Nonfiction Book Suggestion for November 2009

Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds

by Claire Hope Cummings

Summary

How genetic engineering threatens seeds, and the stories of those working to save this precious environmental resource. Seeds are at the heart of the plant systems that provide us with food, energy, medicine, and even the air we breathe. Their power to adapt will be crucial to our ability to cope with a changing climate. In Uncertain Peril, environmental journalist Claire Hope Cummings examines how agriculture has changed dramatically, how corporate control of seeds undermines their biological integrity and natural abundance, and how communities can maintain seeds as the common heritage of all humanity and preserve the regenerative capacity of the earth.

Review from Publishers Weekly

Former environmental lawyer and one-time farmer Cummings offers a persuasive account of a lesser-known but potentially apocalyptic threat to the world's ecology and food supply—the privatization of the Earth's seed stock. For almost a century, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has provided seeds at no cost to farmers who then saved seeds from one harvest to another, eventually developing strains best suited to local or regional climates. But Cummings also tells how seeds became lucrative, patentable private properties for some of the nation's most powerful agribusinesses. Cummings bemoans the plague of sameness intensified by the advent of such fitfully regulated companies as Monsanto, which now not only own genetically modified seed varieties, but also sue farmers when wind inevitably blows seeds onto their neighboring fields. According to Cummings, this tyranny of the technological[ly]elite threatens agricultural diversity and taints food sources. Among the author's many startling statistics is that 97% of 75 vegetables whose seeds were once available from the USDA are now extinct. Cummings heralds plans for a Doomsday Vault to shelter existing natural seed stock, and finds comfort in organic farming's growth, but her authoritative portrait of another way in which our planet is at peril provides stark food for thought.