Another view: how to start an argument with friends

You’ll already have noticed that there are nothing like the numbers of house sparrows in your garden, or the street outside, as there used to be. In fact, where once the sparrow was the most ubiquitous bird in our city, now there are probably none. On the other hand, I quite often look out of my study window and see a flash of green accompanied by a squawk and realise a parrot is alighting in the tree outside. Not long ago I counted nine green parakeets simultaneously on the windowsill of the flats at the bottom of the garden. You didn’t get that in the good old days. Not in London, anyway.

This, ecologists will tell you, is because we are in the middle of the Sixth Mass Extinction. And this time, unlike the previous five (if you’ve forgotten them, that’s because they took place over the past 600 million years), is entirely our own fault. According to experts, and their computer projections, we are losing something between 24 and 150 animal species every single day, mostly through deforestation. I’m not sure how accurate those experts’ computers are, partially because there’s a big difference between 24 and 150, but mostly because we’ve only actually been able to document 800 extinctions over 400 years, out of nearly two million recorded species. And I’m not sure how those figures square with the stats from the WWF, who tell us we’ve lost 58 per cent of our wildlife – fish, mammals, birds, reptiles – since 1970, and it’s because we’re destroying their habitat.

Then there are the bees, without whom, we are always being told, the human race only survive for four more years.

Thankfully they’re thriving in London, at least. My next-door neighbours have two hives and I’m still haunted by the time their occupants swarmed in the tree above the chair where I was quietly drinking a glass of wine and reading a book at the bottom of the garden. First I became aware of a low-key hum that grew increasingly loud, then I sensed it becoming darker even though the sun was out, and then I glanced up and saw a solid mass of bees five or six foot across, about 15 foot above my head... and then I sprinted for the house.

The neighbours burst into tears when I told them about it, because this apparently meant that the bees had left the hive and would never come back, but they got into their white beekeeping costumes and climbed a ladder, and spread a white sheet beneath my tree and shook it until the entire swarm fell to the ground before marching in an orderly fashion into a box (the bees, not the neighbours) which they took away with them. It really was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen – and nobody got stung.

Anyway, while the bees are thriving here in the capital - and eating the honey of your local bees prevents allergies and boosts immunity - they’re not doing so well everywhere else. There have been widespread cases of colony collapse in America and mainland Europe, caused by pesticides. Which brings me, finally, back to GMOs, which really bring out the prejudice in people. I started out by asking one friend, who happens to be a vegan, what he thought of them in general and he immediately replied, just as I expected him too, that he was against them. When I asked why, his answer was: “They’re not natural.” Conversely my son, a science student and newly-converted vegetarian, is adamant that every scare story about ‘Frankenfoods’ is nonsense.

The more I looked into the subject, the more conflicting evidence I found. On the one hand, GM crops can help us feed poor people in far-flung parts of the world by making food cheaper, with a longer shelf life, and more effective farming techniques can help the environment by reducing pollution, emissions and pesticide use. On the other hand, say opponents, allergies are on the rise, and antibiotics are less effective, both as direct results of GMOs, and genes can migrate to other species, resulting in potentially frightening new strains.

We’ve already seen weeds becoming resistant to herbicides, so while the use of pesticides is going down, which is great, the use of strong new herbicides to combat the strong new super-weeds is going up. Which is not so great. And of course, if the insects disappear, then the creatures that depend on them for food – like our house sparrows – start to disappear too. In one major study at more than 100 nature reserves across western Europe, the number of insects has declined by a staggering 80 per cent over the past 25 years. Which cannot be good news for anyone, even though most of us don’t like insects (apart from ladybirds; everyone likes a ladybird).

So who or what’s to blame? In a word: us. We’re building more buildings, which take away the insects’ habitat. We’re lighting those buildings, which disrupts the mating patterns of nocturnal insects. We’re planting different crops, and spraying them with insecticides (or using insect-resistant GM seeds) which diminishes the insects’ food supply. And, if they do ingest the poison, that affects their navigation and communication. Hence the bee problem.

Worst of all, we’re destroying our topsoil through a combination of global warming, intensive chemical-heavy farming and deforestation (causing erosion) – so much so that, unless we take urgent action – which seems unlikely with an eco-averse Trump and his fellow climate change deniers in the White House – by 2050 we will have lost three quarters of our arable and productive land per person in the space of just 90 years. And that in turn leads to further global warming, accelerating the whole process.

So theres’s all that. But then there’s the counter-argument that GM crops enable us to eat tastier, riper, cheaper, longer-lasting fruit and vegetables. And the crucial one that they help us feed people in the poorest parts of the world, where someone (usually a child) still dies of hunger every ten seconds. Which is an abiding scandal when we’re producing more than enough food to feed every single person on Planet Earth.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about for the past 24 hours. I’m not sure what I expected when I first asked what people thought about GMOs but I certainly know more now about the subject than I did 24 hours ago, which can only be a good thing. And I’ve learned that, like pretty much everything else in our binary times where everyone’s ‘for’ or ‘against’ everything, there are no simple answers.