John Feinstein's well-known chronicle of golfing's challenges (A Good Walk Spoiled) should be warning enough that difficult pursuits are often accompanied by painful failure. But it is one thing to miss a hole-in-one, and something else altogether to misjudge the risk that genetic modifications now introduced into plants (and animals) will remain benign or entirely beneficial. It is one thing to spoil a game, another to despoil the landscape for greener ($$$) greens. So it was with melancholy that Tumbledown learned on the same morning that Monsanto would acquire the Delta and Pine Land Company, maker of "Roundup ready" (herbicide glyphosate) and "pest-resistant" cotton and soybean seed, and that ecologists at the EPA had confirmed the common sense notion that genetically modified grass will escape the neat little test plots where it is supposedly confined. Not only will grass pollen spread 13 miles downwind, but the seeds will leak out of bags in transit, be knocked off spreaders into areas not usually maintained by a golf course (will go to seed in the coarser highways and byways--the rougher rough on the edges of a course) and be washed and blown every which way but Sunday. Monsanto isn't the only troublemaker in this instance. Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, supposed friend of gardeners (the high class dealer for chemical gardening addicts), is the manufacturer of the genetically modified bentgrass variety.
Tumbledown sighed and gave thanks that he does not use roundup to control his grass and weeds (there is something to be said for old-fashioned mechanical cultivation), then prayed that Monsanto would find a more honorable and less profitable line of work.
Now, time to drown our troubles in a bowl of oat cereal and berries.
Yum!
References: (NY Times) Monsanto Buys Delta; Engineered Grass Found Growing in Wild; Grass Created in Lab is Found in the Wild
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