Dialogue: Please keep the genie in the bottle

I've got a flyer from Greenpeace on my desk that says, New Zealand is now facing an important choice ... do we want to be part of the largest ever experiment to be undertaken on Planet Earth or do we opt for security and protection for our environment, human health and future generations?

The important choice refers to genetic engineering and the flyer calls for members of the public - all of us - to take a stand and make a submission to the Royal Commission on GE. Even if you're not usually of the protesting persuasion, this matter is too critical to ignore.

We're a small enough nation to have social and other types of experiments tried here.

We are the perfect laboratory but, if we do go GE, who knows what could happen?

It is the uncertainty that should make us insist that we keep things clean and green because the potential fallout is too great to risk.

We have a name in New Zealand for being ecologically safe and sound but it is all too easy to become complacent, to simply accept a reputation without doing anything to deserve it.

That's why I'm going to do my bit and add my voice to the growing numbers who say they do not want an uncertain, potentially very dangerous, future for their environment.

You don't have to be a scientist to make a submission to the royal commission and it's not that hard to understand the ins and outs.

All you need is a couple of minutes, a pen - and to have it done by December 1.

Please, I urge you, either get a form from Greenpeace, a health food store or from the web at www.greenpeace.org.nz. You can be as simple or as detailed as you like.

The important thing is to let the powers that be know how much resistance there is to using us, the general public, as lab rats.

Sure, it would be easy to do nothing and just hope that other people will fight the good fight. But imagine if the machinery of big gene business just rolls right on and before we know it there's no turning back.

The main concern about GE is that it puts genes in places where they don't ordinarily belong, permanently altering plants, animals and other organisms in ways that would never happen in billions of years of natural evolution or breeding.

GE food has already caused unexpected reactions and the possible long-term effects are completely unknown.

If that doesn't scare you, or if I can't appeal to your better natures, perhaps you'll listen to your pockets.

New Zealand could corner the organic market with our exports if we don't go down the GE road.

Organics won't be a niche market much longer as more and more food is feared unsafe and fewer and fewer countries can claim to be as free of modified produce as we are.

New Zealand as an organic nation would see our profits go through the roof.

I once attended a protest against GE, which isn't like me at all, and there I discovered that tomatoes are being infused with the DNA from tuna and other coldwater fish to make them frost-resistant. If I wanted a salad with fins, flippers or scales I would have ordered one. Some scientists are even putting lily genes into potatoes and if that's the case I want to know.

I'm not going to mash the damn things, I'm going to put them in a vase.

The other day a friend of mine put down his new vege garden, a few square metres of homegrown to call his own. It wasn't long before the beans were up and the sweet corn was coming on a treat. That is, until he discovered the neighbour's bunny had overnight nibbled all the new growth down to nubs.

Poor guy. He was philosophical about it but I wonder if he would have seen the funny side if he'd trotted out one morning to check on his garden and found all the tomato plants had swum up to the compost to spawn, their salmon genes having proved too dominant for the soil.

You can laugh, but who's to say that won't happen if we allow the unpredictable, irreversible effects of genetic mutilation to wreak havoc with our world and to play God in our gardens?