Humanism means that I wish the best for Humanity, I want us to succeed. I try my best to lower the hurt in the world, which is why when a friend is suffering I try to help. I make decisions about what to do with my life on things like what I can do for humanity. I don't drive a car for many reasons like because I don't need one to get around and if I ever need one often enough to make the alternatives an inconvenience. I have a bike and I can walk; public transit in this city sucks, but it is manageable. So, no car. I am a vegetarian for environmental reasons, because vegetarianism has less impact on the world. No one is going to over fish for me. No cow has died for me since 1992.
Climate Change; it scares me.
The more you know about Climate Change, the more it will scare you. I mean clutch your children and cry scary.
I see the major options for alleviating Climate Change as not just reducing and eliminating carbon emissions, but sequestration of the carbon that we have pumped into the biosphere as well. That is the prime concern, which I believe that we should stop everything else and just do that until we have stabilized everything and reduced the effects and most importantly introduced some negative feedback loops to counter the positive feedback loops that we have working against our current Climate.
What does all that have to do with GMOs? Simple. We are not succeeding and we, when we wake up to the threat, which I believe we have not fully woken up to yet, need to blunt the impacts of it Climate Change on our population by altering how we live.
They have invented a passive water collector a couple years ago, it harvests water out of the air, just like the water collectors from Dune. We need to mass produce those and set them up everywhere it is too dry and where people live. Because as Climate Change continues, the dry regions where people live will become drier and then it will get worse. I mean, the dry regions where things have gotten worse already are really dry and I mean they no longer have ground water, because that is gone already, like Yemen. There is a war there you know. Drought equals war. Drought equals people displacement and that means war. Climate change means drought, which means displacement, which equals war. Clear? No? Drought means crop failure, which means starvation, which means people are dislocated and they eat the food that others have which means more starvation, which leads to hoarding which leads to war. War leads to environmental destruction which leads to more starvation and drought and displacement and war. That is a positive feedback loop.
GMOs. Self fertilizing, drought resistant, frost resistant, insect resistant, herbicide resistant perennial crops. Do you see that? Also add higher nutrition to that mix. Plant this plant that does not exist yet, except in pieces and you get to put a check in the effects of climate change. A very small check.
Self fertilizing, means that the plant fixes nitrogen like legumes and clover, which means less fertilizers created out of the air created through the use of petroleum. Making it universal on plants means stronger plants. Drought resistance, duh, water scarcity means they may get less water and if plants are more resistant to drought that means they are more likely to survive when it happens, but it is not a guarantee. When Australia had its drought, it lasted years and years. South Africa too. The drought that tipped off the wars in Syria and Yemen lasted years. Just more likely to survive on less water might be enough. Frost resistance means longer growing season, it means that our crops would be able extend their growing season increasing their chances to be harvested and thus lessen the odds of famine.
Insect resistant crops mean that the crop would be more likely to not be eaten by insects and more likely to be eaten by people. The funny thing that I hear anti-GMO people talk about is that they are most against this aspect. So BT is a natural toxin to insects, it is organic, made by a bacteria and it is an approved Organic pesticide. But when you spray it, it kills every insect it encounters, spiders, praying mantis, honey bees, wasps, lady bugs and things that eat the plant like aphids. They all die. And that means when the BT is washed away you have to apply it again and if you don't the next wave of plant eating grasshoppers will devastate your crops because there are no beneficial insects alive from your first spraying campaign. So BT infused plants work like this: the toxin is in the plant, so it only directly impacts the insect that eats the plant. The insect that eats the plant sickens and dies or sickens and stops eating the plant. And spiders and ladybugs and bees and praying mantis don't. Simple. Oh and BT only affects insects, because the toxin affected a physiological affect that only insects rely on. So not toxic to humans at all. Which is not true of all pesticides, especially some Organic Pesticides.
Herbicide resistant plants means that you can spray the crops and they are not affected by the spray. What does that mean? It means that since the only herbicide resistant plants are resistant to Glyphosphate, which is the least toxic of all the herbicides, with the exception of pulling weeds. Roundup works by interfering with a process in plants. In resistant plant, they uses an entirely different process, so are not affected. And I admit that this does kill some plants that have beneficial uses or have non detrimental uses like milkweed. But. But the effects of chemical weeding means that entire crops can be weeded with just one application of the herbicide and production increases substantially. And it is way less toxic than other possible herbicides. The other option is to weed the fields by hand. Or make robots do it. Or maybe plow the fields two or three times before you plant to disrupt the weeds. As they start to grow. There are options, but they are less than useful sometimes and some of them creat more problems; like plowing fields causes disruption of soil habitat and increased carbon release. Stuff like that.
Like most of our crops are annual, which means they die at after harvesting and that introduces all sorts of bad things, like increase soil erosion and increased weeds. It also means that every year the soil is disturbed and our crops need to compete with more aggressive weeds. A very common thing that people who argue with Anti-GMO people is that we have been genetically modifying crops for millennia to get the crops we have now and one way that we have made them is to deny them competition. So the drops we depend on are weak. When they are small and they grow together in the weeds usually win out. There are methods that allow you to defeat the weeds, like the native Three Sisters Crop combo, they planted three crops together. Maize that grows tall, Squash that has huge low leaves which shade the ground and starve weeds of light, and beans that climb the Corn stalk and fix nitrogen into the soil for use by the squash and the corn. But as my friend pointed out, it was a nice concept but in her plot right next to mine, she produced about five times as much food than I did. native populations were so much lower density so they could afford to have relatively greater growing areas. But there is another option: perennial crops.
Perennial crops have the advantage that you don't need to turn the solid over every year. They are rooted longterm and their network is more impervious to annual weeds. The roots hold the soil in place, the dead organic matter from leaves hold more water and the perennial roots allow for faster infiltration of surface water, which means wetter ground for longer and more ground water and more drought resistant crops. This means that you would need to apply even less herbicides. If the plant fixed nitrogen, there would be no need of fertilizers, if the leaves were insect resistant, then the plant would grow better and the crop would be more full. If it were frost resistant it would mean late and early frosts would not have huge impacts and a longer growing year for the food part of the plant. A little more drought resistance with the perennial drought resistance and the soils more resistant to drought would mean that areas that annual crops could not grow would become arable. Want more? Adding changes to the crop to make it more nutritious would mean that people would need to eat less to get more out of it. Quinoa is a complete protien, which means if you could not great a variety of foods, this plant you could live on indefinitely without meat.
We can't fix the environment, because it is too late. People denied there was a problem so long that they denied it into a bigger problem that it might have been. There is a lot of things we need to do now to fix the Environment but in the mean time, if we want to mitigate the effects of Climate Change we need to embrace GMOs now, we need to expand and intensify them. We need to get over the change, because there are bigger changes happening right now and ignoring them will only end poorly. So I give you a choice: embrace GMOs or face more drought, more displacement, more famine, more war, more environmental destruction, less fixing the environment and a lot less humans and perhaps 100% less humans and if theat happens, 100% less mammals and 90% less fish and reptiles and less insects and birds. That is your choice. You can't see it? It is because you can't see next Winter beyond Spring.
Unless someone invents a new technology that fixes the environment with the snap of their fingers. If you are working upon that technology good for you, but if you are not, what are you doing to save Humanity?
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