Carolyn Raffensperger is an environmental lawyer and executive director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, the leading U.S. proponent of the precautionary principle as a new basis for environmental and public health policy. The principle states: “When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically.”

Today, a growing number of communities, school districts, health care organizations, and other entities are applying the precautionary principle to protect the health of people and the environment. San Francisco passed a Precautionary Principle Ordinance in 2003, and many other cities and towns are incorporating precaution into their laws and policies. Schools are using the precautionary principle to find safer alternatives to toxic pesticides. Hospitals are using it to replace supplies containing PVC with healthier options.

A desire to “do something” about the environment had been pondered off and on over the last couple of years by various people at Head-Royce School, a K-12 independent school of about 770 students in Oakland, California.

Proponents of precautions for genetically engineered crops declared victory in their battle to defend the rights of counties and cities to enact local restrictions on genetically engineered (GE) organisms. SB1056, a bill that would have pre-empted such local laws, failed to make it out of committee in the California Senate and died with the close of the legislative year.

The Monsanto-backed bill was introduced last year after the passage of four county and two city bans on GE crops. It was opposed by associations of cities and counties, environmentalists, organic and family farmers, and thousands of citizens concerned that it would have pre-empted democratically established local rules. California currently has no state regulations to protect farmers, consumers or the environment from the risks of GE crops.

Don’t Medicate Your Bay: Prevent Pollution, Dispose Drugs Safely.

Don’t Medicate Your Bay: Prevent Pollution, Dispose Drugs Safely.

It sounds like a science-fiction scenario: engineer a fish with a gene for growth hormones to accelerate maturation and create a giant “super fish.” Freakish as it may seem, for more than a decade, corporations and researchers in the U.S. and abroad have engineered human and other foreign growth genes into salmon, trout, and numerous other fish species in an attempt to make “super fish.” Their incentive, of course, is to create a more profitable fish by taking a commercially viable fish, genetically engineering it to grow bigger faster, thereby bringing more seafood to the market in less time.

AM: How prevalent are genetically engineered (GMO) crops in the food we eat?

Jeffrey: Soy, corn, cotton and canola are used in vegetable oil and soy and corn and their derivatives are prevalent in processed food. My guess is that 90 percent of processed foods contain derivatives of one of these four, which may translate to about 70 percent of all foods sold in the supermarket. There are also dairy products from cows injected with bovine growth hormone. There’s Hawaiian papaya, a little bit of zucchini and crookneck squash. There are also enzymes, additives, processing agents that are not even listed on the label but are created from genetically modified microorganisms and used in the preparation of a lot of foods. One that is listed on the label is aspartame. And finally there are milk and meat products from animals that have been feed genetically engineered foods.

Read Part One of this interview

AM: Here’s a quote from your book: "An internal memo from FDA’s division of anti-infective drug products said that the benefit to be gained by the use of Kanamycin, that’s the antibiotic resistant marker in transgenic plants, is outweighed by the risk.” How are antibiotic resistant markers used and what are the risks?

Jeffrey: When you insert the genes through the gene gun method or by infecting it through bacteria, you don’t know which of the cells got the genes that you want to get into the DNA. You can’t look at a microscope and tell. So what they do is add an anti-biotic resistant marker gene along with your target transgene. The antibiotic resistant marker gene produces a protein, which confers invisibility to a particular antibiotic to the cell. So scientists will douse all of the cells with this particular antibiotic, killing all of them except the very few that ended up incorporating the transgene into their DNA where it’s being expressed. It’s only used for this one moment to select the transformed cells but it becomes cloned and reproduced into the millions of acres of plants and consumed by humans and animals.

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