Stewart Brand: Bring on the GMOs Video Lecture | Shaping the Future: The New Western World - Personal Skills

you
you
well now where are you on things like
GMO foods because you know you ain't no
mom one eye and you eat them all the
time in America but I see stickers on
things now no GMO and our French cousins
are on the warpath to eliminate genetic
modification other losing your
conservationists that you believe quite
well and the conservation thusi astok
Lee that seat it's why I'm an ex
environmentalist but a stronger than
ever conservationists we have to have
sharpened that distinction for us well I
was trained as a scientist as a
biologist at Stanford back in the 50s
and biotech was just beginning to come
in at that point and we all saw that
this was the fundamentals of life were
finally going to be understood and not
only understood but be able to use to
diagnose and then treat conditions in
the real living world not only for
humans with medicine but for as we're
increasingly realizing with whole
ecosystems in terms of being able to
adjust some of these things that
invasive species cause and so on so as a
biologist I was always friggin Gmoser of
course and better agriculture is good
for the natural world because it makes
it more productive which means it uses
less of the wild lands and more the
wildlands come back and so it's like
urbanization in the sense that remember
it used to be the environmentalists were
against cities they sort of caught on
that actually cities are great because
they intensify where humans are and
right but all over the world there's now
a lot of abandoned farmland which is
instantly especially in the tropics
going back to basically forested
wilderness is that right because the
headline seems to be cutting down
forests because some subsidence farmer
wants to you know have his own land one
study that came out of the United
Nations said 50 times more trees are
growing back as second growth than are
being cut down as whoa that is I'm
really surprising
and that probably is too high a number
but that it's any multiple means that
there's no more trees coming on wires
partly being abandoned because people
can make their livelihood in a city
you're growing up as a kid on a farm the
first things you learn ideal it's a lot
of really important wonderful things you
learn but one of the things you really
learn is that farming is extremely hard
work and it's extremely boring and it is
not very well paid and so the kids have
farmers all over the world including the
US say I'm out of here dad I'm going to
town and this is a global phenomenon not
just a u.s. advanced civilization and
what had been marginal land anyway goes
immediately back to forest and then the
wildlife comes in and they're not
cutting not killing the wildlife or bush
meat anymore they're not cutting down
the trees for firewood and so you've got
its staggering it's a massive scale why