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David Suzuki warns that GMOs and virtual foods pose serious risks
Despite continued public concern, governments still support the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) into the food supply. The multi-billion dollar industry behind biotechnology stimulates the economy, but there must be risks. Are we being used as human guinea pigs? Of course we are. We’ve been eating genetically modified food now for over five years. It’s in our food stream, but the consumer has no opportunity to make an informed decision because it isn’t noted on the labels. Government understands very well, as does industry, that if notice were put on the labels, the use of these foods would drop. So they make all kinds of excuses about how it’s too complicated, or it can’t be done, but we already put all kinds of things on labels. You know, we learned from experiments done on people during the ‘50s and ‘60s how we really shouldn’t put people into an experimental situation without first telling them and getting their permission. I think the terrible aspect of this is that we are involved in an experiment, and we’ve never been informed and never been asked. What of the possibility that Frankenstein genetic crossovers may happen in GMO foods? I don’t tend to get caught up in the specifics because I think that’s a dangerous situation. You undercut yourself in trying to prove that there are hazards. For example, I never use the word Frankenfoods; the dangers and benefits are equally conjectural. Looking at it in a broader way, every technology — whether it’s DDT [Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane], or CFCs [Chlorofluorocarbons] — has revealed that we don’t understand the big world when we start using the technology. There are totally unexpected effects that result because our knowledge is too limited. Just imagine if you start flipping genes from one specific organism that has evolved over millions of years into a completely different context: if you take a gene from a flounder, a fish, and you put it into a tomato plant. Now, the biotechnologists say, ‘This is just DNA. We’re moving it the way that you shuffle DNA in every new generation when you reproduce.’ Well, this is absolute nonsense. Of course, it’s just DNA, but DNA isn’t selected on a gene for gene basis. Nature doesn’t act on every gene alone. Nature acts on the total expression of the genes in a genome over time. So fertilization happens; a certain suite of genes is turned on, others are turned off, but they continue to function. Then as they continue to function, others are turned on and off. That’s how the genome is expressed, in this very finely orchestrated way. Nature acts on the total expression of those genes. The genome is the unit of selection. If you take a gene out of a flounder and put it into a tomato plant, that gene finds itself in a completely different context. It’s like taking Bono out of U-2 and putting him in with a Victorian Philharmonic orchestra and saying, ‘Okay, everybody play music.’ You’re going to get sound, but what’s the nature of that music going to be? We’ve no idea. And this is what we’re doing with genetic engineering. We’re creating situations where we have no idea what the long-term outcomes are going to be. What are the dangers — loss of antibiotic resistance? Super-bug potential? Loss of eco-diversity? All of those things can happen. There’s already plenty of evidence that surprising things are happening. Monsanto produces 90 percent of the genetically engineered crops that are planted around the world, and those crops, by and large, are selected so that they carry genes which are resistant to Monsanto’s chemical Round-Up. Glyposate, this compound, can be sprayed over an area, and the crop plant will be saved, and everything else will die. Well, there’s a thing called pollen drift, and whether it’s wheat or corn, whatever, pollen is very light; it flies in the air. It can drift a kilometre away and fall on weeds or related species and transfer those genes. We know that happens. There is plenty of evidence suggesting that we should be cautious because unexpected, negative things are happening. We’re seeing companies trying to patent traditionally wild crops — basmati rice, for example. Isn’t this an insidious new "corporate" colonialism? Should companies be able to patent life forms? It’s absurd. These companies are making a claim that they are discovering or isolating a gene. This is no [less absurd] than finding oxygen in the air and deciding to patent it. We’d be outraged if someone suggested that — outraged. Why isn’t it every bit as outrageous to take what nature has produced, isolate it, and claim that you’ve made an invention? It’s patently absurd. Are we witnessing a critical historical transition — from agriculture as a biological process to its becoming an industrial process? It’s been that way for a number of decades now. The so-called "Green Revolution" has certainly increased productivity, but it did so by creating a situation where farmers have to buy into a different paradigm. Out went small-scale family farms; in came large-scale industrial agriculture. In order to realize the benefits of the green revolution, you had to use specifically selected genetic strains, then use high-inputs of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides: in other words, big technology. This has transformed agriculture into industrial agriculture. What genetic engineering does is to take you to the next level where a few multinational corporations like Novartis and Monsanto are essentially trying to corral the genome of all agriculturally useful organisms. They want to own them. And once they own them, we’ll have the right to "access" those genomes by paying for them. The ultimate cartel? It’s the ultimate cartel — owning the very thing that keeps us alive. What of the failing banana crops worldwide? Some claim that the only hope for a continued crop is genetic modification. Is this plausible, or the edge of a slippery bio-slope? I think if we understood what ecosystems are — the nature of many organisms in an area — it might, in principle, be possible to think of saving a species through genetically modified introductions. But the idea that we think we know enough to carry this out on a broad scale is insane. We hardly know how a fruit fly operates in a test-tube! We’ve studied them in over a hundred years of genetics research, and we’ve no idea how fruit flies survive the winter in Edmonton. The idea that we’re now going to manipulate the genes in a species like bananas and save them? It’s absurdity. How would you encourage us to redesign our contemporary food industries? We’ve got to be much more local, and of course it’s got to be totally organic. We’ve got to get back to being seasonal and eating seasonally. We’ve got to become a local agrarian species. People literally think they can have tomatoes and lettuce 12 months a year. The only way we can afford to do that is by recognizing that a great deal of the cost to the earth, our environment, is rendered as externality — not part of the picture. That is, we can buy fresh plums or asparagus from Chile in the middle of winter, but we’re not even paying the price of all the carbon-dioxides that are released in order to get the food from Chile to here. All that greenhouse gas is not costed into the price. So people say, ‘Well, if you figure it that way, we won’t be able to afford it." Exactly! The pricing is all wrong because the earth has been rendered as an externality. We’ve got to remember to celebrate the seasons. The joy of being an animal is that we can look forward to the activities we have in winter. When spring comes, we see the buds blooming — we should celebrate the beginning of life again in the New Year. When my two youngest daughters were born, every spring in June, we’d go to the Okanogan and pick cherries because I wanted my daughters to understand that cherries, which we all love, are seasonal. We look forward to it, and when we go we eat and eat and eat until we’re sick of cherries! When we leave, we bring hundreds of pounds of cherries for our friends, and that’s cherry season. Next, we look forward to the peaches! We’ve got to understand that the earth has rhythms, and we have to live within them. How can we hope that enough people will grasp the argument that fundamental changes are necessary; that ecological sustainability must supercede immediate economic gain? I don’t know. You’re looking at a guy who, basically, is a failure — I’ve been doing this for 40 years. We’re losing big-time. One of the major reasons is that $60 billion a year is spent on advertising. How can organizations like mine, or other environmental groups, counter this enormous investment in brainwashing people to believe that the good life happens if you’re drinking Coke, or wearing the latest clothes, or driving the latest SUV? We’re constantly hammered that this is what makes us happy. How do little environmental groups counter that? Besides that, you have the government pushing the whole idea of a "growing" economy. I had an environment minister say to me, ‘Suzuki, if we don’t have a growing economy, we can’t afford to protect the environment!’ There’s this idea in our society that the economy is the source of everything that happens, so we must sacrifice everything to keep it going. But pollsters tell us that apparently a big change is happening; the environment is coming back in a big way. But it’s not coming back the way it was in the ‘70s — it’s not about pollution, protecting whales, or setting up parks. It’s being driven by the current generation of Yuppies who are worried about the health of their children. It’s about air — one out of five children in Canada has asthma; and it’s about water — especially after Walkerton, where seven people were killed by contaminated water; and it’s about food. People are worried about these as health issues; to me, they are environmental issues. What we do to the air, water and soil, we do directly to ourselves. Air and water issues are alarmingly basic. What of the idea that the new thinking for this century is all about interconnectedness: what Thich Nhat Hanh calls ‘interbeing?’ Systems analysis is coming in, of course. The problem is that it’s much more difficult when you start looking at interconnectivity. . There are simply too many combinations. With 50,000 compounds out there, science will never be able to figure things out. It’d just be too expensive to check. So, you see, in a world of exquisite interconnectedness, there’s no way that the reductionist approach is going to be able to decipher it all. Everybody says, ‘The human genome — once we’ve deciphered the three billion letters of the human genome, we’re going to have cures for cancer, and new foods, and all this stuff…’ Well, we’ve finally got it now — the human genome. And what are they saying? It’s, ‘Oh well, this is just the beginning. Each one of those 30,000 genes controls a product, and there’s proteonomics — all these proteins are going to….’ Sure. And that’s going to be something that will take gazillions of years. Let’s think global. Without shifting blame onto our Western industrial society that has brought so much damage to others before, how can we change ecologically devastating ways of life in the developing world without sounding like "environmental missionaries?" We are the major predators on the planet: 20 percent of the world’s population in the industrial world uses over 80 percent of the world’s resources, producing over 80 percent of the planet’s toxic waste. We know this, yet we keep saying we need more. We’re growing like mad, and we’re still stuck in an economic crisis. We don’t need more. When countries like ours go in with aid programs, giving no indication that in our own culture we have any intention of changing, and tell Brazilians, ‘Don’t cut down your rainforests...’ Well, I’ve spent years in Brazil on the Amazon, and they tell me, ‘Oh, you’re from Canada: haven’t you cut most of your forests? Aren’t you producing all this greenhouse gas that’s melting the northern ice-sheet? And you’re coming down here telling us what not to do? Who do you think you are? Get the hell out of here!’ Are they right? How do you respond? They’re absolutely right! We’re the biggest hypocrites around in trying to tell the poorer countries, ‘Don’t do what we’ve already done.’ What I say is, ‘Listen, I fight harder in my country than I do in yours. We’ve got to recognize that two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because we’ve already trashed our resources doesn’t mean you have to. As someone from such a country, I have an obligation to help you do it in a different way: like those forests, they are important to you, and yes, you see them as an opportunity. Can we in the industrialized world help you protect them and make a living from them?’ That’s the challenge. In your current vision regarding a sustainable future, do you see an improved, or at least emerging relationship between what’s called "new science" and "new spirituality" or religion? Spirituality and religion are two very different things. I’ve never said we don’t need spirit — we need spirit desperately. I’d say that’s our greatest shortfall right now — that we desperately need spirit. We’ve come to believe that we are really the top dog and no longer need nature because we’re so clever we can create our own habitat, we can go it alone, and we’re smart enough to manage the planet. We desperately need a bit of the humility that comes from understanding there are forces in our lives far beyond our understanding, or that we can control. We’re part of a much more complicated system than we can ever understand. We’re dependent on it, and when we die we’ll go back to it; that’s nature itself. We need to know, then, that within that system of which we’re a part, there are sacred places, places that are important, where we go with respect and veneration; where it would never occur to us to say, ‘Look at the opportunity here. Look at all the resources…’ Where I blamed religion in the past was the Judeo-Christian tradition: it says right in Genesis, ‘Go forth, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Have dominion over the birds of the air, the fish in the sea, and every living thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ That’s the injunction. There are people today — I’ve heard them — for example, Newfoundlanders who’ll say, ‘It is our God-given right to kill seals. God put them on earth so that we can find a use for them.’ I don’t need that attitude, that kind of religion. Now having said that, within the faith community — and I’ve been working a lot within it — there is a very strong response when you say, ‘Look, this is the creation: the earth, nature. Your creator has put this in place. To defile it in the way that we have, to degrade, destroy and eliminate part of it, that is a sin, whatever your religion is’. And as an environmental activist, I also say it’s suicidal. We have not escaped our biological roots. We are every bit as dependent on nature’s productivity as any other species. So there’s a sense of renewed spiritual linkage. What about our young scientists? Science is a very powerful approach or way of knowing. The problem is that scientists confuse their acquisition of knowledge regarding a fragment of nature with the ability to control nature. They think that if you focus upon a part of nature, on a sub-atomic particle, an atom, a molecule, a cell, whatever, and then remove it from where it is — by pulling it into the lab because it’s messy out there; that by isolating it, by controlling everything impinging on it, and by measuring it — they think that’s what science is. That’s traditional science: focus, reduce your view to just a part of nature, gain knowledge about it, control it. Ever since Newton and Descartes, it has been assumed that the universe is like a giant machine, a clockwork mechanism. That if you focus on the springs, the cogs, the wheels — if you understand how they work — eventually you’ll be able to piece it back together and recreate the universe. That’s the reductionist approach. Physicists got away from that a long time ago because they saw it doesn’t work, but biologists and medical doctors still function on that model. What would you think of a psychiatrist who looks at human behavior in trying to figure it out, but who doesn’t give a hoot about the environment we exist in, or doesn’t ask, ‘Well, what part of town do you live in?’ For years, zoologists thought that if you took a chimpanzee and stuck it in a cage, you could study it and learn everything there is to know about a chimp. When Jane Goodall went to Africa and looked at chimps where they live, she found a totally different animal. Suddenly, they’re social and intelligent, organized. Now, the reductionist approach has been very powerful in giving us the abilities to take a gene out of this cell and put it in that one — very impressive! But to say that because we can do that, we know what we’re doing and that we’ll be able to grow these new things out in a field and be able to eat them, that’s where scientists don’t understand the limits of their work. The great challenge is educating these people. With biotechnology, they are dazzled by the allure of money. The money absolutely blinds them so that not only do they not see the limitations of their activity, neither will they tolerate anybody who would dare to criticize them. In the ‘70s, I gave up taking government grants and doing research in what was then called recombinant DNA because I saw the potential — the benefits and dangers — was enormous. I think we need people who know genetics, and who can discuss the issues without being biased by their involvement with the technology. In l979, I published an article in a scientific journal saying I was not going to allow any work of this kind in my lab: not because I was against it, but because I wanted to maintain an ability to discuss it without being like someone from the tobacco industry talking about the dangers of smoking. I eventually left the lab because I didn’t want young scientists not to be able to work in this area. I also wrote a book about it called Genethics: The Ethics of Engineering Life, as well as dozens of columns about it. Now when I get up and speak, the biotechnology industry says, ‘You don’t have any credibility. You’re not a scientist.’ I gave up the research in the area so that I could discuss it. These guys are heavily involved in research, and they think they have greater credibility than me because I’m no longer doing science. They don’t want to hear anyone criticize them. What’s the single most important thing that people can do to help the environment? People always ask me this — how can one person out of 6.2 billion make a difference? Well, go to <www.davidsuzuki.org> and click on The Nature Challenge. We worked with the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a prestigious group, and asked, ‘What are the major areas where our individual lifestyles are impacting on our surroundings?’ We found there are four areas where individuals affect the environment in a significant way: climate change, fossil fuels, air and water pollution, and habitat destruction. Then we asked, ‘What are the main activities that impinge on those areas?’ It turns out there are three main ones: what we eat, how we move and where we live — that’s food, transportation and housing. As a result, we’ve come up with 10 simple recommendations that people can do, and we’re asking people to do at least three out of the 10. That’s what one ordinary person can do. What I’d like to do is get a million [people] to take this step of reducing their ecological footprint. In terms of the collective impact, it’ll be huge. When it becomes a movement, you can’t resist it. Then the politicians will have to sign up, and that’s how you bring about change. As an elected councillor, Trevor Carolan served with the GVRD’s Air Quality and Water committees. A Ph.D. candidate with Bond University at Queensland, Australia, he teaches English at UCFV. |
For the past 30
years, Dr. David Suzuki has been recognized as an internationally-renowned
environmental activist. An award-winning scientist and broadcaster,
his acclaimed television documentaries — including the ever-popular
The Nature of Things, which explains the complexities
of the natural sciences in a compelling, easily understood way
— have been shown in more than 80 countries. A world leader
in sustainable ecology, he is also the author of 30 books, including
Introduction to Genetic Analysis, Genethics, and
10 children’s books. We recently spoke with Dr. Suzuki at
the David Suzuki Foundation in Vancouver, British Columbia.