Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Questioning Biotechnology’s Claims and Imagining Alternatives

Questioning Biotechnology’s Claims and Imagining Alternatives [Humans] are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This . . . should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.1 —Aldo Leopold The controversy surrounding transgenic technologies appears to be based on different assessments of the technology’s merits. Proponents argue that transgenic technologies will help us feed the world, cure diseases, and solve many other problems facing the human species. Opponents argue that the projected benefits are exaggerated and that the technology poses many risks that have not been adequately assessed. But these quarrels lead to circular arguments. We won’t know, for sure, whether transgenic technologies can feed the world until we try it, and if it doesn’t, it’s too late. Developing other options for self-sufficient food systems will have been ignored. We won’t know, for sure, if transgenic organisms will create ecological havoc until we release them, and if they do, it’s too late. We won’t be able to put the genie back into the bottle. In the meantime, we debate the technology’s potential risks or benefits, relying on our personal or collective judgments and biases about the technology’s efficacy and capabilities. It may be more fruitful to examine the assumptions underlying the technology’s promises and problems. If the assumptions are faulty, the conclusions may be unreliable as well. In fact, I do find many 161 This is an edited version of a paper first published in Frederick H. Buttle and Robert M. Goodman, eds., Of Frankenfoods and Golden Rice: Risks, Rewards, and Realities of Genetically Modified Foods (Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, 2001). 162 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience assumptions weak, which leads to the second topic of this paper: an examination of alternatives to biotechnology. Prevailing Ideology The first questions to consider are: What is the ideology that informs modern science? Is that ideology sound? Richard Lewontin, the prominent geneticist at Harvard University, argues that our modern optimism regarding the ability to solve many of our social, medical, and agricultural problems with transgenic technologies is based on what he calls “biological determinism .” This ideology, he says, makes the atom or individual the causal source of all the properties of larger collections. It prescribes a way of studying the world, which is to cut it up into the individual bits. It breaks the world down into independent autonomous domains, the internal and the external. Causes are either internal or external, and there is no mutual dependency between them. For biology, this worldview has resulted in a particular picture of organisms and their total life activity. Living beings are seen as being determined by internal factors, the genes.2 But this ideology completely ignores the actual relationship that exists between organisms and their environments. He suggests that four rules govern “the real relationship between organisms and their environment”: •Environments do not exist in the absence of organisms but are constructed by them out of bits and pieces of the external world. •The environment of organisms is constantly being remade during the life of those living beings. •Fluctuations in the world matter only as organisms transform them. •The very physical nature of the environment as it is relevant to organisms is determined by the organisms themselves.3 Thus, organisms are not the isolated entities assumed when we fantasize about feeding the world by manipulating a few genes in a few plants or animals, or healing debilitating diseases by adjusting a few defective genes. Each individual within a species is a “unique consequence of both genes and the developmental environment in a constant interaction.”4 Human 163 Questioning Biotechnology’s Claims and Imagining Alternatives well-being depends on interactions among genes, organisms, and environment : “It is a fundamental principle of developmental genetics that every organism is the outcome of a unique interaction between genes and environmental sequences, modulated by random chances of cell growth and division, and that all these together finally produce an organism. Moreover, an organism changes throughout its life.”5 The notion that gene technology can by itself solve problems that are, at least in part, derived from social and environmental interactions illustrates a faith in technological fixes that is not corroborated by experience. For example, it has always...