God called the dry ground ‘land’. And it was good. Yet the land has been disturbed and tunnelled through to find gold and oil, and poisoned with radioactive waste, sewers, and heavy metals that fall in the ash from the sky. The earth has been so denuded of nutrients that farmers pile seabird droppings on the fields, but now even the guano is running out. God said, ‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ Biotech companies engineer plant genomes to make them resistant to disease and herbicides; to grow faster; to bear more fruit. The number of species under cultivation dwindles. Engineered species ‘infect’ their wild cousins, and the gene pool narrows. When drought comes, engineered plants wilt — all of them, for there is no longer the genetic diversity required to cope with change. Diverse ecosystems such as rainforests are cleared at a rate of one hundred thousand acres every week.
