New Zealand Engineering 1997 December

Editorial

Truth & Calamity

On the face of it there is not much in common between genetic engineering and climate change. Genetic engineering is inherently microscopic in nature while climate change - the subject of this month's Climate Change Conference in Kyoto - is so macroscopic it is still possible for some to debate whether it is happening at all. But there is a common thread - both involve the subtle interplay of human interventions in highly complex natural systems and both "issues" are driven by concern that, in pursuit of profits, large corporations are risking global catastrophe.

Peter King

It is easy to dismiss catastrophe as if civilisation makes it impossible and that business-as-usual is inevitable. Insulated in our virtual, two-litre, air-conditioned, vaccinated worlds it is easy to forget that the layer of technology that separates us from the mire, parasites and hunger of our ancestors is thin. One only has to look through the history of natural catastrophe to see how misleading "business-as-usual" can be. The Black Death, which killed over a third of the population between India and Iceland in 1348-50 (Tuchmann, A Distant Mirror), shows how devastating nature can be. We ourselves have also learned to be pretty devastating too. Had the worst come to the worst in the mid-1980s when the United States followed a policy of nuclear brinkmanship we could have discovered in a flash just how much we had taken for granted.

The difference with concerns over genetic engineering and climate change is the lack of flash. One more forest fire, one more smokestack, one more diesel 4WD isn't going to make any difference. It's like cigarettes. No one cigarette gives you heart disease or lung cancer, it's the habit of smoking which will ultimately kill you. Similarly genetic engineering. The danger is not now in these tentative exploratory stages where controls are strict but 50 years later when the initial caution has been "proved" unwarranted and recombinant DNA experiments start to become part of every undergraduate's lab work that the unlimitable, unrecallable nature of the risk becomes worrisome.

For most of human history technology has principally been an instrument for land theft, ie. weaponry. In today's nuclear-stabilised, corporate-driven world, land theft makes no sense. The issue is profitability not security. The corporation's golden rule is simple: buy low, sell high. If that means buying labour at slave wages and selling branded products at outrageous premiums, they will. If it means building obsolescence into their products and passing on the costs of waste to others, they will. Worst of all if it means misleading people and lying about their aims and objects they will do that too as Sharon Beder's new book Global Spin attests.

It would be nice to think that corporations could be open and honest without the need for public pressure. Alas examples, such as the Philip Morris cigarette settlement in Florida, gives little hope that it will ever happen. Ultimately, of course, the truth on climate change and genetic engineering will out. The only question is under what circumstances?

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