Wetlands, GMOs and Rogation Day Prayers

Last week on Earth Day, we spoke of Nature's Fortune and how businesses are prospering by making investments that enhance Nature and the environment instead of eroding them.  At the end, we made casual mention of two items that are worth more attention: built wetlands and GMOs.  There is actually a suitable church-calendar occasion for this further commentary on Nature, the upcoming Rogation Sunday and Rogation Days.  The Sunday is observed on the 6^th Sunday of Easter in the Episcopal Church calendar and the Days are the following Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday immediately before Ascension Thursday; the petition is for blessing of crops as they are planted and for the stewardship of creation.

Ways of the World has offered prayers before at this time of year, especially since our current Prayer Book commemorates industry as well as agriculture in the prayers it presents.  This year, as we googled a bit on "Rogation" – it means "asking", as in "interrogation" – we came across commentaries from priests in rural settings in Alabama and in Wyoming who worry about this shift in emphasis away from agriculture and nature, fearing that it will lure people away from their role as stewards of Nature.  Perhaps.  But as our own current lessons are teaching, we now see that we can use this occasion as a catalyst for talking about both wetlands and GMOs as they clearly represent the meeting of industry and Nature.

Why Would a Company Build a Wetland?

In 1996, Dow Chemical was pressured by regulators to do something about water pollution at its Seadrift, Texas, plant; a new wastewater-treatment facility was clearly necessary.[1]  The company's engineers began the design work for a big concrete system they estimated would cost about $40 million.  But one of them had a different idea: "build" a wetland.  This would work because as wastewater flows through such a wetland, as the EPA's website explains, "it slows down and many of the suspended solids become trapped by vegetation and settle out. Other pollutants are transformed to less soluble forms taken up by plants or become inactive.  Wetland plants also foster [the development of microorganisms, which] transform and remove pollutants from the water."[2]  The Dow version at Seadrift occupies 110 acres and treats 5 million gallons of water a day.  This "green infrastructure" cost $1.4 million, a tiny fraction of the much more involved "gray" installation.  Wildlife also like these places, so here is one instance in which man has helped Nature along in at least a couple of ways.

You've read and heard plenty about how big companies, especially chemical companies like Dow, hurt the environment.  This is an example of how they are evidently coming around on this issue.  The EPA reports[3] that there are more than 1,000 constructed wetlands in the US and 5,000 altogether around the world.  Dow also has a one at Pittsburg, California, and their enormous plant at Freeport, Texas, is becoming an experimental center for a huge project with The Nature Conservancy.  Sustainability officers at many companies are now part of the main operational management, not just offshoots of P.R. or public affairs departments.  As seen in the Seadrift example, the company's bottom line got big help from the built wetland innovation, and such cost considerations are part and parcel of these decisions.  The lower cost way was the better way.

What Good Are GMOs?

The GMO issue is trickier, since not all the science on GMOs agrees about their safety.  They have also not been handled in the most helpful way by the companies that produce them.  Here's some of what we do know.  Genetically modified plants are meant to help food production in three ways.  They are intended to make the plants more resistant to insects so less insecticide is needed, they are meant to increase resistance to viruses so plant yields are greater and they are meant to make plants more resistant to herbicides so weeds can be killed without killing the plants themselves.[4]  These are all good things.  But the chemical formulas to achieve these characteristics must be varied for each growing region according to the soil content and the weed situation in each locale.  So GMO production and distribution are more customized, leaving farmers and consumers more dependent on the individual companies making the seeds.  This has generated a kind of monopoly situation, with public emphasis often focused on the profits made by the companies over and above the benefits of the GMO plants.

There is also concern over what the genetic modifications might do to the soil and whether people might have a greater tendency to be allergic to GMOs than to un-modified plants or to have other reactions to the genes in the modified plants.  Information from the World Health Organization (WHO) assures that for GMOs traded in world markets, no additional "allergenicity" is present; they do urge caution in the use of antibiotic-resistant products in which the modified genes might get transferred to those who consume the foods, though WHO says chances of this are small.  In the main, the WHO experts inform us[5], plants sold in international markets have been found safe.

So why use these if they are questionable?  Because plant yields are indeed greater, and less chemical application, such as insect-killers and weed-killers, is needed in their production.  Being able to produce more food with less raw material will be absolutely necessary in coming decades as the world population grows, Mark Tercek of The Nature Conservancy points out, and all the more as people are lifted up out of poverty into more active lives; that's one of the main reasons he wrote the book Nature's Fortune.  Business and industry must invest in and be stewards of agriculture and nature for all of us, all 7 billion of us, to grow and prosper together.[6]

Indeed,

Almighty God, Lord of heaven and earth: We humbly pray that your gracious providence may give and preserve to our use the harvests of the land and of the seas, and may prosper all who labor to gather them, that we, who are constantly receiving good things from your hand, may always give you thanks; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

And

O merciful Creator, your hand is open wide to satisfy the needs of every living creature: Make us always thankful for your loving providence; and grant that we, remembering the account that we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of your good gifts; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

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[1] Mark R. Tercek and Jonathan S. Adams.  Nature's Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature.  New York: Basic Books. 2013.  Pp. 168ff and various Dow Chemical Company reports.  See www.dow.com.

[2] Office of Water, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  "Constructed Treatment Wetlands". http://www.epa.gov/owow/wetlands/pdf/ConstructedW.pdf .  August 2004.  Accessed April 30, 2013.

[3] Ibid.  Some of the constructed wetlands are associated with farms as well as industrial uses.

[4] World Health Organization. "20 Questions on Genetically Modified (GM) Foods".  http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publications/biotech/20questions/en/index.html .  Accessed April 30, 2013.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Tercek and Adams.  Page 3.