`Beyond Beef': Rifkin Challenges Another Sacred Cow

Jeremy Rifkin has had a very close relationship with E. coli for years.

Not that he thinks about the microscopic bacterium very often. Rifkin's thoughts these days tend to run toward the global, the biospheric, even.

Still, he and E. coli rose from obscurity together, back in the '70s, and they're still linked today: E. coli is the bad guy, poisoning children, and Rifkin is the man who gets to say, somewhat smugly, "I told you so."

Rifkin, the terror of technology for the past two decades, turned his attention a few years ago from genetic engineering and scourges of the planet to the beef industry. His book, "Beyond Beef: The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture," published last year, takes no prisoners.

The recent poisonings by hamburgers contaminated with a virulent strain of the omnipresent E. coli have provided Rifkin with a newly attentive audience. Illnesses in more than 400 people, including two children who have died, have been linked to bad beef.

Once again Rifkin has leaped into action, filing petitions and lawsuits, and touting a springtime anti-beef campaign that was already in the works.

But Rifkin's agenda isn't beef itself, although he believes we should not eat it, and that the world would be better off - transformed, actually - without cattle.

This campaign, like all his others, is part of a larger goal.

He is, as he once put it, a heretic, challenging nothing less than our entire "faith system" - our scientific world view.

"I start out with the idea that the most important decisions that affect our lives are decisions on technology - but they're never debated," says Rifkin.

We treat technology as though it were neutral, and it's not, argues Rifkin, who was influenced at an early age by Jacques Ellul's powerful book, "The Technological Society."

"Tools are power. Power is never neutral," Rifkin says.

Omnipresent thorn in the side of technology that Rifkin has proved to be, it's sometimes hard to believe that he was once as unknown as E. coli.

In the '60s, E. coli was an unglamorous bacterium that quietly existed in guts around the world. In the '70s, scientists figured out how to slice out its DNA, change it, and glue it back in. Suddenly, it was a star.

In the '60s, Rifkin was a former beer-drinking frat boy who was moving into anti-war activities. He organized freedom-of-speech and anti-war rallies and a march on the Pentagon. In the '70s, genetic engineering taking place with E. coli caught his eye, and suddenly, he, too, was a star.

Singing "We shall not be cloned," Rifkin brought anti-war dissonance to science, rallying protesters at a national meeting of scientists in Washington, D.C.

He founded the Foundation on Economic Trends, and started filing suits. He sued the government, he sued universities, he sued genetic research companies. He was smart, effective and organized, and scientists, bureaucrats and lawmakers alike were taken by surprise.

As good as he was behind a legal brief, Rifkin was even better on stage.

Juggling facts and real-life scenarios with a natural showman's dexterity, he dazzled his audiences. Fast-talking and entertaining, he convinced listeners that genetic engineering was playing God, practicing eugenics, and worse.

Since those early days, Jeremy Rifkin has taken on nearly every aspect of technology, one by one, from tomatoes and biological warfare to fossile-fuel use and "gas guzzler" automobiles.

He's been called "a social and ethical prophet" (The New York Times, commenting on his reputation in some quarters), and his books have been praised lavishly by figures as well known as Vice President Albert Gore and biologist-educator Paul Ehrlich.

To his critics, however, Rifkin is nothing more than a neo-Luddite, attempting to use lawsuits to smash technology much as his 19th-century counterparts in England destroyed textile machinery in a vain attempt to stop industrialization.

He and some of his books have been savaged by some formidable critics, among them Stephen Jay Gould, the noted Harvard paleontologist.

Although Gould said he agreed that the "deep issue" of integrity of evolutionary lineages was troubling, he panned "Algeny" (1983) as a "cleverly constructed tract of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as scholarship."

Others, especially those in the beef industry, accuse Rifkin of playing fast and loose with the facts.

"He's good at manipulating the data," says Donna Schmidt, spokeswoman for the National Live Stock and Meat Board in Chicago.

"I think he's spreading a lot of misinformation," she adds. "He's a professional activist - he's always trying to capitalize on the issue of the moment."

Barry Swanson, Washington State University professor of food science and human nutrition, says it's "unethical and inappropriate" for Rifkin to use this occasion to attack the beef and fast-food industries, "who offer safe and nutritious food to customers."

But even Rifkin's critics admit that he is very good at getting publicity and attention for his issues.

In the past 20 years he has churned out 12 readable, effusive books covering everything from his own motivations ("Declaration of a Heretic," 1985) to time ("Time Wars," 1987) to the big picture ("Biosphere Politics," 1991).

He is, he admits, a man with a mission.

If he didn't speak in the quick cadences of a New York sidewalk salesman, he would sound positively religious, speaking as he does of good and evil.

"Technology is our God," he says. "We've deified technology, when it is all stuff, as George Carlin would say. It's stuff."

Used to be that we said we were fashioned in God's image, Rifkin says. "Now, we fashion ourselves in the image of technology."

We learn it in school, he says, in the metaphors we use. Bodies are machines: the heart is a pump, the blood is the gas, and so forth.

In our "pathological culture," we dissociate ourselves from the consequences of our actions, Rifkin believes. We patent human brain genes, drop bombs, sell (and eat) hamburgers. Whatever can be done, we do, as long as it's expedient and profitable.

That's what he means when he talks about cold evil. Hot evil is the Judeo-Christian way, which involves two people fornicating, killing or hating. By contrast, cold evil has faceless victims, in Rifkin's view.

"Cold evil is evil that doesn't dawn on us," he says. "But once it dawns on us, we're responsible."

When we eat a hamburger, we're not only running the risk of being poisoned, we're contributing to the destruction of the planet, he argues in "Beyond Beef." Ultimately, he says, we will be our own victims.

Rifkin didn't always feel this way.

As a child, he grew up on the South Side of Chicago, the lone Jewish kid in an all-Catholic working-class and middle-class neighborhood. "No game was ever finished," he recalls. "We always fought."

His father, a small-business owner who manufactured plastic products, believed that technology would help the world, and Jeremy didn't argue.

The only son, Jeremy could have taken over the family business.

Instead, he went to college, earning a degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, and a master's degree from Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.

A stint as a VISTA volunteer in a New York slum brought him close to people on welfare. "I remember wondering at the time, why do these kinds of disparities, injustices exist?"

Now he's married to Carol Grunewald, an animal-rights activist and writer who shuns leather shoes. He still wears them, and feels "mildly troubled" about it.

He does the cleaning; his wife "does the stuff with the tool chest."

As president of the Greenhouse Crisis Foundation, he talks a lot about feelings - our attitude toward the world.

We need to have a new vision of our relationship to each other, he argues, based on "re-establishing participation" instead of control. We need to stop thinking about domination, and start thinking about "stewardship."

Corporate America thinks people are too stupid to make decsions about technology, Rifkin says. But they're wrong.

"This idea that the public is too dumb to understand the complicated ideas of science and technology," Rifkin says, "is the kind of thing we fought a revolution about 200 years ago."