Leading Environmental Activist’s Blunt Confession: I Was
Completely Wrong To Oppose GMOs
By Torie Bosch
| Posted Thursday, Jan.
3, 2013, at 2:27 PM ET
Anti-Monsanto
activists in Germany in 2009 Photo by NIGELTREBLIN/AFP/Getty Images
If you
fear genetically modified food, you may have Mark Lynas to thank. By his own
reckoning, British environmentalist helped spur the anti-GMO movement in the
mid-‘90s, arguing as
recently at 2008 that big
corporations’ selfish greed would threaten the health of both people and the
Earth. Thanks to the efforts of Lynas and people like him, governments around
the world—especially in Western Europe, Asia, and Africa—have hobbled GM
research, and NGOs like Greenpeace have spurned donations of genetically
modified foods.
But Lynas
has changed his mind—and he’s not being quiet about it. On Thursday at the
Oxford Farming Conference, Lynas delivered a blunt address: He got GMOs wrong.
According to the
version of his remarks posted online (as yet,
there’s no video or transcript of the actual delivery), he opened with a bang:
I want to
start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for
having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped
to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby
assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to
benefit the environment.
As an
environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a
right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have
chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.
So I
guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not
only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly
simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better
environmentalist.
His
honest assessment of his heretofore poor understanding of the issue continues
for almost 5,000 words—and it’s a must-read for anyone who has ever hesitated
over conventional produce. To vilify GMOs is to be as anti-science as
climate-change deniers, he says. To feed a growing world population (with an
exploding middle class demanding more and better-quality food), we must take
advantage of all the technology available to us, including GMOs. To insist on
“natural” agriculture and livestock is to doom people to starvation, and
there’s no logical reason to prefer the old ways, either. Moreover, the reason
why big companies dominate the industry is that anti-GMO activists and
policymakers have made it too difficult for small startups to enter the field.
“In
the history of #environmentalism,
has there ever been a bigger mea culpa than that given here?” Discover blogger Keith Kloor
tweeted. (Kloor recently called GMO foes “the climate skeptics of the
left” in Slate.)
I can’t
think of another environmentalist. But it does call to mind another turnabout.
In 2002, medical writer Arthur Allen penned a New
York Times Magazine story titled “The Not-So-Crackpot
Autism Theory.” The piece suggested there might indeed be a link
between autism and vaccination, and its publication in an outlet so mainstream
as the New York Times gave the
previously fringe theory more credibility. But soon after the article’s
publication, more and more published research effectively confirmed that there is no link.
Allen took that research seriously. A 2009 Times article about the book Autism’s False Prophets said of
Allen: “He later changed his mind and now ‘feels bad’ about the [magazine]
article, he said, ‘because it helped get these people into the field who did a
lot of damage.’ ”
He began writing extensively about the dangers of anti-vaccine
activism—including Slatepieces
arguing that thimerosal is safe, criticizing Oprah for promoting
the dingbat Jenny McCarthy, and decrying dangerous autism
“treatments” purported
to reverse “vaccine damage” that never really happened. He wrote a book, Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest
Lifesaver, that examined the fears and misconceptions surrounding
vaccination.
To admit
that you got something wrong—whether for almost two decades, like Lynas did, or
in a single but influential article, like Allen did—is terrifying. It is also
the mark of intellectual rigor.
Lynas
concludes that people who want to stick with organic are entitled to—but they
should not stand in the way of others who would use science to find more
efficient ways to feed billions. “[T]he GM debate is over. It is
finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. … You are
more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food,” he says.
Now the
question is, will his former anti-GMO fellows heed his urge to review the
science—or will they call him a turncoat shill for Monsanto?
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