Hawaii: "gMO Ground Zero"

Andrea Brower, Department of Sociology, University of Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, outlines the capitalist-colonial context of the chemical+seed+biotechnology industry's occupation of Hawai'i, struggles for environmental justice in regard to this pesticide-intensive industry, including how depoliticization operates through discursive narratives that map onto wider ideological contours of capital today, emergent potentialities of resistance that are also bound up in complexity and contradiction from genetically modified organism (GMO) ground zero. She traces immanent possibility and the conflicts that erupt between protection of livelihoods and protection of earth and life when there is a scarcity of radical vision about what people could and should be fighting for. She offers critique as an activist-researcher committed to expanding liberatory possibility and entirely in the spirit of co-laboring to cultivate.