Running Bug Farm tipped me off to this from the beginning of the year:
The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?
I read it with gentle skepticism for a while, because while I won't buy seedless watermelon if there's a seeded version available (it involves using chemicals to spawn haploid and quadruploid chromosomal watermelons, then crossing them to create the tetraploid fruit which is too genetically crippled to reproduce, hence no seeds in the little white jackets -- it scares me), I'm also open-minded on genetically engineered (GE) plants. Yes, it can be bad, it can go wrong, it can pervert the entire drive of evolution like seedless watermelons, but -- I tend to think of genetic engineering as a super-speedy version of breeding and crossing strains to see what happens, which is a time-honored manner of adapting our environment to ourselves and ourselves to our environment.
Then I read on and saw what they're actually having approved: Herbicide-resistant alfalfa.
People. We don't make herbicide-resistant plants. I mean, I don't like herbicides. But they need to work when we have no better option, for whatever reason, to get rid of a plant that's ecologically damaging a bunch of other plants. That's why we have them.
This is why we can't have nice things.
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