We often hear that nanotechnology will transform everything we design and make. That comment is usually followed by speculation about all the wonderful ways we are going to transform things. What's usually overlooked, but perhaps more important, is that, through nanotechnology, we will have the power to redesign and remake everything.

Not just commercial products like tennis rackets and packaging, but plants, animals and people. These powerful consequences often get overlooked in the rush to get the next product to market or make the next scientific breakthrough. But the power that nanotechnology and biotechnology give us to reinvent life is well established, present in the engineered plants and animals all around us.

Eventually, this reengineering process could reach a scale where we begin to redesign nature, to redesign the planet we live on. Many people wonder whether or not that is such a good idea. Evolutionists recognize that nature has evolved over billions of years, subtly adjusting and perfecting along the way. To attempt to redesign natural systems with a technology just a few years old and with our species' reputation for short-sightedness could be arrogant at least, even disastrous.

But the pressure is on to redesign. A hundred-page report, titled Nanotechnology for the Forest Products Industry-Vision and Technology Roadmap, for example, cites potential uses of nanotechnology in forest products including the development of intelligent wood- and paper-based products that could incorporate built-in nanosensors to measure forces, loads, moisture levels, temperatures, or pressures, or detect the presence of wood-decay fungi or termites.

"Nanotechnology can provide benefits that extend well beyond fiber product and new materials development," the Roadmap continues, "and into the areas of sustainable energy production, storage and utilization ... New ways to produce energy, chemicals and other innovative products and processes from this renewable, domestic resource base will help address major issues facing our nation, including national energy security, global climate change, air and water quality, and global industrial competitiveness."

It's hard to argue with aims of cleaner air and reducing global warming. But as usual, "global industrial competitiveness", i.e., profit, is crouching among these other more virtuous aims. Michael Ritter, assistant director of the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., for example, says nanotechnology, "is the wave of the future. There's a lot of money going into it, but the forest product industry has been ignored."

But not any longer. In April the U.S. General Accounting Office will present to Congress a study outlining strategic goals for nanotechnology research in the forest products industry, and will seek from $40 million to $60 million a year in research and development funding by 2008.

Lane Ralph, deputy state director for Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. member and former chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Forestry and Nutrition, says the new study "will evaluate all the federal government's resources in wood product development and what they're doing to help the wood product industry."

But by 2008 we will have destroyed another 150 million acres of rainforest, and some people argue that technology, nano- or otherwise, won't solve problems like global warming and pollution, but that technology is the problem.

As Wendell Berry puts it, "Even such nominally altruistic sciences as medicine and plant-breeding have now become so deeply interpenetrated with economics and politics that their motives are at best mixed with, and at worst replaced by, the motives of corporations and governments."

"To reduce life to the scope of our understanding," he continues, "is inevitably to enslave it, make property of it, and put it up for sale."

Does nanotechnology play a part in reducing trees to "forest products"? I'll let the world's 100 trillion trees have the last word, courtesy of Susan Griffin:

"We are various, and amazing in our variety, and our differences multiply, so that edge after edge of the endlessness of possibility is exposed. You know we have grown this way for years. And to no purpose you can understand. Yet what you fail to know we know, and the knowing is in us, how we have grown this way, why these years were not one of them heedless, why we are shaped the way we are, not all straight to your purpose but to ours."