My friend Ramez Naam is an articulate supporter of GMOs. He just wrote a piece about them for Grist. Below are my thoughts on his position. What are yours? Mez - Dont you think people were just as confident about the safety of plastics for many decades before we realized - uh oh! - it concentrates in the tissues of animals, causes reproductive cancers, creates huge dead zones in the oceans, etc? Isnt it possible that our technological hubris has an inveterate tendency to create increasingly complex problems which are then only solvable by more intense application of the same mindset that created the original problems in the first place - the technocratic mindset that always tell us that we must do this and that, because we now need to feed the billions of people who only exist because the industrial mega machine required them, temporarily, to turn its gears? What if despite all of your certainty on GMOs it turns out that you are just wrong - as earlier technologists were wrong about ozone-depleting chemicals, about plastics, about nuclear radiation (or will you continue to argue that Fukushima is overrated and actually proves how safe it is to eat and drink radiation), and so on? If it goes wrong, what will you say to the potentially billions of people who suffer drastic negative consequences for having this gigantic social experiment inflicted upon them without their consent or their wish? What if the incredibly strong intuition that hundreds of millions of people around the world have about this technology is actually spot on - after all, intuition is not irrational but arational, and could be considered a higher order cognitive process based on sensitivities to forms of awareness the conscious, rational mind is not designed to register? And, also, despite all of your confidence in your statistics, most people who have studied the matter have not seen the necessity, when a vast amount of our current food production is wasted, when we dont use ecologically sound practices, when we utilize mono-cropping techniques that devitalize the soil (which some even connect to the soul). Statistics can usually be twisted and swiveled around any which way, particularly when powerful corporations are making a fortune based on the results of the studies. As Kierkegaard said, Numbers are the opposite of truth. Mez, the truth is that you really dont know this technology is safe - you are not infallible - and it is absurd to make comparisons to plants that grow naturally, which have developed in symbiosis with the natural world as a whole, or even with plants bred by humans in old fashioned ways. Perhaps it is time to admit that humanity simply cannot continue the kind of material growth we had over the last hundred years, and we must shift into a new paradigm where we seek to enhance the quality of our lived experience, deepening contemplative practices, stopping useless work, and ending destructive industries? Instead of treating nature as a “plug and play” platform for our next hyper-technological quick fix – particularly since there are always flaws in our code – why don’t we design social technologies that transform our corrupt economic system, provide a basic subsidy for humanity as a whole, and faciliate global cooperation to restore and replenish the natural world, applying ecological design science, planting trees, repairing watersheds, painting all the urban rooftops white to reflect sunlight, etcetera etcetera etcetera?
Posted on: Wed, 22 Jan 2014 23:50:11 +0000
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