An environmental lawyer for 20 years, including four spent with the USDA, Claire Hope Cummings reports regularly on agriculture and the environment; she has also farmed in California and in Vietnam. She sat down with ESF to discuss her new book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds.

By Bonnie Azab Powell

What motivated you to write this passionate argument against the use of genetic technologies in agriculture?

Because GMOs (genetically modified organisms) don’t seem like an immediate personal threat, their risks to our health and the environment are fairly subtle. They’re real; they’re just not the kind you see on the evening news. There’s a lot of information about those risks already available. I wrote the book because I’m very concerned with the political and moral aspects of the technology. As a public interest lawyer I was appalled to learn how this was invented and imposed on us. We were never given a choice. There’s a whole matrix of control involved, from the biological level—the way they are engineered—to the social level, how they are being imposed on people and nature.

Let’s start with the biological. Why do you call genetic technology the “defining moral issue of our time”?

Because it dismantles the basic integrity of the natural world. It’s so short-sighted. We don’t know enough about the biological world to know what we’re doing, and we haven’t agreed on an ethical framework for these technologies. Genetically modifying a plant severs its relationship to its evolutionary course, and inserts into it, by force—using a gene gun or bacteria—some human idea of what the plant should do. The technology is limited both by its violent nature and our imagination. We’re rearranging the molecular structure of these plants because we think we know how this plant should be used.

Why, instead of breeding plants with traditional methods and relying on the plant’s own carefully created system for say, drought resistance, would you use a much more expensive, unpredictable process like genetic engineering?

Because of patents. So you can own it. I mean, given all these great tools, what did Monsanto come up with? Herbicide-resistant soybeans to sell more of its chemicals. Most GMOs are plants that don’t die when sprayed with a lethal herbicide, or ones that exude insecticide. That’s Monsanto’s idea of how to use nature to make money. The point of GMOs is control over seeds for profit.

Which bring us to the social control aspect.

The ownership issue is a little easier to grasp. For example, Monsanto owns so much of the world’s cotton seed supply now that cotton farmers cannot get conventional [non-GM] seed. It is simply not offered. Monsanto also tells farmers they can’t save seeds, reuse them, or even study them. This is the time honored heart of agriculture. Seeds have always adapted themselves to a specific place and climate. Now, just when we need more food, more adaptability and natural diversity, millions of dollars’ worth of seeds are being thrown away because of biotech industry contracts.

So it’s about who controls our food supply?

Yes. Is food going to be something the public maintains as at the center of our personal and political decision-making, or will we just continue to hand it over to either private corporations, which have a completely different set of interests in mind, or to the government, which is now aligned with these private interests? That’s what we have now. How are we doing so far? I’d say the sorry state of public health and the environment shows our food system is not healthy. When Abraham Lincoln created the U.S. Department of Agriculture, he called it “the People’s Department.” The USDA used to send seeds out free every year to gardeners and farmers all over America. The democratic underpinnings of our food system have been dismantled. what can we do? We can save seeds. It doesn’t matter which ones. Calendula is a really pretty, very hardy flower, very generous with its seeds—so easy to save. Have fun and plant stuff. Kids like to see things grow; radishes are easy kid plants. There are so many easy ways to honor our relationship with plants. It’s sort of like a prayer. You may not want to be a priest, rabbi, or the Dalai Lama, but you can have a simple daily prayer of caring for a plant through its entire cycle, and participate in the generosity and integrity of the natural world by growing food and sharing it. It’s a practical spirituality that keeps us grounded in place and community, while giving us the enormous privilege of assisting in the regenerative capacity of the earth. What it comes down to is whether or not we are going to be allowed to feed ourselves and make informed choices about how we do that—to live in our biological and social reality, which is that people, plants, and place were meant to be working together.

{Editors note: for an extended version of this interview, click here to go to the Ethicurean website.}

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