breeders in international research centres or by transnational seed corporations are called 'advanced' or 'elite'. The implicit hierarchy in the words 'primitive' and 'advanced' or 'elite' becomes explicit. Thus, the North has always treated the South's germ plasm as a freely available resource of no value. The advanced capitalist countries are determined to retain free access to the South's genetic storehouse; the South would like to have the proprietory varieties of the North's genetic industry similarly declared a freely available resource. The North, however, resists this reciprocity. Dr J. T. Williams, Executive Secretary of the International Board for Plant Genetic Resources (IBPGR) has argued that, 'It is not the original material which produces cash returns. ' 15 A1983 forum on plant breeding, sponsored by Pioneer Hi-Bred stated that: Some insist that since germ-plasm is a resource belonging to the public, such improved varieties would be supplied to farmers in the source country at either low or no cost. This overlooks the fact that 'raw' germ-plasm only becomes valuable after considerable investment of time and money, both in adapting exotic germ-plasm for use by applied plant breeders in incorporating the germ-plasm into varieties useful to farmers. 16 [Emphasis added.] In the corporate perspective, only that which makes profit is of value. However, all material processes also serve ecological needs and social needs, and these needs are undermined by the monopolizing tendency of corporations. Patents have become a major means of establishing profits as a measure of value. To patent an object/material excludes others from creating/ inventing a novel and useful variation of the patented object/material, usually for a specific period of time. In the area of industrial design and artifacts, patenting, 'owning' the 'products of the mind', is less problematic 17 than in the area of biological processes, where organisms are self-generating and often shaped, modified or augmented by techniques of breeding, selection and so on. Thus, to assess intellectual property claims in these processes is far more difficult, if not impossible. Until the advent of biotechnologies, which changed concepts of ownership of life, animals and plants were excluded from the patent system. But now, with these technologies, life can be owned. The potential for gene separation and manipulation reduces the organism to its genetic constituents. Monopoly rights on life forms are conferred on those who use new technology to manipulate genes, while the contributions of generations of farmers and agriculturalists, in the Third World and elsewhere, in the areas of conservation, breeding, domestication and development of plant and animal genetic resources are devalued and dismissed. As Pat Mooney has observed, 'the argument that intellectual property is only recognizable when performed in laboratories with white lab coats is fundamentally a racist view of scientific development/ 18 The clear inferences of this argument are: 1) that Third World farmers' labour has no value, while Western scientists' labour adds value; and 2) that value is measured only in terms of the market: profitability. It is, however, recognized that, 'the total genetic change achieved by farmers over the millennia was far greater than that achieved by the last hundred or two years of more systematic science based efforts'. Plant scientists are not the sole producers of utility in seed. Invasion and justice When labour is defined as non-labour, values becomes non-value, rights non-rights, and invasion becomes defined as improvement. 'Improved seeds' and 'improved foetuses' are, in reality, 'captured' seeds and foetuses. To define social labour as a state of nature is an essential element of this 'improvement'. This achieves three things simultaneously: 1) it denies any contribution by those whose products are appropriated, and by converting their activity in passivity transforms used and developed resources into 'unused', 'undeveloped' and 'wasted' resources; 2) by construing appropriation to mean 'development' and 'improvement', it transforms robbery into a right with the claim to ownership based on a claim of improving; and 3) and relatedly, by defining previous social labour as nature, and thus not conferring any rights, it transforms people's assertion of their customary, collective usufructary rights into 'piracy', and 'theft'. According to Sir Thomas More, when ‘any people holdeth a piece of ground void and vacant to no good or profitable use' its confiscation is justified, an argument he applied to the confiscation of the Americas from its indigenous inhabitants. In 1889, Theodore Roosevelt said that 'the settler and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their side; this great continent could not have been kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid savages'. 19 Native use was non-use, native lands were empty and 'void', and could be defined as valueless, free, 'nature', to be 'justly' appropriated. New colonies are now being created, carved out by reductionist thought, capital and profit, controlled by patriarchal might. The new technologies are making their greatest 'progress' in plant biotechnology and reproductive technologies — the boundaries between what is, and what is not nature, what is and what is not a right are being redrawn. The 'seed wars', the trade wars, patent 'protection' and intellectual property rights designed by GATT 20 are modem versions of claim to ownership through separation. The US international trade commission estimates that US industry is losing between US$ 100 and 300 million due to the absence of 'intellectual property rights'. If this regime of 'rights' being demanded by the US takes shape, the transfer of these extra funds from poor to rich countries would exacerbate the Third World debt crisis ten times over. 21 Violence, power and ecological disruption are intimately linked as lifeprocesses are rendered 'valueless' and their sundering becomes the source of the creation of value and wealth — when invasion into the space within (seeds and wombs) becomes a new space for capital accumulation and a new source of power and control which destroys the very source of control. Regeneration, production and consumption The colonization of regenerative sources of the renewal of life is the ultimate ecological crisis: patriarchal science and technology, in the service of patriarchal capitalism, have tom apart cycles of regeneration, and forced them into linear flows of raw materials and commodities. The selfprovisioning, self-regenerative systems have been reduced into 'raw' material, and consuming systems have been elevated into 'production' systems which supply commodities to consumers. The disruption of natural growth cycles becomes the source of capital growth because, as Marilyn Waring has pointed out, the principle underlying collection of data for the national accounts is to exclude data relating to production where the producer is also the consumer. The destruction of regeneration is not revealed as destruction, instead the multiplication of 'producers' and 'consumers' and commodities signals growth. Mainstream environmentalists, as manifested at the 1992 Earth Summit, divorced from feminism, continue to use the model of the world designed by capitalist patriarchy. Instead of rebuilding ecological cycles, it focuses on technological fixes. Instead of relocating human activity in regeneration, it maintains the categories of production and consumption, and offers 'green consumerism' as an environmental panacea. The feminist perspective is able to go beyond the categories of patriarchy that structure power and meaning in nature and society. It is broader and deeper because it locates production and consumption within the context of regeneration. Not only does this relate issues that have so far been treated as separate, such as linking production with reproduction, but more significantly, by making these links, ecological feminism creates the possibility of viewing the world as an active subject, not merely as a resource to be manipulated and appropriated. It problematizes 'production' by exposing the destruction inherent in much of what capitalistic patriarchy has defined as productive and creates new spaces for the perception and experience of the creative act. The 'activation' of what has been, or is being construed as 'passive' according to patriarchal perception, becomes then the most significant step in the renewal of life. Overcoming estrangement from nature's rhythms and cycles of renewal and becoming a conscious participant in them becomes a major source of this activation. Women everywhere are indicating this. Whether it is Barbara McLintock 23 referring to a 'feeling for the organism', Rachel Carson 24 talking of participating in nature's perennial rhythms, or Itwari Devi 25 describing how shakti (power) comes from forests and grasslands. That search and experience of interdependence and integrity is the basis for creating a science and knowledge that nurtures, rather than violates, nature's sustainable systems.