This video has been doing the rounds quite heavily recently. The piece is a lecture from Mark Lynas to the Oxford Farming Conference on the 3rd of January about genetic engineering (GE).
In the speech, Lynas describes his journey from being an anti-GE campaigner, to a fervent supporter. The story is actually quite common; one in which the ‘science’ convinces Mark to switch from anti to pro-GE. After discussing this transition, Lynas goes in to heavily rip into the environment movement. He effectively argues that the movement is willingly allowing people to starve as they fight for an illogical ideological position advocating for ‘natural food’.
Now, I have to say that I am not anti-GE. I am probably like Lynas was a number of years ago – I simply haven’t read enough about it to create an informed opinion. And, even as an environmentalist, I have been willing to come out against anti-GE campaigns, including the destruction of GE crops by Greenpeace activists in 2011.
Despite this, like so much of the discussion round GE, I find Lynas’ speech really frustrating, almost infuriating. I think it is the epitome of the problematic way many, particularly environmentalists and those on the left, treat science in our society.
Lynas’ argument is based almost solely on the support of ‘science’. He argues that as he got engaged on climate change, he saw a contradiction between his ‘pro-science’ climate campaigning, and his ‘anti-science’ GE campaigning. As he said:
“For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change.”
“Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because it is marketed by the big auto companies?”
It is in making this comparison that Lynas makes a massive mistake. Supporting one stream of science does not mean we have to support another. Science is a broad field, with many different streams looking at a range of different areas.
Let’s take a look at climate change and GE for example. The science behind these two things are very different, and this distinction is extremely important. Climate science is about discovering and reporting an effect humans are having on our world. GE however, is a form of science that is trying to solve a problem (whether that problem is not enough profits for big companies, or global food shortages). It is a science that is creating new things – new technologies for our world.
In blindly supporting GE science therefore – to say that we have to support it because it is ‘science’ – we are not only supporting the GE , but we are also promoting science as the key way to deal with the problems we face. This is vastly different to supporting climate change, which is more about backing scientists up when they say they’ve discovered something about the world.
The problem with this is that science doesn’t take into account many of the social, economic and power realities of our world. For example, when it comes to agriculture, many of our problems don’t stem from a lack of food, but rather from inequitable distribution of food. Power relations in our world are leading to a situation where poor people in the third world are starving, whilst the wealthy have far too much food and are wasting significant amounts of it. GE science doesn’t deal with this in any way and we invest money in as much GE technology as we like, but it still isn’t going to solve this problem.
Building on to this, science often then builds into these power structures, creating solutions focused wholly at those with power and not those without power. Whilst I have to believe many of the stories of how GE has helped impoverished people that Lynas points out, there is often another side to the coin; one in which scientific research, funded by large companies, is focused to benefit (or in other words to make more profits) those who are already doing well. Whilst this may have some ‘trickle down’ effects it is not science that is inherently designed to help impoverished people. If we want to challenge these social issues therefore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with opposing a scientific field that builds into these power structures.
Does that make GE a bad thing? Not necessarily. Clearly technology development has to be part of the mix of the solutions we need to fix food security issues. But, we also need to have a much more nuanced, and serious discussion to this debate. Science is only one part of the mix, and sometimes we may want to decide that the scientific solutions available don’t fit with our desired goals. It is perfectly reasonable to say we don’t want to use, nor want to spend money, on what science has provided at this point.
But what seems to have happened is that we have now created a world in which we say ‘it’s scientific’ so therefore it must be the solution. Ironically, we’ve started to worship science, just as many others worship the religion that we often deride.
This could be okay if science was an encompassing ideology, one that tool into account the social, economic and power realities in our world. But science doesn’t do that – it is just one part of our current system. Living solely by this is not a healthy approach.