Jeremy Rifkin Quotes
Basic income is not a utopia, it's a practical business plan for the next step of the human journey.
You can eliminate, for example, a Brazil nut gene if you know that it will create an allergenic effect.
We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.
Many of the genetically modified foods will be safe, I'm sure. Will most of them be safe? Nobody knows.
Can we reach biosphere consciousness and global empathy in time to avert planetary collapse?
Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.
What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.
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.
We are entering a new phase in human history - one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.
Being both entrepreneurial and social is no longer an oxymoron, but rather a tautology.
Europe will not accept genetically modified foods. It doesn't make any difference in the final analysis what Brussels does, what Washington does, or what the World Trade Organization does.
Turning points in human consciousness occur when new energy regimes converge with new communications revolutions, creating new economic eras.
What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.
The industry's not stupid. The industry knows that if those foods are labeled "genetically engineered," the public will shy away and won't take them.
We are learning that the earth functions like an invisible organism. We are the various cells of one living being. Those who work to save the earth are its antibodies.
Generations of human beings were transformed into machines in the relentless pursuit of material wealth: We lived to work.
We were making the first step out of the age of chemistry and physics, and into the age of biology.
They're now turning those seeds into intellectual property, so they have a virtual lock on the seeds upon which we all depend for our food and survival.
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.
We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.
Today we are raised with the notion that to be secure is to be financially autonomous. Amassing wealth is viewed as the primary rite of passage to a secure, autonomous existence.
I know quite a few farmers all over the United States who have tried this and have said the opposite, that they have to use more herbicides, not less. The same holds true with BT.
The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.
It may be that everything the life science companies are telling us will turn out to be right, and there's no problem here whatsoever. That defies logic.
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.
So my attorneys brought litigation in the U.S. federal courts. The judge ruled in our favor.
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.
We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.
If your corn has a herbicide-tolerant gene, it means you can pray your herbicides and kill the weeds; you won't kill your corn.
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.
We need a game plan to deploy it very quickly to both move the economy forward and create the new businesses and jobs, and address climate change. It's a pretty big task. Pretty challenging.
Cosmologies are made up of small snippets of physical reality that have been remodeled by society into vast cosmic deceptions.
