DANGER: GMO and GE Products

“One thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (Aldo Leopold)

A specter is haunting humanity—the specter of inequality. This ghost has been chasing humanity through out the history. At this point of time, it is very much evident in the world of politics, religion, economics, and even on the issue of food production. Famine, hunger, and unequal distribution of goods are everywhere. Many are crying and battling for food. What is its root cause? What should humanity do?

The world of biotechnology corporations is offering humanity an alternative. They are presently promoting an easy and convenient way of feeding the world and banishing hunger—i.e. through the promotion of genetically modified organisms (GMO) or genetically engineered (GE) products in the realm of livestock and agriculture. Genetic engineering, i.e. injecting or adding of a single cell into an organism for a single desired effect, according to biotech corporation, can guarantee greater production and thus more food supply. For example, in the case of Bt corn and GM rice in the Philippines, by injecting a particular gene to corn or rice—Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) on the case of corn—they will be protected form parasites. As an effect, it will lead to better and higher production. Biotech even argues that GE crops require fewer herbicides and pesticides than conventional crops and that it will benefit health and environment.

But are GMO and GE products really the answer for global hunger? Is it healthy? Is it also environment friendly?

Sean McDonagh, a Columbian missionary priest, stated that GE is not the answer for food shortage for there is no such thing as food shortage. What really haunts humanity is the specter of greed. But even though, there is still no need to pursue genetic engineering for the fact that it is not safe. According to McDonagh, adding a single gene into an organism may unintentionally cause other harmful reactions within that organism which are not detectable. GE products could cause allergies, toxicity, and even cancer. Genetic engineering also diminishes the nutritional content of a product.

As they are harmful to health, McDonagh also points out that genetic engineering is harmful to environment. It impinges biodiversity. On the case of Gt corn for example, impact on wild life would be one of the major impacts. Because corn is the main and only source of food of some parasites, injecting Bt on corn genes will underlie lost of their food source. In the long run, genetic engineering will just create a sick planet. This would be a new threat for humanity for, as Thomas Berry points it, “we cannot have healthy humans on a sick planet.”

As consumers, it is a challenge for us not to support GMO and GE products. Even the church is one with McDonagh on saying that it is still advisable to support the conventional product because aside from the fact that it will help the third world countries who stick with conventional product, it is also a sign of love and care for our environment and for humanity as well. As Pope John Paul II points it, we must “resist the temptation of high productivity and profit that work to the detriment of the respect of nature.”

STARDUST

Stardust! I am a stardust.

It is a fact that man comes from ape. But the real story does not started here. We must widen our horizon. The Darwinian story of evolution is just a small part of a far more longer and complicated story of evolution—a story that starts from that very first beam of light that appears in space and time (the primordial flaring forth).

Having seen evolution on this way, we can really say that all things are connected. All beings share a certain commonality—that we all have the same origin. We all came from stardust.

This reality should somehow make man realize his spot, his niche in the universe. We’re not in the position to say that we are the apex and the most important creatures—that we are the elite. We must learn to view reality using new lenses. Because we are all brothers and sisters, we, human beings, must live in communion with other beings—the non-humans. We must treat tem as subjects and not as mere objects. It is only through this act of love that we can again experience the ‘oneness’ that had happened in the primordial flaring forth.

This is the call of the new generation—a new spirituality. A life of communion with others—the unity of all the stardust.

THE ECOZOIC ERA

As we think about the future form of an integral Earth Community we might begin with the observation that in the sequence of biological periods of Earth development we are presently in the terminal phase of the Cenozoic and the emerging phase of the Ecozoic era. The Cenozoic is the period of biological development that has taken place during these past 65 million years. The Ecozoic is the period when human conduct will be guided by the ideal of an integral earth community, a period when humans will be present upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.

The Cenozoic period is being terminated by a massive extinction of living forms that is taking place on a scale equaled only by the extinctions that took place at the end of the Paleozoic around 220 million years ago and at the end of the Mesozoic some 65 million years ago. The only viable choice before us is to enter into an Ecozoic period, the period of an integral community that will include all the human and non-human components that constitute the planet Earth.

The first principle of the Ecozoic era is recognizing that the Universe is primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. This is especially true of the planet Earth. Every being has its own place and its own proper role in the functioning of the planet, its own presentation of itself that might be identified as its voice.

Our difficulty is that we have become autistic. We no longer listen to what the earth, its landscape, its atmospheric phenomena and all its living forms, its mountains and valleys, the rain, the wind, and all the flora and fauna of the planet are telling us. Since the Seventeenth Century we have not heard, we have not understood the inner world about us. We have experienced the external phenomena. We have had no entry into the world of interior meaning. We have not heard the voices.
Until we do listen, until we do hear these voices and understand what they are telling us, our lives will continue to be shriveled, our judgment as absurd, as destructive as we can presently observe in what we have done to the soil, the water, the air, and the living forms of this loveliest of planets. We will appreciate or revere the planet if we are to form a viable Earth Community.

To achieve this intimacy with the Earth we need new religious sensitivities. The redemption- oriented religions in their traditional forms have fulfilled a significant part of their historical mission. Cosmologically oriented religion is the way into the future. We need to recognize the story of the universe as we know it through our empirical sciences as our sacred story. From its beginning the universe has had a psychic-spiritual as well as a physical-material dimension.

Earth in a special manner has given expression to this psychic-spiritual dimension of the universe. The human belongs among these forms. It establishes with them a single community. There is no effective spiritual or religious mode of being for the human in isolation from this community. The visible world about us is our primary scripture, the primary manifestation of the divine, and this for human communities throughout the entire planet.

A second principle of the Ecozoic era that might be proposed is the ethical principle that beyond suicide, homicide, and genocide, there are even more violent crimes -- biocide and geocide: biocide, the wanton killing of the life systems of the planet; geocide, the killing of the planet itself in its major forms of expression. Ultimately humans cannot extinguish life on the planet. What humans can do is to severely damage the planet beyond recovery to its former grandeur within any comprehensible period of human historical time. This in some manner deserves the designation of geocide.

We might indicate the third principle of the Ecozoic era by noting that the human is derivative, the Earth is primary. The primary concern of every profession, institute, and activity of the human betrays itself unless it makes this larger earth community its primary referent.

So with Economics, the first concern, the first principle of understanding, must be the economic integrity of the planet. Concern for the Gross Earth Product must be the primary concern, not the Gross Human Product. Only within the ever-renewing cycle of Earth productivity can human productivity be sustained.

So with the healing professions, the primary concern must be to maintain the integral well-being of the planet. Not even with all our medical sciences and technologies can we establish well human beings on a sick planet.

A fourth principle might propose that in the future the Earth will function differently than it has functioned in the past. Throughout the Cenozoic the Earth evolved independently of the human. In the emerging Ecozoic period almost nothing will happen that will not in some manner be related to the human. Not, however, that we will control the inner workings of the planet. We cannot make a blade of grass. But there is liable not to be a blade of grass if it is not accepted, protected, and fostered by the human. We have completely new and comprehensive responsibilities now that we never had before. Ultimately we should be diminishing the domestication of the planet and assisting the wilderness to reactivate itself. A contradiction, perhaps. Yet what is needed is that we accept and foster the wild fertile forces of the planet that are consistently being weakened, unless humans withdraw their terrifying presence and grant to the other members of the Earth Community their rights to habitat and their share of the Earth's benefits.

A fifth principle might propose that any valid Progress must be progress of the entire life community, not progress of the human at the expense of the non-human members of the community. To designate human plundering of the plant as Progress is an absurdity beyond description.

A sixth principle guiding the future might propose the need for celebration. The universe throughout its vast extent in space and its sequence of transformations in time might be considered a single multiform celebratory event. The very purpose of the planet Earth seems to be to exhibit a culminating celebratory mode of expression, something to justify the emergent galaxies, the supernova explosions wherein the elements were formed, the shaping of the solar system, the emergence of this privileged planet. When we ask what is the meaning of the flight of the birds, their song; what is the meaning of the quiet gliding of fish through the sea; what is the meaning of the evening song of the cicada: we can indeed assign some pragmatic answer, but that would not go to the deeper meaning of the phenomena. This we find under the rubric of celebration.

So with the human, our entry into the Ecozoic period can only come through celebration of the grandeur and loveliness and joy of existence on the planet Earth. Once we begin to celebrate, all things become possible even an Ecozoic era.
Thomas Berry is an historian of cultures and a former President of the American Teilhard Association. Presently he is Director of the Riverdale Center for Religious Research in New York. He is author of The Historical Theory of Giambattista Vico, The Religions of India, Buddhism, and most recently The Dream of the Earth, published by Sierra Club Books, as well as numerous articles on human-earth relations.

(written by Thomas Berry)