Paradigm clash - Engineering our future

Engineering our future
Nobody knows what the long-term effects of GM will be
by PAM SHERRIFFS
Natal Witness
http://www.witness.co.za/feat_sherriffs20010423.htm

IT'S not hard to understand why a group of Italian activists (if they were responsible) decided to burn down a storage place suspected of harbouring genetically modified (GM) seeds recently. When your opponent - in this case, the biotechnology industry - seems to have unlimited money and limited scruples and to be winning the battle overwhelmingly, then guerrilla warfare is one of few options left open to you.

What's perhaps harder to understand is why so little anti-GM guerrilla warfare is going on, considering that the difference in outlook between the extreme pro and anti movements is as fundamental as that of any political revolution. I once interviewed an anti-GM environmental lawyer who had just come out of a meeting with a group of pro-GM salesmen and scientists. She said she hadn't felt so utterly estranged from other South Africans since the bad old days of the security police. The mental distance between them was so great they might as well have thought she was a kommunis. In fact, they probably did.

What is this difference, this underlying philosophical divide that can create such strength of feeling about a bunch of seeds among so many people, half of whom have probably not set foot on a farm in decades, if ever? It's much deeper than whether you believe GM foods will cause disease or not. It's a way of seeing the planet and people's place on it.

On the "instrumentalist" end of the spectrum are people who think that all of nature is here for humans' benefit. Humans have the right, the intelligence and the ability to use and abuse nature as we see fit, and those parts of nature that don't profit us are worthless and can be destroyed.

On the other end of the spectrum are people who think that all nature has intrinsic value, regardless of whether it obviously benefits us or not; that humans do not have the right or the wisdom to interfere with nature more than is necessary for survival and that we should proceed with caution, humility and constraint before we destroy the web of life further than we already have.

The biotechnology industry is clearly on the instrumentalist end of things. Ironically, though they often portray their opponents as reactionary and old-fashioned, it could be the approach of the GM industry itself that is the more outdated. Author Jeremy Rifkin describes genetic modification as "primitive 19th century applied science going under the rubric of the frontier. You take this little corn and arm him with genetic weapons and you send him out there to fend off the environment. In physics and chemistry they're way beyond that, at least theoretically. They're talking dissipative theory, complexity theory, intermathematics. The molecular biologists are back in the 19th century as engineers".

On the "intrinsic value" end of the spectrum, many people in the anti-GM movement (which is as much a shared instinctive discomfort as an organised political group) believe that there's no such thing as a free lunch in nature and that technological "solutions", like genetic modification, tend to cause more problems than they solve.

Benefits from one part of the system eventually turn up as costs somewhere else. Cut down a forest and the soil erodes into a faraway lake, murking the water and stopping fish from recognising each other enough to breed. Dam a major river and (apart from the more obvious effects like siltation and disruption of the river's ecosystem) you change the nature of a small ocean, which affects the temperature of ocean currents, which might cause glaciation on another continent.

Nobody knows what the long-term effects will be of releasing genetically modified organisms into the environment. (Least of all the biotechnology industry. They claim that the ecological impacts are neglible or controllable but the U.S. insurance industry refuses to insure against potential ecological damage, saying there is no way to predict or measure it. Also, the small print in contracts which sell GM seeds to farmers says that the farmers themselves are legally responsible for any environmental damage that might occur, not the suppliers of the seeds.)

Only a fool, wrote Aldo Leopold, father of the fledgling science of ecology, more than 50 years ago, would discard seemingly useless parts of the biotic pyramid. Genetic engineering discards all sorts of parts. In agriculture, it accelerates the loss of wild crop varieties and species through the promotion of monocultural farming methods. It also discards genes or bits of genes whose functions it does not understand or value. (These are sometimes referred to as "junk DNA".) >From a holistic perspective, even getting rid of something as seemingly unwelcome as the gene for sickle cell anaemia is potentially problematic. Research suggests that while it makes people susceptible to sickle cell anaemia, the gene might also make them resistant to malaria.

Why, when the risks of GM are high and poorly understood, is it so rapidly colonising the world? Partly because it can do some very clever things (in the short term, anyway; we don't know how clever it will turn out to be). Partly because there's enormous money to be made from it. But also because it fits into the "reductionist" scientific paradigm that has been dominant in the west for centuries and which we hardly ever question.

In this way of thinking, the smaller and more basic the part you are looking at, the closer to reality you are. The bigger the microscope, the better the science. Though this paradigm has been spectacularly successful in some ways, many people are beginning to realise that nothing happens in isolation, that there's a bigger picture out there which we have hardly begun to understand, although we have already done it a lot of damage.

By the time the changing paradigm makes its way through schools and universities and industries - if it does - it will be too late for many of the species and ecosystems that have lost out in the GM age. Many ecologists believe it could be too late for us as well. Through short-sighted tinkering, including GM, we might have upset the balance of the planet so much that it is no longer comfortable for us, and there will be no way to reclose Pandora's Box. Maybe in their own way, those Italian activists were trying to keep the lid down a bit longer.
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Pam Sherriffs is a former Witness staffer, now a freelance journalist.