INCREASING PLANT DIVERSITY 

The world is awash with purveyors of doom and gloom, claiming that species of some sort are disappearing every few minutes. The doomsayers leave cohorts, supporters and the rest of the population suspended in horror with the image of a shrinking world. Diversity of crop seeds, for example, is predicted to lead to a mono-cultured corn or bean that someday will be victim of a new disease and we will all starve in an age of pestilence and famine.

Don't believe it. Exactly the opposite is more likely to be true. Why? Instead of following the panic cry of "fire" in the global theatre, look at the coming previews and see the picture I see. This is no longer the world of the 1800s, the 1950s or even the 1980s. The world has changed, and will change more, and dramatically so. Developments are advancing so rapidly that this will not be a long wait. Let's consider crop diversity. With conventional "old-age" thinking, a lost species of plant or animal was gone forever. While we should not deliberately eradicate any species nor curtail obvious polluting or environmentally dangerous actions, look at what is happening. Laboratories and private research centres around the world are experimenting with creation.

Genetic manipulation has already accomplished feats totally impossible in the past. The abilities of one species, be it animal or plant, have already been transferred into not only another species of the same family but across species lines. In what may be called the "breakthrough of the age", the gene that causes the "glow" in a firefly has been transferred to a plant! There are now plants that glow in the dark. An "anti-freeze" gene, once resident only in the Atlantic salmon, to allow it to swim in below-freezing waters, now circulates within some Pacific salmon and even in some canola plants .... resulting in a freeze-resistance unknown before.

We will not be losing diversity in the future. The question will be what to do with the over-abundance of diversity. Within this decade, supermarkets will provide not only foods you never tasted before but foods that never existed before. And if this seems far out, remember that some extinct species may be resurrected via DNA revitalization. Think about that one for awhile! Even as I write this a signal flashes as my computer screen and reports that Calgene Inc. of California has applied for U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to release the first genetically manipulated whole food for sale in the U.S. -- a tomato that ripens on the vine but stays fresh enough to be shipped thousands of miles. If approved you could be eating it within 500 days.

Once upon a time the horse was the "modern" way to get around, the covered wagon was the Ferrarri of the day, and "man would never fly".

Progress is only a change-in-thinking away.

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