A growing sector of climate tech and green investments is concerned with what can best be described as “upgrading nature”. Things like ‘better’ insects, ‘improved’ trees, ‘enhanced’ wood, ‘supercharged’ vegetables, ‘superior’ algae, ‘more efficient’ cows.
The separation of humans and nature, known as dualism, which is a key enabler of capitalism’s exploitative relationship with the world, reaches its peak in the idea of patenting a life-form and owning, legally, its very existence on an evolutionary level. For the purpose, of course, of making an outsized profit.
It may sound preposterous but its run-of-the-mill in climate tech circles. Despite all the positioning about the importance of nature-based solutions, regeneration, and healing almost 12% of the 300+ climate tech investments I am investigating are busy upgrading nature.
I am not talking here about approaches like rice intensification, precision fermentation, selective breeding, or enhanced weathering which are focused on scaling or speeding up a natural process through human intervention.
I am referring to the companies looking at nature and coming to the conclusion that it is just not good enough.
So what’s the problem here?
There is of course the philosophical and ethical issue around whether it is morally acceptable to ‘play God’ (or whether such a characterisation is accurate in the first place) but much has been written by better people on that angle.
Instead I want to look at the merits of these ideas and their potential to mitigate or reverse the climate- and poly- crises.
Monsanto
Not everyone will immediately know why being a “New Monsanto” is not something to aspire to. Especially since it has fallen out of the public’s eye as of 2018 when its acquisition was completed by Bayer.
Monsanto’s brutal legacy can be characterised by three things: environmental catastrophe, murder, and financial failure.
The company’s invention and/or large-scale dissemination of DDT (non-selective insecticide), RoundUp (a non-selective herbicide), and GMO staple crops directly caused massive amounts of biodiversity loss, desertification, low-nutrient foods, vastly increased GHG emissions, and loss of income for millions of smallholders.
The actions and products of Monsanto directly led to tens of thousands of farmer suicides, especially in India, due to crushing debt and loss of livelihood. This I class as murder.
Finally, despite all this, the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer has been classed as one of the worst corporate deals in history. So ultimately, even by corporate capitalist standards, the company was a failure.
Underpinning all of these things were massive amounts of lobbying, expensive marketing campaigns, legal action, and influence on regulation under the guise of “feeding the growing global population”.
It’s also worth noting that Monsanto is not the only “bad guy” here. They were just one of the worst but they’re not an exception.
Problem #1: Extractive Setup
Like Monsanto, the “nature upgrade” companies that are sprouting, seem to be for the most part organised around the same profit motive that drives extractive business practices.
By extractive what I mean in practical terms is that the growth of the company and the acquisition of wealth take precedence over any other motive, including both human rights and the thriving of nature. This means that inevitably, their financial performance will trump the climate performance goals.
Unless the company is fundamentally organised in a way that will maintain an ongoing and true balance between growth and regeneration there is no guarantee that that balance will be maintained. In fact the likelihood, based on history, is that it will not be maintained.
If the companies being funded are to scale and grow without becoming extractive they need to adopt from the get go at least some inbuilt infrastructure that prevents them from going rogue.
Being a BCorp, steward-owned, community-owned, a co-operative, a future guardian, or a public benefit corporation are good starting points.
Problem #2: Enclosure and Monoculture
Let’s take the example of Climate Crop that “upgrades plants” to be more efficient through a “proprietary gene”. Their pitch is that they:
increase the daily starch storage in plant leaves using a simple, non-GMO, precisely targeted gene edit. This improves photosynthetic efficiency in an indirect but powerful way, enabling plants to perform better.
Skating around the abhorrent idea that a gene can be patented in the first place, what are the implications of this technology?
First we have the enclosure of knowledge and technology. To be profitable and scalable with such tech as a targeted gene edit the incentive is to provide farmers with plants or seeds that will not self-propagate or from which seeds cannot be collected. This then makes no contribution to improving farmer independence and self-reliance.
In turn we also have the effect of rigidly entrenching the current harmful practices of industrial agriculture and monoculture. Even their website marketing makes no secret of this with a variety of picture showcasing “successful” mono-cropping:
Add to this the idea that to produce and distribute the seeds or seedlings containing this proprietary gene edit requires even more monoculture and industrialisation in the first place.
Finally, because the root causes of our failing agricultural systems are not being addressed by this solution, it is inevitable that this approach is just a plaster. The soils will carry on being degraded, the biodiversity will carry on being extinguished, the water will carry on being depleted, and resources will carry on being applied to producing artificial and harmful fertilisers.
These “enhanced” crops will find themselves eventually failing anyway.
Problem #3: Precautionary Principles and Risk Assessment
The precautionary principle is hotly debated. The basics of it state that we should exercise “caution, pausing and review before leaping into new innovations that may prove disastrous” (Wikipedia). Critics argue that it stifles innovation and progress.
Extreme views on the matter are unhelpful. Sometimes a technology is worth the risk, and sometimes not. That comes down to a case-by-case basis but the common thread has to be a risk assessment. Only by understanding the risks can you make a call on how precautionary you need to be.
This is not new. There are well-understood methods of running environmental impact assessments but I see very few of these taking place with the focus instead being purely on GHG emission avoidance or capture.
As an example lets look at PhycoBloom. They genetically engineer improved algae that
will continually release oils into their surroundings. This makes the oil easier to collect without damaging the algae themselves. Genetic engineering allows our algae to produce much more oil in less time, at a far lower cost than existing options. We will make algae oil that is cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.
It sounds great and has clear potential to replace fossil fuels. But what happens when algae that don’t die, reproduce quickly, and continually release oil end up in (warming) rivers, lakes, and oceans? What are the effects of that on biodiversity, fishing stocks, acidification, and livelihoods?
Downgrading Humans
Ultimately my problem with these kinds of approaches is that they are not human-centric. And by extension also not planet-centric. They are profit-centric aimed primarily at maintaining the current agricultural and economic systems, but possibly slightly less bad. Unchecked, they are just the seedlings a few more Monsantos.
Photo by Mike Marrah on Unsplash
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