Annalee Newitz: GMO agriculture will probably save the world in this c...

I believe that it's fine if the university wants to regulate, for example, bandwidth access, but they should treat the students data as private data.

Annalee Newitz

data want believe

Everything I had read in the fields of fiction and science led me to a single, dark conclusion. Humans are screwed, and so is our planet.

Annalee Newitz

fields dark fiction

Eventually, humans invented agriculture, which could be understood as a way of turning the natural world into a tool for our use. There's evidence that we have been domesticating crops and animals for at least 15,000 years, adapting ecosystems to our preferred way of life.

Annalee Newitz

ecosystems animal years

Amphibians are dying out like crazy, and frogs and salamanders may be largely extinct by the end of the twenty-first century. Imagine an animal that begins its life in the water, but ends it on land - already, that's pretty weird. But, also, a lot of them are incredibly tiny and look wildly improbable. They have funny little toes, they stretch their throats into weird bubble shapes when they croak, and some of them are poisonous to the touch. I think kids from the twenty-second century might mythologize amphibians the way kids today mythologize dinosaurs.

Annalee Newitz

crazy kids thinking

Obviously it depends on how you define a word like "evolution," because of course we have been evolving - both biologically and culturally - in relation to the natural world for hundreds of thousands of years.

Annalee Newitz

evolution world years

I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.

Annalee Newitz

mass-extinction fuel cities

Cities should function more like ecosystems, or even metabolisms. When we build, we should be thinking about how we can integrate into the ecosystems around us, but without sacrificing all the niceties of civilization like good restaurants, concert halls, and high-speed Internet access. I'm saying that partly tongue-in-cheek, but I'm also deadly serious. The future of technology is sustainable ecology.

Annalee Newitz

sacrifice technology thinking

That said, a lot of people buy products with "green" in the brand name, but make no attempt to understand what it would really take to live sustainably. I think one of the most pernicious examples of magical environmental thinking is the anti-GMO movement.

Annalee Newitz

gmos names thinking

There are plenty of publicly-funded organizations and nonprofits that are trying to develop GMO crops that could help feed people in developing nations by producing disease-resistant or drought-resistant strains of staple crops like cassava or bananas.

Annalee Newitz

gmos organization people

A lot of environmental and biological science depends on technology to progress. Partly I'm talking about massive server farms that help people crunch genetic data - or atmospheric data. But I also mean the scientific collaborations that the Internet makes possible, where scientists in India and Africa can work with people in Europe and the Americas to come up with solutions to what are, after all, global problems.

Annalee Newitz

technology talking mean

Using virtual world, a scientist in Japan can conduct an experiment using a special facility in California, watching the entire thing via a live stream - and possibly controlling the experimental equipment remotely. We can use that same kind of technology to control a robot on Mars.

Annalee Newitz

japan california technology

To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful about the future. Mass extinction is a long, complicated process that we are just now beginning to understand - and likewise, we are just beginning to understand how we might prevent one.

Annalee Newitz

mass-extinction knowing thinking

Even though I now know that it's likely the Earth will suffer through mega-volcanoes or meteor strikes that could take out millions or billions of people, I feel less anxious about it because I actually understand what the threats are. There's nothing like researching something exhaustively to make it less terrifying.

Annalee Newitz

volcanoes suffering people

I think it's the process of demystification, and realizing that we are not talking about some supernatural nightmare - we're talking about a natural process that the planet has gone through before, and which animals have survived before.

Annalee Newitz

animal talking thinking

My first goal would be to reduce the perturbation in the carbon cycle. That would mean using carbon neutral sources of energy, and changing our agricultural practices to be less disruptive and polluting. I'm not talking about a policy here so much as changing the way our infrastructure works. That's why I'm so fascinated with changing the way we build cities, because they are the most developed forms of physical infrastructure for human habitation.

Annalee Newitz

carbon-cycle cities mean

So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics.

Annalee Newitz

mass-extinction together culture

There are definitely recurring themes in humanity's relationship with our environment. The biggest is probably adaptation, because humans are incredibly good at adapting to new environments in relatively short periods of time. The ancestors of Homo sapiens started leaving Africa over one million years ago, moving from warm, tropical climates into the freezing wilderness of Europe and the desert ecosystems of the Middle East.

Annalee Newitz

europe years moving

One reason that we're so adaptable is that humans are excellent tool users and homebuilders. When our environment doesn't provide us with something that we need, we try to make it ourselves out of whatever is available, whether that's rock or wood or ore or DNA.

Annalee Newitz

rocks dna trying

The fact is that humans have been shaping the genetics of what they eat for thousands of years. Genetic engineering simply speeds up the process that used to take generations. Preventing people from getting things like golden rice or disease-resistant cassava destroys human life, and does not spare the environment in any way.

Annalee Newitz

engineering people years

The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction, where climate change caused in part by mega-volcanic eruptions wiped out ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It took about ten or twenty million years for the planet's ecosystems to stabilize. During that time you saw a lot of weird, out-of-balance ecosystems where, for example, crocodile-like predators ripped the crap out of each other along the coasts.

Annalee Newitz

mass-extinction ecosystems years

GMO agriculture will probably save the world in this century. But in the developed world, where few people are haunted by the specter of famine, people are free to fetishize heirloom tomatoes and worry about the provenance of what sits on their dinner tables.