Journey to the Origin: Biological Integrity and Agriculture

At the outset, it is important for me to describe myself as a layperson in this gathering. My background is in art. I have no formal education in science or agriculture. But I am here with a point of view completely opposed to biotechnology in general and to its place within agriculture in particular. I say this out of my own experience. I left teaching art in the early 1970’s, having been deeply moved by the specter of world hunger as it was looming on the global horizon. After the oil embargo of the same period, and in order to meet its balance of payments, the United States quadrupled the price of its export agricultural commodities. It was a response to the lawlessness of the global market system, whereby unilateral decisions on oil and food commodities wreaked havoc on the desperate economies of the non-industrial world. I remember the vivid realization of learning that the cattle of the feedlots of the United States were daily consuming grain adequate to feed the hungry peoples of the world. That fact determined the direction of my life, and I have been involved with the analysis of hunger and agriculture ever since. In 1977, I heard a paper delivered by Thomas Berry. The context he outlined also set a direction in my life that has helped me to probe ever deeper the root causes of the kind of dysfunction that plays itself out in the global crises of our times. Thomas Berry is a renowned historian of world cultures and in his two seminal books, The Dream of the Earth and The Universe Story , which he co-authored with Brian Swimme, he suggests that the root of our crises is contained with the cosmology that has shaped the total context of western thought. I suggest in this presentation that this cosmology also underpins the world of biotechnology and that it is both flawed and dangerous. I also suggest that a contemporary scientific understanding of the origin, nature, and functions of the cosmos would indicate that biotechnology is itself an extension Journey to the Origin: Biological Integrity and Agriculture