Has anyone read

Dec 3, 2006

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this? Silent Spring (Penguin Modern Classics)

I was glancing through the bbc news website, as I do on a fairly regular basis. I came across this article about Rachel Carson, which sounded interesting. I’d never heard of her before, so I went wandering off to find out more and found her biography on her own website.

This all tied quite neatly into a couple of other things I was looking at last night, a comment is free article about genetically modified spuds and the personal implementation of the oil depletion protocol.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m no kind of scientist so I’m not sure about all this genetic modification stuff. What I mean there is I’m not sure what precisely they are doing. Genetic modification by controlled breeding I understand perfectly, but splicing and dicing in a laboratory, no. So I don’t know whether it’s safe, and I don’t think we can know whether it’s safe until we’ve seen what happens over the course of years, and by then, it’s a bit difficult to decide, no, it wasn’t and go back.

On the oil depletion stuff, I came across the site following Gareth back to his blog. It’s a slightly scary site, but then again, it’s a slightly scary world that we’re living in, and I think that’s a large part of the problem. Many of us can’t see where to start to make a difference, so we just don’t start. I know I’m one of the worst offenders atm with my pootling up and down the motorway on a daily basis, but trust me, I really don’t want to do it. Problem is that the whole house selling stuff is yet another thing I can’t really see where to start on, so I’m ineffectually flapping about doing stuff all.

Well, that was a rambling completely pointless kind of post wasn’t it? I’ll try to be back with something more coherent later 😉

political stuff

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Comments

10 responses to “Has anyone read”

Leo
3 December 2006
No. I’ve heard her ideas were partially to blame for the DDT ban – recently lifted. The DDT ban caused far too many malaria deaths. Not nice.
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rosie
3 December 2006
No, I’ve not read it, but somehow think I need to.
No, not pointless 😉
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Jax
3 December 2006
Haven’t found anything about the lifting of the ban yet, but this site appears fairly clear on the history. It does give some credit to her book, but also notes that the bans started some years before her book was published, so seems like there was other evidence against it too.
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tbird
4 December 2006
Tim erad this years ago and in fact was talking to J&J bout it last week when we were off the path. He rates it and in fact it’s on his Christmas list I think.
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Tim
4 December 2006
No I didn’t. Never even heard of it. 🙂
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Bob
6 December 2006
I think the problem with GM is a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind.
The genetic changes caused by breeding have been happening slowly since life began, and the physical limitations about what can mate with what means that the set of genetic changes possible between a parent and its child are relatively small. The rest of the ecosystem has had time to adjust to all this, so nature is as we know it.
The genetic changes caused by GM are arbitrarily large. You could (I think) take any gene and insert into any other young organism and so get glow in the dark potatoes etc.
The trouble is the size of the genetic change possible (not the change itself) – the rest of the ecosystem scrambles to catch up and can’t do so very quickly. Just like our bodies haven’t had time to adjust from the scarcity of calories in our hunter-gatherer days to the (over-)abundance now in much of the developed world. I.e. ecosystem as a whole is out of kilter for possibly a long time, which is generally a bad thing.
Also, the ecosystem catching up can produce unforeseen consequences. The glow in the dark potatoes in the test field can spread their genes to any potato plant nearby, and if it’s genetically advantageous (or at least not genetically a disadvantage) some other potato will start glowing in the dark. I think it’s basically a genie-out-of-the-bottle kind of argument.
I’m sure someone like Chris Haricot could give you more on this, but that’s my view from a position of relative genetics ignorance.
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Bob
6 December 2006
Oh, and the GM proponents say that GM is needed to boost yield so that there’s enough food for a growing population.
As usual this is a scientific plaster over a non-scientific wound. The real problem is growing population, not really food supply. As well as food supply, a growing population will have increased demands for clean water, land, energy and so on. The real fix will be curbing population growth, which is politically v. tricky. Coming up with new miracle grow rice species X that grows 1.34 times as much as the previous best will only be a temporary solution as the population will grow again, and rice X will no longer be enough, so we need newer rice species Y and so on.
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Leo
6 December 2006
Oooh, glow in the dark potatoes, scary! 😀
I don’t understand what is the fuss about GM and only see it as technofobia. People have been manipulating food since they could. Wheat didn’t exist. Nothing that we eat is natural. Just going one step ahead in knowledge changes nothing, it can only improve our lives.
About the DDT:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/main.jhtml?xml=/health/2006/09/18/who17.xml
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Bob
7 December 2006
As I said, it’s a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind i.e. we have been breeding food species (and others) for ages, but nature imposes certain limits on what can breed with i.e. give genes to what. GM allows us to bypass those limits, which is neat but possibly not always a good idea.
I don’t see myself as a technophobe, although others may differ – I design computer programs for a living and have been in computing all my working life. But I do think that science and technology are tools for civilisation and not ends in themselves. We need to question constantly their direction, monitor their use and so on. For example, DDT was a scientific wonder but had such bad side-effects that it had to be banned.
GM to boost yield will not solve the real problem, but might fool the public or even decision makers into thinking it has been solved.
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Leo
8 December 2006
Nature imposes limits? Are you saying Nature is a tyrant? I say we overthrow it, then. 😉
Human creativity has no limits.
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