Abstract

The Christian tradition has, in so many respects, turned into secular Western technological and economic expansion all over the world.

John Bowden, SCM

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 05, 1999

Planet Death

The human species is an environmental abnormality.

E O Wilson

Humanity is suicidal. Since the War public measures of welfare show that we have mostly enjoyed an improvement in material wealth. Yet, disillusionment is high. People are not happier. They are anxious and frustrated. They feel cheated. Material prosperity has not led to universal happiness.

The logic of science has brought us material progress but it has pooh-poohed our intuitive sense that all is not right. We are not the masters of all we survey. We are part of the world that we survey—but seem to have forgotten that we are!

We are genetically programmed to be selfish. We consider ourselves first, then our families, and then tribe or nation. Any sense of global responsibility is too weak or non-existent. Nor do we plan ahead for more than the generations which we see about us before we die—one or two at the most, remembering that few people would have seen beyond their sons and daughters or perhaps grandchildren in the time of mankind’s evolution. So in evolutionary terms there was no need, in an apparently infinite world, for any evolving human to consider more than its immediate family in distance and time.

Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence extinguishes itself. When a mass extinction occurs, it takes about 10 million years for the biodiversity to be restored to its former level. We have a poor grasp of the way that species interact to support each other. Each species down to fungi and bacteria has its niche with particular conditions. If those conditions change, it is hard to say what the knock on effect of the loss of that habitat will be on other species dependant upon it. Symbiosis is the rule of nature. When species are joined in symbiosis, the loss of one means the loss of the other. All species are interconnected, so the loss of any could be important to another far removed. All depend upon certain arrangements and hierarchies. We ride roughshod over these at our peril.

One laissez-faire school of thought ignores this, claiming that God has given us human ingenuity so that we can transcend the common rules of ecology. Ingenuity and the power of our technology can find solutions to problems. Would that it were so. The ecological systems are too complicated and once they have been destroyed, they cannot be studied. Even if they had, it is unlikely that we would know how to replace them.

Amphibian species in many parts of the world are declining sharply. In much of the Americas from the Canadian Rockies through the US Rockies, to Costa Rica, the Amazon basin and the Andes, not to mention places as far apart as Italy and Australia, amphibians are suffering or dying out. Not all regions have been surveyed so it is probably safest to assume that the phenomenon is global or essentially global. Causes might be desiccation from the global heating, fragmentation of habitats, UV damage through ozone layer destruction and pollution.

The thin skin of amphibians leaves them particularly susceptible to pollutants. Their habitats often collect pollution run off and they suffer accordingly. Since they are predators of pests such as flies, they could lead to serious environmental problems if they declined significantly.

A second problem is the mass deaths of dolphins and seals, often apparently from bacterial infections. It happened off the eastern US coast in 1987-88, when half the doplphins died, and as far away as in Lake Baikal in Russia at the same time when a tenth of the seals there died. 40% of seals in the Baltic and North Seas also died of viral infections triggered by pollution damage. Whole coral reefs and their inhabitants like sea urchins are also dying.

Many species of fish have been found to suffer from tumours particularly in the Great Lakes and particularly associated with the liver—a sign of pollution. Half of marine turtles in the Pacific and Caribbean have tumours.

Lastly certain migrating birds have declined by up to 50 per cent since the 1950s. Many bird populations are declining through pollution and loss of habitat, especially in the tropics.

Even amateur naturalists can use some of these sensitive species for monitoring. They can estimate amphibian populations and the populations of dragon flies, damsel flies and tiger beetles. Mosses and lichens can be monitored even more easily and have slow growing populations at the best of times, so that a noticeable decline would be likely to have significance.

What is the cause, though? Most likely is the 50,000 synthetic chemicals which are deposited into our environment with no attempt to know their consequences.

Another problem has been the increase in poisonous coastal algal blooms. They have occurred from Japan, Hong Kong and Thailand to the Black and Baltic seas, the Adriatic and the eastern US seaboard. They seem to be caused by excessive leachates of nutrients like phosphates and nitrates combined with certain toxic chemicals.

Microscopic algae are the grass of the sea. They are present in the plankton in vast numbers but their concentration is normally low and a microscope is needed to see them. Sometimes however they bloom into vast numbers per millilitre and the water goes opaque with their bodies. The water looks like dishwater and the feeders on algae might have a lush pasture to feed on. In some cases it is less pleasant, and for us living near a body of water it might be too.

Algae are plants and produce oxygen by photosynthesis during the day. But at night they use up oxygen in the water to breathe and can suffocate animals swimming in their midst. The blooms of algae can also block the gills of fish, a problem of fish farming. The farmers have to be on the lookout for algal blooms and replenish the water as fast as they can to prevent suffocation. If they are too late, millions of pounds worth of fish can die.

Some algae have developed poisons to inhibit grazers from devouring them. Of course, fish might have little choice if they swim into a patch of algae and take some into their bodies. It is when the fisherman eats them that the poisonous nature of the algae is realised. When he landed there in 1793 the natives of British Colombia told George Vancouver that they never ate shellfish when the tide glowed at night. The reason was that the phosphorescence was caused by a poisonous alga. Such algae have killed hump-backed whales and manatees. The alkaloid poison they contain is so poisonous that a minute amount is toxic to people.

About 2000 cases of human poisoning by algae are reported each year—about one in six die. The first symptom will be numbness about the mouth and lips. The numbness will spread and in severe cases will paralyse the muscles for swallowing then breathing and the victim dies. Other types cause diarrhoea and sickness but are usually not fatal and another variety causes persistent nerve damage causing unsteadiness. When toxic algae are reported, the economic consequences on fish or shellfish exporting regions can be devastating. No one wants to import potentially poisonous fish.

Most of the toxic algae are localised and the natives have learnt when and what to eat. But widespread shipping in which water is used as ballast has transported strange blooms to unusual parts of the world. Algal poisoning from shellfish was unknown in Australia until the 80s when it began to occur around the ports of Adelaide, Hobart and Melbourne. It was traced to ships from Japan.

Human pollution is causing the main problem—providing excess nutrients that produce algal blooms. Waste from paper mills in the Seto area of Japan where many fish were farmed caused an algal bloom in 1972 that killed 14 million fish valued at $500 million.

It is total folly to neglect the rest of life. Our only hope is to try to halt the headlong plunge into death that we are currently following. Population growth has to be halted or it will halt itself. Exploitation of the earth’s resources has to halt or they will run out or degrade to a state of uselessness. Pollution has to be halted almost absolutely.

Meanwhile, whatever portions of the earth and its species can be conserved, until we understand them fully, must be conserved.

Multinational Capitalism

In the 90s, the top 500 corporations controlled 70 percent of world trade, 80 percent of foreign investment and 30 percent of world GDP according to the WWF. Oxfam adds that they generate half the greenhouse gases of global industry. Dupont alone controls 25 percent of the world’s CFCs. Six companies control 60 percent of aluminium production. Twenty manufacturers control 94 percent of the world’s agrochemical business. Their conservation, energy management, recycling and waste management policies are essential to the health of the planet said the UN in 1990.

Yet, the governments of the advanced countries protect these giants. The TNCs complained that Third World counties were stealing their technology and so the US demanded eight times the volume of Third World aid in compensation for lost royalties! Their weapon is trade sanctions. Oxfam says they are forcing the Third World into low cost, inefficient, unpatented technology. The TNCs retaliate by issuing platitudinous reports full of good intentions and objectives that they have negligible intention of implementing. Where improvements are made it is not for any altruistic reason but simply because some executives have come to realise that often environmentally friendly methods are also efficient methods. Thus they pretend to introduce change for environmental reasons when it is really to push up profits still further.

Misapplications of Science

He who pays the piper calls the tune. Scientists often rely on commercial funding. The people who provide do not have a dispassionate interest in the results of the research. Commercial funding and the economic system that give rise to it are have deep implications for scientific ethics.

Poor people in the world cannot pay, and carry no clout with the commercial funding of science. They cannot be served by that science. It will pay less attention to their needs than to the big timber companies, whose interests may be against the interests of the poor and vulnerable people in the world.

The genetic engineering of crop plants shows the dangers. People are led to believe that the genetic engineering of farmed plants will feed the world and even that without it we shall starve. Genetically engineered crops will often produce higher yields than unmodified plants, soon we shall not have enough food to feed the world, so genetic engineering will save the world from starvation.

Yet, starvation has always occurred by available food not getting to the starving people, either because they could not afford it or because unsuitable food was being grown as cash crops. While famines rage, there has always been a class of people who still got fat. Genetic engineering of plants will exacerbate this inequality, and cause famine.

1 per cent of the landowners in Brazil own 50 per cent of the land. The poorest 50 per cent of landowners, the peasant farmers, own less than 3 per cent of the land but produce most of the manioc, maize and beans that Brazil needs as staple food, and 40 per cent of the rice. They were feeding Brazil, while big landowners with their capital, land and international contacts were growing cash crops for export. They sold into rich markets at great profit while the poor sold into their domestic poor market at subsistence levels.

Helping small farmers therefore helps feed the poor, but helping rich farmers through expensive technologies that only they can afford helps only the rich.

Corporations are patenting plants. Many of the plants which the big pharmaceutical companies use as their raw material have been developed over hundreds or even thousands of years by peasant cultivators. The corporations take them to their laboratories, stick in a flounder gene here and a llama gene there and produce a modification with some better quality—a longer growing season, resistance to pests or a better response to fertilizer.

Having patented these modified plants, the big companies sell the improved seed to the peasant farmers, giving credit if necessary, then demand a royalty every time a farmer saves some of the seed and replants it in following years! If farmers refuse such terms, they have to compete using traditional seeds against farmers who can afford the more productive methods. Big landowners grasp the land and production more tightly than ever. Food supplies become less secure.

GM companies promised two things. The first was that GM food would enable us to reduce our dependence on pesticides—toxins would not have to be sprayed on the environment because plants could cope with pests through their modifications. The second was that we would always be able to choose whether or not we wanted to buy genetically engineered products. Both of these promises were immediately broken.

Monsanto had a herbicide called “Roundup” that could kill anything in a field. It also has a stake in 78 per cent of the soya seed suppliers in the US. Monsanto biologists spliced a gene into soya that enabled it to withstand the Roundup and drove monoculture to its insane limits. The “Roundup Ready” soybean is the one plant that is not destroyed by Roundup herbicide. Soya farmers do not have to apply selective herbicides. They just destroy everything in the field that is not a soya plant with Roundup. So, fields have no diversity at all.

The US now has large quantities of genetically engineered, “Roundup Ready” soybeans that it wants to foist on to the rest of the world, so it claimed it could not keep the Roundup ready beans separated from ordinary soybeans. If manufacturers want soya beans they have to buy GM soybeans. Soya derivatives are found in more than half of all the processed foods bought in the UK. They will have no choice but to buy Monsanto patented beans, in some form or other. Great scam, eh! Note the collusion of the US government.

In 1995 the European Parliament for the first time ever rejected a directive of the European Commission to extend the range of biological “inventions” that could be patented. European parliamentarians, particularly German MEPs, thought it so loosely drafted that manufacturers could patent almost anything. The new draft directive is worse. You can patent plants and animals in general but not plant and animal “varieties”. American patent law has been interpreted in the same loose way. W R Grace, a big pharmaceutical company, has received a patent for all genetic modifications of cotton.

This is outrageous. People should be rioting in the streets. Where are the Christians? They have happily allowed land and water to be privately owned and the air to be polluted by private industry. Isn’t this what God created in their myth, and belongs to everyone. Ha!

The ethics of ownership get even more outrageous when applied to human genetic material. The European draft directive says patents on human genetic material inside the body will not be granted, only patents on materials taken from the body and purified. Commercially useful material has to be extracted and purified, so this is just a blind that allows people to be used like cows, milked for genetic of other materials that they produce to be extracted and commercially sold. An eminent geneticist at Smith Kline Beecham owns the gene for human maleness! What once belonged to the commonweal, or were not considered as possible to be owned, are being patented as private property.

The Human Genome Diversity Project is a well-funded multinational project to prospect for useful human genes throughout the world. It will produce a complete map of the human genome within the next five or ten years. Advocates say they want to preserve the germ lines of indigenous people before they become extinct, so that their genes will continue to be useful for potential medical or commercial applications after they’ve gone.

Indigenous peoples did not know much about this. They are not bothered about their genes when they are extinct. They want to make sure they do not go extinct. Again human beings are being seen as stores of genes for other peoples use.

The Human Genome Diversity Project has funded research among the Hagahai people of New Guinea. They found a gene sequence that conferred resistance to a rare form of leukaemia. Samples were handed to the Institutes of Health in Washington, which patented the leukaemia-resisting genes. Something that Nature has conferred on these native people has been legally stolen by this US institution.

Cases like this are of particular concern in Britain, which has no privacy rights. Insurance companies and employers can practice genetic discrimination. It is done already merely on relationships—a family disposition to heart disease for example. Whole sections of the population can have insurance withdrawn or charged at premium rates. People with such gebetic disposition proved will become unemployable in any but menial jobs. No employer will want to train someone who might die early, or spend a lot of time sick.

Checking foetuses for faulty genes or harmful genes will also be possible, but if this were to lead to deliberate elimination of foetuses with certain genes, no one has any idea what the long term effects on the population might be. Nothing like this should be done until, not just the sequence, but every least impliction of every genetic process can be worked out—a much bigger project. When germline gene therapy becomes possible, the genetic characteristics of an embryo will be changeable by clipping genetic material into or out of an embryo’s genome.

Such technologies will be available at a price. Like private education, some people will have an advantage at the expense of others, irrespective of merit. In the UK, wealthy people are indifferent to the poor quality of state education because they had privileged access to good quality private (called “public”) schools. Gene therapy could allow them to ignore the environmental degradation that led to poor health. When the present biosphere collapses under the strain, conceivably only the rich will survive by a crash programme of splicing genes to resist the effects of pollution.

The motor car is a case of what is good for the individual not being good for society. Long ago, when the motor car was an idle luxury, men with red flags had to walk in front of them. With the toll of deaths and injuries caused by cars since the lifting of that restriction, it looks like a sensible idea. But the carbecame an essential of human society—society had to change its values to accommodate it.

Information about our genetic make-up should be governed by the strictest of privacy legislation. Consumers should have the choice of eating genetically engineered products or not. No one should be able to patent genetic sequences. It is like patenting the air,the view, the wind, the sun. A gene is no more an invention than the air or the sun. But if corporations can turn ordinary words into trade marks and stop others from using them, they can certainly patent a group of genes. People should be going in armies to their representatives and refusing to move until they get them to oppose all this insanity.

The public must themselves be informed not only of supposed benefits of new biology, but also the dangers. The maniac managers want to carry out experiments that are effectively on our very essence with totally inadequate controls or safeguards. Extremely long cooling-off periods must be imposed by law during which consultation and discussion must be total, and every suggested potential danger acted on, with extentions of the cooling period for each new one produced. No corporation’s profits are more important than the preservation of the biosphere.

As the most informed creatures in the biosphere on these matters, and the intellect that makes the research and its application possible, scientists must accept that they have the central responsibility to defend the biosphere and preserve Nature. Synthetic Nature not only sounds absurd, it can only mean Magna Matricide.

Genetic Engineering

SAGE (Somerset Against Genetic Engineering) held a public debate on genetic engineering. Luke Anderson, an author and national campaigner on GM food, outlined the case against, citing the political framework within which genetic engineering is being introduced, the amount of money at stake and the race between Japan and the US to get products on the market, forcing relaxation of regulatory laws.

Speaking in favour of GM food was Dr Nigel Halford, a senior research scientist at the Institute of Arable Crop Research, Long Ashton, near Bristol. The wise person would immediately have been suspicious of such a speaker, based on the question: “Who pays him?” A research establishment like Long Ashton has to get funding from somewhere and it has to sell its discoveries to someone. Whoever these people are, the speaker is not likely to want to offend them or risk losing his own job. At the very least he will not be telling us the whole truth.

So, the first thing he said was that for thousands of years man has been genetically modifying (GM) plants by selective breeding! Quite how selective breeding can change genes is beyond anyone’s understanding, so the expert begins by lying—or at least by introducing a red herring. Selective breeding can do exactly what it says—select genes that are already present in the genetic pool of the species. It cannot modify genes—and that is the subject of the debate—even if selecting particular genes can change the plant by favouring particular traits.

Genes could be modified previously by irradiation with various high energy rays. Apparently, at one time all the barley in Scotland was radiation mutant, and no one complained. One wonders how many people knew this. Genetic engineering is a more powerful, precise and convenient technique, in which genes can be cut from one creature and pasted into another. There is no limit to their source. Genes from a slug or a parrot can be introduced into a strawberry or a potato, and vice versa.

GM food products from the US can now be bought in Britain’s shops. GM tomatos with their ripening gene modified to prevent too rapid ripening, a boon to cheaper processing, are sold as tomato paste. Apparently they remain popular even though they have now been labelled as containing GM tomatos. Herbicide resistant soya and insect resistant maize are both also sold in the UK, formerly mixed with non-GM varieties. It has taken years to get labelling sorted out. This has been a disaster for GM marketing in the UK. Now all products with genetic material or proteins from GM organisms must be labelled.

We are told the benefits of GM crops are impressive. GM introduced resistance to herbicides means that one application of herbicide can kill surrounding weeds, but leave the GM crop intact. The battery of more toxic herbicides farmers use today can be replaced with just one, and that is good for the environment and cheaper for the farmer. Trials with GM sugar-beet at Long Ashton allowed one third less herbicide to be used. Soil erosion, too, is reduced because weeds can be left to grow in autumn and winter. In some areas of the US, pesticide use is gone. Sales of organophosphate are down by 85 per cent.

It sounds convincing but when you consider the full implications, it is not. Who owns the seed with the GM in it? Who owns the herbicide that complements the seed? The answer is the multinational that developed them and using them without paying is a breach of the patent. Monsanto has produced soya resistant to their herbicide “Roundup”. Farmers are not allowed to replant seed produced from previous GM soya crops but have to buy new. Two hundred farmers have been held in the US facing prosecution and $30,000 fines, allegedly caught through “spying”.

In third world countries, where 1.4 billion farming households depend on saving seed, GM crops are promoted as helping to solve world hunger. Peasant farmers can be “marketed” into buying the GM seed, then would have to continue doing so or face prosecution, because they would not be legally able to save the patented GM seed that are the property of the multinational. This is outrageous.

GM scientists assure us they can introduce genes which will help Britain economically. Britain has a £7 billion deficit in food. A gene to increase the protein content of wheat could mean the end of North American grain imports. Much of the food grown overseas is GM. The UK could not keep it out. A moratorium on eating GM foods in the UK is not feasible. So says the expert on GM. The UK government seems content to allow unsafe trials and to allow unsegregated seed to be sown in the UK. Their hope is that when enough GM fodder has been spread about, they can say, “The genie is out. What is the point of protesting further?” We have already heard this said!

Another benefit is said to be that easily grown crops can be altered to yield valuable products. The gene from evening primrose can be inserted the oilseed rape so that evening primrose oil—used for several medical conditions including eczema—can be produced more cheaply. Soap, plastic and fuel oil will be produced in oil seeds in the twenty first century. What then if the soap gene or the fuel oil gene hybridises into cabbages or seaweed? “Impossible”, they will say. Thalidomide was impossible, and was tested for far longer than these variants!

Crops can be produced with high vitamin or protein content, longer shelf life, better flavour and colour. America’s farmers have chosen to grow these crops because they get a benefit from them. Thirty-seven million acres of these crops are being grown worldwide. As for safety, the GM products on sale in Britain have had to undergo EU tests in 300 labs. They could not find a thing wrong with them.

The European Union is supposed to be signed up to the “precautionary principle” but it is almost ignored in Britain. Scientific evidence has been suppressed, and the bodies declaring GM foods safe are not impartial. Crops are not tested thoroughly at all, nor are GM food tests conclusive, especially in terms of risk. The longest safety test extends only for 100 days—pharmaceuticals have to be tested for more than 15 years. Risks include genetic pollution, impoverishment of Third World farmers forced into debt to buy seed each year, “spying” on US farmers to ensure they do not sow their own seed and unwilling countries being forced to accept GM crops and foods under international free trade agreements.

On genetic pollution, there was the risk of GM animals or plants inter-breeding with non-GM species with irreversible consequences in nature. Genetically engineered organisms cannot be recalled as faulty once they have been released, like tyres or motor cars. Some GM products seem particularly unstable—GM mustard plants are 20 times more likely to pass their DNA onto other crops than natural mustard.

GM animals can also pass on their mutated genes. An average 20 per cent of salmon escape from fish farms. If GM salmon were introduced into them, large numbers of synthetic genes could pass into of the wild population, where they would remain for an indeterminate period.

The process of genetic engineering is not precise. One method involves firing the desired gene into plant cells, but where it lands upon the host’s DNA cannot be predicted. Genes coding for red piqment fired into white petunias did not create red petunias. Instead the plants had a variety of unrelated altered properties. They were more resistant to fungi, less fertile and grew more leaves. This is just the sort of way that “Frankenstein” weeds can be inadvertantly made and spread into the environment. Perhaps the triffids of Wyndham’s book did not come from space but from Long Ashton or Porton Down.

“Bioprospecting” is the new global money-spinner for transnational food companies. Firms are trawling through third world countries patenting genes from plants and animals. Living organisms are being patented for private gain. One antiseptic plant has 29 patents, now regarded as inventions of the company that will earn it royalties.

The alternative to genetic engineering is sustainable agriculture that will not force millions of the poorest farmers into debt. Already Third World countries pay £50 million a day interest on debt to the developed world. Humanity is producing more food than we ever have but more people in the world are hungry. And the fat cats want to be fatter!

Substantial Equivalence

When biotechnology companies developed GM foods, they had to have government approval for their introduction. Governments however had no precedents. Since the possible effects were utterly unknown, the sensible approach would have been cautious, and the regulations applied to any new chemical product for human intake such as pharmaceuticals and food additives would have been used as they were or adopted. Toxological tests would have been made to determine Acceptible Daily Intakes (ADIs) and laws based on these introduced.

Since an ADI is one percent of the dose shown to be harmful to animals, it was a criterion that manufacturers of GM food were not happy to accept, and nor were they ready to accept the delay and expense of extensive toxicology. Governments knew that the GM food under consideration were intended as staples like grain, beans and potatoes that might make up a half of poor people’s diets. So they introduced the concept of “substantial equivalence” meaning that as long as GM food was substantially the same as some natural vegetable, it would be allowed. If a GM bean looked like an ordinary bean, it was acceptable.

One would have thought that if a GM bean was just the same as any other bean then there was no basis for patenting them, but this turns out not to be the case. “Substantial equivalence” is not equivalent enough to make the GM bean the same as any other bean, so far as patenting is concerned. Though beans can look and seem identical to the eye and gross chemical analysis, at a genetic level it can have some subtle difference that distinguishes its behaviour sufficiently to allow it to be patented, but not sufficient to make it different from other beans so far as “substantial equivalence” is concerned.

The gross chemical composition simply does not usually relate to the fine tuning of genetic make up by GM. Species that have been studied for centuries like grapes have revealed no simple relationships between chemical composition and taste, appearance or quality of wines that they make, and their genetic make up. “Roundup Ready” soya beans are “substantailly equivalent” to other soya beans, but have been patented because they have been made to carry a gene that resists the weedkiller, glyphosate. A specific test can simply show that the bean is not equivalent to other beans, but because it has the gross chemical composition of other beans it is “substantially equivalent” to them and therefore needs no further toxicological testing before getting on your plate.

Not only that but the equivalence is judged without the specific treatment that they are intended to have. The “Roundup Ready” beans are grown without being treated with “Roundup” and are compared with similarly untreated beans. There is nothing in “substantial equivalence” that could reveal any interactions between treatment with “Roundup” and the GM modified plant. Unmodified ones, we know, would be killed! If the glyphosate kills normal beans but not GM beans, how are they equivalent, and how are we to know what damage it does to the surviving plants that might be harmful to us when we eat them?

Derek Burke, a former chairman of an advisory committee on “novel foods”, assures us that detailed analyses of treated soya beans show no difference from untreated or natural beans. He seems to miss the point that it is these painstakingly detailed analyses, made publicly available, that reassure us and not a sieve so coarse that it would allow us to be fed poison.

Mae-Wan Ho, of the Open University, points out that exotic genes from viruses and bacteria and other non-food species are introduced into food crops often with promoters to make the gene express continuously. The splicing methods cannot as yet put an insertion into any specific spot. The bacterial gene introduced into “Roundup Ready” soya beans produces a new enzyme involved in amino acid biosynthesis that is immune to glyphosate. The enzyme is stable and survives through several successive generations of conventional hybridisation. It is described as non-toxic, easily destroyed by digestion and usually destroyed by processing anyway.

This latter is reassuring, but it applies to one plant and one modification. The experts want us to believe that it proves that “substantial equivalence” is a sound and safe criterion itself. P Kearns of OECD and P Mayers of Health Canada say “substantial equivalence is not a substitute for safety assessment”, but is meant to be the standard for chosing natural varieties for comparative tests. “Substantial equivalence” is no substitute for all this careful specific testing, yet that is how the GM food companies want it to be used.

“Substantial equivalence” should be replaced by more careful standards like DNA analysis, protein fingerprinting, secondary metabolite profiling and toxicity testing and in plants that have been treated just as they would before they got into our mouths. It is known that in non-GM crops crossed and hybridised to offer insect resistance, for example, that toxins such as psoralen was induced by light in celery and solanine in cool weather in potatoes. Anthony Trewavas of Edinburgh University dismisses these as minor instances in millions of alterations made. GM soya beans have been eaten for years by Americans and Europeans with no ill-effects—so they are safe! How many millions have eaten BSE beef and might now succumb to vCJD? Only a decade ago, a UK minister was feeding his daughter beefburgers and reassuring us in the same way as Trewavas.

The GM Debate

E Millstone of Sussex University says there is an unwillingness by GM defenders to face up to scientific and policy issues regarding GM. There can be no better example than this Anthony Trewavas who says that attempts to introduce GM food “have stimulated, not a reasoned debate, but a potent negative campaign by people with other agendas who demonize the technology”. The panic in this sentence does not need highlighting. Trewavas understands by a reasoned debate, a debate with someone who agrees with him. Other people he says are unreasonable, have “other agendas” and have supernatural fears about it all. Apparently, he says in “Nature”, we also ignore “farming practices”, “facts about plants” and attribute unfairly to GM problems in general. Finally, “almost without exception opponents of GM foods are not plant biologists”. Trewavas is plainly a typical “idiot savant”, one of those people who have learnt more and more about less and less until the know everything about nothing. The trouble is that the little he knows everything about goes no way to allaying the fears of people he expects to eat the synthetic food he wants to devise.

“Opponents of GM foods are not plant biologists”. It stands to reason that plant biologists have a vested reason for maintaining their own self-interest—the technologies and the transnational corporations that employ them ot fund their work. Yet Trewavas cannot avoid the truth that some prominent plant biologists are decidedly uncomfortable with the way GM of plants is going. What they thought would be in the public domain for general use for the public good, they have found will be patented and used only for corporate profit. Those who oppose their self-interests will carry far more influence in open debate than those like Trewavas who defend them. Least of all, we shall listen to those who tell us we are stupid and should shut up and put up with what they tell us is good for us, when the only obvious fact is that it is good for their bank balances.

Experts have a sorry record in caution, but at one time they were mainly a danger to themselves. Now they are a danger to the world. So long as the danger was their own, they could be allowed to take risks, but as soon as they want us all to take risks for them, they can expect us to protest. If some of Trewavas’s own kind support our skeptical view, then we feel all the more ready to stick with it.

Of course, we are dunces about everything, unlike him. Yet, farming practices in this context could only mean indistrial farming, and he is wrong—we do not ignore it—we oppose it too, and so should he. It is destroying the very substance that farmers should be aiming to preserve—the soil—but these selfish and greedy people do not care a fig if the soil is spent to death in 50 or 100 years time with their neglect of good husbandry. They are happy to live well off it while they are killing it off. We know more about the value of plants than Trewavas does. We know they are valuable natural resources that can be damaged by carelessness once their fundamental genetic structure is being toyed with. We want to keep them as they are until we are sure that there is no danger from tampering with them.

Trewavas says he has little time for agribusiness and the private use of genetic knowledge. He ought, then, to be on our side. Yet he insists on sounding like a cross between a god and a donkey. Many weeds already have rersistance to specific herbicides but can be eliminated by using another. They said the same about anti-biotics, as Trewavas knows but seems to expect his audience not to. If a germ gets a resistance to one, then use another. Now we have germs invading our hospitals that are resistant to them all. He cannot learn anything from this. God or donkey? There is no suggestion of caution, investigating slowly and painstakingly so as to be sure of the outcome when something is introduced, and above all not allowing such resources to be wasted or downgarded by overuse just to let some people get rich.

Trewavas is astonishigly blind. He points to plants introduced from overseas as the real superweeds. Plants like rhododendron and Japanese knotweed. He cannot see that such examples, though not GM, make the case against GM. He knows that 60 alien species have hybridised with native species giving additional varieties and problems from the “unpredictable consequences of mixing thousands of new genes in a continuing process of illegitimate gene flow”. He cannot see the relevance of this to GM at all! Yet however alien these genes are to our locality, they are not alien to plants. What he wants to set loose on the world are. For him, we have let non-native species loose so we should not object to letting barely tested synthetic vegetables loose in the environment. He wants to be able to devise his homunculi and let them loose while we cheer him for his public spirit, or at least let him get on with it unencumbered by protest.

Now he tells us that there is no danger from synthetic vegetables because all domesticated varieties die out quickly left to their own devices in the uncultivated wild, because they do not have the genetic variability of wild plants. He means that the particular domestic variety dies out but not that its genes necessarily do. All that happens is that genes exchange from wild varieties into the domesticated ones and vice versa, and so the genes bred out of the domesticated varieties return, and the particular genes selected for, disappear back into the general gene pool. If any gene has been introduced artificially that gives it an evolutionary advantage then it will be selected and spread in the wild, not die out as Trewavas wants to pretend.

Turning to the dangers of insecticides, he reminds us that conventional farmers use upwards of five applications of broadband insecticides to each crop, with disastrous consequences for insects. The technology is self-limiting because the insects eventually become immune, he tells us! Much less harmful would be to insert a gene for some specific insecticide that will let non-harmful insects to proliferate. If he really felt concern about the use of insecticides, why is he not in the camp arguing the case against them. Frankly, he does not seem to know what “ecology” means. The use of specific agents introduced to control some pest have led to disastrous consequences, including extinction. Kill of such and such a pest with this specific genetic insert and our crops will be pest free. But the pest is actually controlling a worst pest, or something down the line that eventually will become a worse pest. Any number of introductions have led to a case worse than the original problem. Ecology is a complicated network of interactions with non-linerar outcomes, that simple linear minda like Trewavas’s cannot or will not understand. Yet even he has to concede that the GM of plant genetics is “not perfect”. That does not bother him in the least, but what he cannot understand is that it bothers us. He does not like “negative propaganda” against GM, because only his own propaganda is reasonable!

In the 70s, it was discovered that only 50 metres separation was needed between crops to keep them 99.5 percent pure, and that is now an internatinal standard. In any case, “pollen moves much further than genes”, he cryptically tells us as if pollen has nothing to do with dispersion of genes. Besides, seeds can be carried much further than birds, but we should not bother because transgenic genes have poor survival chances. Have you noticed that this man cannot stop begging the question. The odd seed cannot matter and nor does the odd alien gene if it is present at less than one in 200. This is what he seems to want us to believe. What might happen once the gene has entered the gene pool of some hybrid, does not bother him. His mind thinks in averages, so individual cases do not matter. It is precisely what happens to genes that get loose that worries us. It does not matter if it is only one in 10,000, or less because once GM is allowed there will before long be millions of plants each with millions of pollen spores, each with millions of genes. A gene that is a boon to a farmer as a fungicide might have survival value for wild hybrids, and in a few generations it might be present widely in some species.

By putting the genetic modification in the chloroplasts, the spread of genetic modifications by pollen can be prevented in those cases where the pollen does not contain any chloroplasts. This then ought to be required practice. The prevention of implanted genes spreading out of control is central to opposition to GM. If it were certain genetic dispersion could be prevented then there would be less opposition. The trouble is that it requires the public to trust the experts in what they say, and that trust does not exist, for reasons that Trewavas makes clear.

Trewavas goes on and on, now praising the “green revolution” for allowing the population of the Third World to explode. The population has doubled from 2 billion to 4 billion but the number of malnourished people has actually fallen by about a quarter of a billion to less than a billion. He simply cannot seem to understand that he is simply making the problem worse. When the collapse comes because the world has stretched beyond its capacity, green revolution or none, it will be a much worse catastrophe than otherwise. Supporting such huge growth rates of human population cannot be sustained. If we do not reduce it by planning, Nature will reduce it by calamity. What we have seen is no “green revolution”, unless it refers to greenbacks for the corporate shareholders. It is a cynical exploitaion of simple people for profit, no different in essence from selling them cigarettes or armaments. Not one of these people, who doubtless make a show of meretriciously attending their churches, care a jot whether these people in the Third World live or die as long as they can make a profit out of them. Trewavas himself sees a “holocaust” on the way but tells us that GM will stop it. The best it can do is put it off while cynical corporate bosses and their cynical lapdogs make more money.

Trewavas disparages organic farming as only half as efficient as the farming he is supposed not to have much time for, and needing cows for manure, taking up land that could be producing GM soya beans. So, this noble plant biologost is campaigning against the death of the forests to open them up as prairie for beefberger cattle? Not that he tells us. But he does want to tell us that cross hybrids of natural plants are unnatural and should not be used by organic farmers. He wants to save us the bother of having cows by inserting the chargrilled cow gene into tomatoes, so that we can grow steak flavoured tomatoes and dispense with the steak. Bravo! We are all with him.

This unprincipled blusterer wants to tell us what is the right thing to do, when it is plain that he objects to not having a free hand to do just as he likes. He wants to feed us his steak flavoured tomatoes with an ethylene glycol gene so that they will grow in winter, and a ponceau red gene so that they look ripe when they are not, and a peanut oil gene so that we will die of an anaphylaxic reaction and not be able to complain that we have been poisoned. He justifies his right to splice genes as he likes to feed us what he likes through our unique “biological characteristic”, the “human spirit!” This expert, that wants to feed us whatever he likes, thinks their is a biological characteristic called the human spirit. And he tells us that we know nothing! He sounds as though he has had his genes spliced with a New Age nut and a Victoroan bishop. Anyone who can end a supposedly scientific polemic in a learned journal with such pseudoscientific rubbish is a fraud and should be derided.

The Adelphiasophist Wisdom of Charles, Prince of Wales

Prince Charles had this to say on BBC Radio 4 concerning the respect we should have for Nature if we are to survive. He wrapped it in references to traditional patriarchal religions, doubtless because he is a Christian and because he would become the head of the Anglican Church, if he were to become monarch of the UK. But in urging us to regard Nature as sacred, he is upholding Nature as divine and Christianity does not do that. For Christianity, Nature is profane. So HRH the Prince of Wales is here being Adelphiasophist in his outlook!

If we are to achieve genuinely sustainable development, we will first have to rediscover, or re-acknowledge, a sense of the sacred in our dealings with the natural world, and with each other.

Fundamentally, a sense of the sacred helps us to acknowledge that there are bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which set limits to our ambitions, and define the parameters of sustainable development. In some cases, Nature’s limits are well understood at the rational scientific level. As a simple example, we know that trying to graze too many sheep on a hillside will sooner or later be counter productive for the sheep, the hillside or both. More widely, we understand that the overuse of insecticides or antibiotics leads to problems of resistance. And we are beginning to comprehend the full, awful consequences of pumping too much carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere.

Yet the actions being taken to halt the damage known to be caused by exceeding Nature’s limits, in these and other ways, are insufficient to ensure a sustainable outcome.

In other areas, such as the artificial and uncontained transfer of genes between species of plants and animals, the lack of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences is regarded in many quarters as sufficient reason to allow such developments to proceed.

The idea of taking a precautionary approach, in this and many other potentially damaging situations, recives overwhelming public support, but still faces a degree of official opposition, as if admitting the possibility of doubt was a sign of weakness or even of a wish to halt “progress”.

On the contrary, I believe it to be a sign of strength and of wisdom. It seems that when we do have scientific evidence that we are damaging our environment we aren’t doing enough to put things right, and, when we don’t have the evidence, we are prone to do nothing at all, regardless of the risks.

Part of the problem is the prevailing approach that seeks to reduce the natural world, including ourselves, to the level of nothing more than a mechanical process… Nature has come to be regarded as a system that can be engineered to our own convenience, or as a nuisance to be evaded and manipulated, and in which anything that happens can be fixed by technology and human ingenuity.

Above all, we should show greater respect for the genius of Nature’s designs, riorously tested and refined over millions of years. This means being careful to use science to understand how Nature works, not to change what Nature is, as we do when genetic manipulation seeks to transform a process of biological evolution into something altogether different. The idea that the different parts of the natural world are connected by an intricate system of checks and balances, which we disturb at our peril, is all too easily dismissed as no longer relevant.

Of course, our descendants will have scientific and technological expertise beyond our imagining, but will they have the insight or self-control to use this wisely, having learned both from our successes and our failures? They won’t, unless there are increased efforts to develop an approach to education which balances the rational with the intuitive. Without this, truly sustainable development is doomed.

Who Will Play God?

Some “idiot savant” called Steven Connor, writing in the same edition of the Independent as the report of the Prince’s Reith Lecture speech, pooh-poohs any concern about the current rising series of assaults on Nature. These people never answer the questions put to them, but instead set up straw men, supposed to be Adelphiasophists, Prince’s of the realm, or anyone else concerned about the profligate battering of the biosphere, and then knock them over with ease and a patronising chuckle. Their aim is to depict concerned people as ignorant or deluded, when they themselves, chuckling and patronising, are the ignorant and deluded ones—and their readers, if they believe them.

Connor begins his piece by denigrating “the many food committees that today safeguard the British diet”, as if they were the foolish fancies of fussy, nanny-state wimps. Never mind that in Victorian times before these regulating committees started to be established, our food was contaminanted with a large number of adulterants, many of them poisonous. Connor jeers that the potato would not pass these committees with approval if it had been introduced today. Yet his conclusion is that “natural” is not necessarily “healthy”, implying that some people at least benefit from being warned off deadly nightshade or laburnum peas.

Hacks like this are pathetic, but editors seem to think their musings are extremely clever and informed while we who take the careful view are fools who start at our own shadow. The reason is of course ignorance. Most of these hacks and editors do not understand science, being graduates of classics and literature, so they take the handouts of the multinationals and governments as the last word on these matters despite their record of lies and self-interest. We environmental pessimists evidently go around eating green spuds and laburnum peas because they are natural while refusing to eat “Roundup Ready” rape even though it is a boon to humanity.

Few people are right in everything they pronounce upon and Prince Charles is not one of them, but he is right to highlight the failure of all governments to be cautious when they might be making or condoning irreversible changes to the climate and the bioshphere. All of the apologists lie and lie again to tell the general population that there is no danger. Yet they admit they have not done the scientific work that would enable them to make such a decision. No one, can blame science for these false assurances because the scientific work to back them up has not been done. Scientific trials could be done to determine the outcome of GM on foodstuffs without allowing the crops access to pollinating insects. They need only be grown in stringently sealed glasshouses, and then tested as feed in the laboratory. New drugs are not allowed to be used willy-nilly without stringent testing, so we are entitled to ask why governments are in such a rush to admit GM plants into the environment without equally strict tests.

Now we know that GM foods grown in open fields in Canada have contaminated crops growing at what was supposed to have been a safe distance. Europeans now have to eat “Roundup Ready” rapeseed oil whether we want to or not. It is in the commercial rapeseed illegally sold and unwittingly planted in recent summers. The recommended “cordon sanitaire” of the experts proved not to be safe, despite all the assurances of the “idiots savants” wheeled out to tell us otherwise. Do they have any feelings of compunction for handing out this false information? Not at all. “Oh, the cat is out of the bag now. No need to bother about it any more. Just go ahead…” with the contaminating flood feared by Prince Charles. Are these people aliens?

Prince Charles asked, “What is to prevent us treating the world as a great laboratory of life where science is allowed to run rampant and unchecked?” The hack does not even recognise it as a question and instead asks the reader, “Is he correct?” He answers that most scientists do not think so. This great corrector of mistaken ideas must have done a survey of all prominent scientists. He gives us no statistical breakdown of his astonishing survey but instead quotes two who seem to be simply saying that Charles is picking the wrong target in aiming at science. Few scientists are in a position even as influential as that of the prince. Like the hack, they are employed to do research and to report upon it, and like the hack, when their employers tell them to report on research they have not done, then they do it—favourably for the employer, naturally—or lose their jobs.

It is this “scientific rationalisation” that the Prince is aiming at, though he might not have a clear distiction in his own head between this and scientific method properly used. No honest scientist could agree with “scientific rationalisation”, when it is used as a dishonest way of assuaging genuinely-held and possibly real fears. It will not do for scientists to tell us that all will be well when they are just chanting semi-religious mantras because they do not know. Science gives us the means of proving whether some procedure will or will not be well and proper scientists would want to test anything that is likely to be spread widely throughout the world to prove it is safe before so doing.

Let no one ever believe experts who cannot quote precise scientific research to back up their assertions. If they do not have the evidence, then they have no more right to be taken as experts than Prince Charles. It is an example of scientific rationalisation to wheel out two “prominent” scientists whose prominence alone is supposed to be sufficient a criticism of the Prince of Wales’ stance. One is “saddened” and one finds Charles “unhelpful”. Would it not be more saddening if some rogue gene started to wreck the world and to whom is it “unhelpful” for the Prince to criticise the inadequate controls and the untested release of GM on to the world? The answer is the transnational corporations who want to patent the very seed that we need for life.

The Prince is warning us to meddle with Nature at our peril. What could possibly be wrong with such sensible advice? For our hack, Mr Connor, Nature is the enemy that we have to batter into submission. Smallpox, botulism, cholera, and genetic disorders are all natural, dontcha know? Medicine is unnatural, sowing seeds is unnatural, storing seeds is unnatural. For our tutor, we should let Nature run her course of disease, famine and death, with no interference from humanity, if we want to be natural. The reader will note the usual ploy of such hacks—defining some extreme view, accusing us of holding it, then telling us we are fools for so doing.

Well, Mr Connor, we are not as dim as you think. In fact, we are less dim than you are, but you are too dim to know it. Let us explain to you in language that even an “idiot savant”, indeed, even an idiot, could understand, that all of the changes that humanity have applied to Nature hitherto have been within Nature’s own bounds and timescales. People have realised that Nature can bite back and when they have ignored this rule, she has bitten back. No one would willy-nilly spread anthrax around the human environment. Anthrax is dangerous and scientists treat it with respect. When Nature has been treated cavalierly, disaster has befallen some of us. Thalidomide, cigarettes, rinderpest, Chernobyl and many environmental disasters ought to be sufficient warning.

One might add the explosion in the human population since the infectious diseases were cured. Yet for Connor this is apparently an achievement to be admired, and we have done it by being unnatural. Indeed we have. We have enabled people to live longer without teaching them to have fewer children instead of more, and the prospects now are utterly unthinkable—mass starvation and ecological disaster or the use of further extreme methods to support the excessive human population we have built. We have done it by unnatural methods like selective breeding of better foods, fertilisers and pesticides, with no compensation on the contraceptive side. We have contraceptives but, it seems, there is no money in selling them, or rather no one sees any sense in buying them when life in the third world is so uncertain. They prefer to have the certainty of children as an insurance against destitution in old age rather than promises.

Of course, selective breeding, fertilisation and pesticidal control are all perfectly natural responses, and what we know of them, we have generally learned from Nature and within her own bounds of natural diversity. The fact that Nature has produced our own species by selective breeding shows that it is not unnatural. Nor is the fact that all plants need nutrients to grow anything other than proof that feeding anything properly is entirely natural. Then the presence in plants that have grown entirely naturally of substances like pyrethrum as an insecticide is proof that pesticides are natural responses of Nature.

Nevertheless, scientists know that any of these methods taken to extremes could be disastrous. Selective breeding can dangerously reduce genetic diversity, leaving a species prone to sudden death. Excessive use of inorganic fertilisers cause the soil to degrade until it becomes useless and fields turn into desert, and rivers and oceans into cesspits. Excessive use of pesticides results in overkill when the insects that pollinate the plants and the animals that depend upon them die with unknown consequences, and pesticides permanently pollute the environment that cannot degrade them, as in the case of DDT. Scientific knowledge devised the methods but governments and companies used them to their own advantage without checking the consequences. The cause of the ensuing disasters are discovered—too late—when governments and multinationals call in the scientists once more to tell them what went wrong.

Connor sees that there have been costs but asserts, with no evidence, that none of this could have been avoided. He ignores that the threat now to humanity is from the very things that he considers boons. If it is true that GM foods will allow us to feed twice the population, is that good? Why would it not be better to restrict the population and avoid the need for untried and untested synthetic foods like GM? If we go down this road, what further mutation will we have to promote to allow the population to grow to 50 billion or 100 billion—miniaturisation of the human species perhaps? Without a constant invention of some new artificiality, there will eventually be a catastrophe. In other words, there will “be” a catastrophe, so why not take a less risky route? Instead of pandering to the demands of governments and transnationals for more and more growth, we should be restricting population and stabilising the world economy at a sustainable level. That is what Charles, the Prince of Wales, is pleading for, but our unduly clever dimwit of a hack cannot see it and wants us to think as stupidly as he does.

Totally blinded by a vision of GM crops feeding untold billions of human beings, the “idiot savant” tells us it allows “better crops to be developed more quickly” than by conventional methods, but he has no qualms despite his recognition that earlier methods had “costs”. What we want to know is why there has been no assessment of these risks and costs, and why are governments and multinationals so keen on rushing in without careful testing and assessment of them. The answer is not science—it is greed for profit!—greed that denies future generations a decent world to live in.

Connor has to admit that it is “fairly” unnatural to move genes from one species to another unrelated species. Yet, because cases in which it happens through the intermediary of a bacterium are known, Connor thinks it must be all right. Perhaps it is, but what is the objection to checking the procedure and the artificial products of it to ensure it is safe and that the introduced gene will not itself mutate too easily in its unnatural environment or change its position in the genetic code thus creating something altogether more dangerous? Connor is so simple and insensitive that he is unperturbed by such thoughts and disparages those who are concerned as “anti-GM merchants”.

Pro-GM merchants tell us that GM can reduce a farmer’s dependence on chemical sprays, and few would depict this as in any way bad, but how is that to make profit for the developer? The plain fact is that the whole point of the “Roundup Ready” GM varieties is that they are used in conjunction with the chemical spray called “Roundup”, which they alone can resist! The developers see a time in the not distant future when farmers will be sowing “Roundup Ready” rape or whatever then spraying them with Roundup and getting wonderful yields. It will then become impossible to buy any seed that is not “Roundup Ready” and the farmers will be entirely dependent on the transnational company for both seed and the sprays needed for them.

GM can get rid of disadvantageous genes like the one that causes pod-shattering in canola seeds. Connor does not wonder why such an evidently disadvantageous gene arose and persisted in the plant in the first place. When such genes persist, they have some subtle effect on the plant, the advantage of which balances the apparent disadvantage. What is this subtle advantage? What will happen if the disadvantageous gene is eliminated? The consequences might be awful, but they will certainly be unforeseen, because the GM lobby simply do not even want to think about it. No one except Adelphiasophists and like-minded people such as Prince Charles, are asking these questions, and the pro-GM merchants have no intention of setting up any extended trials to seek answers.

Connor talks about using GM techniques to make plants that produce medicines that we can extract from them and use. He makes no mention of the thousands of such plant species being destroyed for good each day in the continuing destruction of the environment by slashing and burning the hardwood forests for beef production. No one will have the chance to discover what wonderful medicines that Nature has herself produced that mankind could have cultivated. No, the pro-GM merchants are happy that the forests should be burnt and instead that we should do the equivalent to plants of moving ears to legs and eyes to the middle of the belly—in fact create monsters. And, if such artificial medicinal plants were grown in open fields, can the GM merchants assure us that the presence of these medicines freely accessible to bacteria and viruses in the ordinary biosphere will not induce a resistant strain of virus or bacterium that we could not handle? The answer is they cannot without doing the extensive scientific testing we demand but they pooh-pooh as a waste of time and effort.

Since Connor is concerned about feeding the billions of additional humans he expects in this century, why doesn’t he advocate transferring the genes for photosynthesis into human beings so that they could get sustenance just by standing in the daylight, like plants. Indeed why not get humans to exchange the genes for legs for the genes for roots, allowing us to save energy by not wasting it on motion and instead get even more sustenance directly form the earth. If GM is acceptable at all then why pussyfoot around with making “Roundup Ready” varieties of plants when we could manipulate the human genome. Doubtless this will be considered absurd, but it is no different in principle from what is being advocated without control for food crops. The precautionary approach demands that fears be addressed and legitimate questions be properly and thoroughly answered before monstrous genetic changes are introduced into the environment.

The whole trouble with people like Connor is that their metaphor is the anthropocentric one of humanity struggling against Nature when we must think of in the Nature-centric terms of humanity living in symbiosis with Nature. Connor quotes “the father of DNA sciences”, James Watson as saying, “If scientists do not play God then who will?” doubtless an accurate quote of a man known to be clever but arrogant and foolish in many of his pronouncements—a typical “idiot savant”. The trouble is that some human beings think that they are gods. Those that do ought to be locked up as being more dangerous than any murderer or criminal. Adelphiasophists think that any scientist that thinks he, or mankind, are above Nature is not only a bad scientist, he is a danger to the human race, and indeed the biosphere as a whole. For Connor, Watson has a Nobel prize so must be right, whereas the Prince of wales talks to plants so must be a kook. On this issue, the kookie Prince is right and Watson is wrong, and we had better get to realise it soon.

Feeding the Starving

GM is sold to us, by its propagandists, as they way of feeding the starving world. The truth is that the shortage of food in the Third World has nothing to do with normal plants being unable to feed the starving millions. People starve because they have no land on which to grow food and no money to buy it. Given a modicum of land, start up cash, training and freedom from corruption and gangsters, far more people in the Third World could feed themselves. GM is not only irrelevant, it is likely to be positively harmful.

Several large scale trials have now shown that traditional methods used by choice are more effective than modern techniques of monoculture, pesticides and fertilisers, of which GM is the pinnacle. A comparison of modern and traditional techniques on a scale of hundreds of hectares has been made on rice growing. The traditional methods were by far the best. Half the sample was sown with a single high yield variety of rice and treated with fertilisers, fungicides and pesticides. In the other half, a mixture of traditional varieties was sown together and allowed to grow using traditional methods of cultivation, chemicals only being used in response to attack.

The mixed fields were more resistant to fungal and pest attacks, needing therefore less treatment with pesticides and fungicides and yielded 18 percent more. Many smaller trials on other crops had left the picture unclear, though not favouring monoculture. Traditional and modern methods seemed little different in yields in these smaller scale trials, but the soil quality improved using tradtional methods. However, trials on wheat in Hertfordshire has shown consistently over long periods that manure gave better yields than fertilisers.

Comparisons made in India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have shown that even unsophisticated farmers can get two or three times the yield from organic or partially organic production than from using modern methods. In advanced farming countries like the US, the story is the same. Small farms growing mixed crops were able to earn ten times per unit of ground than large farms using monoculture.

On the other hand, places like the Punjab, where modern intensive cultivation was taken up enthusiatically, have seen output collapse. The reason was simple and should have been forseeable. Hybrid high yield varieties needed much more water and more nutrients to give their vaunted higher yields. In arid land, they sucked off the groundwater and exhausted the ground of nutrients, requiring irrigation and fertilisation, and causing salination and destruction of the quality of the soil. What was already arid took a further step towards being desert.

Whatever the propagandists of monoculture say, good practice and evolution belie it! The monopolists know it, but they are interested in selling their own patented varieties and the fertiliser and pesticides they need whether they are best for the peasant farmer or not. Traditional mixed seed varieties, composting and crop rotation leave the monopolists with no power and no profit, but they benefit peasants and small farmers by leaving them independent.

The monopolists have also sought to buy up seed banks and control distribution by having governments license particular seeds on the grounds that they have some resistant quality to fungus or disease. Yet, as the large scale trial mentioned above and evolutionary common sense prescribes, mixed varieties are better than single varieties however resistant they might be to some disease or another. Evolution demands diversity, so what is the sense of growing single varieties? Crops of mixed parentage have the genetic diversity to resist attack from different pests and diseases, reducing dependence on chemical treatments and protecting the quality of the soil. Evolutionary principles should be followed in which Nature is caressed rather than cudgelled to feed the starving. As George Monbiot says: organic farming is the key to feeding the poor.

Genetic Science and Public Confidence

Speaking of George Monbiot! An agricultural application of genetic engineering has the potential to reduce pesticide use—the production of genetically modified organisms that attack crop pests. Viruses could be modified to kill a single pest species, leaving the rest of the ecosystem intact. Naturally, it requires a lot of testing and development to make sure that is all it does.

George Monbiot, the molecular biologist, tells this cautionary tale in “Resurgence” magazine.

There can scarcely be a clearer illustration of the need for transparency and accountability in research and development. When the public is kept in the dark, it is bad for democracy and for science, which loses credibility and public confidence.

Stale bread

By combining an acid-stable alpha-amylase enzyme derived from the black aspergillus fungus and an alpha-amylase enzyme derived from the bacterium, “Bacillus stereothermophilus”, then adding this wholesome mixture to bread dough, the resultant loaf will keep “fresh” for a week.

Doubtless, if we were all making our own bread this discovery would be a boon to humanity, but we are not! Bakeries can bake our bread every night, so why should we want to keep it “fresh” for a week?

The hardening of bread is thought to be caused by crystallization of parts of the starch, making it harder, and until now additives called emulsifiers have been the chosen way of inhibiting this crystallization, so that our bread can remain “fresh”. These emulsifiers and the water they retain make bread seem unnaturally soft giving thoughtless people the illusion that the bread is fresh, but it is the excessive retained water that eventually makes the bread grow fungal blooms of many colours instead of desiccating and getting hard as it used to.

Maybe the cocktail of enzymes will be an improvement on these emulsifiers, though the bakers and food retailers will doubtless use both to be on the safe side, but what is wrong with ordinary unadulterated bread that goes stale instead of multicoloured with fungal growths? Bread that has gone as hard as a brick is still edible. Bread growing its own garden is not.

Stale bread and cheese were the iron rations of long ago, and armies marched on them, as well as Dick Whittington in the fairy story, and many another impoverished hero. If people did not have the jaws and teeth for rock hard bread, they could float the pieces in a hot soup until they softened, or soak them in water or milk to make them into a bread or a milk pudding. If it had to be discarded, it could still be softened to use for feeding pigs, chickens or ducks, or in the last resort could be added to the compost heap or wormery to improve your garden soil.

The point of this misplaced food science is to make people think that old bread is really fresh, then lazy shopkeepers do not have to judge daily purchases of bread. They do not have to bother at all until their stock of nutritious artificially “fresh” bread is no longer on the shelf. Their suppliers can also be large bakeries able to supply huge areas because the bread remains “fresh”, and the small baker is pushed out of business. Then the customer has no choice but to buy the lovely “fresh” bread supplied by the baker hundreds of miles away—unless they choose to make their own.

This is a plain misapplication of science. These bread softening technologies are only for the benefit of the manufacturers’ and sellers’ profits, not for the customer or the urban poor. The consumer is fooled by marketing into thinking that soft bread is fresh bread, but it is not. It might be soft and cheap through the giant baker’s economies of scale but it might be weeks old and already decaying in subtler ways than the food scientists or their employers thought of.

Give us back bread that tells us itself when it is not fresh!

War is Declared. The “Wise Use” Agenda

In “The War Against the Greens ”(Sierra Club Books, 512 pages, $25), award-winning reporter, David Helvarg, chronicles the environmental backlash and the “Wise Use” movement. This article is abstracted from an interview with David Helvarg in the Boston Phoenix.

In 1988, George Bush spoke of being “the environmental president”. After the unregulated, free-market environmental policies of the Reagan years, such talk was scary for the oil, mining, logging, and livestock industries and they gathered to develop a counter-strategy that would prolong Reagan’s policies. Out of those meetings came a manifesto that preached a creed of greed.

The “Wise Use” Agenda aimed to prevent or cut restrictions on oil drilling offshore and in national parks, gain freedom to cut timber in wilderness areas, allow unrestrictred cattle grazing on public lands, abolish the Endangered Species Act, lift clean air, water quality and pesticide regulations, and allow infills in wetland areas or obtain Federal compensation.

The name, “Wise Use” Agenda, was a cynical exploitation of a phrase used in 1907 by the first director of the US Forest Service who called conservation “the ’Wise Use’ of resources”. It was meant to sound prudent and reassuring, as if it an environmentally concerned lobby. It was designed to appeal to those whose economic futures were uncertain, and brought under its ideological umbrella loggers and ranchers in Western states who blamed government regulation for their troubles, and property-rights activists who contend that it is unconstitutional to regulate or “take” environmentally sensitive land that is privately owned.

Its corporate backers wanted “Wise Use” to seem like a grassroots movement, but it is an umbrella group for a wide array of right-wing interests, including white supremacists, members of the John Birch Society, and followers of Lyndon LaRouche and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

”Wise Use” has taught industry to play the grassroots game. Its national fax guerrillas is a paper movement, but effective on Capitol Hill. It feeds on people’s anxieties—where they are out of work, where their mortgages may be at risk, and where the jobs they have are no longer viable—by accusing environmentalists of opposing their jobs, and being more interested in owls and lizards than people and families. It finds a suitable dispute, polarizes it and leads people to vigilante action. It mobilizes people against environmentalists, often when the environment is not an issue or not the main issue, to advance industry’s agenda. Since their objective is to keep issues on the boil, “Wise Use” opposes compromise with environmentalists and labour unions, and government agencies and farmers.

As the “Wise Use” movement has grown, so has violence against environmental activists. “Wise Use” rhetoric is one of war. Amidst violence the organisation has itself stirred up, it is saying, “If we don’t get political power, there is going to be a civil war. People are rising up. People are ready to pick up guns and go to war”. It has local thugs and is a hotbed for armed militias—including gun activists and white separatists—who are coming together in Montana, Washington, Idaho, eastern Washington, and eastern New Mexico. Despite the “Wise Use” movement’s use of terrorist tactics, law-enforcement officials have not responded.

Campaigns of harassment escalated to violence, arsons and shootings from “Wise Use” campaigns in the Pacific Northwest and the Adirondacks. A dentist who was active on environmental issues in the Adirondacks, the land of night riders and vigilantes, had his office burned out.

In the South and other parts of the country, private-security cowboys work for outlaw industries. A park commissioner had her barn and vehicles burned. Three anti-logging activists from New Hampshire and Maine were burned out. Cases of harassment, vandalism, and death threats against environmentalists are in the thousands.

• A doctor in Georgia, who was going to testify in a federal suit against a local polluting factory, found his dog taken on his front porch with all of its blood drained. Killing pets is typical of their intimidation.
• A retired Bethlehem Steel worker in Michigan, protesting against a hazardous-waste dump planned for his town, found a cat head in a box on his car, and a note saying his wife or grandkids would be next.
• Pat Costner, the director of toxics research for Greenpeace, had her home in Arkansas burned down.
• Diane Wilson, a shrimper in Texas who was protesting the pollution of a bay by a huge multinational plastics company, had her dog shot. Her mother-in-law was also shot at, and her boat was sabotaged and almost sank six miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.
• Paula Siemers was beaten, her house was set on fire, and her dog was poisoned. She lived in a low-income community in Cincinnati. She was one of the people who appeared on a “60 Minutes” report in 1992 on the violence. After “60 Minutes” interviewed her, she was attacked and stabbed on the street. And at that point, she left Cincinnati and went into hiding.
• Stephanie McGuire was raped and beaten. She was protesting pollution in the Fenholloway River, in Florida. “60 Minutes” also profiled her, and since then there has been a major campaign to discredit her story.

A disproportionate number of these widespread attacks have been against women—often in rural, isolated situations. Killing pets and targeting undefended women shows how cowardly these terrorists are, but “Wise Use” leaders have been successful in distancing themselves from the violence. One leader argues, “How can you tell a logger who is out of work and whose neighbor is molesting his daughter because he has nothing else to do that he should remain nonviolent, that he should work in the system?” And then smiles, “I’m a follower of Gandhi”.

The Law has not responded to the violence against environmentalists. The only attempt at enforcement—when Governor Cuomo ordered the state police to look into the violence in the Adirondacks—had an immediate and dramatic effect. When state police began interviewing and questioning some of the property-rights militants, violence, which had reached the point where people were being shot, dropped dramatically. That’s the exception. Nationally, there is little activity.

On issues like domestic terrorism, local sheriffs look to the FBI for guidance, but the FBI has a double standard—it prefers pursuing “Earth First!” the militant environmental group best known for “spiking” trees to prevent loggers from cutting them down. The industrial sabotage that “Earth First!” advocated peaked in the late ’80s, but is still of more interest to the FBI than current incidents of physical violence against concerned citizen-activists. For the FBI, attacks on industrial property is a Federal terrorist issue, but physical attacks on private citizens are local issues of no concern to the Fed.

Nor have environmental groups responded adequately to their people being targeted by “Wise Use”. Front-line people of the environmental groups are left exposed. Attacks in rural communities and low-income areas are ignored by the media and by the big environmental groups. The Sierra Club, Audubon, National Wildlife Federation, and so on, hope, by ignoring the problem, it will go away. It will not, until one side or the other wins. And it is of wider importance than environmental groups. It is important for everyone who believes in the First Amendment right to protest and develop strategies for social change without fear, intimidation, and terrorism.

A model for the environmental movement to address or counter “Wise Use” tactics is the response to anti-abortion violence. As soon as the violence began, the national abortion-rights groups went to the Justice Department and the House Judiciary Committee and began documenting the violence and demanding action. It took them years, and the deaths of two doctors, but eventually there was a law-enforcement response. Five or six years into this anti-green violence, none of the major environmental groups has gone to the Justice Department or has gone to Congress. That’s what’s required. Political pressure has to be applied to get federal law-enforcement effort redirected.

Human Folly: The Fate of Petra

Question. Why should such a remarkable city as Petra have been built in the desert and then disappeared?

Answer. It was not built in a desert!

Petra was the capital city of the Nabataean Arab kingdom under king Harith at the time of Jesus. It featured in the Indiana Jones film called “The Last Crusade” but has been famous since it was rediscovered in 1812 AD, after being lost for about a thousand years, because it is hidden up a narrow ravine between steep cliffs and is partly cut out of the faces of the interior cliffs themselves.

It was wealthy at the time of Jesus because the Nabataeans were allies of the Romans and protected the trade in spices and drugs from India and the East through Arabia into the Roman empire. Even before it became one of the richest cities of the Roman and Byzantine worlds, Petra had been a thriving town in neolithic times.

To determine the reason for its decline, three Arizona scientists have actually examined the dens of a rabbit-like herbivore called a rock hyrax. Animals of this type build themselves a subterranean den which they line with material from their environment, then bind it with dung or crystallized urine.Thus hardened, the linings of the dens can last for extremely long times and can be dated. The dens of an animal with a similar habit called a pack rat from Nevada in the USA have been dated to be almost 10,000 years old. Indeed, it was studying these animals that made the US scientists realize they had a general technique, if they could find animals that built dens like these.

Looking at the ancient dens of the rock hyrax at times dated to centre on 300 AD, 500 AD and 900 AD allowed the acientists to find traces of the characteristic plants of the times. Pollen and identifiable plant fragments showed plainly enough that the vegetation was changing markedly throughout this roughly 1000 year period.

Before the turn of the first millenium, the plants in the region were forests of pistachio nut trees and oak trees. By about 500, the plants had reduced to grasses, herbs and shrubs and, by 900 AD, all the plants had gone, leaving dunes and desert.

None other than the human species caused this desertification. The dense forests from antiquity were slowly being denuded by early people but the arrival of the Romans—civilization, one might say—accelerated the cutting until the forests disappeared before 500 AD. Though the Western empire then ceased to be, the Byzantine empire continued for another 1000 years in its corrupt Christian glory, and in this time, the Arabs turned to goats to find sustenance in the devastated landscape. This they did, finally destroying everything that could grow at all.

By the time of the Arabs, inspired by their own brand of manic Patriarchal religion, the region was sand, unable to sustain any population, and became deserted itself. Before long only a few wandering Bedouin knew where the city was.

So, whenever you see pictures of this strange city in the desert with its classic temple facades cut into the rock, just remember that it thrived in a quite different situation. Human beings did what they were to do repeatedly, and are doing so still but even more universally—they destroyed their own environment.

There are many other examples, including Troy, and Ephesus too, pride of Christian history. It had a wonderful harbour embraced by gloriously wooded slopes. The trees were progressively cut down, especially under Roman rule until the hillsides were denuded and erosion was washing the soil into the harbour. The harbour silted up forming a malarial swamp, and now the remains of the city are several miles from the sea.

These events happened several thousand years ago, time for human beings to learn, one might imagine. Do they?

Water

Irrigation water is no longer an inexhaustible resource. The United Nations says water, not oil, will be the next resource over which nations will go to war. Georg Borgstrom of Michigan SU told us this in 1969—the growing population will force conflicts about water ownership in basins of the rivers Mekong, Indus, Jordan, Nile, Euphrates, Tigris, Amu Dar’ya and Syr Dar’ya, and Danube as well as lesser rivers. Today, a billion people lack access to clean drinking water. Today we can add conflicts about water pollution, having seen the greatest european rivers, the Rhine and the danube often grossly contaminated.

Hostility and conflict over water will occur where a river is shared by at least two countries but its water is insufficient to meet demands, and there is no treaty governing the allocation of the water between the countries.

Deep well-water use by cattle ranchers has caused severe lowering of the groundwater level in many semi-arid areas. It is one of the main reasons for desertification. When deep wells are used for irrigation, neighbouring shallow wells dry up, creating lack of drinking water. Trees, orchards and large plants do not get sufficient water at their roots, and after a while, they wither and die, creating a desert. In deep wells, mineral salts can get into the water, causing saline and barren land, unfit for cultivation, a common problem in Australia.

It is vital that programmes for conserving surface water using ponds, canals, lakes and small reservoirs are introduced. Where rainfall is scarce, many small-scale ponds and lakes should be constructed and their banks must be forrested on a large scale.

Seventy-five years ago, Aldo Leopold described the Colorado delta as a “milk-and-honey wilderness”. The river teemed with fish and the surrounding areas teemed with wildlife. Today, the river is dammed and its water diverted into the western United States and Mexico. The Colorado delta is now mud-cracked earth, salt flats and murky pools.

A major cause of drought has been the so-called “green revolution”, the concept which, in the seventies, was introduced by the Western world to lift the Third World out of poverty and famine. It was not managed properly, leading to over-use, and needed high inputs of irrigation water so that, in some areas, underground water has dried up completely.

Much of the fresh water in the United States is used to grow feed for cattle. Severe water shortages occur but consumers do not seem to connect water restrictions to their demand for steaks. Nearly half the water consumed in the United States goes to grow feed for cattle and other livestock. Just a pound of grain-fed steak requires hundreds of gallons of water to irrigate feed crops eaten by steers.

A pound of beef protein needs about fifteen times more water than an equal amount of plant protein. A middle-class American indirectly eats over a ton of grain each year, 80% of it grain feed for cattle. Feed versus food will be an important issue in obtaining fresh water in the coming decades.

Important measures in securing enough fresh water for all of the world’s inhabitants will include global afforestation, returning to vegetarianism, recycling waste water, capturing rain in small ponds, desalination and plain water economy. But ultimately, the only way to prevent droughts is to live in harmony with Nature instead of mugging her.

Even the sea is getting too polluted for some lifeforms. Even if the water is not drastically polluted the seabed often is. So bottom feeders like the flatfish shown here can be terribly polluted by contaminated sediment. Such fish suffer from liver disease, bacterial and viral infections and skin lesions. Their eggs are genetically abnormal and the incidence of bizarrely mutated fish in trawler catches is increasing, though the details of whether we eat them are kept secret.

Hermaphrodite fish and shellfish that are changing their sex have been often found in the last twenty years. Research shows that only low levels of oestrogenic hormones or imitators cause mutation in carp and rainbow trout but the findings were kept from the public by commercial confidentiality clauses or by the failure of lazy journalists to do their job by exploring obscure scientific journals.

Today’s water crisis reflects the spiritual drought of humanity.

The Global Military Machine

In the 1990s, the global military machine has been spending over a trillion (1000 billion) dollars a year! Mostly developed countries spend it, yet with the dissolution of the USSR, where is their enemy?

1. 10 per cent of global iron and steel production is used for the military and military demand for copper, aluminium, nickel and platinum exceeds their use in the whole of the Third World countries.
2. The US military produces at least half a million tonnes a year of toxic wastes. Toxic decontamination costs the US taxpayer $40 billion a year.
3. The US military uses about 50 million tonnes of fuel each year and puts as much CO₂ into the air as the whole of a country the size of the UK—150 million tonnes.
4. The cost to the US taxpayer of nuclear weaponry since 1950 is guessed to be a trillion dollars (a thousand billion). In addition the costs of nuclear decontamination and compensation payments is at least half a trillion, while nuclear fallout has already damaged 100,000 babies and caused even more premature deaths from cancers and such.
5. Every launch of the space shuttle puts another 75 tons of chlorine into the air as hydrogen chloride, as much to destroy the ozone layer as a year’s emissions of CFCs from old refrigerator factories.
6. UK military production and activity uses 5 per cent of national petroleum production, uses 2 per cent of national electricity production and takes up 4 per cent of the UK’s land area.
7. Stocks of unwanted plutonium and uranium have never been higher and breeder reactors still produce more. How long before some Penquin-like figure threatens the world with what he’s procured?

Why cannot some of these inflated resources be devoted to the salvation of the environment. Everyone’s real enemy is now pollution. A three percent cut in military spending over ten years would yield $1.5 billion to spend on preserving Magna Mater. Major Britt Thorin has tried to persuade governments to re-allocate military resources to the environment. The military is well equipped and organised to dispose of toxic materials. Military aircraft, ships and satellites can collect data about atmospheric and oceanic pollution. The US and UK governments opposed the idea at the UN.

The Relative Uninhabitants

Carole Gallagher is a photographer who wrote a book (“American Ground Zero”, MIT 1992) based on her interviews with people living downwind of the USAEC’s nuclear weapons test site at Mercury, Nevada. When the USAEC opened the test site in 1950, it issued a report describing the downwind area to the north east in Utah and Arizona as “relatively uninhabited”. Faced later with campaigning about their excessive incidence of cancer and birth abnormalities, the residents took to calling themselves “the relative uninhabitants!”

It was relatively uninhabited because it was a hot bleak landscape of red round-topped mountains and salt flats, scarcely the ideal living place for human beings, but the point is that “relatively uninhabited” is not the same as “uninhabited”—unless, that is, officialdom defines it as the same.

Every six weeks or so for the next twelve years, from 27 January 1951 until the partial test ban treaty of 1963, the AEC or its successor, the US Department of Energy, allowed tests to go ahead with no regard for the nearby “uninhabitants”. After the partial test ban treaty, tests went ahead just as intensively but underground.

In Logan, southern Utah, Jackie Maxwell conceived six times. Four times she miscarried through multiply deformed foetuses. About one of them she said:

It was so deformed, they couldn’t tell me what it was. It took three days for me to miscarry, bits of it coming out a piece at a time.

Bonnie McDaniel’s second son was born with a cleft lip and no stomach muscles. Bonnie worked at the test site in the payroll department. Nearby was the office where the film badges used to monitor exposure levels were inspected. She declares she heard the monitoring officials saying things like:

This one’s too hot. Let’s ditch it. Get a new one and give it the same number.

Al Maxwell, Jackie’s husband died in 1987 of multiple myeloma, and Hap Lease, Bonnie’s father, also died that year of cancer of the throat. many of the “uninhabitants” are Mormons, and Al Maxwell, a WWII veteran, said on his deathbed:

This country is worth dying for. You might not agree with what is going on, but the Constitution is divinely inspired.

Gallagher says she heard the same sentiment many times in this Mormon dominated state, as if it were official doctrine. It is hard to see the sense in being willing to die for a Church or a state when they are the very agents colluding to kill you. Such loyalty is misplaced.

Tomorrow Will Be Too Late!

For 200 years now, the greedy and ruthless have been plundering the planet, but soon there will be nothing left to plunder. The forests have almost gone, the fish of the sea are all but exhausted, the air surrounding us and the waters of the earth will soon be able to take no more poisonous wastes and the soil is eroding.

The whole great edifice of international trade and finance is becoming unsustainable. Ten years ago no economist predicted the collapse of the mighty Soviet machine. It was a warning that international capitalism will follow.

A limited company is not responsible to the environment it exploits or to the people who work for it. If management can get bigger profits by dumping poisons into rivers, it must do it. If management can make more profit by halving the work force, it must do so. Those that do not fail or are swallowed up by one that has no scruples.

The system requires directors to make profits for the shareholders or be sacked, but shareholders have been relieved of any liability for debts incurred by the company, and take no responsibility for anything the company might do to the environment. Shareholders perhaps ought to have liabilities returned to them, putting them on a par with sole traders and partnerships, and making them think twice about what is being done with their money.

The Age of Plunder has driven the world’ s population into vast cities that are ugly and dangerous. The billions who live in them can only be kept alive by an unwieldy system of transport that brings the necessities of life often great distances to sustain them.

The tiny scattering of people left on the land resort to more and more destructive methods of producing the food needed to sustain these billions. They ignore the laws of husbandry, which maintain the fertility of the soil, and farm instead with chemicals and huge machines. The soil is poisoned and eroded. The beneficiaries have been the chemical companies but no chemical can make bare rock fertile.

When the Age of Plunder ends, a new age must arise—the Age of Healing—or the world will end for human beings. We can each of us start it now by determining:

What I “can” do, I “will” do!

The Goddess, the Avenger

The purpose of reverence for the Goddess is to get people to revere nature and work symbiotically with it, not to burn down forests or fight each other in drunken rages, to develop caring female qualities, creative qualities, artistic ones, to preserve beauty not chaos, to help each other not to fight each other. Finally to promote truth and honesty not pious lies. There can be no life without death. To pretend otherwise is the most terrible of frauds. We die so that our children and grandchildren can live. We treasure life, in the main, but so did our ancestors and so will our descendants. Not one of us has a right to distort the balance of life or death in our own favour. Yet we have done so.

Our descendants will reap the whirlwind. Already new varieties of bacteria are resistant to our best cures. Already the atmosphere is gasping in a fever because its lungs are shot. Already our bodies have reacted to our neurotic fear of dirt by becoming hypersensitised to allergies.

We are not even allowed to die with dignity when the time comes. The world is insane. Paraphrasing a saying attributed to Euripedes: Whom Nature would destroy, She first drives insane. Plainly, this is happening. We shall have to cut back the greatest edifice of patriarchy to stop it—Capitalism.

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