The God Species_ How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans - Mark Lynas [55]
As things stand, there are two ways to get more nitrogen-efficient crops. One is conventional selective breeding, but this takes a long time and is rather hit-or-miss. Plant scientists have either to wait for a useful gene to spontaneously appear via some lucky mutation, or to spend years breeding generation after generation of gradual improvements into a target crop while hoping for an outcome that is worth the wait. With genetic engineering, however, scientists can make much more precise and rapid changes by selecting a gene from any species and inserting it into the genome of the target crop to deliver a more nitrogen-efficient and higher-yielding crop. For this reason genetic engineering is an enormously powerful technology, holding major potential to help transform humanity’s ability to produce food sustainably on a limited area of land and with much less fertilizer than is used today. That it has not delivered these benefits so far is not down to any lack of effort from plant scientists, but because genetic engineering per se is implacably opposed by almost all Green groups worldwide, for ideological rather than scientific reasons.
Consider, for example, a recent breakthrough achieved in Canada by plant scientists working with canola (known in Europe as oilseed rape), the country’s most important export crop. By introducing a gene from barley into canola, the scientists made the new GE crop 40 percent more efficient in using nitrogen. In other words, it could produce the same yields as now using 40 percent less fertilizer—a very real environmental benefit from a crop that is grown over 11 million acres of western Canada.37 Similar nitrogen efficiency achievements have been made in plants varying from poplar trees to tobacco.38 Perhaps the most important recent success involves transgenic rice, where the same barley gene seems to work just as well as it does in canola, delivering vast improvements in nitrogen-uptake efficiency.39 That’s something that could never be done with conventional breeding of course—you can’t cross barley with rice under normal circumstances. Rice is a staple food for half the world’s population, so a genetic modification that allows transgenic rice to increase its yields by a fifth with no increase in applied fertilizer could be good news both for human nutrition and the nitrogen planetary boundary.40
None of these potential benefits of genetic engineering cut any ice with Greens, however. “The introduction of genetically engineered organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and evolution,” argues Greenpeace.41 Friends of the Earth has campaigned determinedly against genetic engineering for more than a decade, while the idea of an organic-labeled GE crop is inconceivable. I am personally very familiar with all the arguments against genetic engineering, because I used to make them myself. In an article for the Guardian in 2008, I wrote that “the technology moves entirely in the wrong direction, intensifying human technological manipulation of nature when we should be aiming at a more holistic ecological approach” and that GE “raises a whole new category of risk.”42 A decade earlier, I joined many campaigners in taking direct action against genetically engineered crops in the U.K., often at night and risking arrest by the police. Looking back, I now realize that I was caught up in more of an outbreak of mass hysteria than anything resembling a rational response to a new technology.
So what has changed? Reading the comments underneath my 2008 Guardian article was something of a eureka moment. One after another, the commenters pointed out that my approach was unsupported by science and largely founded in ignorance about genetics in general. That was hard