Field Guide: the first GMO forest
The first genetically engineered forest was planted this winter in Georgia. Let's get into the weeds, as they say.
Last week, my latest feature was published in MIT Technology Review: a look at Living Carbon, a climate start-up that’s planted trees genetically engineered to soak up extra carbon. There, I focused mostly on the science of how (and if) this works, as well as the company’s marketing approach. Here I want both to take a closer look at the forest itself, which is in southeastern Georgia, and to consider the ethics of these kinds of projects.
The emergence of genetic engineering was once called “the second big bang”—an epoch-changing development that reoriented the human relationship with the more-than-human world.
But the first GMO forest went into the ground with hardly a bang at all.
When Living Carbon planted this forest in early February, a New York Times story appeared on the front page—of Section D. As I note in my piece for MIT Technology Review, less than a decade ago, when it became public that a firm called ArborGen had created a genetically engineered loblolly pine, protestors descended on their headquarters. But so far as I can tell, no one has protested the Georgia planting.
Despite the field guide conceit, I’m not going to send you directly to this forest, since it’s on private property. I can describe what’s known, though.
The trees were planted in some bottomlands just outside the small town of Reidsville. The landscape here was once part of the vast southern expanse of long-leaf pine forest. Today, you’ll mostly fine loblolly pines, grown for timber, and cropland. The region is especially known for its Vidalia onions—though onions cadn be a rather sordid business, at times, as it turns out.
The genetically engineered trees are poplars, tweaked using genes drawn from green algae and pumpkins to overcome an inefficiency in photosynthesis. There is some evidence from field trials that these trees do grow faster than their natural peers, though it’s currently unclear how much faster.
The trees are meant to yield a carbon credit, and since the land in question is currently managed for timber, this is technically an “improved forestry management” project. The landowner, Vince Stanley, told the New York Times that he plans to harvest the trees. Still, Living Carbon describes their work here as more akin to a reforestation project. These kinds of wet bottomlands, they note, often remain idle for ten years or more; there were few standing trees when the planting began.
The company planted 5,600 genetically engineered saplings—which, as I discovered in my reporting, represents only five percent of the planted trees. If I have it right, then, Living Carbon in total planted more than a hundred thousand trees across what one press release describes as a 2,000-acre site. The other trees included “conventional” poplar trees, grown as a comparison, and twelve “wild-type” species, including cypress and sweetgum. The GE trees are all female, so they do not produce pollen; they will be carefully monitored, Living Carbon says, both to track their performance but also to ensure that they aren’t fertilized by local interfertile trees.
All told, this feels to me less like a creepy sci-fi forest than, as I put it in my piece, “a traditional reforestation project with a small [GE] experiment tucked inside.”
Stanley himself is an interesting figure. His family, according to one press release, owns 30,000 in the area, devoted to both timber and crops, including Vidalia onions. The onion business is rife with labor abuses, as Shane Mitchell documents in her Bitter Southerner story “Blood Sweat & Tears” (the recent recipient of two James Beard awards). A decade back, Stanley Farms LLC settled with farmworkers who alleged they’d been underpaid. (I reached out to Stanley Farms, but they did not respond.) At one point, the family sold its Vidalia interests to Bill Gates, who wound up in some Vidalia-flavored hot water, though from what I understand Gates has since moved on.
Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature is often described as the first mass-market book about climate change. What’s forgotten is that McKibben was also writing about genetic engineering—technology that, when the book was first published in 1989, was coming into its early maturity.
One ene of nature was the world’s altered atmosphere, which back then was already so pumped full of greenhouse gases that “nature as we know it is over,” as McKibben put it in the book. But he also discusses genetic engineering will as a second end of nature—not accidental, as was the case of global warming, but pursued intentionally.
The result, McKibben suggests, will be a kind of spiritual shift.
“We will never again be the created being; instead we will be creators,” he writes. Nature will be reduced to a set of codes, and every code can get rewritten—improved. So in the age of genetic engineering, every living being can be redesigned to better serve human desires. In the end, McKibben thinks, we’ll end up living not in the mysterious dance of nature as it’s been known for millennia, but “in a shopping mall, where every feature is designed for our delectation.”
In the decades since the book appeared, genetic engineering has become ubiquitous in agriculture—and, though opposition remains, is increasingly accepted as a useful, and potentially world-saving, technology. The biggest trouble with GMO crops has been the designs that corporate giants pursue, which exploit farmers and encourage the over-use of toxic chemicals.
As farm fields were reworked by genetic technologies, trees remained a mostly unbroken barrier.1 There were, I think, social reasons for this. Agriculture inherently is domestic, after all. Trees seem somehow more wild.
There are potential scientific reasons, too: trees live so long, and genetic manipulations often have unforeseen side effects. So we don’t know what these “enhanced” poplars will do to the rest of the forest, and as the National Academies points out, our current regulatory system does little to assess the effects of GE plants on forest health. The scientists I interviewed mostly assuaged my fears: while I think more study is always useful, my own takeaway is that we don’t need to worry that this GE poplar will suddenly run amuck, reworking the world’s forests.
In some ways, what happened in Georgia is not new. GE trees have been planted many times in controlled test plots, since timber companies have long dreamed of a faster-growing tree. Living Carbon’s new forest (and a subsequent planting in Ohio) will be carefully monitored, too. So they represent a small step forward. Still, it’s a symbolic step, I think.
Other “wild” GE plants are coming. Scientists have been working for years on a GE chestnut tree, a once-iconic and now mostly absent species in Appalachian forests. The chestnuts were devasted by blight early in the twentieth century; the GE trees is resistant.
Great pools of ink have been spilled about this tree, which has been subjected to much stricter scrutiny than Living Carbon’s poplars. (As I note in my story, Living Carbon’s passed through a now-closed loophole in the regulations). A decision on the chestnut trees should be coming soon. My guess is that they’ll be deemed okay.
There’s a nonprofit called “Lab to Land” in California that is exploring the use of genetic technologies in what they call “wildlands”—the 52% of the Earth’s landmass that is not a city or a farm or some other managed space. It’s a potentially vast resource when it comes to carbon storage. Though Lab to Land tells me they’re not yet committed to the use of genetic engineering, and are at least a decade away from deployment, they’re considering whether longer-rooted grasses might better withstand wildfires in California.
It’s worth noting that the nation’s landscapes have already been invaded. In Oregon, a GMO turfgrass, originally marketed to golf courses, has spread rampantly. Rogue GMO crops appear in organic fields. And, of course, if you look beyond genetic engineering, the human influence is impossible to escape. Our wildest forests are being reshaped by, among other things, our human-warmed atmosphere. Such is the core idea of the Anthropocene.
There are passages in The End of Nature that have not, in my opinion, aged well. McKibben mourns the lack of “newness” on the continent—expressing envy for the early white explorers who knew few of their pale kin had seen the landscapes they surveyed. But North America has not been new for tens of thousands of years; almost every landscape on this continent was shaped and tended by Indigenous people. McKibben seems to be wanting nature to be something pure, something separate from humanity—an idea that is passing out of fashion. And good riddance, as far as I’m concerned. That’s why rather than talk about “nature,” I often talk about the “more-than-human world.”
When I interviewed Patrick Mellor, Living Carbon’s chief technology officer, he expressed his own impatience with this idea of purity. We limit ourselves by thinking nature is a place we cannot intervene. This is true, though I’m not convinced, that just because there’s no such thing as pure nature, every kind of intervention should be deemed okay. What we need is a new kind of ethics—a search for the right human place in this more-than-human world.
Over the years I’ve been writing about the environment, I’ve learned much from Indigenous thinking. So I note that there are Indigenous groups that advocate for an outright ban on genetically engineered trees. One rationale that I find compelling is the difficulty we have containing gene drift: if a genetically engineered tree is planted in the wild, it may be difficult to stop the genes from passing across international borders, or onto Indigenous lands.
But Indigenous people are not a monolith. I interviewed Keolu Fox, a Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) geneticist at UC-San Diego who is a co-director of science at Lab to Land. He told me that gene-editing natural landscapes is an act of desperation. But we’re desperate enough to need it. It’s just essential, he said, that the development of such technologies is done in collaboration with Indigenous people—who have a proven track record as the best environmental stewards on the planet.
I’ve written before about the “rights of nature,” the idea that we might extend legal rights to natural entities, much as we have to corporations—a concept that in some ways overlaps with Indigenous thought. Even if such rights are never developed, the concept has informed my own environmental ethics: we ought to conceive of ourselves as having mutual obligations to the nature around us, the trees included. In Wild Souls, writer Emma Marris proposes a simple ethical test when it comes to sticky issues in conservation: is the intervention something you’d be willing to endure yourself? She was thinking of animals, but I think the same can be applied to plants. So: would you be willing to have your growth rate supercharged so that you could save the world?
Inserting blight resistance into chestnut trees is an adaptive trait, one that helps the species live in our altered world. So is giving grasses deeper, fire-resistant roots. Patrick Mellor, the CTO at Living Carbon, noted that enhanced photosynthesis is actually counter to selective pressures. In our over-carbonized world, a tree would never naturally develop more efficient photosynthesis; there is so much carbon out there that it’s okay to waste some.
I think there’s an ethical line here, too: the difference between helping a species live and our world and turning a species into a tool.
You could argue that supercharging these poplar trees is good for the trees—after all, if it helps us avert the climate crisis, it’s good for nearly every living being in the world. I don’t always want to be a superhero, though, and I’m not sure if we have the right to force that task onto this tree.
There have apparently been GE poplars planted in China already.
Are these poplar's non-native species or native cottonwoods specific to the region? I would have much less queasiness of the use of GE trees if they were native species, but introducing GE non-natives to a region just sounds like a recipe for a disaster. Especially after seeing your escaped GE grass link. I've been following the GE chestnut news over the last decade and generally support that and have kind of started to just accept GE in crop plants because I cannot do anything about it now and it seems to be in almost every product these days, but GE plants for carbon capture? Eh, I don't know that I can get on board. Is the goal to turn over these crops on a 10-20 year basis? It seems like you would want to plant them and not log them for maximum carbon uptake, but maybe I need to do more reading on the subject.
Thanks for bringing this subject up!