March 14, 2000 / Wired Magazine / L. Hunter Lovins
Plants, shaped into incredible diversity by 3.8 billion years of evolution,
make possible all life 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 created 10,000 years of
agriculture.
Now, however, in the name of feeding a growing human population, a
completely different kind of botany, in the Cartesian tradition of reducing
complex wholes to simple parts, strives to alter isolated genes while
disregarding the interactive totality of ecosystems. 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.
The new botany aligns the development of plants with their economic, not
evolutionary, success: survival not of the fittest but of the fattest.
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 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. 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, 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. 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. The official assumption is
that they're different enough to patent but similar enough to make identical
food; 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 becomes part
of 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. 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 forebear, 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. It's unwise to assume, as "genetic engineers" generally do, that
90-plus percent 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. 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.
Our key choices now are not between unwelcome alternatives - nuclear power
or freezing in the dark, transgenic crops or starvation - but between those
bad choices and attractive ones outside the orthodoxy. For crops, the best
choice would be fairer distribution of food grown by a respectful and
biologically informed agriculture that stops treating soil like dirt. But
sound choices tend to emerge and get adopted in time only if we take
seriously the discipline of mindful markets and the wisdom of informed
democracy. Botanists have a professional duty to help us all understand the
vital differences between biology and biotechnology - between the
foundations of their traditional science and the scientifically immature but
commercially hell-for-leather enterprise, a billion times younger, that aims
to replace it.
Amory Lovins, a physicist and MacArthur Fellow, and Hunter Lovins, a lawyer
and social scientist, are cofounders of Rocky Mountain Institute, the
copyright holder. An unabridged version is available at
www.rmi.org/biotechnology/twobotanies.html
(posted without permission)
