Environmentalism
Most practitioners of complementary and alternative medicine sincerely believe that they are doing their patients good. In many cases, they actually are, because - mixed in with all the rubbish about crystals and qi - being nice and making people feel valued and happy is in itself useful. Most practitioners of environmentalism believe they are doing the planet good. In many cases they actually are, because - mixed in with all the rubbish about hemp-paper and Gaia - being concerned about the Earth going to hell in a hand-basket is in itself useful.
Sustainability is the latest way of describing what the majority of people want: that the desires of human beings today should be provided for without making these desires impossible to fulfil in the future. Human beings - as is their wont - disagree violently on the definition of a reasonable desire, but it is important to note that environmentalism is just as much about fulfilling the desire of one group of people to have forests, GM-free fields or no human beings left alive; as current world policy seems to be about fulfilling the needs of the oil industry to carbonise the atmosphere. Is there anything we can actually agree on?
- Most people don't want the Earth to be sterilised of human beings. Hence, the first thing we all seem to want is living human beings, at the very least of the sort that were around about 20 000 years ago, hunting and gathering and being a 'natural' part of the ecosystem.
- The second thing most of us want are pleasant diversions. For some of us, this will mean houses, medicines, interesting foodstuffs, cinemas and electricity. Getting these things means meddling with the ecosystems of the Earth, whether we like it or not. If we don't want to be a vanishingly small population of hunter-gatherers in the Rift Valley, then we have to pillage the Earth in some 'unnatural' way.
- The third thing that most of us seem to want is a functional planet. Most of us would add the Earth to our list of interesting diversions, and would like to preserve some or all of its diversity of organisms, habitats and scenery. Whether this is for spiritual, religious or purely practical reasons is essentially irrelevant.
So most of us want (a) to live (b) somewhere other than a cave eating nuts and berries on (c) a planet with high biodiversity. However, we are cutting forest and replacing it with agricultural land or desert at a significant rate. There is a large (if shrinking) hole in the ozone layer. We are making too much carbon dioxide and methane, which will lead to further global warming. We are expending non-renewable resources, with little idea what to do when they run out. We produce pollutants, from pesticides, through fertilisers, smog and asphalt to radioactive waste.
The root cause of these problems are people. We put strain on the planet because although one American/European (even a very greedy one) makes an insignificant difference to the world, many millions of them cause problems. There are too many of us for the Earth to support, at least in the comfort to which those in the developing world are accustomed. If environmentalists spat a little more poison at the Vatican instead of Monsanto, one significant issue in the environmental debate would be actually be given the attention it deserves (although with the Vatican's attitude to condom use and the resultant spread of HIV/AIDS, perhaps this will be sorted out in a manner far more gruesome - but presumably more acceptable - to their favoured deity).
Waste disposal, food production, recreation, wilderness, forestry and urbanisation all clamour for space. How do we maximise the number of people living in comfort whilst maximising the biodiversity of the earth? Beyond the obvious (and unpalatable) of reducing our standards of comfort, this means doing a cost-benefit analysis of some sort for the whole world. This is an almost insurmountable task, but rather than trying to make headway with it, what I more often see from the environmental lobby is a near religious inability to consider alternatives to its favoured dogma. A choice between industries and governments seemingly intent on terracide, versus an environmental movement weighed down by the sort of pseudoscientific baggage you'd expect of a New Ager is not really choice at all. The dogmatic positions of environmentalist lobby groups on GM crops provides a pertinent example…
A case study: GM crops
This plant is the most pernicious weed in Britain. To plant it or aid its growth in the UK is a criminal offence. This plant is a superweed by anyone's definition.
Fallopia japonica, Japanese knotweed.
But this plant isn't genetically modified. It's not even a crop. It's a garden plant introduced to the UK about 100 years ago from Japan as ground cover for large gardens. This plant, and many, many others, were introduced into the UK for no better reason than they look pretty, with no thought whatsoever as to their possible environmental impact. We happily introduce very invasive plants with no native parasites, but have a paranoia about growing genetically modified crops, for fear they'll turn into superweeds.
Most of our crop species are poor competitors, otherwise we wouldn't need to go spraying their competitors with herbicide. In the UK, maize is so frost-tender, it cannot survive even a mild winter. Cultivated polyploid potatoes have more then the usual two sets of chromosomes and because of this, they are practically sexually sterile. Since crops, by definition, have been artificially selected to be soft, non-toxic, and dependent on humans, they are certainly not the plants to start with if you want to make superweeds. Adding herbicide or pest resistance genes to most crops is unlikely to make much difference to their vigour outside of a farmer's field, because they start off so disadvantaged.
Their wild relatives are not saddled with the human-friendly but disadvantageous genetic baggage we have bred into crops, hence when crops are grown in the same area as their relatives (which some crops aren't) hybridisation between the two can occur. Environmentalists express concern that these hybrids will either over-run the wild relatives, or that the hybrids will have such a huge advantage that they will over-run the entire countryside as superweeds. Neither of these arguments holds much water, at least in the case of herbicide resistance. This is because the only place a resistant hybrid has an advantage is in a place where it is sprayed with herbicide, i.e. farmers' fields, gardens and where the wild relative is a weed. In the rest of the country, being herbicide resistant is likely to be disadvantageous, because it will waste energy better spent on seeds. So, if the hybrids do not get sprayed with the herbicide, they will not have a competitive edge, and the hybrid and its transgene are unlikely to persist in the environment. The hybrid might well be a pain in farmers' fields, as 'naturally' herbicide-resistant wild oats already are, but it will have no advantage elsewhere. Ironically, the people most likely to suffer at the hands of resistant hybrids are farmers. There is evidence of transgene environmental persistence in some crops, but pulling up GM crop trials is not the way to find out if a given crop is a hazard or not.
Pest-resistant GM-crops might have an advantage over non-resistant relatives, because pests are present everywhere, not just in farms. However, there's no guarantee that a hybrid will actually be pest resistant, and pests and diseases have a nasty habit of overcoming resistance genes anyway. Again, a case-by-case approach should be taken: a GM plant with no wild relatives, with a slightly raised pest resistance in a country where it cannot survive the winter, is not a case that should cause sleepless nights. A GM crop with many wild relatives that are already weeds, carrying a gene that gives it resistance to its most important pest, or to a herbicide used to control its relatives, should give cause for concern.
GMOs have the potential to become superweeds, but no-one is maliciously trying to bring on vegetable Armageddon. GMO crops are not wantonly planted without the first thought about their possible effects on the environment, wild relatives and on farmers' behaviour. There will be mistakes, and unforeseen trouble, but acting as if these mistakes would be something qualitatively different to the problems caused by the introduction of Japanese knotweed to the UK is incoherent. Far more thought has gone into the trials of GM rape (canola) than ever went into the introduction of wheat, rabbits, rhododendrons or sweet chestnuts. Each case is different and deserves its own hearing.
The toxin in green potatoes (solanine) has a lethal dose of about 5
mg kg−1, and green potatoes are about 0.1% solanine.
A lethal dose is therefore a rather worrying three potatoes. Bear in
mind that toxic effects would occur at substantially lower levels
than the LD50.
Ignoring the obvious things like excess saturated fat, refined sugars, and whatever the latest scapegoat is, there are so many vile things in food, it makes you wonder why you eat anything at all. Everything you ever eat that has nice char-grilled stripes, contains benzo[a]pyrene, one of the most potent carcinogens known. Most plants contain toxins: cyanide in sprouts, oxalic acid in spinach, solanine in potatoes, and there is so much of the photosensitiser psoralen in celery, celery pickers have been known to get skin burns. Food plays host to hundreds of bacteria and fungi and their toxins. So, in any discussion about the safety of food, you ought to remember that food is a pretty nasty thing to start with.
Every day you eat countless billons of genes, digesting them as you do all food. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that your body will be affected by genetically-modified genes than it is by the billions of other genes you eat every day.
Part of the process for making GMOs incorporates antibiotic resistance genes into the GMO as markers. There've been concerns that these genes will get into human pathogens; however, other sorts of marker gene can now be used that don't cause such concern.
Another concern is that the technology often uses a promoter from the cauliflower mosaic virus to ensures the transgene is strongly expressed. The food-risk of this promoter has been raised as a concern, but it is already eaten in huge amounts by anyone having a meal of cabbage, cauliflower or (if you must) sprouts. It is possible that the promoter could allow gene flow from GM plants to cauliflower mosaic virus, and possibly to other viruses. If this were to happen, there is a tiny possibility that this could make the viruses more virulent. However, this possibility has not stopped conventional breeders from engineering in hundreds of genes and embedded retroviruses from the wild relatives of crops by simple cross-breeding. This issue is a legitimate concern, but you should be aware that gene flow already happens, and in fact, genetic engineering wasn't invented by us at all: viruses, transposons and bacteria (particularly the co-opted Agrobacterium) have been at it for about billions of years.
Like the blindness we show to introducing potential superweeds to the country in the name of horticulture, we don't see that conventional breeding is a way of randomly adding swathes of genes to a crop with no knowledge of their potential side-effects. It seems bizarre that GM technology, which allows the insertion of a single gene into a place in the genome that can be traced, is seen as worse than conventional breeding. As far as the viral promoter goes, other promoters, some from the crop plant itself, can also be used with success. Some are even organ specific, so genes can be expressed in parts of the plant that are not even eaten.
A paper by Pusztai received huge media coverage in 1999. A dubiously significant difference was observed in gut crypt length in a sample size of rats that even an undergraduate student would find laughable. That's all. There is no point in pillorying the work, but one sickly swallow does not a summer make.
An attempt was made to increase the nutritional quality of soy beans by boosting their methionine content with a gene from Brazil nuts. The question of allergy was raised, tested for, and the company involved didn't release the bean onto the market when it proved to be dangerous for Brazil-nut allergy sufferers. The strange thing about this work is the spin put most commonly on it: "irresponsible scientists engineer allergens into staple foodstuff". Not only is this disingenuous, you might also like to think, did they actually do the right thing? Brazil nut allergy is very rare, especially outside of the developed world, and malnutrition is exceedingly common, especially in the developing world. Furthermore, GM can be used to actually knock out the allergen genes from peanuts, Brazil nuts and so on.
Teosinte (Zea mays teosinte), the forerunner of maize. Did
you recognise it?
Food is neither natural nor wholesome. It is not natural because virtually all the food you eat will be the product of thousands of years of breeding, selection, and other sorts of human meddling. The crop is unlikely to be grown in its native range, and every crop has a thousand and one 'unnatural' things (weeding, pruning, cleaning, fertilising, monoculture, etc.) done to it every day. And then you go and cook it!
Food is not wholesome, because it is full of poisons, and it is also prone to infestation with parasitic worms, bacteria, flukes and moulds. Anyone who says 'a little bit of mould never hurt anyone' might take note that one of the most poisonous substances know, aflatoxin-B, is made by moulds growing on damp peanuts. We try to make food wholesome by cosseting it, cooking it, refrigerating it, breeding out toxin production and so on, but this makes the food even more unnatural. Either food is natural and nasty, or artificial and slightly less nasty. Food is rarely nice of its own accord.
given that all food is unnatural and barely wholesome, claims by the Soil Association about the superiority of organic food should be taken with a large pinch of salt (and just what on earth is 'organic salt' supposed to mean?) Organic food may be free of a certain subset of human-made pesticide residues, but it is still full of plenty of natural pesticides. One of the tenets of organic farming is that crops should not be fertilised with 'chemical' fertilisers (although what dung, seaweed and the rest are made from, other than chemicals, is beyond me). The use of green manures and dung is encouraged. Dung has a place as a fertiliser and soil improver, but there are very good reasons why it is not as widely used as it once was. You have to keep animals, which require feeding, and it is not clear a priori that keeping animals, growing their fodder, and watching them fart us towards global warming is any more ecologically sound than using chemical fertilisers. Is a fallow field really better for the environment than a smaller, chemically-fertilised farm and a bit more woodland? Quite possibly, but I'd actually like to see the evidence, rather than take it on (someone else's) intuition. Fertilisers are either made from:
- Cows (global warming in a leather jacket).
- Kelp (raping the most biodiverse bit of the sea).
- Fallow fields (agricultural anti-forest).
- Ground up rocks (toxic mine tailings).
- The Haber process (fossil fuel consuming).
None of these options are very nice. Nor is the option of less intensive fertilisation, and consequently more agricultural anti-forest. Choosing between these flawed options is difficult enough without silly prejudices about the naturalness of manure. A similar argument applies to the pest control options:
- Chemical pesticides (toxic, some persistent in the environment, made from oil).
- Ground up rocks (very toxic and made in mines).
- Biological control (potential for disaster, à la Partula).
- Nothing at all (more anti-forest).
Again, all are bad in different ways, choosing the sustainable approach with the least impact on biodiversity is difficult enough without silly preconceptions.
The UK is not supposed to be a green and pleasant land. It's supposed to be a dank forest with a hint of grassland and moor. Every bit of land under agriculture is a bit of land not under trees. Arable-land and farms are unnatural by the very definition people like the woolly-minded heir to the UK throne like to bandy about in relation to GM. Agriculture is human-made. If you want to make the UK more 'natural', then plant it with trees, or at the very least grass: not with crops, or green manures. There is a balance to be struck between over-intensive agriculture and hunter-gathering in the wildwood, but whether any given conventional or organic approach is this balance is something for rational scientific investigation, not assumption. If organic farming really were the way out of our ecological rut, I'd support it wholeheartedly, but where is the evidence? Where are the life cycle analyses comparing organic apples to conventional apples? Where are the large, double-blind, controlled studies on health benefits? Where are the studies on the effect of organic recommendations and actual organic practice? Are any benefits really down to the organic farming doctrine, or can nuggets of truth be extracted from what looks essentially like a well-meaning exercise in pseudoscience?
Thanks to the level at which this debate has been discussed in the British media, it is impossible to buy GM produce anywhere in the UK: so much for the consumer choice that the press have been demanding. There is little evidence of any significant difference between GM crops and conventional crops. In the absence of such evidence, the reception that GM technology has received is based on little more than irrationality and blind prejudice, and that is no way to make decisions about anything.
Fossil fuel.
Biofuel.
Environmental bugbears
If GM gets the less rational variety of environmentalist foaming at the mouth, energy is the topic that really gets them wailing and gnashing their teeth. We can't currently live without fossil fuels, but every other alternative energy source poses its own hazards and problems. Wind-power obviously only works if it's windy; the energy we get from solar power is directly proportional to the amount of the planet we pave with solar panels; and hydroelectric power is an excellent way of drowning a huge area of biodiversity.
Unintentional (and extremely rare) explosions aside, nuclear fission uses few non-renewable resources for the amount of energy it produces. It does produce radioactive waste, but the oil industry produces carcinogenic waste too, and we plaster that all over the ground and call it asphalt. Nuclear power is essentially the only answer to our current energy problems: every source of energy messes the planet up: at least with nuclear, you get a largely carbon-neutral solution that gives you a lot of bang for your buck. The problem is that Chernobyl is so much better as a sound-bite than all those people dying in freak weather caused by global warming, or from organic and radioactive carcinogens churned out by burning fossil fuels…
Biofuels have been proposed as substitutes for fossil; however, the idea that we will all soon be topping our cars up with esterified seed oils or ethanol relies on the assumption that it's perfectly OK to convert very nearly the entire world over to growing sugar cane (ethanol) or canola (oils). Biofuels (probably those based on lignocellulosic materials) will almost certainly have a place in the carbon-neutral economy, but we are nowhere near making them sustainable at the moment, and to use them as a mantra to ward off the nuclear industry is idiotic.
Hemp is a terrible source of paper under most situations. A field of
hemp is a crop of exotic weeds as much as a plantation of non-native
pines is. However, it doesn't produce nearly as many microhabitats as
a plantation: not really a sustainable substitute for paper after
all.
Following on from that, forestry has a very bad name in the ecowarrior's handbook. Forests, even monoculture plantations of exotic softwoods, are far more biodiverse than a field of wheat, hemp or whatever annual weed you suggest as a substitute for our fuelwood, paper and building needs. Quite what we are supposed to build with, instead of wood, is beyond me: wood is renewable, sustainable and biodegradable. Even when we have to treat it chemically to prevent termites and rot, it still beats the alternatives hands down on every environmental front. Bricks, concrete and plastics all produce net carbon dioxide during their manufacture and disposal. Are we to build all our houses of metal? The only industry with a worse name than forestry is mining!
There are some things whose environmental unfriendliness really aren't matters of dispute. CFCs have no redeeming features beyond their low toxicity and flammability. The damage they do to ozone is so severe, there really is no excuse for not using the better substitutes immediately. However, such relatively clear cut cases are few and far between, and the rest of the topics discussed have answers we can only find by the appliance of rationality.
A plague on both your houses
No matter what we do, we will have an impact on the environment, most likely one that reduces biodiversity. Minimising this impact and ensuring that we and future generations have the option to live comfortable lives in a biodiverse environment, is not a issue for muddled thinking and preconceptions. The whole debate is as polarised as the one about animal testing ("it's evil, we must use tissue culture instead", or, "we should be allowed to cut up as many cute kittens as we like, we're doctors and know better than you ever will"). Using our brains is the only way we'll get out of such self-destructive debates.