Nice article summing up and describing the conversion of Mark Lynas from anti-GMO leader to pro-GMO:
“It has been more than fifteen years since companies like Monsanto began intense efforts to export agricultural biotechnology from the United States to the fields of Europe and the United Kingdom. The battle continues to this day. Few opponents have been more militant or effective than Mark Lynas, one of the first people to break into fields that scientists had planted with genetically modified test crops—and then rip them out of the ground.
In 1999, shortly after a London protest against poverty turned into a riot, Lynas published an article for the journal of the radical environmental group, EarthFirst!, in which he wrote that, as we entered a new millennium, two forces—a powerful coalition of multinationals and “strong social movements across the Third World’’—were on a “global collision course.’’ The agendas “of these two competing forces,’’ he wrote, ‘’were utterly irreconcilable.” The title of his article was “Savages Strike a Blow Against Capitalism,” and he was proud to count himself among the savages.
For years, Lynas clung to what can only be described as a religious conviction that g.m. foods were unnatural. It never mattered to him that dozens of scientific organizations, including the British Royal Academy and the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S., had studied the issue and had come to the opposite conclusion. “In my view, the technology moves entirely in the wrong direction,” he wrote in the Guardian, in 2008, “intensifying human technological manipulation of nature when we should be aiming at a more holistic ecological approach instead.”Finish reading here.
