A Tale of Two Botanies
By Amory B. Lovins and L.
Hunter Lovins
Wired Magazine
April 2000
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.
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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.
This article available on-line at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/botanies.html