Mark Lynas

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  • Mark LynasWikipedia-W.svg
  • political director of CAS
  • He has dubbed the 17 EU countries that banned GMO crop cultivation of "turning against science". He dubbed them the "coalition of the ignorant".


Articles

  • Jan.17.2018: Lynas, lies, and marketing. Mark Lynas has a talent for selling himself and his wares, even if they don’t bear close inspection. Lynas's "complaint" about being accused of founding the anti-GM movement ... lying is exactly what he was accused of, by many of the leading figures in the UK's environment movement during the ‘80s, ‘90s and noughties. They were so outraged by him garnering bucket loads of publicity that a score of them issued a joint statement: "These claims of Mark Lynas's importance in GM campaigns are not true". But the real reason Lynas has devoted himself "pretty much full time to the GMO issue" is that he's being paid to do so. Before that, GM wasn’t his thing – climate change was, ... he was offered a full time position with Bill Gates' GMO PR outfit at Cornell. Gates’ so-called #Alliance for Science is in the business of hyping the benefits of GM crops, particularly for the developing world. The same guy who told his Oxford audience he wanted a GM "peace treaty" and to put an end to people calling each other shills, didn’t hesitate to call GM Watch "an industry shill for Big Organic". Lynas' work raises more questions: Why does a science group need a political director? And why would CAS choose Lynas for the role? Lynas is not a scientist but an environmental writer who rose to sudden fame after embracing GMOs, and his science has been critiqued at length by scientists, reporters and professors. GM Watch.
  • Jan.14.2018: “I’m right, so please stop arguing” Lynas is a techno-environmentalist of the Stewart Brand persuasion who has spent most of his career as a writer focusing on climate change. He has published four books over the past 14 years, the most recent arguing that "nuclear energy is essential to avoid catastrophic global warming". ... "If you are telling me that you think it is wrong to move a gene between species, that is your belief and I respect that. If you are telling me that it is dangerous, that is a question that can be resolved by science." Well, maybe. In the long run. Provided someone is prepared to do the research and can locate the funding for it. But even granting that, ethics is more complicated and important than he seems to realize. Not being actively poisonous is only the first prerequisite for approval of any food; that’s older than the human race. But the ethics of intervention in the natural world, be it directly in humans or edible crops, or indirectly by means of economic interventions or other forces, are wide-ranging and often hard to resolve. ... GM Watch.
  • May.17.2017: Shadows and mirrors: GMOs in China. Sometimes I hear scientists in the West especially those who have had their lives made difficult by anti-GMO activists say they wish things were as straightforward as they are in China, where political dissent is not tolerated and science-based development can supposedly proceed unhindered. I tell them to be careful what they wish for. The situation in China is far from simple. China’s current policies on GM crops make as little sense as those in Europe and India. It is an open secret that huge areas of illegal Bt rice and Bt corn are being grown by Chinese farmers. The reason why is obvious: they are cheaper to grow because they require less pesticide, and farmers get a higher yield because of less damage to the crop by insect pests. Periodically, however, activists and state media have collaborated in exposes of products from these illegal crops being sold in Chinese shops, which fan public fears that GMOs are poisonous. Anti-GMO sentiment is fanned by these NGO-media exposes ... Mark Lynas, Cornell Alliance for Science.


Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS)

  • Jan.22.2016: Why is Cornell University hosting a GMO propaganda campaign? Cornell, one of the world's leading academic institutions, has abandoned scientific objectivity, and instead made itself a global hub for the promotion of GM crops and food. Working with selected journalists and industry-supported academics, Cornell's so-called 'Alliance for Science' is an aggressive propaganda tool for corporate biotech and agribusiness. CAS was launched in 2014 with a $5.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and a goal to "depolarize the charged debate" about GMOs. A review of the group's materials and programs suggests that CAS is promoting GMOs using dishonest messaging and PR tactics developed by agrichemical corporations with a long history of misleading the public about science. The context CAS offers on the topic of GMOs is not in depth and comprehensive but rather highly selective and geared toward advancing the interests of the agrichemical industry. A core industry narrative is that the science on GMO safety is settled. ... Stacy Malkan, co-founder and co-director of US Right to Know, The Ecologist.

More from this article:
The report Spinning Food, which I co-authored with Kari Hamerschlag and Anna Lappé, documents how agribusiness and food industry funded groups are spending $tens of millions a year to promote misleading messages about the safety and necessity of industrial-scale, chemical-intensive, genetically engineered agriculture. The companies that profit most from this system - Monsanto, Dow, DuPont and other agrichemical giants - have repeatedly violated trust by misleading the public about science, as Gary Ruskin showed in his report Seedy Business. So they rely on front groups and third-party allies such as scientists and professors to spread their messaging for them. In Spring 2014, CAS launched a petition attacking my group US Right to Know for filing Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain the emails of publicly funded professors as part of our investigation into the food and agrichemical industries and their PR operations. CAS called the FOIA requests a "witch hunt", yet documents obtained via these FOIA requests generated news stories in several top media outlets about academics who were working with industry PR operatives on campaigns to promote GMOs without disclosing those ties to the public. (more)