Whole Earth Discipline_An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

by Stewart Brand

  • The science is in. The question then is, what do anti-GE environmentalists do with it? Some just deny the science exists. In February 2008 the editor of a UK magazine inaccurately named The Ecologist wrote, “[Politicians] can truthfully say that they have never seen any data showing that eating GM is harmful to humans, because, of course, the research has never been done.” Others say the science is irrelevant. Joschka Fischer, a leader of the Green Party and Germany’s foreign minister from 1998 to 2005, said in 2001, “Europeans do not want genetically modified food—period. It does not matter what research shows; they just do not want it and that has to be respected.”

  The weird fact is that GE foods, because they are so exhaustively vetted, are safer to eat than the products of conventional and organic farming. In the United States, new GE crops are tested by the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Environmental Protection Agency, whereas new crop varieties created by breeding go through no such process.

  Consider the kiwi. Arrived at by traditional selective breeding of the Chinese gooseberry and marketed aggressively by New Zealanders, it has become popular worldwide. Yet, as Israeli plant scientist Jonathan Gressel points out, “If the kiwi fruit had been genetically engineered, it would not be on our tables. A very small proportion of the population develops severe allergies to kiwi fruit with a wide range of symptoms, from localized oral allergy syndrome to life-threatening anaphylaxis, which can occur within minutes after eating the fruit.” (Peanuts, shellfish, wheat, dairy products, and other common foods also cause allergies; they—and the kiwi—could some day be made nonallergenic with genetic engineering, and should be. A nonallergenic GE peanut is already being developed at the University of Georgia.)

  Toxicity is normal in plants because they can’t run from their predators and competitors. They have to stand and fight. They use spines against the predators, shade against the competition, and poison against everybody, including us. Organic farmer Raoul Adamchak reports, “I have discovered that green potatoes make pretty good rodent poison. One day I went into the certified organic hoophouse to find three dead mice near some freshly eaten green potatoes.” His wife, geneticist Pamela Ronald, comments, “So far, compounds that are toxic to animals have only cropped up in foods developed through conventional breeding approaches. There have not been any adverse health or environmental effects resulting from commercialized GE crops.”

  Bruce Ames once did animal carcinogenicity tests on 27 of the 1,000-plus natural chemicals in a sample of roasted organic coffee. He and his colleague Lois Gold found that 8 of the chemicals were not harmful, but 19 caused cancer in the rats—acetaldehyde, benzaldehyde, benzene, benzofuran, and on through styrene, toluene, and xylene. “On average,” they wrote, “Americans ingest roughly 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides and their breakdown products.”

  Geneticist Nina Federoff elaborated in Mendel in the Kitchen (2004):Lima beans contain a chemical that breaks down during digestion into hydrogen cyanide, which is poisonous. Toxic psoralens in celery cause skin rashes. Moreover, psoralen cross-links the strands of DNA to each other, which can cause cancer. A chemical in cauliflower can make the thyroid enlarge. Carrots contain a nerve poison and a hallucinogen. Peaches and pears promote goiters. Strawberries contain a chemical that prevents blood from clotting and can lead to uncontrollable bleeding. Peas, beans, cereals, and potatoes contain lectins, which cause nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.

  Everything depends on dosage. It takes four hundred carrots to give you a harmful dose of neurotoxin. (I know of a food zealot who single-handed his sailboat from California to Hawaii eating only carrots along the way. By the time he arrived, his eyes were orange and he was hallucinating.)

  Nevertheless, eat your vegetables. Along with all that mild poison are crucial micronutrients and antioxidants. Bruce Ames found that one of the major causes of cancer is dietary imbalance: “The quarter of the population eating the least fruits and vegetables has double the cancer rate for most types of cancer compared with the quarter eating the most.” (Some hormesis theorists speculate that vegetables are good for us because of the very-low-dose natural toxins keeping our detoxifying mechanisms busy and fit.)

  It’s worth remembering that in Mary Shelley’s story, Dr. Frankenstein’s creature was a misunderstood good guy, wrongly vilified by the fearful populace. Of course, that’s a rhetorical argument, devoid of meaning. But so is the term Frankenfood.

  One reason biologists are unalarmed about genetic engineering is that they know what a minor event it is amid the standard chaos of evolution and the just-barely-organized chaos of agricultural breeding. Take our own genetic makeup, for instance. Science journalist Carl Zimmer notes: “Scientists have identified more than 98,000 viruses in the human genome, along with the mutant vestiges of 150,000 others. . . . If we were to strip out all our transgenic DNA, we would become extinct.” (More on that matter in the next chapter.)

  Human evolution has been accelerating ever since we left Africa seventy thousand years ago, and it sped up even further once we began coevolving with agriculture. Races emerged only twenty thousand years ago. With the larger population that agriculture permitted, our rate of evolution increased a hundredfold. Seven percent of our working genes are recent adaptations. “Nobody 10,000 years ago had blue eyes,” says anthropologist John Hawks. “Why is it that blue-eyed people had a 5 percent advantage in reproducing compared to non-blue-eyed people? I have no idea.” (My blue-eyed hypothesis would be that a number of males and females decided that blue eyes were sexy.) Gregory Cochran, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Utah, says that “history looks more and more like a science fiction novel in which mutants repeatedly arose and displaced normal humans—sometimes quietly, by surviving starvation and disease better, sometimes as a conquering horde. And we are those mutants.” Thanks to globalization and urbanization, races everywhere are mixing more, and that gives evolution even more variability to work with. We are becoming a world of smart mutts.

  Craig Venter, the leading cataloger of the human genome, notes that only 3 percent of our genome consists of protein-producing genes, and the rest is “regulatory regions, DNA fossils, the rusting hulks of old genes, repetitious sequences, parasitic DNA, viruses, and mysterious stretches of who-knows-what.” (Venter is careful never to use the term junk DNA.) One truly selfish gene has made a million copies of itself, taking up 10 percent of our genome; it seems to have no function other than self-replication. Genetically speaking, humans are a fast-moving mess. So is everything else.

  • Humanity’s first venture into genetic modification—agriculture—was a global event. We exploited the genetic malleability of dozens of plants in at least ten independent centers of agricultural innovation. The process was gradual, progressing from selective gathering to small-scale and then large-scale clearing and tilling, to techniques such as irrigation and crop rotation for what were by then exquisitely designed cultivars. Sing their praises!—the crops of the Americas: squash (first domesticated 10,000 years ago), corn (9,000 years), potatoes (7,000 years), peanuts (8,500 years), and chilis (6,000 years); the crops of the Mideast: rye (13,000 years), figs (11,400 years), wheat (10,500 years), and barley (10,000 years); the crops of China: rice (8,000 years) and millet (8,000 years); the crops of New Guinea: bananas (7,000 years), yams (7,000 years), and taro (7,000 years); and the crops of Africa: sorghum (4,000 years) and pearl millet (3,000 years). Humans rearranged thousands of plant genes, and the world was permanently transformed.

  Some anti-GE activists talk of defending the “intrinsic integrity” of crop-plant genomes. What integrity? Crop plants have no integrity of their own; they are products of human tinkering and only remotely resemble their wild cousins. Botanist Klaus Ammann points out that good old wheat, fashioned through good old breeding, has modifications that include “the addition of chromosome fragments, the integration of entire foreign genomes, and radiation-induced mutations.”

  Transgen
ic blending is an old story in agriculture. As philosopher Johann Klaassen argues, “We don’t feel revulsion at the thought of a mule, an unnatural cross between horse and donkey; at a rutabaga, an unnatural cross between cabbage and turnip; at triticale, an unnatural cross between wheat and rye.”

  Organic farmer José Baer (son of solar pioneer Steve Baer) offers perspective:We have been creating weird crop species for millennia. First we simply selected the ones we liked and planted them again, then we used chemical mutagenesis to speed up mutations and arrive at the ones that weren’t likely to appear anytime soon. Then we discovered radiation mutagenesis was even more effective. GM allows us to pick the trait and splice it in rather than discovering the trait we were looking for in amongst the rubble of mutated seedlings.

  As a certified organic farmer, Baer grows several crop varieties that come from radiation mutagenesis—blasting seeds with intense radiation to get more mutations in the seedlings—widely used by breeders since 1927 and common on organic farms, but he is not allowed to grow any genetically engineered crops. A comparison study published in 2007 by the National Academy of Sciences showed that rice lines resulting from gamma radiation mutagenesis caused more disruption of “non-target genes”—more unexpected consequences—than occurred in transgenic lines of rice. Organic rules force José Baer to use seed with a slightly greater risk of unintended consequences.

  All forms of breeding introduce unexpected consequences, whether or not they’re accelerated by chemicals or radiation (as two thousand current crop varieties have been). “A standard problem with breeding,” says plant geneticist Pamela Ronald, “is you pull a trait from one plant over to another, and you get linked traits that you don’t want. It’s called ‘linkage drag.’ With genetic engineering you don’t get that.” The precision of GE, writes Jonathan Gressel, lets you control “in which tissue, under what circumstances, and how much a gene will be expressed. This is done without introducing all the extraneous genetic baggage brought by crossing with the related species. Genetic engineering is like getting a spouse without in-laws, whereas breeding is like getting a spouse with a whole village.” The traditional method for removing the extraneous genes is with many generations of backcrossing—a blind, random, painstaking process.

  Unwelcome traits still get through. In the 1960s the Lenape potato was developed by crossing the popular Delta Gold potato with a wild relative to increase insect resistance. The Lenape was delicious and indeed insect resistant, so it was released to public use, distributed as popular potato chips and used by other breeders. But after one breeder found that Lenapes made him nauseous, analysis showed that they were high in a natural glycoalkaloid toxin from the wild potato. The Lenape was formally withdrawn, but it was too late. Thirteen varieties of potatoes still remain on the market with Lenape toxins bred into them.

  • In 1999 Amory Lovins made a public statement against GE that puzzled me. (I’m using Lovins as a foil more than he deserves because his statements have such clarity that they offer good purchase for argument.) “Shotgunning alien genes into the genome,” he wrote, “is like introducing exotic species into an ecosystem.” If Lovins’s background was in biology instead of physics, I doubt he would have written that. His analogy between a gene and a whole species is misplaced. Genes may be selfish, but they are nowhere near as freestanding and robust as wild species are. A gene is a fragment, one among the tens of thousands of genes it takes to make a whole organism. No individual gene can dominate or transform a genome the way some alien-invasive species can dominate an ecological neighborhood. A gene has to go along with most of the game in order to function at all. A more useful analogy would be to a computer program that has a bug. GE is a bug fix—a tiny bit of the right code in the right place to make a problem go away.

  I think Peter Raven nailed what it’s really all about. “When people talk about taking genes from one distantly related organism to another,” he told an interviewer in 1999, “they talk as if every gene in a mouse had a little mouse in it and putting it somewhere else would be bizarre.” Genes, he said, are nothing but “strings of bases which, in triplets, specify the amino acids that make up proteins. A lot of different organisms use similar or nearly identical genes to do the same job.”

  Where a gene comes from is irrelevant; the point is what it does.

  Genetic engineering is so much more precise, transparent, and accountable than breeding, it invites the thought experiment proposed by technology historian Kevin Kelly: “Suppose the sequence was reversed. Suppose genetic engineering is what we had been doing all along. Then some group says, ‘No, we’re going to use this new process called breeding . We’ll create all kinds of interesting recombinations, we’ll blast seeds with radiation and chemicals to get lots of mutations, and we’ll grow whatever comes up, pick the ones we like, and hope for the best.’ What would people say about the risk of doing it that way?” They would call it genetic gambling, says inventor Danny Hillis, and outlaw it.

  As for medicine, the panic generated by recombinant DNA back in the 1970s has completely died away. In 1982, a human gene was introduced into the bacterium E. coli so that “bioreactors” of trillions of the engineered organisms could generate vast quantities of human insulin in a way that is safer and far cheaper than the old technique using the pancreases of calves and pigs. These days about a quarter of all new drugs are made by genetic engineering—130 so far in the United States, 87 in Europe—and the rate is accelerating. We put these substances into our bodies without a second thought, and for good reason. GE drugs are just as safe as GE foods.

  Actually, the foods are safer, free of the overdose and bad-combination risks that all drugs have.

  “Natural food.” Whenever I hear those words crooned, my inner crank cranks up. “Natural!” I would rail if I gave it voice. “No product of agriculture is the slightest bit natural to an ecologist! You take a nice complex ecosystem, chop it into rectangles, clear it to the ground, and hammer it into perpetual early succession! You bust its sod, flatten it flat, and drench it with vast quantities of constant water! Then you populate it with uniform monocrops of profoundly damaged plants incapable of living on their own! Every food plant is a pathetic narrow specialist in one skill, inbred for thousands of years to a state of genetic idiocy! Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!”

  To an ecologist, or to a Gaian for that matter, agriculture is one vast catastrophe. The less of it, the better. Thus Peter Raven: “Nothing has driven more species to extinction or caused more instability in the world’s ecological systems than the development of an agriculture sufficient to feed 6.3 billion people.” Thus Jim Lovelock: “The fact that at least 40 percent of the land surface is used for food crops is hardly ever taken into account in our current approach to climate change. A self-regulating planet needs its ecosystems to stay in homeostasis. We cannot have both our crops and a steady comfortable climate.” (That 40 percent of the Earth’s land breaks down to 5.8 million square miles in permanent cropland, 13.5 million square miles in permanent pasture. The remaining 31 million square miles is ecological.)

  Opponents of genetic engineering are right to suspect GE crops of being ecologically harmful, because all crops are ecologically harmful. The question then becomes: How do GE crops compare with traditional crops in terms of doing ecological damage or ecological good? By “good” I mean richer soil, more wildlands, better integration with noncrop biodiversity, and (adding a social goal) getting more people the hell out of poverty and away from starvation. Critics of GE focus on soil effects, on quantities of herbicides and pesticides in the environment, and on the potential for creating superweeds and superbugs. Exhaustive studies have been made on all these questions, and the data is in.

  • About 40 percent of crop yield in the world is lost to weeds and pests every year. The spectacular success of GE crops in lowering those losses is why Science magazine could report in 2007, “Over the past 11 years, biotech c
rop area has increased more than 60-fold, making GM crops one of the most quickly adopted farming technologies in modern history.” Just two GE traits are responsible for most of that success—herbicide tolerance and insect resistance.

  The herbicide in question is glyphosate (pronounced GLY-fo-sate), discovered in 1971 and marketed since 1974 by Monsanto as Roundup. It’s a pretty miraculous compound. Sprayed on a plant’s leaves, glyphosate disables an enzyme in the chloroplasts so that the plant starves to death over a week or two. It has no proven effect on any animal—insects, fish, birds, mammals, or us. It binds in the soil and degrades to harmlessness within weeks, so it doesn’t pollute the water or linger in the ground like other herbicides, and it has a fraction of their toxicity. Starting in 1996, Monsanto introduced “Roundup Ready” corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and alfalfa, all genetically engineered to tolerate glyphosate. Then the price of the herbicide dropped by half when glyphosate went out of patent in 2000. The attractions of cheap glyphosate overwhelmed traditional farmer conservatism. By 2007 in the United States, over 90 percent of soybeans and 75 percent of corn crops were engineered for glyphosate tolerance.