Oh, like bananas?

We must not only be scientifically educated but historically educated. Some of our most egregious fuckups have occurred because people were all, “OMG THIS IS THE BEST AND NOBODY HAS EVER THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE INVEST IN TULIP BULBS!!”

And history goes forward as well as backward. We must think processes right through to the end, asking ourselves the proverbial question about the effects on the next seven generations.

We must put our technologies through rigorous scrutiny, which is different than dismissing something. Scrutiny and critical investigation presume an informed observer. We must adapt and discard as necessary when our ideas turn out to be not so hot, or to have unforeseen consequences. We must — essentially — have some humility and assume that Nature has probably provided a good solution if we work with and for her, not against her. (She always gets us in the end, the sneaky witch.) As Richard Feynman remarked, “I think Nature’s imagination is so much richer than man’s.”[sic]

Science and technology are fantastic things. They offer tremendous possibilities. I just like to stick up a little intellectual post-it note saying, “Remember thalidomide.”

I think one big problem is that people are simply not scientifically literate. Their understanding of things is so limited that they cannot compose nuanced arguments one way or another; they simply do not know the fundamental concepts on which the argument itself could be based. People are for or against, say, GMO without even knowing what genes are or do, or how agriculture actually works. (Or that “food” comes from “farms” and not “Dennys” or “supermarkets”, LOL.)

But at the same time, life spans are longer and standards of living are higher than ever (at least in developed countries). Technological innovation is a double-edged sword, and the benefits must be balanced against the risks. Plastics are a good example, such as polycarbonate. We know that bisphenol A leaches from PC bottles, and we know that BPA is an endocrine disruptor. However, PC has been around since the 1950s, and since then it has given high-risk buildings the security of bullet-proof glass, it has given the military a way to drink clean water in the desert without adding too much weight to their gear, and it has made eyeglasses significantly safer and more comfortable (also protective glasses; as a chemist, polycarbonate goggles save my eyes all the time). You can ask how many people have been hurt by exposure to BPA, but at the same time you have to ask how many people’s lives have been improved or saved by it (for the record, I’m an academic chemist, so I have no vested interest in PC or any market plastic).

I agree that we have to start doing a much better job at letting problems rather than profits drive innovation, and I am typically the first to argue that at the rate we are trying to correct our current problems, we will not be able to avert ecological disaster. However, I detect an almost belligerent tone towards technology, and I would simply like to point out that many of us would not be alive if it wasn’t for vaccines, drinking water disinfectants, high-impact automobile parts, and modern medical instruments and diagnostic techniques (not to mention the comforts and pleasantries we enjoy in terms of digital media, generally safe and easy travel, and hordes of information at our fingertips). This is not a justification for the direction we have been heading in, it’s a call for balance.

Carl Sagan coined a phrase “technological adolescence”. He’s right. Just like a 12 year old boy who just realized he can make a really cool blowtorch out of a match and a can of hair spray, we are completely destroying our physiology (and world) by playing with much larger and more dangerous matches.

Thanks for an awesome post that just about summarizes it all.

NOW WHAT? NOW WHAT?

I have a horrible premonitory nightmare of mass famines due to the monocultural food supply of entire countries, comprised of what are essentially clones of a single organism, being blighted by some pathogen exploiting a genetic weakness. If big multinationals really cared about world hunger, etc., they would expend more effort and produce a range of genetically-diverse cultivars carrying useful traits rather than arrogantly assuming that humans are better geneticists than the forces of evolutionary pressure, and that we can therefore keep outbreaks of pathogens from endangering the global food supply when GM crops have pushed out the small farmers and totally undermined biodiversity in our cultivated species by causing heirloom varieties to go extinct.

GM might be the wave of the future, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the future won’t be a dystopia.

In Canada alone there were 200 varieties of tomatoes bred; around 300 varieties of apples. All adapted for local growing conditions and to enhance biodiversity.

We already have these crops.

GM is typically not a project for public good nor to enhance sustainability; it is a project for corporate profit and market dominance. Corporations have attempted to patent organisms that farmers have historically produced through selective breeding. They sell seeds that are genetically engineered to be sterile after one growth cycle — farmers cannot collect seed from a crop to re-use them; they must buy new ones every year. Their vision is one of dominant monocrops that are private property, dependent upon petroleum-based chemical fertilizers. Additionally much of the food land is now being diverted into biodiesel production via GM corn. There’s more money to be made in fuel than in preserving indigenous ecosystems or food for the less affluent regions.

Thus: Could we use GM for good? Yes. Are we? No.