|
This visionary bestseller is a groundbreaking blueprint for an ecologically sustainable economy; it explains how the world is on the verge of a new industrial revolution that will transform our fundamental notions about commerce and its role in shaping our future.
The Lovinses are also co-authors, with Ernst Ulrich Von Weizsäcker of Factor Four : Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use (Earthscan publications, London, 1997: ISBN 1 85383 407 6). Published in 26 previous books and hundreds of papers, the Lovins' work has been recognized by the Onassis, Nissan, and Mitchell Prizes and the Heinz, Lindbergh and Right Livelihood Awards.
Amidst the furore over genetically modified living organisms (GMOs), A Tale of Two Botanies provides a succinct scientific argument against the so-called "genetic engineering" of plants and animals, and why the GM food industry should be outlawed.
|
|
A TALE OF TWO BOTANIES
Plants, shaped into incredible diversity by 3.8 billion years of evolution, make possible all life, underpin every ecosystem, and are resilient against almost any threat – except human destructiveness. From botany came the genetics of Mendel and Lamarck, formalizing the patient plant-breeding that's created 10,000 years of agriculture.
Now, however, in the name of feeding a growing human population, the process of biological evolution is being transformed. A St. Louis firm is practicing a completely different kind of botany which, in the Cartesian tradition of reducing complex wholes to simple parts, strives to alter isolated genes while disregarding the interactive totality of ecosystems. Seeking what Sir Francis Bacon called "the enlarging of the bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things possible," its ambition is to replace nature's wisdom with people's cleverness; to treat nature not as model and mentor but as a set of limits to be evaded when inconvenient; not to study nature but to restructure it.
As biophysicist Dr. Donella Meadows notes, the new botany aims to align the development of plants not with their evolutionary success but with their economic success: survival not of the fittest but of the fattest, those best able to profit from wide sales of monopolized products. (High-yield, open-pollinated seeds abound; the new crops were created not because they're productive but because they're patentable.) Their economic value is mainly oriented not toward helping subsistence farmers to feed themselves but toward feeding more livestock for the already overfed rich. Most worryingly, the transformation of plant genetics is being accelerated from the measured pace of biological evolution to the speed of next quarter's earnings report. Such haste makes it impossible to foresee and forestall: unintended consequences appear only later, when they may not be fixable, because novel lifeforms aren't recallable.
In nature, all experiments are rigorously tested over eons. Single mutations venture into an unforgiving ecosystem and test their mettle. Whatever doesn't work gets recalled by the Manufacturer. What's alive today is what worked; only successes yield progeny. But in the brave new world of artifice, organisms are briefly tested by their creators in laboratory and field (no government agency systematically tests for nor certifies their long-term safety), then mass-marketed worldwide. The USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for unlimited release; US researchers have tested about 4,500 more. Just during 199599, the non-Chinese farmland planted to such new crops expanded from zero to an eighth of a billion acres, about the size of Germany. Over half the world's soybeans and a third of the corn now contain genes spliced in from other forms of life. You've probably eaten some lately – unwittingly, since our government prohibits their labeling. The official assumption is that they're different enough to patent but similar enough to make identical food, so Europe's insistence on labeling, to let people choose what they're eating, is considered an irrational barrier to free trade.
Traditional agronomy transfers genes between plants whose kinship lets them interbreed. The new botany mechanically transfers genes between organisms that can never mate naturally: an antifreeze gene from a fish (Arctic flounder) rides a virus host to become part of a potato or a strawberry. Such patchwork, done by people who've seldom studied evolutionary biology and ecology, uses so-called "genetic engineering" – a double misnomer. It moves genes but is not about genetics. "Engineering" implies understanding of the causal mechanisms that link actions to effects, but nobody understands the mechanisms by which genes, interacting with each other and the environment, express traits. Transgenic manipulation inserts foreign genes into random locations in a plant's DNA to see what happens. That's not engineering; it's the industrialization of life by people with a narrow understanding of it.
The results, too, are more worrisome than those of mere mechanical tinkering, because unlike mechanical contrivances, genetically modified organisms reproduce, genes spread, and mistakes literally take on a life of their own, extending like Africanized bees. Herbicide-resistance genes may escape to make "superweeds." Insecticide-making genes may kill beyond their intended targets. Both these problems have already occurred; their ecological effects are not yet known. Among other recent unpleasant surprises, spliced genes seem unusually likely to spread to other organisms. Canola pollen can waft spliced genes more than a mile, and common crops can hybridize with completely unrelated weeds. Gene-spliced Bt insecticide in corn pollen kills Monarch butterflies; that insecticide, unlike its natural forbear, can build up in soil; and corn borers' resistance to it is apparently a dominant trait, so planned anti-resistance procedures won't work.
It could get worse. Division into species seems to be nature's way of keeping pathogens in a box where they behave properly (they learn that it's a bad strategy to kill your host). Transgenics may let pathogens vault the species barrier and enter new realms where they have no idea how to behave. It's so hard to eradicate an unwanted wild gene that we've intentionally done it only once – with the smallpox virus.
Since evolution is a fundamental process, it must occur at every scale at which it's physically possible, down to and including the nanoecosystem of the genome. Shotgunning alien genes into the genome is thus like introducing exotic species into an ecosystem. (Such invasives are among the top threats to global biodiversity today.) It's unwise to assume, as "genetic engineers" generally do, that 90+% of the genome is "garbage" or "junk" because they don't know its function. That mysterious, messy, ancient stuff is the context that influences how genes express traits. It's the genetic version of biodiversity, which in larger ecosystems is the source of resilience and endurance.
Transgenics is showing disturbing historical parallels to another problematic invention, nuclear fission – "a fit technology," said Nobel laureate Robert Sinsheimer, "for a wise, farseeing, and incorruptible people." In both enterprises, technical ability has evolved faster than social institutions; skill has outrun wisdom. Both have overlooked fundamentals, often from other disciplines wrongly deemed irrelevant. Both have overreached – too far, too fast, too uncritical. Both have failed to take their values from their customers and their discipline from the market. The rise and fall of such technologies seems to go something like this:
|
