Enemy of Precaution

Next Thursday, on November 15, Gary Marchant will give a lecture in the auditorium of the LaSells Stewart Center.  He will offer his views on laws that govern genetically modified food.  Marchant's presentation is part of the Horning Lecture Series of the History Department.

Marchant is a law professor at Arizona State University.  He used to represent the auto industry in litigation about air quality standards.  Now he is an outspoken opponent of the legal application of the Precautionary Principle.  In 2005, Marchant wrote Arbitrary and Capricious with Kenneth Mossman, an ASU Professor of Health Physics (a field that primarily trains scientists to work in the nuclear industry).  In an article for Legal Times, the authors wrote:

The idea is flawed in theory and practice, and the enshrinement of the precautionary principle sets Europe down a path that will wreak havoc on the economy ...

Would that be a bad thing?

The Precautionary Principle is a pillar of the social movement for ecological awareness.  It stipulates that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to humanity or nature, and there is insufficient proof that the risk is in the public interest, then the action or policy must not be allowed.  The principle is the antithesis of the hyper-masculine agency of modern industrialism — concisely summarized by Nike advertisers whenever they tell us to just do it.  In other words, "damn the torpedoes" or the risk of ecological disaster; "progress" demands that we push ahead and let our grandchildren deal with the fallout.

The Precautionary Principle is similar in some ways to the ancient teachings of Lao Tzu — who counseled his followers on the wisdom of inaction in the service of maintaining harmony.

The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.  Through this I know the advantage of taking no action.

Indeed, the quest for harmony lies at the core of the emerging ecological counterculture.  But this worldview of caution and deliberation is intolerable from the modern industrial perspective — which seeks the power to control and rearrange the entire world.

Arizona State University is the home of the Biodesign Institute.  The Director of that organization is George Poste — who has a very interesting resumé.  Among his many dubious distinctions, Poste serves on the Board of Directors of Monsanto — the infamous biotechnology giant that produced Agent Orange during the Vietnam War and now produces tons of Roundup-Ready seed for industrial agriculture.  Farmers across the country have seen Franken-pollen blow into their fields and contaminate their crops with the altered genes from Monsanto laboratories.  The long-term effects of such genetic alterations in the wild are unknown.  Thus, the corporate giant has thrown the Precautionary Principle to the wind.

Monsanto is also the corporation responsible for pushing recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH) into the dairy industry.  When two Florida reporters tried to warn the public about the use of rBGH on dairy cows, Monsanto and Fox Television colluded to suppress the information.  Station managers ordered the reporters to lie to their viewers to protect Monsanto.  After the reporters refused, Fox fired them.  The ensuing court battle revealed the unethical lengths to which Monsanto will go to bloat its bottom line.

Meanwhile, the ASU revolving door involves even more than academia and corporate boardrooms.  Guy Cardineau, a professor at the Biodesign Institute was recently appointed to the Advisory Committee on Biotechnology in the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  Marchant cheered the political implications in a press release about the appointment.

The reception for Gary Marchant in Corvallis suggests that Oregon State University employs administrators and professors who have a poor view of nature.  The unrestricted release of engineered genes into the biosphere is a prime example of reckless irreverence for the mystery of life.  The risk is especially high because the recombinant DNA processes cannot control where a foreign gene sequence lands on a chromosome when it is blasted into the nucleus of a host cell.  The dangerous assumption of agricultural biotechnology is that gene expression is independent of the chromosomal neighborhood.  While that hypothesis remains unproven, the enormous risk of uncontained genetic experiments is an externalized cost for corporations like Monsanto.

When an academic institution offers a platform to a leader in the corporate legal maneuvering against precaution, while offering no similar forum against biotechnology, one might be tempted to excuse the single instance as a harmless oversight.  However, the Food for Thought Lecture Series has offered a strong and persistent bias in favor of agricultural biotechnology.  Outreach in Biotechnology is supposedly "a program to communicate factually and contextually accurate information."  That claim may be sufficient for lawyers, but the public presentations either ignore opposing arguments or offer mischaracterizations (i.e. straw men) that are easily dismissed.  Opponents are derided as uninformed or unscientific — a blatant distortion — and the rhetoric is riddled with the usual hubris.

The bottom line is that Oregon State University is abusing the public trust by providing a propaganda service for the biotechnology industry.  Large corporations serve the interests of their stockholders, which is usually not the same as the public interest.  Even though much of the university's work is funded by private endowment, the university remains a land grant institution — which means that OSU has a campus and considerable political clout that have been endowed by the citizens of Oregon.  At a minimum, the university is ethically obligated to use its resources to serve the interest of those citizens.