<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/new-shade-of-green-stark-shift-for-onetime-foe-of-genetic-engineering-in-crops/?src=recg>
January 4, 2013
New Shade of Green: Stark Shift for Onetime Foe of Genetic Engineering in Crops
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
In case you missed the coverage and commentary yesterday (the Twitter
flow is here), you can now watch Mark Lynas, the British writer and
environmentalist who once helped drive Europe's movement against
genetically engineered crops, apologize for those actions and embrace
this technology as a vital tool for ending hunger and conserving the
environment. He spoke yesterday at the Oxford Farming Conference at
Oxford University. (Many other fascinating presentations are now
online.)
An excerpt from Lynas's prepared remarks is below. Here's his
remarkable preamble:
For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent
several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to
start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby
assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can
be used to benefit the environment.
As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in
this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their
choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I
now regret it completely.
The arc of Lynas's fascinating career is in some ways neatly
encapsulated by two acts at Oxford - throwing a cream pie in the face
of Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptic of eco-calamity, at a book signing
there in 2001, yelling "pies for lies" (see photo below), and now
echoing more than a few of Lomborg's assertions in his lecture at the
Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday.
In doing so, he has displayed an encouraging - and still rare -
capacity to shed dogma in favor of data. His valuable 2011 book "The
God Species" (a host of reviews here) was the first big sign of this
transformation.
After "The God Species" was published, Lynas explained his shift this
way in an interview with Keith Kloor:
Well, life is nothing if not a learning process. As you get older
you tend to realize just how complicated the world is and how
simplistic solutions don't really work There was no "Road to
Damascus" conversion, where there's a sudden blinding flash and you
go, "Oh, my God, I've got this wrong." There are processes of
gradually opening one's mind and beginning to take seriously
alternative viewpoints, and then looking more closely at the weight
of the evidence.
In reading the text of Lynas's speech yesterday, I asked him if he'd
reassessed the pie assault. His reply showed just how willing he is
to endure slings and arrows from old allies by invoking another name
that is anathema to many traditional greens:
Bjorn was always the perfect gentleman about that incident. I have
apologized properly over email to him, and we've had a couple of
phone conversations since. These days I read his stuff with interest
but I do think he could make his case more strongly by avoiding his
own tendency to confirmation bias and being rather selective with
his sources, to say the least.
I only recently discovered the work of Julian Simon, who was
Lomborg's original inspiration, and I think it should be required
reading for all enviro types - some vital wisdom there.
Before we get to Lynas's talk on genetics and agriculture, it's worth
posting my reply on Simon:
Simon was too demonized for sure (his relevant work is online). But
he was wrong on one thing - the need for more people to make more
progress (more geniuses), as I wrote here: "Julian Simon's 20th
century notion that population growth was good because it raised the
odds of generating a fresh batch of breakthroughs was half right;
you just don't need the extra billions if you expand access to
education and tie brains together with communication
(and translation)."
Read on for an excerpt from Lynas's speech (as prepared for
delivery), but please read or listen to the whole thing, and then to
dig in to "The God Species," as well:
When I first heard about Monsanto's GM soya I knew exactly what I
thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track
record, putting something new and experimental into our food without
telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as
unnatural as you can get - here was humankind acquiring too much
technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These
genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the
stuff of nightmares.
These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was
essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs
like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the
rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most
successful campaign I have ever been involved with.
This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot
of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as
they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the
Frankenstein food tag - this absolutely was about deep-seated fears
of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we
didn't realize at the time was that the real Frankenstein's monster
was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.
For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly
inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to
climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004,
and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than
just a collection of anecdotes.
So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite
data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing
glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of
mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific
papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very
different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my
degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.
I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be
incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn't listen to the
climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change.
So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the
importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that
mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly
journals.
My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won
the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had
become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject
than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still
penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM - even
though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a
pretty limited personal understanding. I don't think I'd ever read a
peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this
late stage.
Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me
were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian
article. In particular one critic said to me: so you're opposed to
GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you
also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big
auto companies?
So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished
beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.
I'd assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned
out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.
I'd assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out
that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers
needing fewer inputs.
I'd assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the
right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago,
and that Terminator never happened.
I'd assumed that no one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that
Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil
because farmers were so eager to use them.
I'd assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer
and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for
example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional
breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.
But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and
the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and
insects and even us - it's called gene flow.
But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God
Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset
and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale. [The
full text is here.]
Comment from Kathryn Marsh at the Organic Gardening Discussion List:
I've been watching Mark Lynas heading in that direction for quite a
while now. When he was anti-GM I spoke against him on the platform
on one occasion and from the floor at several because his position
against GM appeared to have no basis in rationalism. I doubt if he
has read any more of the science in supporting it than he did in
opposing it. He went from a degree in history and politics to
environmental lobbying and journalism without ever learning any
science. It is possible to complete that particular degree at that
particular university without ever learning to do any hard analysis
and I'm guessing that is what he did.
Unfortunately he's a charismatic and passionate individual and can
do damage among those who are swayed more by the yuk factor than be
hard knowledge
kathryn
_______________________________________________
Sustainablelorgbiofuel mailing list
Sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org
http://lists.eruditium.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel