Mark Lynas at Oxford: “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion here today is very clear: the GM debate is over. It is finished.”
It’s taken awhile for public opinion in Europe to come around, though mostly unnoticed by Americans the creators of the “Green Revolution” and Genetically Modified (GM) crops, Europeans have moved the debate forward in a decidedly pro biotech fashion and there is a consensus building to permit GM foods into the EU food stream, even in France.
This debate has always been more about a dilettante’s romantic faith than scientific truth and the entire “organic” movement and it’s child the “anti-GMO food movement” today comes laced with the conviction of a snake-oil salesman and the aftertaste of self-delusion. Really, is the $5 chicken at Aldi materially different from the $25 chicken at Whole Foods?
Below are two videos that I hope will inform your views on the subject. The first is by Mark Lynas, an environmental writer and early opponent of biotech foods, whose books on climate change have been very influential in publicizing that threat and who has recently undergone a conversion towards the benefits of modern agriculture. Thanks for keeping an open mind Mark. You put your mastery of English to good use and explain it all better than ever I could.
This second video is a Q&A with Vandana Shiva one of the original “tree huggers,” whose views, I think, represent a good deal of the anti-biotech worldview. I think there is great merit in Eastern religion but not as it’s interpreted by today’s food gurus and their devotees who seem fixated on an ultimately destructive romantic ideal of a ‘natural’ pre-scientific wisdom that trumps everything pitiful humans can accomplish. It’s a soothing philosophical tonic but I can’t help but ask every time a Hindu or Disney producer invokes the ‘natural’ argument, “Which nature are you talking about? The one that gave us bubonic plague, malaria, polio and a millennia of curses we’ve only just now escaped through unnatural science.
