BIOSECURITY
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Flax on top of a mountain, King of the World? |
The New Zealand Plants Biosecurity Index is an interactive website where we can find out what precautions are needed to bring various plants into New Zealand. Assessments and regulations have been developed for many well-known agricultural plants. It is more difficult, and more dangerous, to bring in unfamiliar wild or cultivated plants from other countries. For such plants, new effort and expense is needed in order to determine what is safe, and what is not. The term "biosecurity" sounds very grim, but the need to protect our existing wild and cultivated flora is serious. When new weeds appear in our country, or when new pests and diseases arrrive, the economic costs can be enormous. "Biosecurity" is also "Food security" and "Economic security". Despite some risks, we do need new plants and plant varieties for economic and social developement. The safe introduction of new plants can bring huge benefits. The current regulations for plant imports are the result of many years of experience and study by many people, and we can expect them to be refined and extended in the future, as more is learned about plants, plant ecology, and the pests and diseases that attack plants.
When is a plant not a plant?
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Wild bananas in their natural habitat |
Plants have been getting bad press lately... They are invaders or synthetic mutants, condemned as living things or manipulated as material objects. We worry about them or worry at them. If they are not for us, they are against us. I suspect that these conflicts are a distraction from more essential or pressing problems. Plants are not the essential problem, whatever their status, whether entirely natural and wild, or strangely forced to conform to our will. The essential problem is us. We love plants as emblems of natural bounty, and are shocked at ourselves when we can no longer trust them to be natural.
Of course, we have been interfering with plants for thousands of years, bending them to our wills, domesticating them in many different ways. What is different when this process is taken from the level of whole plant to individual genes? The effects are cumulative. We are not doing less when we move one gene, since it is in addition to all else that we are doing to plants. Yet moving one gene is in itself not more, say, than moving an entire plant into a new environment, making whole plants into enemies identified as invaders.
Should we condemn individual genes as invaders, just as we condemn entire plants and species? Perhaps it is not the structural level that matters, so much as relationships. Does the whole plant disturb relationships with which we are familiar and comfortable? Does the gene disturb existing relationships - in good ways or bad ways? We are forever meddling with plants and creating new ecological interactions, with unintended consequences.
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Burning off sugarcane after burning off lowland forest in a previous era |
What consequences are unacceptable? Failing to feed larger numbers of people well, with the plants that already exist? Failing to to feed them well despite, or because of, unsustainable inputs of energy and fertiliser? The fall will be bigger when it comes, if growth is our only goal. Will it help to increase the efficiency with which plants use light, or water, or soil nutrients? What is gained by greater efficiency? If human populations just keep growing, increasing efficiency will just change the limiting factors. If carbon dioxide is fixed with greater efficiency, then the soil nutrients needed to support all the other aspects of plant growth (e.g. to build leaves) will be used up more quickly. If water efficiency is increased during crop growth, it may depend on cereal crops that require much water to be rendered edible. Nothing is free, except sunshine. That is free, even if we have to pay carbon taxes in order to keep the atmosphere clean enough to receive it.
There may be, and often are, local and temporary benefits when we create new plant varieties - benefits for particular farmers, communities, companies, or countries - and this is enough reason for most efforts in plant breeding. One benefit of genetic modification could be to reduce the quantities of agricultural chemicals required by mass production for the present world population. Perhaps mass production can be achieved organically, without GM, with a social system that values the substitution of human labour for energy-intensive machinery, and agricultural chemicals - but how long will it take for the social revolution to take place, on a global scale?
No effort in isolation can solve the larger problems that we face as inhabitants of a limited yet complex planet. Can we change direction, globally, before all possible hydrocarbon supplies have been used, and our atmosphere has been destroyed?
My personal feeling is that the new plant breeding methods are nothing new, philosophically or scientifically speaking, since they beg the question of how to live within limits. Increasing yields in a fixed area, increasing efficiency, extracting medicines, improving food qualities - these are all goals that have existed for thousands of years. Personally, I feel that genetic modification of plants is neither inherently bad, nor necessarily good. The weakness of justifications for GM is the same weakness of justifications for many notions of progress. What we are seeing is more of the same, rather than a revolution in understanding that will save the planet, or significantly large parts of the planet.
Modern biology has given us a revolution in understanding, but this is only a partial revolution. Individually and collectively, we still do not know how to exercise self-restraint during our tenure on the limited world we occupy.
We cannot expect any second chances, as a species. It is hubris or egotism to suppose that we can cross to other stars and planets, or that a higher power (God? An alien civilisation?) will take care of us - and it is inhumanity and a poverty of imagination to suppose that war, disease, and starvation are the only restraints possible. Are there really no socially-acceptable ways of restraining ourselves?
Science is not leading us anywhere much better than where we are now, nor should we expect science to do this. We should not condemn science because it is failing to satisfy false expectations, but we should condemn people who try to use science to support false expectations. When science is too much in the pockets of industry, selling science becomes a business of dubious ethical and social value. This is not the science that all scientists want or believe in, nor is it the science that all non-scientists want or believe in.
When is a plant not a plant? Never I suppose, given that this is a circular question. Or perhaps a plant is not a plant when it becomes a symbol for something else - or when it is modified in ways that make it a symbol for something else. A more sensible question may be, why are we losing faith in the plants that have supported us well for so many thousands of years? Why don't we love them and live with them any more? What metaphors and familiar knowledge have we abandoned? Why are we so drawn to flashy new plants dressed in brightly coloured clothes? What satisfaction can we expect if all science is reduced to the very special services of an intellectual brothel? Are we just confused, and looking for temporary satisfactions while avoiding the real issues in our lives?
Seeking knowledge is not the newest profession, yet we are still lacking in many kinds of wisdom. Perhaps our ancestors did discover the proverbial fountain, and we are perpetually doomed to an unwise youth (revised 9.1.05).
