Indigenous Perspective: Biotechnology Versus the Rights of Mother Earth

Presented by: BJ McManama

Indigenous Environmental Network

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

GratitudeRespect

&Solidarity with

Indigenous Peoples

Thank you to the organizers of this NASEM Committee on Forest Health and Biotechnology webinar for the invitation to present our position on this extremely timely and multi-layered issue facing the next Seven Generations.

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Forests are interwoven with human evolution:

Indigenous Peoples have lived in harmony within forest ecosystems and until the onset of peoples, plants, animals, and microorganisms from foreign lands, we evolved with and adapted to 10’s of thousands of years of climatic changes.

Every geographical area has unique complexities. To maintain the delicate biodiversity of each ecosystem is completely dependent on the interactivity of countless elements, seen and unseen.

Modern science is still learning and understanding what Indigenous Peoples have known for countless generations.

Our planet has evolved, in balance, creating balance, for 4.6 billion years. Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago. About 10,000 years ago, Peasants developed the selection and breeding of seeds and domesticated agriculture began. Human creativity combined with nature to provide the abundance that allowed the evolution of societies and species. Humanity and Nature renewed each other, sustaining civilization and providing the potential for the Industrial Revolution. Biodiversity, GMOs, Gene Drives and the Militarized Mindby Vandana Shiva - https://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/07/10/biodiversity-gmos-gene-drives-and-militarized-mind

Forests are more than trees

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

What is the current state of the science regarding the potential for using genetic engineering (GE) and similar technologies in trees to improve forest health?

Science has barely scratched the surface of knowledge needed to safely employ genetic engineering of any element of forest ecosystems.

• Trees can live for decades• Trees are only one element in a forest

ecosystem• Knowledge of how they contribute to the

unique biodiversity depends on a multitude of factors to include geographic location

• Employing biotechnology to manage or eradicate disease and/or non-native/invasive species is dangerous at best

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

• Containment of a genetically engineered tree, plant, microorganism, or bug is likely to migrate outside of the target area

• Many of the problems our forests are suffering from are solely due to human error/hubris and globalization

What is the current state of the science regarding the potential for using genetic engineering (GE) and similar technologies in trees to improve forest health? Cont’d

Genetic engineering/biotech has not lived up to promises

Genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields and has led to an overall increase in the use of chemical applications:

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

• Nature still has the edge over scientists hoping to solve human problems with GE organisms: • Bt corn has lost the effectiveness to stave off disease and now requires more

pesticides – this increases toxicity to soil, air, water• Herbicides have become largely ineffective and again require more

applications or stronger concentrations or combinations of chemicals• Yield studies show European crops produce more or similar yields without the

use of genetic modificationBroken Promises of Genetically Modified Crops -

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/business/gmo-crops-pesticides.html

What are the potential ecological and economic impacts of deploying trees protected from pests and pathogens using biotechnology?

Impacts may result in pests mutating and becoming resistant or creating completely new problems not anticipated due to related/unrelated interactions in a forest ecosystem.• Economics: For far too long forests around the world have been exploited which

is contributing to climate change and weakening natural resistance

• Biotechnology is now being used to engineer trees expressly for commercial use. Not only are they being designed for current markets but new markets are being created to increase the need for more trees and other forest resources

• Instead of looking at forests as a cash crop we need to be looking at other less land and resource intensive crops, and employ science to help in reducing demand

• Biomass for energy production has destroyed millions of acres of forest and grasslands in the global south and contrary to industry hype is NOT carbon neutral• Indigenous Peoples in South America and Southeast Asia are loosing

their ancestral homelands for tree plantations both GE and non-GE, therefore biotechnology will increase forest loss and not save vital rain forest ecosystems

• The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s definition of a forest exacerbates the destruction of millions of acres of natural forests

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

What are the potential ecological and economic impacts of deploying trees protected from pests and pathogens using biotechnology? Cont’d

Economics & Forest Destruction

The extreme extractive economy is out of control, of which forest resources are part of…the answer to reducing the damage from pests and pathogens is to allow these ecosystems to repair/adapt with the guidance of Traditional Indigenous Ecological Knowledge

Is this a radical idea? Yes, but it is gaining acceptance should be seriously implemented if we are to truly adapt to the rapidly changing climate.

Are we able to predict what radical changes in precipitation are going to occur in the next 10 / 20 / 30 years?

• Pathogens and pests are also subject to climatic changes. • Making the wrong change and deploying a genetically modified tree into a

forest doesn’t guarantee a genetically modified organism won’t mutate and cause more damage or succumb to unexpected changes.

• Genetically engineering and placing a tree species into an already stressed forest is likely to have grave/unintended consequences

• The time that it takes a tree to reach maturity may or may not solve the original problem and may do more damage to the ecosystem it was placed within

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

The Current Regulatory System

The system currently in place is riddled with inadequacy and has been usurped by industry influence.

• Despite a wealth of independent research and evidence government agencies tasked with protecting human and environmental safety have approved agrochemicals that negatively affect: • Water: Over just the last two decades a variety of agricultural chemicals are found at

concentrations that exceeded aquatic-life benchmarks in many rivers and streams that drain agricultural, urban, and mixed-land use watersheds. There is a growing dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico due to agricultural runoff

• Air quality: Scientists have found that particles containing a variety of highly toxic chemicals released in the atmosphere in Asia can reach the forests and on the west coast of the United States in less than a week

• Land: Agricultural chemicals have been shown to destroy microorganisms and healthy bacteria that are vital to the health of the plant and the humans that consume them. Glyphosate interferes with uptake of several important micronutrients, including manganese, zinc, iron and boron

• Pollinators: The rapid decline in a variety of native and non-native/naturalized pollinators can be attributed to neonicotinoids -https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/reports/4048/water-hazard-aquatic-contamination-by-neonicotinoid-insecticides-in-the-united-states

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

The Current Regulatory SystemCont’d

Over the last few years genetically engineered trees have been approved with NO agency risk assessment or public evaluation and input-two examples:

• Loblolly Pine – containing undisclosed novel genes• Arctic Apple – removed the enzyme that causes browning

Even though testimony from FDA’s own scientists called into question the safety of GMOs in general, three varieties of potatoes were approved in 2017

Growing Doubt: a Scientist’s Experience of GMOs, Jonathan R. Latham, PhD-https://www.independentsciencenews.org/health/growing-doubt-a-scientists-experience-of-gmos/

Confidence in the processes and lack of respect for the people who will be most affected by these decisions without Free Prior and Informed consent is the highest form of disrespect and lack of concern for general well-being

Industry incursion into the regulatory process, motivated by profit/greed, has completely scuttled respect and confidence in the system.

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

We need more regulation not less

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Although the USDA determined that the Loblolly pine tree was engineered with no plant pests used in development:

• These pine forests are a key habitat for more than 20 songbirds and many other animals, including the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker

• This tree was engineered to have denser fibers that could very well limit the red-cockaded woodpecker from its food source

• Loblolly pine is also the leading commercial timber species in the Southeast, where forests and plantations supply both lumber and pulp for paper and energy.

• The ArborGen GE loblolly pine contains novel genes that are currently undisclosed• Seeds and pollen of GE loblolly pine travel over a distance of many miles, and will

disperse the novel genes well beyond any plantation into natural forests where GE trees could potentially spread

• Even seemingly small changes in characteristics of a key forest tree can have cascading impacts

Center for Food Safety, 2015 New Genetically Engineered Tree To Avoid Federal Oversight Completely

https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/press-releases/3713/new-genetically-engineered-tree-to-avoid-federal-oversight-completely

Biotechnology is genetic engineering / modification –Public Opinion Bait and Switch?

Indigenous views on the use of biotechnology to improve forest healthGenetic modification or engineering has become synonymous with controversy-so we notice that using the term biotechnology has replaced GE/GMO when attempting to garner public acceptance

• Indigenous perspective is that biotechnology/genetic engineering is risky at best if employed as a panacea for everything from food production to meet human demands, to human diseases or abnormalities

• We are well aware of the promises not kept and the results of a variety of claims by industry-supported science that have not only not materialized but the exact opposite has occurred

• About half of those questioned note skepticism and even fear, leading to some very strong opposition

• General consensus is that we have for thousands of years co-existed with nature and by making even the slightest changes to the genetic makeup of any organism creates a non-native and potentially invasive / damaging intruder

• Our medicine people teach that our relationship with the plant nations is predicated on respect and communication and rightly question whether that relationship will be compromised

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Can we trust biotechnology to improve forest health?

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

It’s difficult to trust biotechnology for any application with the history of cover-ups, outright attacks, and industry hit pieces on organic farming and alternative medicine

Headlines:• The Poison Papers: Documenting the Hidden History of Chemical and Pesticide

Hazards in the United States - https://www.poisonpapers.org/

• Monsanto’s Fingerprints All Over Newsweek’s Opinion Piece, a Hit on Organic Food - https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-propaganda-newsweek-2528277875.html

• First GMO ever produced by genetic engineering poisoned thousands of Americans- https://www.naturalnews.com/055133_GMOs_scientific_fraud_FDA.html

• Broken Promises of Genetically Modified Crops -https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/30/business/gmo-crops-pesticides.html

Common sense opposition is met with varying degrees of media hit pieces and with industry’s full cooperation and assistance

The Genetically Engineered American Chestnut

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Fast Food Mentality of Biotechnology

One of the positions in favor of a GE American chestnut tree, is the research and development of a conventionally bred tree that can resist the fungus that caused the blight, is taking too long

Indigenous Peoples and many scientists know that Natural Law has its own time table. Time isn’t measured in minutes or years but instead is driven by symbiotic relationships within an ecosystem – no organism is isolated and acts upon a variety of factors

When using conventional plant breeding techniques natural law is the deciding factor and if the marriage of specific traits/genes is to be successful, nature will decide. This keeps us, humans from making really disastrous mistakes – Cat/Dog?

Combining unrelated genetic material more often than not produces mutations and these can take place at any time with successive generations. If released into a natural ecosystem these mutations potentially will have a high degree for disaster – a cascade of mutations that would threaten the delicate biodiversity and would not be limited to a contained area

Genes do NOT exist in a protective bubble and the reactions of all the elements they interact with are very likely to produce unintended consequences with no clear means to stop, reverse or mitigate the damage

Gene Editing is still genetic modification and needs to be evaluated

Crispr Cas9 and other gene editing techniques that can be used to alter a plant, microorganism, animal or human has serious ethical questions and highly suspect consequences

• Discovering the way to alter a gene without insertion of foreign/unrelated DNA is a monumental breakthrough but is it all that proponents say it may be?

• Dramatic changes are still taking place within an organism and the potential for eradicating a pest or bug or plant or tumor comes with many questions and few answers

• Biologics have begun to help cure disease but also may cause the human body to turn on itself causing widespread organ failure – risks some are willing to take

• Eradicating a plant pest, like amaranth for instance is also a food crop for millions of people and animals around the world-not only would it be unethical to engineer its total demise it would equal genocide in many cases

• Eliminating a bug or worm in any given forest could also begin a cascade of interactions that would cause the collapse of biodiversity, again not necessarily contained to the original area

There is too much we don’t know to determine if biotechnology should be employed at any stage or point for forest health – in fact there are too many unknowns to be considering this as a path we should take

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Maybe we need to learn from our mistakes?

Real life isn’t the movies – and there is no hero riding in on a white horse with a white hat going to save us from all our mistakes

All too often we have thrown caution to the wind and did what we thought was best at the time without thinking the problem or need through.

Not only need-- there are a lot of wants that we don’t need but someone, somewhere thinks they can make it happen. Capitalism in all its glory has mowed down forests, eradicated countless species, and continues to create need where there is none and no good reason to continue

The American chestnut could have been saved except the rush to harvest every last board foot of lumber most likely destroyed trees that had a natural defense to the blight – there are still natural American chestnuts surviving in isolation-conventional breeding can work – but we need to give it time

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Other trees that are now at risk of extinction are due to the importation of foreign diseases – again globalization

The question now is should we try to save these trees. How should it be done and is it possible without causing a cascade of other negative consequences?

We need to step back and yes, this might mean that we have lost a tree species.

The forests where the American chestnut tree once dominated have recovered from that loss. Oak, hickory, walnut and other trees took its place and the animals that depended on that food have adapted.

We have no confidence that the altruistic efforts taking place to restore this tree to the forests won’t be co-opted, genes stacked and patented for commercialization

What we do know is that we are stressing almost every acre of land on Mother Earth because we desire and believe we are entitled to whatever we find, wherever it may be and we will commercialize and make money – man’s greatest enemy is us

Maybe we need to learn from our mistakes?

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

How might indigenous understandings of forest health, restoration, and genetic engineering complement or challenge Western viewpoints

I can’t answer this question with any confidence but what I do know is that if scientists and researchers are truly ready to work with Indigenous Peoples and solve our collective issues then they really need to listen and follow the advice of Indigenous Peoples.

Free Prior and Informed Consent is more than giving lip service to consultation. If biotechnology / genetic engineering is proposed then the Indigenous Peoples whose forests you want to save have to be listened to and their final decision honored. Even if they refuse, then you walk away.

For far too long Western viewpoints have been forced upon us with largely disastrous results – Same Calvary different day

Our elders teach us we are only a small part of this mysterious creation that we inhabit. Mother Nature has Rights – the animals, fish, birds, plants, the rocks and streams all have rights – and when making all the choices we have over the thousands of years we have depended on and considered the viability of the lands, air, waters, Mother Earth and Father Sky

We have to make some really hard choices – and this time the consequences are global – they will be permanent and we may just have to learn to not make the same mistakes

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

Science, Technology, and Traditional Indigenous Knowledge

We have great respect and work closely with many dedicated scientists, researchers, community, and tribal peoples

Their perspectives in some cases are in direct conflict with counterparts who are funded by multi-national corporations and federal government agencies

Billions have been spent and are earmarked for future R&D at universities and colleges in the United States

Indigenous Peoples opposition is based on the evidence of past and current decisions that have rendered the lessons learned that we should factor in to future actions

Ultimately we ask that we have the opportunity and are not prevented from presenting scientific research, and the Traditional Indigenous Knowledge of our elders and medicine peoples that will allow everyone to make completely informed choices

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign

References and Links for More Information

• George W. Bush’s Healthy Forests: Reframing the Environmental DebateJacqueline Vaughn and Hanna J. Cortner – University Press of Colorado

• The Hidden Life of Trees: How they Feel, How they Communicate, Discoveries from a Secret World

Perter Wohlleben – Greystone Books Ltd. Vancouver/Berkeley• Genetically Engineered Trees: The New Frontier of Biotechnology

Center for Food Safety - November 2013https://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/reports/2637/genetically-engineered-trees-the-new-frontier-of-biotechnology

• European Glyphosate Safety Report Copy-Pasted Monsanto Study By Lorraine Chowhttps://www.ecowatch.com/eu-glyphosate-monsanto-2485590981.html

• The World According to Monsanto - https://youtu.be/zfOSFaaLx_o• Rights of Nature & Mother Earth: Rights-Based Law for Systemic Change

http://www.ienearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/RONME-RightsBasedLaw-final-1.pdf

For much more visit: http://saveourroots.org ~ http://ienearth.org ~ http://no-red.com

Indigenous Environmental Network – Save Our Roots – Native Energy & Climate Campaign