GJEP sent a team to the Indigenous Environmental Network’s Protecting Mother Earth conference that took place from 1 to 4 August in Cherokee, NC. Immediately following this, our team traveled to the IUFRO Tree Biotechnology 2024 conference in Annapolis, MD that began on the evening of 4 August. The transition from the holistic indigenous worldview to the compartmentalized science-for-profit paradigm almost gave us whiplash.
The Protecting Mother Earth conference took place entirely outdoors on the territory of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and included several hundred people – predominantly Indigenous Peoples as well as ally non-indigenous participants. The event was rooted in the indigenous worldview that centers the sacredness of life and was focused on the need to develop unified strategies to stop destructive projects that are impacting Indigenous peoples as well as the ecosystems on which they depend and in which they live.
With workshops on the threats from Geoengineering, carbon trading, “green” mining and other false solutions to the climate and biodiversity crises, the event denounced and exposed industry attempts to paint destructive projects as sustainable.
Genetic Engineering - "Let's teach nature something new!"
Let’s Teach Nature Something New!
Fast forward to the IUFRO Tree Biotechology 2024 conference. As a stunning contrast, in this event, biotechnologists embrace their title – believing that trees can be broken down into their base components, altered, engineered and re-assembled using the latest “cutting edge” technologies, with the aim to use using genetic engineering to expand, extend and entrench business as usual. Slides with giant highlighted messages like “Let’s teach nature something new!” reveal the fundamental arrogance of these manipulators of life.
Biotechnologists like to spout a narrative around their experimentation with life that it is meant to contribute to the betterment of the world – to reduce pollution or energy consumption in paper making, or to create green energy. But their own presentations reveal the real motivation: Altered lignin GE poplars they claim will lead to “increased profits of $5-$10 million per year in just one pulp mill. $1-2 billion annually for the industry.” They can accomplish these feats, they insist, with “just a few tweaks” to the genetic makeup of these trees. By “snipping out” a gene here and there, they can manufacture trees explicitly “designed” for “deconstruction” of its problematic lignin, which must be broken down in the manufacture of paper and ethanol. But why stop there, ask the researchers. Why not synthesize the perfect designer lignins to enable the easy and cheap processing of tree biomass into all kinds of products from fuel to plastics, textiles and more?
Wobbly Trees
But lignin is a fundamental component of trees, and is responsible for the protection of the tree, for water transport within the tree, and for enabling it to stand tall and strong. It protects the tree from invasion by insects, browsing by animals, and environmental stressors like wind and storms. It also slows the decomposition of trees, ensuring they can nourish future life and store carbon in soil. What happens to trees over the years if they have reduced lignin? And what happens if that trait escapes the GE tree plantation and contaminates native wild relatives? Ask the engineers. They don’t know and they have no idea how to find out. In fact, risks and how to assess them is not a part of this conference. Potentials and unicorn promises, not risks and dangers.
Life: Rich, complex and ancient
Over billions of years, life evolved in balanced, interconnected and symbiotic ecosystems that have enabled the thriving of an unfathomable diversity of life forms on this planet. Much of the livability of this beautiful blue-green orb is due to a blanket of forests that, until quite recently, has covered much of its surface, providing habitat to diverse species, cleansing fresh water, stabilizing the climate, building soil, regulating rainfall, creating oxygen and storing carbon.
Genetically Engineering Trees: Myopic and Compartmentalized
The myopic and compartmentalized view of the genetic engineers here at IUFRO’s Tree Biotechnology 2024 conference is that the trees that form the backbone of critically important and diverse forest ecosystems need to be “improved.” By invading their DNA – also unfathomably intricate, complex and ancient – we can “snip out” genes to transform trees into products for the “bio”economy – i.e. the dominant economy painted green, but really the same old Capitalist paradigm explicitly designed to transform life into profits. In this case by using novel, unproven and inherently unpredictable technologies. But perhaps the term bioeconomy is really more honest since it spells out in its name its mission to turn life into commodities that will enhance the accumulation of wealth.
IUFRO: the False Promise to Youth
IUFRO’s Tree Biotechnology 2024 conference includes participation by many young graduate students. The organizers of the conference are opportunistically showering these youth with praise and the promise that they can be leaders in the effort to genetically engineer trees, with no attention paid to critical questions about the ethics of re-engineering life for the benefit of an elite minority, nor any discussion about who will pay the price. The worldview that humans, separate from and superior to nature, can pull it apart, dissect it, and redesign it is unchallenged.
IEN PME: Uniting to Protect and Defend the Earth
This leads us back to the IEN Protecting Mother Earth conference. That event lifted up the ancient worldview that places humans inside of the web of interconnected life – a part of, not apart from, the whole system and therefore completely reliant on it remaining intact.
Accomplishing the seemingly herculean task to keeping intact the ecosystems on which we depend demands the creation of diverse alliances of people with the common objective to protect and defend the Earth and all of its inhabitants. This is the true path toward a livable future on the Earth. Genetically engineered trees have no part of that future.
