Genetically engineered trees have been planted in American forests
The back-story and some reflections on a wild tree story
Here’s some news I can almost guarantee you haven’t read before: genetically engineered trees have been planted in an American forest, in a long-shot bid to soak up huge amounts of carbon dioxide and cool the planet. I broke the story in an exclusive for the New York Times, with awesome photos from Atlanta-based photographer Audra Melton.
I first covered genetically modified trees several years ago, when I wrote about a chestnut tree that had been engineered to tolerate a devastating blight that all but wiped out the American chestnut a century ago. The engineered chestnut, already several decades in the making, was about to be submitted to a federal review process. That review began in 2020 and three years later it’s still ongoing. Outside of a few carefully regulated research plots, no genetically modified chestnut trees have been planted.
So I was surprised — a bit startled, even — to learn recently that a four-year-old biotech startup in California named Living Carbon was planning to plant thousands of genetically modified trees on private land with no regulatory oversight. To be clear, this is perfectly legal. But it revealed to me how arbitrary and inconsistent our federal GMO regulatory apparatus can be — and that we may be entering a new era in which genetically engineered life becomes far more common and biotech seeps into places we never would have expected to see it. (I understand that some recent changes may have made the GMO regulatory system more logical and consistent going forward.)
As I wrote the story, I thought a lot about the journey that GMOs have taken in my lifetime. I first remember hearing about them in an undergraduate biology course I took in the fall of 2000, when they were still fairly new. The professor gave them a pretty positive review, as most professional biologists do, although to his credit he presented the anti-GMO position, represented by a Greenpeace ad featuring a Frankensteined Tony the Tiger on a faux Frosted Flakes box. But I must have heard about GMOs prior to that, because I remember already knowing that I was against them. That said, I also recall that I couldn’t really explain why.
I spent several years after college working on organic farms among people for whom GMOs were about as popular as, say, toxic waste or intestinal parasites. But in the intervening years, it has become pretty clear that for the most part, neither the feared health impacts of GMOs nor their much-ballyhooed benefits have materialized. They have been implicated in some environmental problems such as the dramatic reduction in milkweed and monarch butterfly populations in the Midwest, although there’s debate around how much of a role GMOs per se have played. They’ve also boosted American commodity crop yields to unprecedented levels. Unfortunately, those commodities are more likely to feed cars and cattle than people, so GMOs so far have done little to reduce hunger or malnutrition. Some people think a new wave of GMOs could start to deliver some of those long-promised benefits.
Meanwhile, the American public seems to have largely, if grudgingly, accepted them. While I’d be surprised to hear someone working for Greenpeace say anything positive about GMOs, I don’t see any major environmental group spending time or resources opposing them anymore. We’ve all eaten plenty of GMOs by now, and we’re not all getting sick. My impression is that most people don’t want the fact that their food contains genetically modified ingredients to be staring them in the face, but as long as this fact is sufficiently obscured, consumers don’t really care that much. Genetic engineering itself is also evolving with innovations like Crispr, and the lines between engineering and the conventional breeding that humans have practiced for millennia are increasingly blurring.
What this means for genetically engineered trees is unclear. On the one hand, the poplar trees that Living Carbon is planting don’t have the visceral connection to our bodies that food does, so they may elicit less of a reaction. On the other hand, forests serve, for many of us, as a refuge from the technological human world, and biotechnology in forests may feel like an unwelcome incursion into that refuge. For some, that could be more objectionable than GMOs’ presence in the already artificial realm of agriculture.
At least one small environmental organization, the Global Justice Ecology Project, publicly opposes GMO trees. And while it’s far from a well-funded, polished juggernaut like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, the organization apparently has some reach. When the engineered chestnut went out for public comment as part of the federal review process, large numbers of people wrote in opposing it, many citing the GJEP. Many other people also wrote in supporting the tree; overall it garnered hundreds if not thousands of comments on both sides. I suspect the tree will ultimately be approved, though possibly with some restrictions.
Living Carbon, being a Silicon Valley creation rather than an academic project like the chestnut effort, seems to be taking more of a “move fast and break things” approach reminiscent of the likes of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The companies’ scientists have introduced a genetic hack to make the process of photosynthesis more efficient, so their trees should, in theory, produce more useful sugars and starches — and, ultimately, wood — from a given amount of solar energy. They claim that these “enhanced” trees will grow wood faster and soak up more carbon dioxide than normal trees, which seems plausible, but there’s no guarantee — many factors beyond the rate of photosynthesis determine how fast trees grow. As one expert put it to me, the company’s leaders are making bold claims based on limited data — just one non-peer-reviewed greenhouse trial, at least in terms of what’s been made public.
To convince scientists who have seen many promising early-stage results come to naught that their trees are anything special, Living Carbon will need at minimum several years of data from trees grown outdoors. But they’ve already convinced some venture capitalists and at least one landowner to take a chance. And in a world with lots of wealthy people and organizations looking to fund climate change solutions (or at least activities that look like they could be climate change solutions), that’s apparently enough to get started.
I suppose it was inevitable that people would try to turn trees into technological solutions to our environmental challenges, just as we’ve done with so many other pieces of the natural world. In a best-case scenario, one could imagine plantations of carbon-gobbling, wood-producing trees living in future harmony alongside natural forests that are freed from the pressure of human use. Of course, things in the real world rarely work as cleanly as in a startup’s business plan.
At least two things are certain: We’ve never seen anything like this, and the next few years will be very interesting.
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