Exercising Responsibility
-- even in disputed areas
by Susan Youmans

Where does the authority come from to take a position on genetically engineered foods? This is a disputed, complex topic involving technical questions about science, regulation, law, trade and development. Yet some of today's practices challenge values we hold as people of faith -- love of justice, reverence for creation, esteem for humility. Our religious vocation invites us to take this issue very seriously. But how to augment our vocation with the nerve and ability to develop a position? We can learn from other communities that have authorized themselves to learn and operate amidst dispute and technical complexity.

You may know the story of the leukemia cluster in Woburn, Mass., from A Civil Action. Anne Anderson, one dying child's mother, fiercely believed that something caused the leukemia. Bruce Young, her Episcopal priest, urged her to substantiate this or move on in her grieving. She learned where each sick child lived and put pins in a map for each home; all cases were in the same neighborhood. When the child's oncologist saw the map, he called the Center for Disease Control.

What occurred next has been described as similar to early public health research -- "barefoot epidemiology." Anderson and Young ran an ad asking people with childhood leukemia in their family to attend a meeting at the church. Gradually, in addition to learning a lot about the causes of childhood leukemia, the families learned about the possible connections of the disease with the hazardous practices at a local tannery, now a plant where solvents were used to clean machinery and then poured out onto the ground.

When I first heard this story, in 1985, the struggle was considered to have been somewhat successful. I'd been involved with issues of production and use of scientific and technical information for 25 years, and I attributed the success to the fact that the citizens had used technical information. Then, in seminary in the early 1990s, I was led back to the story from a different direction. I had done field work at MIT in which I interviewed professors about what responsibility accrues from the power associated with having knowledge. One professor alerted me to a seminar in which the topic was citizens acquiring power through gaining their own knowledge. I went, and heard the Woburn story again. It led to my reading much more about that struggle, spending many hours with Bruce Young, and meeting scientists and others involved.

Learning the science had not been the critical part of the citizen's success. They did read, and they presented extensively on the topic. But it was an alliance of knowledges that made the difference. At a crucial point they talked at a Harvard seminar, attended by chance by a professor who had a methodology -- a statistical model -- he was eager to try out. He teamed up with the Woburn families. The data collected was sufficient to claim an association between the water and leukemia, though his work was attacked by colleagues (who were later described by sociologists as industry-inspired).

But the momentum had been created. Anderson and Young testified at hearings where Superfund legislation was being re-authorized. Proceedings began which resulted in the Environmental Protection Agency requiring a clean-up. It was a victory in terms of remediation of the land, increased knowledge in the science of remediation, and identification of an additional cause of childhood leukemia (benzene).

A recurring pattern

What does the Woburn story have to do with our concerns about genetically engineered food? It shows a pattern that recurs in most struggles about the effects of technology:

1. Non-experts in a field learn both technical information and political processes.

2. They usually receive no credit for their perception or the homework they've done to understand the problem.

3. They learn that processes they expected to protect them, do not.

4. They find that, alone -- that is, without credentialed allies -- they cannot usually win these David-and-Goliath battles with entities of great economic clout.

5. With each other's support, they stand firm through severe emotional and physical hardship.

6. Public officials and scientists contradict the facts of their experience.

7. Those involved and their community split over the costs to the community's economic interests.

8.This battle about power and various kinds of suffering is fought out in terms of science and struggles to renew and strengthen public processes.

Environmental sociologist Phil Brown has described the experience of Woburn's activists as learning science, protecting their community, growing in self-esteem and making democracy work better. The success required the teaming of experience-based and expert knowledge, and a cauldron of trials for both sides. I have seen this pattern recur in many other environmental health struggles.

Failed struggle

I would like to tell a second story about people who fought and failed to stop installation of a cellular phone antenna in a historic church steeple very close to their homes and school. It took place in Lexington, Mass., in a neighborhood around a church where Emerson and Thoreau preached. In this controversy, the opponents of the antenna were what anyone would call intelligent lay people -- middle-class, highly educated people. Some were parents at a private school located 100 feet from the church.

The proponents of the antenna, in whose steeple the antenna was to be installed in exchange for a "rental" fee, came from similar backgrounds as the opponents.

The corporation involved here was Nextel, a member of an industry that obtained national legislation severely limiting communities' powers to set limits on antenna installation.

The dispute here did not concern children already dying, but suspected consequences of long-term exposure to extremely low levels of radio-frequency-level electromagnetic radiation (the sort of exposure you would get if your bedroom window was 40 feet from a cellular phone antenna). As the risk is now gauged for radiation at this frequency, standards for setting safety limits are based on thermal effects, so anything less than the heating of tissue is below the level of the standard's focus. But research suggests that health effects occur at far lower levels of exposure -- enough that many European countries are drastically reducing the level of exposure acceptable. And towns all over the U.S. are attempting to place moratoria on siting of antennas near residences, schools and hospitals, until more is known.

But interpretation of the research is the point. To establish risk, there must be a consensus on the biological mechanism of harm. Yet in this case, because the biological mechanism through which some effects occur cannot yet be precisely described, consensus at this point is impossible to accomplish. The church council took this as a basis for claiming that it was unlikely that the antenna would pose a risk.

In my 20s in graduate school I was married to a law student who told me about the legal concept of "the reasonable man" (or woman) as a standard for responsible behavior. The reasonable person is an "everyman" whose behavior is assumed to be reliable enough that the law protects him or her from being wronged. In the Lexington story the hypothetical reasonable person is crucial. To that person, a question is not eliminated because a hurdle 25 years down the road can't be leaped today.

We as individuals must exercise the "reasonable human's" measure of responsibility about technically disputed areas. For instance, we must notice where the strong and the vulnerable are represented. We must notice, if scientific arguments seem to lead nowhere useful in an important conversation, what function they are performing in the dialog and for whom. We must think as a person would think when buying a car -- suspending the social nicety of assuming that rhetoric is always being used for mutual benefit.

In Lexington, neighbors brought alternative scientific interpretations of research, as well as significant work in public health on the precautionary principle, to the attention of the church's parish council. From this, the church leaders might have been led to conclude too little was known to prove the installation safe. But years-long academic debates on risk were too many domains away from the work that scientists on the parish council had done. They considered applying precaution -- or the precautionary principle -- a bogus issue.

Lessons for the GE food struggle

These stories teach many lessons about how to proceed in the area of genetic engineering and foods.

First, build relationships with people in other fields of knowledge. In the field of genetic engineering and food, there are so many facets to discerning what questions churches should ask. For instance, it is relevant to understand the nature of current testing, regulatory structures, and how the effects of genetically modified organisms might impact ecosystems.

Second, don't avoid the complexity of the issue. When considering the genetically engineered foods issue, all of us come with many kinds of expertise, and we also encounter other areas where we are not experts. Use what you already know about how highly disputed technical issues unfold (e.g. in global warming, asthma as an urban health issue, incineration, nuclear waste, tobacco). Look for what is different in the genetically engineered foods controversy and then seriously pursue what stands out according to your knowledge and experience. (For me, for example, it is corporate claims for ownership of genetic information based on the concept of intellectual property. From my past work I know the meaning of intellectual property has been put into question in the decades since 1960, when information technology provided new ways to unhook content from form in publishing.)

Recognize the demands of being on new ethical territory. The church committee in Lexington, initially approached by Nextel for a "rental," never dreamed that this involved choices that perhaps exposed their neighbors to a possible, if disputed, health risk.

Churches have little experience with the dialog issues distinct to technical and scientific controversies -- and no norms for what is appropriate in this dialog. In Lexington, a slide in a key discussion quoted a technical article, saying that the research reviewed showed that the cancer risk from long-term, low-level radiation was negligible. No one explained, nor did the audience understand, that in the technical parlance of the article, no general conclusion about safety was being made. Yet the laypeople were being invited to draw this conclusion.

Third, expect that really getting out there with your knowledge can be hard. A church in a nearby town invited two Lexington women to describe what they had learned about themselves from their struggle. When they arrived, they were peppered with questions, not given time to document what they knew and not taken seriously. They went home without covering their topic and feeling like failures. The following Sunday, members of the host church expressed chagrin that they had derailed the meeting's agenda by insisting too much on facts. As an evironmental scientist observed, "Opinions play a role when you are trying to get to some kinds of truths."

We are on both sides of the Lexington story and the GE foods debate. We need to apply carefully the chance we have to enrich our perspectives with new ideas and new allies. We must not kill dialog and relationship by failing to value our own and other peoples' opinion- and experience-based knowledge.

Susan Youmans is a member of the Episcopal Church's Committee on Faith Ethics, Science and Technology.