DEFENDING FOOD A Talk With Dr. Wes Jackson

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MacArthur Fellow Dr. Wes Jackson lent some valuable time to the MOTHER staff to talk about getting back to the land and the role agriculture is taking in the community. Having spent the past 25 years in Kansas directing research at the Land Institute, Dr. Jackson has become a leading expert not only on sustainable agriculture, but on the culture of sustainable agriculture in what he calls a "coherent community."

Have you discovered any new crops at the Land Institute that help your sustain soil nutrients and increase nutritional value?

What we've done is work with wild species mostly for the purpose of answering the basic biological question, but now that we've nailed down [the fact] that perennialism and increased yields can go together... the next thing is to perennialize the major crops: the corn, the wheat, the sorghum, the soy beans, sunflowers and so on.

Will genetically engineered seeds make these things easier? Considering the strong reaction against genetically modified crops in places like Europe, it seems this type of advanced technology might be doing more harm than good.

Let me put it this way: I am concerned, with a lot of my friends, about the slippery slope of biotech. First of all, all slopes are slippery. Some are steeper and slicker than others. Some have sand glued to them and sideboards you can hang onto. I think the danger is minimal when you're talking about the movement of genes within plant families (like in the grass family or the legume family) in such a way that will speed up breeding. I do think it's improper to move genes over long evolutionary distances, from bacteria and viruses. I mean, we can probably get away with it for a while. And that's the problem. You get away with it for a while and it works for a while. So rather than take an absolutely fundamentalist stance on it, I leave it open and am of course concerned about the slippery slope.