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Perhaps nothing symbolizes the decline of the
New Yorker magazine more than the hatchet job on Vandana Shiva that appears in the latest issue. Written by Michael Specter, the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress”, the article is a meretricious defense of genetically modified organisms (GMO) relying on one dodgy source after another. This is the same magazine whose reputation was at its apex when Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking articles on DDT appeared in 1962. If DDT was once a symbol of the destructive power of chemicals on the environment, GMO amounts to one of the biggest threats to food production today. It threatens to enrich powerful multinational corporations while turning farmers into indentured servants through the use of patented seeds. Furthermore, it threatens to unleash potentially calamitous results in farmlands through unintended mutations.

Specter represents himself as a defender of science against irrational thinking. Since many activists regard Vandana Shiva as grounded in science, it is essential that he discredit her. For example, he mentions a book jacket that refers to her as “one of India’s leading physicists”. But when he asked her if she ever worked as a physicist, she invited him to “search for the answer on Google”. He asserts that he found nothing and furthermore that no such position was listed in her biography. Not that I would ever take an inflated publicity blurb that seriously to begin with (having read one too many of those for Slavoj Žižek), I wondered what being a physicist would have to do with GMO in the first place. Is a degree in particle physics necessary for understanding the transformation of vast portions of the Gulf of Mexico into a dead zone because of fertilizer-enriched algae?

Specter is a defender of the Green Revolution, a technology-based approach to farming that Norman Borlaug developed in the 1940s and that serves as one of the pillars of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Like Specter, the Gates Foundation sees GMO as the latest and greatest tool for carrying the Green Revolution forward.

To buttress his case for the Green Revolution, Specter calls upon a couple of witnesses to testify. They are a husband and wife team consisting of Raoul Adamchack, the former president of California Certified Organic Farmers, and Pamela Ronald, a professor of plant genetics at UC Davis. Without the Green Revolution, the planet would be “smaller, poorer, and far more agrarian”, according to Adamchack. Hmm. That’s the first time I ever heard “agrarian” used as a swear word but let’s leave that aside for the moment.