To listen to the earth minute, go to: http://archive.kpfk.org/parchive/mp3/kpfk_110628_070010sojourner.MP3
and scroll ahead to minute 42:40.
Text of the Earth Minute is below:
I am writing this week’s Earth Minute from the 2011 Tree Biotechnology Conference in Bahia, Brazil.
It is a global gathering of 300 or so scientists, foresters and industry representatives, who are discussing the future of high tech tree breeding and genetically engineered or GE trees.
The take away message from the conference’s keynote speaker, a veteran tree biotechnologist, was that in the past 25 years, the science has made great strides, but still very little is known about how genes function in trees, or about how GE trees will react in a forest ecosystem.
Additionally, a UN survey found that the second greatest concern of tree engineers about GE trees was unintentional contamination. Even so, GE tree company ArborGen (a co-sponsor of this event) is requesting permission to sell their GE eucalyptus trees at the rate of half a billion per year, for planting over millions of acres from Texas to Florida.
Fortunately groups around the world are galvanizing to stop GE trees. For more information, go to stopgetrees.org.
From Brazil, for the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth show this is Anne Petermann, from Global Justice Ecology Project.
To view today’s Action Alert against GE trees, go to: http://forests.org/shared/alerts/sendsm.aspx?id=frankentrees
