[Previous entry: "Blogger Info"] [Cliffs - Home] [Next entry: "Privilege?"]

11/16/2003: "Tree Huggers!"

Planet saving tree huggers, may I have your attention please! Yes, Boston Harbor should be clean, and it's a bad idea to clearcut South America, but guys, believe me, you haven't even started to worry yet. How about something really important, like totally irreversible damage on a planet-wide scale? Look, I want to have a nice place to live too, but let's allocate our "Hell Raising" resources realistically. You can always regrow trees, stop dumping in a body of water, and even reseed India with tigers from the zoo if you really want to; hell, you can even make more oil, given geologic time frames, but what happens if you lose track of what's really "REAL." Now, we're talking irreversible damage. Click more.. below.

What do you mean by really "REAL?" Well, I'm talking about the cloning and genetic engineering of plants and animals. No, not science-fiction, but food products. Every day consumers in this country purchase genetically altered food products, and the only thing I hear consumer advocates whining about is the lack of labeling. Yeah, I think you should know when you're eating something "man-made," and opening yourself up more subtly to the dietary equivalent of rayon playsuits for children. Flaming children attract a lot of attention, and people take drastic and immediate action. Because the effects of genetically altered food products may be more subtle and the results less dramatic than those of man-made fibers, people are less likely to take drastic and immediate action. How long did take us to realize that DDT accumulated in plants and animals, and even people? And we knew that DDT was a poison!

Anyway, we've heard a few wake-up calls from consumer advocates about at least knowing that we're eating genetically altered products, but who's growing this stuff, and more importantly, where and in what degree of isolation? What if we noticed that genetically altered corn was having some really strange effects on cattle that consumed it? What if the effect was something dramatic, like "Mad Cow" disease, and by the time we finished arguing about whether it was indeed Mad Cow disease or the result of genetically altered corn being fed to the cattle, it was too late? What do you mean too late? I mean, what if you market a popular strain of genetically altered corn worldwide before you find out there is something wrong with it? And it grows in fields all over the world right next to "natural" corn, then what? Have we irrevocably lost "natural" corn?

If you imagine all kinds of plants and animals being "altered," all over the world, with pods and spores blowing in the wind and floating in the water, not to mention honeybees and other insects pollinating, all of them polluting plant life as we know it, then, at the same time, animal husbandry, planned and accidental, artificial insemination, and even mosquitoes polluting animal life, then I think that in a "free market," the use of genetically altered food stuffs makes losing track of what's really "REAL" not a possibility but a probability. I don't know about you, but I think that's a hell of a lot scarier than global warming.

Take a moment to relax and check out the new "This Week's Skin."

Note to readers:
Readers with Internet Explorer can use these links to "Add to Favorites." The rest of you are on your own. Remember, Cliffs Notes dot Info.
Click here to add this page to your favorites!
Click here to add this site to your favorites!

If you've enjoyed Cliff's Notes, click here to find lots more blogs. This link opens in a new window in case you realize you were better off here.
Last but not least, if anything interesting comes to mind about the above post that you would like to share, blurt it out in the form below. If you enter a "homepage," your "name," as you entered it, will become a link to your site. E-mail addresses, if entered, may be harvested by spammers.