The Environmentalist: Brent Blackwelder

Pesticides?
When I play golf, I'm trying to get a healthy walk in a natural setting. Too many times you find you're walking right in the areas where they've sprayed. And you're like, "Whoa, what am I doing walking here?" I'd rather be doing something else than following a truck that's spreading chemicals everywhere, especially when the guy driving the truck has got the protective suit on and is using a respirator. One of the serious concerns with pesticides is that, whereas, say, an adult male with a large body weight might not be that susceptible, for youths or women of childbearing age, exposure to a chemical in even a very small amount at the wrong time can do awful things. We're just learning about this. There are only two cancers that are dropping in age-adjusted incidence: lung cancer in men, for the obvious reason that men aren't smoking as much, and stomach cancer; it's not clear why. A lot of the others -- prostate cancer, breast cancer, childhood cancer -- are very much on the increase. The survival rates are better, but the incidence is growing. We should be going after prevention, because if we just go after cures, we're going to lose the ballgame in the long run.

Is it realistic to think that golf courses could ever stop using pesticides?
What is realistic is all golf courses using the principles of Integrated Pest Management, which is typical in agriculture. There's no doubt that that's the first step. You don't automatically spray everything as soon as there's any problem. You try to identify the problem and understand the reasons for it and use the pesticide only sparingly, and as a last resort. From that, some courses might start moving toward being more organic. It happened in agriculture. People said, "Oh, you can't grow organic food." But now we have a growing organic farming movement. Look at how whole-foods grocery stores and local farm markets are just skyrocketing in popularity.

What about genetically engineered grasses? A lot of people in the golf industry say a "Roundup Ready" grass should be approved because it would allow superintendents to spray less often, and with just Roundup, which they say is a benign product. What's your view?
It's totally the wrong way of thinking about it. I think it's fine to do hybridizations -- selective breeding of different grasses. That has served humanity well for 10,000 years. But when you're doing genetic engineering, you're doing stuff that doesn't occur in nature, cannot occur in nature. You're putting animal genes in plants, plant genes in animals, genes from one species into another. And when you do that, strange things can begin to happen. It's one thing to look at this stuff in closed labs, but once it's out in nature, you've got something that's live, it's breeding, it's multiplying, it's replicating. It's potentially a biological pollution that you've put out into the world. This technology is powerful. We're pretending we know what we're doing, but we are at a stage of incredible ignorance. With genetic engineering, you're putting something really wild into the equation, and you'd better be ready for some big surprises. And we're getting enough environmental surprises today with things like climate change.

The other point I'd make is that the big selling point for genetically engineered plants in agriculture -- which were approved and are in widespread use -- was that they'd need less herbicide use. That's not been the case. They also said there'd be increased yields. That's not been the case, either. It's terrible -- the majority of soybeans now are genetically engineered, as are vast acreages of corn, and there's no monitoring of it. And there's no way to know if we've eaten genetically engineered food today, because there are no labels on anything that we've eaten.

But for genetically engineered golf-course grasses, what is the worst that could happen if it were approved? What are the dangers?
One of the problems is that some genetically engineered grasses are getting into the national forests, and the U.S. Forest Service cannot get rid of them. Try to get rid of some invasive species, like garlic mustard, that have come into our forests from Europe. It's spreading like wildfire. Or look at the American chestnut. It was the most important timber species east of the Mississippi -- great, gigantic trees, durable lumber, produced more nuts than anything else. A very valuable wildlife tree. Well, 100 years ago, the Department of Agriculture thought, Wouldn't it be nice to bring the Asian chestnut into the United States? And the American chestnut disappeared like that. It succumbed to a blight, an airborne fungus, from the Asian chestnut. There are no native American chestnuts now that can do anything other than grow up 15 feet and die. And we have no answer to it. And I'm just saying, you think that's bad? What happens with a plant that's got animal genes stuck into it? What happens to the things that eat that plant? Who knows? And what does that do to the rest of the food chain? It's hard for us to even conceive of what the effects might be.