Craig Holdrege - Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering

Drive the Nebraskan backroads in July, and you will encounter one of the great technological wonders of the modern world: thousands of acres of corn extending to the vanishing point in all directions across the table-flat landscape. It appears as lush and perfect a stand of vegetation as you will find anywhere on earthalmost every plant, millions of them, the same uniform height, the same deep shade of green, free of blemish, emerging straight and strong from clean, weed-free soil, with the cells of every plant bearing genetically engineered doom for the over-adventurous worm.

If you reflect on the sophisticated tools and techniques lying behind this achievement, you will likely feel some of the same awe that seizes so many of us when we see a jet airliner taking off. There can be no doubt about the magnitude of the technical accomplishment on those prairie expanses. And yet, the question we face with increasing urgency today is whether this remarkable cornucopia presents a picture of health and lawful bounty, or instead the hellish image of nature betrayed.

Actually, it is difficult to find much of nature in those cornfields. While nature always manifests itself ecologicallycontextuallytoday's advanced crop production uproots the plant from anything like a natural, ecological setting. This, in fact, is the whole intention. Agricultural technology delivers, along with the seed, an entire artificial production environment designed to render the crop largely independent of local conditions. Commercial fertilizer substitutes for the natural fertility of the soil. Irrigation makes the plants relatively independent of the local climate. Insecticides prevent undesirable contact with local insects. Herbicides discourage social mixing with unsavory elements in the local plant population. And the crop itself is bred to be less sensitive to the local light rhythm.

Where, on the farm shaped by such technologies, do we find any recognition of the fundamental principle of ecologynamely, that every habitat is an intricately woven whole resisting overly ambitious efforts to carve it into separately disposable pieces?

But all this represents only one aspect of agriculture's abandonment of supporting environments. The modern agribusiness operation in its entirety has been wrenched free from the rural economic and social milieu that once sustained it. The farm itself is run more and more like a self-contained factory operation. And the trend toward vast monocultureswhere entire ecologies of interrelated organisms are stripped down to a few, discrete elementshas become more radical step by step: first a single crop replacing a diversity of crops; then a single variety replacing a diversity of varieties; and now, monocultures erected upon single, genetically engineered traits.

As the whole process drives relentlessly forward, the organism itself becomes the denatured field in which genes are moved to and fro without regard to their jarring effect upon the living things that must endure them. Want to make a tobacco plant glow in the dark? Easyinject a firefly gene! Want a frost-resistant strawberry? Try a gene or two from a cold-water flounder.

Yet, despite such chimera-like prodigies, the overriding question about biotechnology is not whether we are for or against this or that technical achievement, but whether the debate will be carried out in just such fragmented terms. In focusing on technological wonders to improve agriculture, are we losing sight of the things that matter mostthe diverse, healthy, and complex communities and habitats we would like to live in? The question to ask of every technology is how it serves, or disrupts, the environment into which we import it.

The natural setting whose integrity we need to consider first of all is that of the individual organism. The challenge we're up against here emerges in the frequently heard argument that genetic engineers are only doing what we've always done, but more efficiently. Writing in the New York Times, Carl B. Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, objected to the claim by critics that what [traditional breeders] do is natural while modern biology is not: Archaeologists have documented twelve thousand years of agriculture throughout which farmers have genetically altered crops by selecting certain seeds from one harvest and using them to plant the next, a process that has led to enormous changes in the crops we grow and the food we eat. It is only in the past thirty years that we have become able to do it through biotechnology at high levels of predictability, precision and safety (Feldbaum 1998).