Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish: 

“It’s too cheap, it’s too fast, there are too many people who know too much, and it’s too late to stop it.” [Robert Erwin, biogeneticist]

Disturbing story in the Washington Post this morning about the uncontrolled growth of the biotech industry and the rather horrific dangers this poses for life across the globe.  Here’s the link.  It is very long, but worth the read.

The article articulates well the ramifications of our ability now to create new viruses and other pathogens by reconstructing them from DNA bought and sold from biotech companies.  Anyone can buy them, no matter how badly-intentioned.

Some of us in the DC area remember when, just a couple weeks after the 9/11 attacks, we were hit with the still-unresolved anthrax attacks.  The post office in DC where the anthrax passed through the system killing two postal workers — that was my post office then, 5 minutes from my office.  My young staffer had taken our newsletter there (from the no-longer-extant Religious Task Force on Central America and Mexico) during the very days when the powder was in the air at the bulk mail facility, so he had to go on Cipro, the antibiotic of choice, for 45 days, just in case.

Following on the 9/11 tragedy, we were a bit shaken in those days.

Anyway, perhaps that is why I found this odd tingle going down my spine as I read this article.  It is amazing to me that this industry proceeds apace — a very rapid and accelerating pace — without any government regulation, without enforceable laws and rules about this lethal stuff that can be created in a high school lab.

We are messing with profound stuff here, stuff that could not only be bad news in the hands of terrorists or scary unstable individuals, but have enormous repercussions for the bio-systems of this earth.  The positive promises of this industry — to find cures for diseases, etc. — must not excuse it from enforceable regulation.

It is also clear that regulating this only within the US solves nothing.  We are again dealing with an issue that begs the need for international governance, a new kind of global community, cooperating together to address these unprecedented challenges that none of our institutions were ever designed to address.  This will take a lot of international cooperation, a willingness to move beyond the nation-state model of world organization (which is collapsing now in any case), and beyond the market mentality that would leave these life-and-death questions to the mercy of profit-making coporations.

“The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man,” said one study quoted in the WP article.

During this mind-numbing heat wave, with fires raging in the west, the Amazon rainforest near death, London and other European cities wilting, glaciers melting – something else to worry about.  Does it bother you that your government is not dealing with this stuff in any substantive way?