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to take, but the truth is they were right. One person wrote: “It would be interesting to develop nitrogen fixing versions of the main food crops, thus avoiding the need for nitrate fertilisers.” That too got me thinking. Several people also posted comments pointing out that none of my arguments—such as my concern about how biotech corporations were using the new GE crops to boost their profits—logically led to an outright rejection of the technology. “One does not fight the corporate misdeeds of the automotive industry, for instance, by demanding that the wheel must be banned,” someone pointed out in a thought-provoking analogy. I decided to stop writing about genetic engineering for a while and read up on the science before tackling the subject again.

A second eureka moment came in a book by an environmentalist who had already changed his mind about genetic engineering, the American writer Stewart Brand. In the opening sentence of the “Green Genes” chapter in his 2010 book Whole Earth Discipline, Brand writes: “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.” That is a strong statement, but the more I looked at the evidence, the harder I found it to disagree with him. I hunted through the scientific literature, but I could not find any convincing evidence that genetically engineered crops or foods had ever harmed a single human being or animal. Nor was there any substantiated evidence of environmental damage, even after thousands of separate tests and wide-scale commercial deployment across the world. Most convincingly of all, as Brand points out, millions of North Americans have eaten GE soy, corn, and canola in huge quantities for over a decade, while consumers in Europe have boycotted them. Were Canadians and Americans getting sick or suffering allergic reactions as a result, we would certainly know about it by now. But they haven’t been. As Brand puts it: “It was great civilisational-scale science, and the result is now in, a conclusive existence proof. No difference can be detected between the test and the control group.”43

Most shocking for me was the realization that I had been just as guilty of misusing biological science in the service of ideological ends as global-warming “skeptics” have been in misusing climate science. I was repeating assertions made by campaigning groups without checking the primary evidence. I was citing as fact one or two studies showing apparent harm from GE products without putting these in the context of an overwhelming expert literature showing that GE was safe. (When skeptics do this on climate, I condemn it as “cherry-picking.”) Most damning of all, I realized that throughout the entire time I had been an anti-GE activist, donning biohazard suits and mounting nighttime raids against test sites, I had never read a single scientific paper on the subject. Nor did I understand much about the genome, the process of genetic engineering itself, or why transferring genes from unrelated organisms might not be so scary after all. In sum, I was not applying the high standards I was demanding from others on climate science to myself on biotechnology.

Although none of the major environmental groups will admit it still, the first generation of GE crops has almost certainly been beneficial both to the environment and to farmers. Herbicide-tolerant crops, like Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” soy, canola, and sugar beet, seem bad at first pass because they involve farmers spraying whole fields with the potent weedkiller glyphosate, which the transgenic crops are engineered to survive. The environmental benefit comes because glyphosate is pretty benign compared to most of the conventional pesticides used to kill weeds, and is so effective combined with GE crops that much less of it needs to be used.44 This reduces toxic runoff and the number of tractor movements in a spray regime, benefiting