Harvest of Fear

Seeds of doubt: Author Richard Heinberg thinks genetically engineered crops may yield a grim harvest.

Author Richard Heinberg takes a skeptical look at genetic engineering

By Patrick Sullivan

UNDER COVER of darkness, a small group of people enters the quiet cornfield and goes to work among the rows, using their hands and feet to pull up crops and stomp them flat. When the intruders finish their task and depart, they have ensured that the harvest isn’t going to match the expectations of the farmer–who is, as it happens, a plant biologist at the University of California at Berkeley.

The crop stompers also have fired the first shot in what may be a newly confrontational battle against genetic engineering in the United States.

For this is no ordinary cornfield. Before the crops were destroyed, the Berkeley location was the site of a university experiment in genetically altered corn, part of an attempt to learn which genes are responsible for corn’s nutritional traits so that researchers can eventually produce sweeter or more protein-rich plants.

The crop-stomping incident, which took place earlier this month, underscores the strong reactions provoked by genetic engineering, the controversial high-tech practice of manipulating DNA to, among other things, create new varieties of plants and animals. While supporters call it the best hope to end world hunger, opponents say genetic engineering poses an ominous threat to human health and the environment.

The group of crop-pulling protesters–which reportedly included activists from Sonoma County–was inspired by environmentalists in Europe, who have long employed such tactics to dramatize their opposition to what they call “Frankenfoods.” According to some observers, the Berkeley crop pull and two other recent actions targeting genetically modified commercial cornfields in the Central Valley may be the first time these tactics have been employed in the United States.

And it won’t be the last, according to Richard Heinberg. The 48-year-old Santa Rosa author, whose latest book, Cloning the Buddha: The Moral Impact of Biotechnology, a radical critique of genetic engineering due out in late August, was not involved in the Berkeley action. But Heinberg–who will read from his book on Aug. 26 at New College of California in Santa Rosa–supports such tactics because he fears that Americans are rapidly turning their farms and supermarkets over to genetically modified foods before anyone determines what dangers those products may pose.

While Heinberg’s book paints a grim picture of the power and momentum of the biotech industry, the author says the tide may now be turning. Americans, Heinberg says, are waking up to the dangers of genetic engineering. In part, that’s owing to new scientific evidence about the unexpected side effects of the technology, including a recent Cornell University study that found that pollen from a widely planted variety of genetically modified corn kills the larvae of the monarch butterfly, an important pollinator.

Still, despite growing public awareness, Heinberg–who is a faculty member at New College of California–argues that the urgency of the situation demands such radical actions as crop pulls–and such radical critiques as the one made in his book.

“This process [of implementing biotechnology] is moving very quickly, and I’m convinced that the likelihood of serious unintended consequences is very large,” Heinberg says. “I think in a situation like that, somebody does need to yell fire in a crowded theater, because there really is a fire.”

MANY AMERICANS don’t realize how deeply biotechnology already touches their lives. The United States now grows an estimated 75 million acres of genetically modified crops. Roughly 60 percent of the processed foods sold in America contain genetically engineered ingredients. But the average consumer doesn’t know that, in part because no labeling is required for such food–a fact that looms large in Heinberg’s book, which calls for legislation mandating the clear labeling of altered ingredients.

Of course, such measures have been proposed before, but so far both government regulators and the biotech industry have strenuously resisted. That’s partly because many polls show that a large percentage of Americans would refuse to consume food they knew to be genetically engineered, so putting such a label on a product could bankrupt a company.

Some defenders of biotech also argue that there’s no good reason for labeling because genetic engineering is, in one sense, nothing new. After all, humans have been breeding plants and animals to get desirable characteristics for thousands of years.

Genetic engineering, some supporters say, is simply a high-tech version of that traditional process.

But Heinberg and many others argue that such modern techniques as cloning and gene splicing allow scientists to tinker with organisms in fundamentally new ways to produce, as Heinberg puts it in Cloning the Buddha, “genetic changes that would never occur in the wild or through the most intensive breeding.”

The results of that process can be both impressive and terrifying. On the one hand, scientists are producing crops that grow quickly and resist pests. On the other, genetic engineering sometimes produces unexpected side effects that range from the inconvenient–like food allergies–to the potentially catastrophic.

In his book, Heinberg tells the alarming story of an attempt in the early 1990s to genetically redesign Klebsiella planticola, a common soil bacteria, to break down lumber companies’ wood waste into useful fertilizer.

The new organism was apparently on the fast track to EPA approval before an alert Oregon microbiologist determined that it was both lethal to plants and extremely competitive. If it had been introduced into the general environment, the new strain of Klebsiella might have spread quickly and wreaked ecological devastation, turning forests and fields into dead sludge.

HEINBERG USES such incidents to buttress his contention that Americans must work quickly to learn everything they can about genetic engineering in order to come to grips with the urgent practical and moral issues that surround it.

“This technology is poised to reshape our lives at very basic levels: the food we eat, how we reproduce, what our children look like,” Heinberg says. “These are pretty important issues, and we really can’t just leave them to the experts, because the experts tend to be very highly trained in very narrow fields of knowledge. They really aren’t equipped to make the kind of basic ethical judgments that affect all of society.”

Cloning the Buddha goes straight to what its author sees as the root of the problem–the mechanistic scientific worldview that spawned biotech in the first place. In an era where new technology presents us with difficult choices, Heinberg believes that we need a new ethic–and even a new spirituality–to sort out right from wrong.

For an example of these sticky dilemmas, Heinberg turns away from agriculture to offer his readers the difficult issue of genetic therapy, which may soon be used to alter the DNA of human gametes or fertilized eggs to prevent some diseases.

“Well, on a micro level, yes of course, anybody would have to agree with that,” Heinberg says. “But how do you define a disease? Tay-Sachs? Sickle cell anemia? Sure, everybody would agree that those are diseases. How about shortness? Or male-pattern baldness? Are these diseases that would require genetic intervention?

“Where do you stop?”

At a time when, according to Heinberg, a basic genetic engineering laboratory can be put together for as little as $20,000, gene therapy is just one of the difficult issues likely to confront Americans in the near future.

The author hopes we’ll be ready.

“It’s entirely possible that genetic engineering could have a wide range of ethically acceptable uses once we have put it under some kind of public control and scrutiny,” Heinberg says. “What I’m saying is that we haven’t had that conversation yet. We haven’t thought through the issues.”

A three-part series on biotechnology begins at New College of California on Thursday, Aug. 26, with Heinberg’s reading. The series continues on Sept. 28, with a lecture by Dr. Ignacio Chapela, chair of the Microbial Biology Department at UC Berkeley. Finally, on Oct. 26, Britt Bailey, co-author of Against the Grain: The Dangers of Genetic Engineering of Crops, lectures. All events begin at 7:30 p.m. at 99 Sixth St., Santa Rosa. A $5 donation is requested. For details, call 568-0112.

From the August 19-26, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Rich Harvest

MICHAEL AMSLER

School-garden projects are blossoming all over

By Paula Harris

IT’S AUGUST and La Tercera Elementary School in Petaluma is closed for summer vacation, but the campus garden is bustling with activity this mellow morning. Several students and parents scurry among the tall golden sunflowers in the butterfly and hummingbird habitat area, intent on their various tasks: deadheading plants, collecting seeds, watering the herbs, and amending the soil.

“I love it here,” says Becky Dunaway, an outgoing 8-year-old with long dark hair and a quick smile, as she digs in the dirt. “We plant seeds and watch the plants grow. If they’re vegetables, we get to eat them. If they’re flowers, we get to take the seeds and plant them and watch them grow all over again.”

These families are “baby-sitting” the school garden, which organizers say has in two years gone from a committee-based concept to an award-winning community project, which is the pride of students and parents alike.

This year, La Tercera was one of 300 schools nationally to win the National Gardening Association Youth Garden Grant. The project is funded by donations from county businesses.

“Our garden is in the lush and blooming shape it’s in right now because 20 families volunteer to come in and care for it during the summer vacation,” says Denise Ward, a parent volunteer who became school garden director when the project began in 1997.

Ward says all the school’s students, grades K-6, help care for the garden and learn valuable lessons from doing so, and she laments the lack of state dollars for such projects. “The state should supply more funding and understand that in nurturing and caring for things, children are less likely to hurt themselves or the world around them,” she says. “Your mind is in a different place when you’re gardening and growing something.”

TINA POLES, school-garden teacher trainer for the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, which helps public and private schools in Sonoma County start and sustain organic gardens, agrees. “The school garden is a kind of a growing place that tends to lend itself to being very respectful of life and our processes, and I think children sense that,” Poles says. “In a well-done program, the garden is a place to just be. Sure, you can do lessons in it, but it’s also a place to just be and do work, move barrels of dirt, and make compost piles, and there’s an end product. It’s very concrete– you do this and things happen.

“Kids really love that–they don’t have a lot of that in their lives.”

Poles has seen transformations in students as they work on the garden projects. “It seems to calm children down who need to be calmed down, and it excites children who are passive,” she says.

In addition, Poles observes, the garden is a healing place for children who may live in a small apartment or who haven’t had much experience with nature and being outside. “[The garden] is an incredibly good antidote to too much television and too many video games,” she says. “You can’t do those things in the school garden, so in some ways you’re saved from all that stuff.”

For the past two years, the OAEC has offered a five-day residential training program for local schoolteachers and parents (of kids from preschool to high school) who are interested in creating and maintaining a school garden. A recent workshop was attended by teachers from a dozen local schools planning to add a school-garden project to their curricula.

To help nurture this growing trend, the OAEC has also established a Sonoma County School Garden Resource Network. “This links people who do horticultural work in Sonoma County with schools,” explains Poles.

The network offers technical assistance, donations of materials, and other support services. Among member organizations are the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, the Sonoma County Office of Education, the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, and Sonoma County Jail Industries.

NEXT SUMMER, the network will host a national school-garden project symposium at Sonoma State University, which will include a variety of speakers on the topic. The OAEC teacher-training program, offered twice yearly, consists of hands-on organic gardening sessions; an examination of curriculum development to see how the garden can fulfill state-mandated curricula at all grade levels (the garden is an outdoor laboratory that can provide a natural setting for integrated curricula); a course in nutrition, including a garden harvest lunch; and a course in teaching art in the garden.

Speakers from Occidental’s Harmony Elementary School, which has maintained a very successful school garden for several years, share their knowledge and ideas with the OAEC trainees. The goal is that the students should be part of the entire design process and feel total ownership of their new garden.

Intertwined throughout the program is information about fundraising for gardens and networking with the community to keep the project alive. School must often rely on grants and donations to keep the garden going. “It’s a constant struggle, but people in community have been very generous,” says Poles.

One such community member is Joan Betts, who last year handed out more than $60,000 worth of plants to local schools. As part of her Master Gardener Project at SSU, Betts operates Cinderella Nursery, a non-commercial facility near Rohnert Park. She works with companies such as Home Depot to provide schools with much-needed greenery. “We get last week’s plants,” she says with a laugh. “The reps pull everything that’s not premium off the shelves because people insist on everything in perfect bloom–so we pick ’em up.”

Betts tends to peaked plants, restores their health, and donates them to school gardens and other youth-garden projects. “Gardening is a necessary tool for learning,” says Betts. “Children need to understand the environment, and they learn through growing things. If they can respect growing things, they can better respect the land and make better environmental decisions in the future.” *

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

The Edge

Tutoring programs for college-bound teens are catching fire

By Janet Wells

KENT PINGREY didn’t want to spend six weeks of summer vacation and every Saturday hitting the books. What teenager would? But now that the 19-year-old Rohnert Park native is on his way to an engineering degree at San Diego State University, he’s glad he spent his leisure time dissecting pigs and calculating rocket-projectile vectors.

Pingrey is one of almost 1,000 local high school students each year who participate in programs through Sonoma State University that prepare them for an increasingly competitive college-admissions gauntlet.

When Pingrey was in middle school, he was recruited by Sonoma State’s Academic Talent Search, a federally funded program that offers workshops on everything from study habits to self-esteem, the Saturday Academy, tutoring, and field trips.

At Rancho Cotate High School, Pingrey chose to participate in 3-1-3, a joint program with SSU that identifies 30 at-risk ninth graders and enrolls them in rigorous college-preparatory classes. Senior year is a combination of classes at high school and at Sonoma State, which allows most participants to then complete their college degree in three years.

“The program made it so much easier here,” Pingrey says of his first full year at SSU. “I already had a couple of classes under my belt and knew my way around. Some students when they come in, they don’t really even know how to take notes.

“The real benefit is that they make sure you’re on track, that you’re fulfilling the requirements and your grades are good,” adds Pingrey, who has transferred to San Diego State for the fall.

In addition to intensive academic tracking, SSU’s pre-college academic development program has 50 tutors logging more than 12,000 hours helping students at public high schools around the county.

Pingrey, self-assured and motivated, didn’t bother with academic tutors until his senior year, when he was taking calculus at SSU.

“Then I was in there every day,” he says.

THESE DAYS, fulfilling the high school graduation requirements isn’t enough for students who want to go to college. Even good grades and decent SAT scores don’t guarantee admission. To help their chances, students now do summer internships, play sports, and perform community services to show leadership qualities. They take honors courses to boost their grade-point averages. And to show that they can stand up to academic challenge, they participate in pre-college programs like those at SSU.

“It used to be that college was for kids with a lot of brains who could get scholarships or those who could afford it. Historically, it was the rich person’s privilege,” says Gloria Miller, director of pre-college programs at Sonoma State University. “People have recognized that pretty much without a college degree you don’t get a chance at the better-earning jobs. Now people are better off as a whole economically, so college is a possibility for many more people.

“You wouldn’t think with us being in the backwater of Sonoma County we’d be competitive,” Miller adds. “We are.”

Sonoma State, with about 6,000 students, accepts 80 percent of its applicants. More than half of those have a grade-point average of 3.0 or better, according to the National College Board website. San Francisco State University accepts 69 percent of its applicants, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the most competitive state university, takes only 38 percent of those applying. Then there are the really tough schools, like the University of California at Berkeley, which accepts just 31 percent of its applicants, most of whom have 4.0 grade-point averages or better.

By comparison, Stanford University accepts 15 percent of applicants, and Harvard just 13 percent.

KARLA MARROQUIN’S parents hoped that she would go to college, but as recent immigrants from El Salvador, they didn’t speak English and had no idea how to begin to maneuver their 8-year-old daughter through the system. Sonoma State’s academic-talent-search staffers found her in seventh grade and steered her into Upward Bound, a four-year program for low-income high school students who are the first in their family to pursue a college degree.

As part of Upward Bound, Marroquin went to summer school at SSU, enrolled in the Saturday Academy, and attended tutoring sessions every Wednesday after school.

“You grew up in the program. Every Saturday we’d talk, kind of like a support group,” she says. “There was more support than in high school. The [high school guidance] counselor put me in English as a Second Language classes automatically. The Upward Bound staff went around and put me in college prep classes instead.”

Two years ago, Marroquin graduated from Casa Grande High School in Petaluma with a 3.66 GPA, heading in a very different direction from her friends.

“They were going to go to work when out of high school,” says the 19-year-old SSU sophomore, who plans on majoring in economics and going into international relations.

“Most of my friends got pregnant, got married. They have different ambitions than I do now.”

For more information on Sonoma State University’s pre-college programs, call 664-2428.

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

On Course

MICHAEL AMSLER

Sonoma County charter schools are a bold experiment in education

By David Templeton

WHEN THE UNASSUMING double doors of Sonoma Charter School first swung open, back in the fall of 1993, the event was viewed by local bureaucrats and education watchdogs as the start of a worthy, if controversial, experiment. As one of California’s first charter schools–created as an alternative to a public school system that, according to charter-school advocates, has become inefficient, outdated, and unbending–everyone involved knew that this ambitious K-8 school out on Sonoma Highway would be the focus of much public scrutiny.

To an extremely focused and determined core of parents and educators, however–most of whose students would be attending the brand-new school–that first day of classes was more than just Day One of some educational “experiment.”

To them, it was nothing short of a dream come true.

“I’m constantly blown away by the things these parents have accomplished,” enthuses Roger Frost, principal of Sonoma Charter School, now officially the oldest operating charter school in the county. Aside from all the pre-legislation letter-writing and petition signing, Frost mentions fundraising efforts, school-wide painting parties, rotating volunteers for lawn-cutting and landscaping, and daily food service.

Parents even sit in when new teachers are being interviewed.

Though it may have been the passage of the 1992 California Charter Schools Act that made charter schools legally possible, it is the parents and teachers that made it happen to begin with. And it’s those same parents and teachers that continue to make things happen, as California’s charter-school program enters its sixth year. “The big majority of charter schools are founded by families that are seriously seeking a different educational option,” Frost says, “a program they can have some control over. Charter-school parents tend to be very involved.”

Indeed. Seven years after the charter-school bill passed, with nearly 200 such schools now up-and-running in the state (including 10 in Sonoma County alone, with two new ones opening doors this fall), it is clear that a high level of parent-teacher involvement is pretty much typical of the ever-growing charter-school movement.

Not that there is any such thing as a “typical charter school.”

“The whole theory behind charter schools is to generate new and innovative techniques and models of learning,” explains Colin Miller of the California Department of Education. As examples, he cites “back-to-basics” charter schools, arts-based schools that combine academic studies with emphasis on performance and fine art, and bilingual immersion schools. There are charter schools that include religious teachings, schools that take place outdoors or in museums, schools that combine classroom learning with large amounts of homeschooling, and schools that aim to help at-risk children or those with various learning blocks or substance-abuse issues (Marin County’s Sobriety High School, for instance, offers a curriculum involving 12-step meetings and routine urine tests).

“To try and lump all these schools together,” says Miller, “and to say that they are all similar, or that they are all intended to accomplish the same thing, is just impossible.”

AT A CROWDED luncheon in June, Ray Carlson–head of the board of directors for the award-winning, non-profit Kid Street Theater, in Santa Rosa–stood up before a packed room of supporters to announce that the innovative arts-therapy program had won approval for charter-school status. After several years of operating as an after-school and summertime program for at-risk children, the highly successful program has become Sonoma County’s newest charter school.

According to Carlson, it’s not a moment too soon.

“So far, most charter schools have served an upper-middle-class segment of the population,” explains Rose Haynes, Kid Street’s charter-school administrator, pointing out that the new school, which officially opens Aug. 30, will serve a distinctly less advantaged group of children: homeless kids, those in shelters, children who’ve seen severe abuse. “Most of the kids who will be coming to us literally don’t know how to learn,” she says. “The circumstances of their lives have been focused purely on survival, not learning. Our goal at Kid Street Charter School is to create a loving and caring environment so that our students can become learners.”

On the other hand, a charter school can help save existing school programs threatened by changing social and political tides. Ginger Dale is the principal of Cali Calmecac, an award-winning bilingual immersion school, grades K-8, that was a Windsor district public school until last year, when it transformed into a charter school to avoid being shut down by the anti-bilingual Unz initiative. Now that Cali Calmecac has been chartered, Dale has seen a dramatic increase in interest from parents outside the Windsor school district.

“A lot of parents evidently want their kids to be bilingual,” she says. The change, she says, has been a positive one. “Now that we’re a charter school, there’s a sense among the parents and teachers that everyone has more say in school matters–and everyone’s excited by that. We haven’t made any big changes yet, but there’s a sense of great potential, as everyone is looking at what we want from our school in the future.”

But the future of the charter system is uncertain. While parents rave about this newfound sense of participation in their children’s education, politicians concerned with such issues know that there’s more to an effective education than having happy parents. At some point, academic standards have to come into play.

“Charter schools still need to prove themselves as an effective alternative to public schools,” insists Assemblywoman Virginia Strom-Martin, D-Duncans Mills, a former elementary school teacher. “For now, the jury is still out.”

She admits that charter schools are certainly popular–to accommodate this popularity, the state Assembly has just passed legislation that will allow up to 100 new charter schools per year. But she is far from convinced that they are any better, academically, than public schools.

A recent state report, while inconclusive, found no evidence that the charter schools are academically superior to their traditional counterparts. “I basically think charter schools are fine,” continues Strom-Martin. “But I’m concerned that charter schools might be seen as some magical educational panacea. People see charters as the only alternative to problems within the public school system, but we can still do a lot of creative things within the existing structure. Teachers in public schools are not as ‘hamstrung’ as charter-school advocates believe.”

UNFORTUNATELY, the very diversity and academic range of charter schools that make them so appealing also make them difficult to evaluate, and make their performance nearly impossible to compare to that of public schools. Academically, it’s an apples-and-oranges situation. As Miller points out, “Not all charter schools are going for academic excellence. If a school is designed to serve low-performing students, then their tests will show that they are performing below standard–but does that mean the school is unsuccessful? The students might, in fact, be improving. Those types of things are hard to gauge by test results.”

Assemblywoman Kerry Mazzoni, D-Novato, agrees that some would prefer the charter-school experiment to fail. “I think some charter schools are doing a good job, and some aren’t living up to the expectations their local communities had for them,” she says. “There are people who feel that charters are threatening the existence of public schools. But I’m not one of them. And the majority of the Legislature believes that charter schools are here to stay. What we want to have happen now is for those schools to work.”

Most charter-school fans, however, believe they already are working, and that what they need is to be left alone. The last thing they want is any well-meaning legislative tinkering. “After all,” says Roger Frost, “one small step can ruin something beautiful.”

From the August 12-18, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.