Last Friday I talked by
phone to Andre Leu, co-author of the No. 1 Smoking Gun (see Mission Statement
for the reference), who’s in Australia. Despite
his French-sounding name, he’s a fair dinkum Ozzie with their typical relaxed,
easy-going manner over a very down-to-earth, hard-to-fool mind, the exact opposite
of the stereotypic anti-GMOer I mentioned in my last post. I kicked off by asking him if there had been
much reaction to his article. There had
been some, but he admitted it hadn’t yet been that much (it’s certainly not a
fraction of what it merits). But that,
he said somewhat to my surprise, had been intentional. They deliberately wanted to avoid a Pile-On
(see The Credentials Game for what a Pile-On is). They wanted to keep a low profile and let the
word spread gradually through academia, convincing those who needed to be convinced.
I told him that I was
planning a full-court press on the article (details forthcoming) and asked him
if he wanted me to lay off. If he had
said yes, this blog would no longer exist (at least not in the form I had planned)
because I immediately liked and respected him and the last thing I wanted was
to upset his plans. No, he said, as long
as it was someone else bearing the brunt, that was fine, if I was ready for
it. Ready, I said, indeed eager.
Another thing I asked him
was, why hadn’t they published in a higher-impact journal? Answer, because you can’t get anti-GMO papers
into higher-impact journals. I believe
him and I believe that in his case at least this is neither paranoia nor loser’s
whine. Science as a whole may not be for
sale. But wherever Science impacts on
Big Money, it’s for sale. At least there
are buyers and takers. Look, use your
common sense. Corporations exist to make
profits for their shareholders. It’s all
they exist for. What’s wrong with
that? So if millions of dollars are at
stake, and if you run the risk of losing them if you get too much adverse criticism,
are you just going to sit on your hands?
And there are more ways of buying people than just handing over wads of
cash.
But that's another post.
But that's another post.
Next day came the
Vandana Shiva lunch. This was a fully
interactive event sponsored by the North Shore branch of the Outdoor Circle (of which my wife
Yvonne is a board member) in collaboration with the Center for Food Safety. Our State senator Gil Riviere was there and
just before the formal proceedings started I asked him where he stood on
GMOs. He said he was in favor of
labeling but had an open mind on other issues.
I was disappointed, because he had been a leading opponent of the Dirty
Dozen, a series of anti-environmental bills that came before the State legislature
a couple of years ago, but he left with the usual polspeak about paying
attention to the feelings of his constituents.
Thirty of these plus
Vandana gave him a forceful account of those feelings in the next couple of
hours. Practically everyone said their
piece but yours truly; as the new kid on the anti-GMO block I kept mouth shut
and ears pinned back, except I did announce this blog and got a good laugh. Among other highlights, Andy Kimbrell
outlined CFS’s strategy for the coming year.
It was to start by preparing and pushing for a bill that would mandate
full disclosure of when, where and how much pesticide was sprayed in the islands. Despite a long history of pesticide problems,
Hawaii is one of a minority of states with no regulation. Big advantage of this approach is that it
would be very hard to combat. The usual
argument here against any GMO or pesticide regulation, that it would “hurt
farmers”, just would not fly. Moreover,
once parents got to know what quantities of toxic materials were regularly
released in the vicinity of their kids’ schools, we would tap into another very
powerful constituency, and bills involving the creation of “buffer zones” to
limit spraying, already in the pipeline, would stand a better chance of
passing. Only after that would we get on
to heavier issues like labeling or (shudder) the actual prohibition of particular
crops and pesticides.
I dug this approach
because it was just like a technique Yvonne would use, when she was still in
practice, on clients with phobias. It’s
called “successive approximation”. You
start from making them imagine circumstances where the fear might arise, then introduce
them to real physical circumstances that might trigger a relatively mild form
of the fear, and after that gradually escalate things until you could take,
say, an acrophobic to the roof of a high-rise and have them look over without
panicking. Yes, it does work.
All in all, the event
was a success. People who had seldom or
never met before bonded with one another.
People who already knew each other well reinforced their commitment and
went away full of hope and enthusiasm for what might be a decisive year. I’m an optimist about my own life but a full-on
pessimist on almost everything else, so when I say I shared these feelings it
should surely count for something.
