Liberal arts education

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education

  

Philosophia et septem artes liberales, "philosophy and the seven liberal arts." From the Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (12th century)

Liberal arts education (from Latin liberalis "free" and ars "art or principled practice") is the traditional academic course in Western higher education. Liberal arts takes the term art in the sense of a learned skill rather than specifically the fine arts. Liberal arts education can refer to studies in a liberal arts degree course or to a university education more generally. Such a course of study contrasts with those that are principally vocational, professional, or technical, as well as religiously-based courses.

The term "liberal arts" for an educational curriculum dates back to classical antiquity in the West, but has changed its meaning considerably, mostly expanding it. The seven subjects in the ancient and medieval meaning came to be divided into the trivium of rhetoric, grammar, and logic, and the quadrivium of astronomy (often more astrology), mathematics, geometry, and music. The modern sense of the term usually covers all the natural sciences, formal sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities.

History

Before they became known by their Latin variations (artes liberales, septem artes liberales, studia liberalia), the liberal arts were the continuation of Ancient Greek methods of enquiry that began with a "desire for a universal understanding." Pythagoras argued that there was a mathematical and geometrical harmony to the cosmos or the universe; his followers linked the four arts of astronomy, mathematics, geometry, and music into one area of study to form the "disciplines of the mediaeval quadrivium". In 4th-century-BC Athens, the government of the polis, or city-state, respected the ability of rhetoric or public speaking above almost everything else. Eventually rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic (logic) became the educational programme of the trivium. Together they came to be known as the seven liberal arts. Originally these subjects or skills were held by classical antiquity to be essential for a free person (liberalis, "worthy of a free person") to acquire in order to take an active part in civic life, something that included among other things participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and participating in military service. While the arts of the quadrivium might have appeared prior to the arts of the trivium, by the middle ages educational programmes taught the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) first while the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy) were the following stage of education.

Allegory of the seven liberal arts, The Phoebus Foundation

Rooted in the basic curriculum – the enkuklios paideia or "well-rounded education" – of late Classical and Hellenistic Greece, the "liberal arts" or "liberal pursuits" (Latin liberalia studia) were already so called in formal education during the Roman Empire. The first recorded use of the term "liberal arts" (artes liberales) occurs in De Inventione by Marcus Tullius Cicero, but it is unclear if he created the term. Seneca the Younger discusses liberal arts in education from a critical Stoic point of view in Moral Epistles. The exact classification of the liberal arts varied however in Roman times, and it was only after Martianus Capella in the 5th century influentially brought the seven liberal arts as bridesmaids to the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, that they took on canonical form.

The four "scientific" artes – music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy – were known from the time of Boethius onwards as the quadrivium. After the 9th century, the remaining three arts of the "humanities" – grammar, logic, and rhetoric – were grouped as the trivium. It was in that two-fold form that the seven liberal arts were studied in the medieval Western university. During the Middle Ages, logic gradually came to take predominance over the other parts of the trivium.

In the 12th century the iconic image – Philosophia et septem artes liberales (Philosophy and seven liberal arts) – was produced by an Alsatian nun and abbess Herrad of Landsberg with her community of women as part of the Hortus deliciarum. Their encyclopedia compiled ideas drawn from philosophy, theology, literature, music, arts, and sciences and was intended as a teaching tool for women of the abbey. The image Philosophy and seven liberal arts represents the circle of philosophy, and is presented as a rosette of a cathedral: a central circle and a series of semicircles arranged all around. It shows learning and knowledge organised into seven relations, the Septem Artes Liberales or Seven Liberal Arts. Each of these arts find their source in the Greek φιλοσοφία, philosophia, literally “love of wisdom”. St. Albert the Great, a doctor of the Catholic Church, asserted that the seven liberal arts were referred to in Sacred Scripture, saying: "It is written, 'Wisdom hath built herself a house, she hath hewn her out seven pillars' (Proverbs 9:1). This house is the Blessed Virgin; the seven pillars are the seven liberal arts."

Page, with illustration of Music, from Marriage of Mercury and Philology

In the Renaissance, the Italian humanists and their Northern counterparts, despite in many respects continuing the traditions of the Middle Ages, reversed that process. Re-christening the old trivium with a new and more ambitious name: Studia humanitatis, and also increasing its scope, they downplayed logic as opposed to the traditional Latin grammar and rhetoric, and added to them history, Greek, and moral philosophy (ethics), with a new emphasis on poetry as well. The educational curriculum of humanism spread throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and became the educational foundation for the schooling of European elites, the functionaries of political administration, the clergy of the various legally recognized churches, and the learned professions of law and medicine. The ideal of a liberal arts, or humanistic education grounded in classical languages and literature, persisted in Europe until the middle of the twentieth century; in the United States, it had come under increasingly successful attack in the late 19th century by academics interested in reshaping American higher education around the natural and social sciences.

Similarly, Wilhelm von Humboldt's educational model in Prussia (now Germany), which later became the role model for higher education also in North America, went beyond vocational training. In a letter to the Prussian king, he wrote:

There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.

The philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin has criticized discrepancies between Humboldt's ideals and the contemporary European education policy, which narrowly understands education as a preparation for the labor market, arguing that we need to decide between "McKinsey and Humboldt".

Modern usage

The modern use of the term liberal arts consists of four areas: the natural sciences, social sciences, arts, and humanities. Academic areas that are associated with the term liberal arts include:

• Life sciences (biology, ecology, neuroscience)
• Physical science (physics, astronomy, chemistry, geology, physical geography)
• Logic, mathematics, statistics, computer science
• Philosophy
• History
• Social science (anthropology, economics, human geography, linguistics, political science, jurisprudence, psychology, and sociology)
• Creative arts (fine arts, music, performing arts, literature)

For example, the core courses for Georgetown University's Doctor of Liberal Studies program cover philosophy, theology, history, art, literature, and the social sciences. Wesleyan University's Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program includes courses in visual arts, art history, creative and professional writing, literature, history, mathematics, film, government, education, biology, psychology, and astronomy.

Secondary school

Liberal arts education at the secondary school level prepares students for higher education at a university.

Curricula differ from school to school, but generally include language, chemistry, biology, geography, art, mathematics, music, history, philosophy, civics, social sciences, and foreign languages.

In the United States

Main article: Liberal arts college

Further information: Liberal arts colleges in the United States and Great books

Thompson Library at Vassar College in New York

In the United States, liberal arts colleges are schools emphasizing undergraduate study in the liberal arts. The teaching at liberal arts colleges is often Socratic, typically with small classes; professors are often allowed to concentrate more on their teaching responsibilities than are professors at research universities.

In addition, most four-year colleges are not devoted exclusively or primarily to liberal arts degrees, but offer a liberal arts degree, and allow students not majoring in liberal arts to take courses to satisfy distribution requirements in liberal arts.

Traditionally, a bachelor's degree in one particular area within liberal arts, with substantial study outside that main area, is earned over four years of full-time study. However, some universities such as Saint Leo University, Pennsylvania State University, Florida Institute of Technology, and New England College have begun to offer an associate degree in liberal arts. Colleges like the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts offer a unique program with only one degree offering, a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies, while the Harvard Extension School offers both a Bachelor of Liberal Arts and a Master of Liberal Arts. Additionally, colleges like the University of Oklahoma College of Liberal Studies and the Harvard Extension School offer an online, part-time option for adult and nontraditional students.

Most students earn either a Bachelor of Arts degree or a Bachelor of Science degree; on completing undergraduate study, students might progress to either a liberal arts graduate school or a professional school (public administration, engineering, business, law, medicine, theology).

Great Books movement

In 1937 St. John's College changed its curriculum to focus on the Great Books of the Western World to provide a new sort of education that separated itself from the increasingly specialized nature of higher schooling.

In Europe

Thriumph of S. Tomas & Allegory of the Sciences by Andrea di Bonaluto. Frasco, 1365-68, Basilica di S. Maria Novella.

In most parts of Europe, liberal arts education is deeply rooted. In Germany, Austria and countries influenced by their education system it is called 'humanistische Bildung' (humanistic education). The term is not to be confused with some modern educational concepts that use a similar wording. Educational institutions that see themselves in that tradition are often a Gymnasium (high school, grammar school). They aim at providing their pupils with comprehensive education (Bildung) to form personality with regard to a pupil's own humanity as well as their innate intellectual skills. Going back to the long tradition of the liberal arts in Europe, education in the above sense was freed from scholastic thinking and re-shaped by the theorists of the Enlightenment; in particular, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Since students are considered to have received a comprehensive liberal arts education at gymnasia, very often the role of liberal arts education in undergraduate programs at universities is reduced compared to the US educational system. Students are expected to use their skills received at the gymnasium to further develop their personality in their own responsibility, e.g. in universities' music clubs, theatre groups, language clubs, etc. Universities encourage students to do so and offer respective opportunities but do not make such activities part of the university's curriculum.

Thus, on the level of higher education, despite the European origin of the liberal arts college, the term liberal arts college usually denotes liberal arts colleges in the United States. With the exception of pioneering institutions such as Franklin University Switzerland (formerly known as Franklin College), established as a Europe-based, US-style liberal arts college in 1969, only recently some efforts have been undertaken to systematically "re-import" liberal arts education to continental Europe, as with Leiden University College The Hague, University College Utrecht, University College Maastricht, Amsterdam University College, Roosevelt Academy (now University College Roosevelt), University College Twente (ATLAS), Erasmus University College, the University of Groningen, Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Central European University, and Bard College Berlin, formerly known as the European College of Liberal Arts. Central European University launched a liberal arts undergraduate degree in Culture, Politics, and Society  in 2020 as part of its move to Vienna and accreditation in Austria. As well as the colleges listed above, some universities in the Netherlands offer bachelors programs in Liberal Arts and Sciences (Tilburg University). Liberal arts (as a degree program) is just beginning to establish itself in Europe. For example, University College Dublin offers the degree, as does St. Marys University College Belfast, both institutions coincidentally on the island of Ireland. In the Netherlands, universities have opened constituent liberal arts colleges under the terminology university college since the late 1990s. The four-year bachelor's degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences at University College Freiburg is the first of its kind in Germany. It started in October 2012 with 78 students. The first Liberal Arts degree program in Sweden was established at Gothenburg University in 2011, followed by a Liberal Arts Bachelor Programme at Uppsala University's Campus Gotland in the autumn of 2013. The first Liberal Arts program in Georgia was introduced in 2005 by American-Georgian Initiative for Liberal Education (AGILE), an NGO. Thanks to their collaboration, Ilia State University became the first higher education institution in Georgia to establish a liberal arts program.

In France, Chavagnes Studium, a Liberal Arts Study Centre in partnership with the Institut Catholique d'études supérieures, and based in a former Catholic seminary, is launching a two-year intensive BA in the Liberal Arts, with a distinctively Catholic outlook. It has been suggested that the liberal arts degree may become part of mainstream education provision in the United Kingdom, Ireland and other European countries. In 1999, the European College of Liberal Arts (now Bard College Berlin) was founded in Berlin and in 2009 it introduced a four-year Bachelor of Arts program in Value Studies taught in English, leading to an interdisciplinary degree in the humanities.

In England, the first institution to retrieve and update a liberal arts education at the undergraduate level was the University of Winchester with their BA (Hons) Modern Liberal Arts programme which launched in 2010. In 2012, University College London began its interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences BASc degree (which has kinship with the liberal arts model) with 80 students. In 2013, the University of Birmingham created the School of Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, home of a suite of flexible 4-year programmes in which students study a broad range of subjects drawn from across the University, and gain qualifications including both traditional Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences, but also novel thematic combinations linking both areas. King's College London launched the BA Liberal Arts, which has a slant towards arts, humanities and social sciences subjects. The New College of the Humanities also launched a new liberal education programme. Richmond American University London is a private liberal arts university where all undergraduate degrees are taught with a US liberal arts approach over a four year programme. Durham University has both a popular BA Liberal Arts and a BA Combined Honours in Social Sciences programme, both of which allow for interdisciplinary approaches to education. The University of Nottingham also has a Liberal Arts BA with study abroad options and links with its Natural Sciences degrees. In 2016, the University of Warwick launched a three/four-year liberal arts BA degree, which focuses on transdisciplinary approaches and problem-based learning techniques in addition to providing structured disciplinary routes and bespoke pathways. And for 2017 entry UCAS lists 20 providers of liberal arts programmes.

In Scotland, the four-year undergraduate Honours degree, specifically the Master of Arts, has historically demonstrated considerable breadth in focus. In the first two years of Scottish MA and BA degrees students typically study a number of different subjects before specialising in their Honours years (third and fourth year). The University of Dundee and the University of Glasgow (at its Crichton Campus) are the only Scottish universities that currently offer a specifically named 'Liberal Arts' degree.

In Slovakia, the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) is located in the Old Town of Bratislava. It is the first liberal arts college in Central Europe. A private, accredited three-year degree-granting undergraduate institution, it opened in September 2006.

In Asia

A young man introduced to the seven Liberal Arts by Sandro Boticelli, c. 1484. Fresco in Villa Lemni, Florence.

The Commission on Higher Education of the Philippines mandates a General Education curriculum required of all higher education institutions; it includes a number of liberal arts subjects, including history, art appreciation, and ethics, plus interdisciplinary electives. Many universities have much more robust liberal arts core curricula; most notably, the Jesuit universities such as Ateneo de Manila University have a strong liberal arts core curriculum that includes philosophy, theology, literature, history, and the social sciences. Forman Christian College is a liberal arts university in Lahore, Pakistan. It is one of the oldest institutions in the Indian subcontinent. It is a chartered university recognized by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Habib University in Karachi, Pakistan offers a holistic liberal arts and sciences experience to its students through its uniquely tailored liberal core program which is compulsory for all undergraduate degree students. The Underwood International College of Yonsei University, Korea, has compulsory liberal arts courses for all the student body.

In India, there are many institutions that offer undergraduate UG or bachelor's degree/diploma and postgraduate PG or master's degree/diploma as well as doctoral PhD and postdoctoral studies and research, in this academic discipline. The highly ranked IIT Guwahati offers a "Master's Degree in Liberal Arts". Manipal Academy of Higher Education – MAHE, an Institution of Eminence as recognised by MHRD of Govt of India in 2018, houses a Faculty of Liberal Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, and also others like Symbiosis & FLAME University in Pune, Ahmedabad University, and Pandit Deendayal Energy University (PDEU)  in Ahmedabad, Ashoka University, and Azim Premji University in Bangalore. Lingnan University, Asian University for Women and University of Liberal Arts- Bangladesh (ULAB) are also a few such liberal arts colleges in Asia. International Christian University in Tokyo is the first and one of the very few liberal arts universities in Japan. Fulbright University Vietnam is the first liberal arts institution in Vietnam.

In Australia

Campion College is a Roman Catholic dedicated liberal arts college, located in the western suburbs of Sydney. Founded in 2006, it is the first tertiary educational liberal arts college of its type in Australia. Campion offers a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts as its sole undergraduate degree. The key disciplines studied are history, literature, philosophy, and theology.

The Millis Institute is the School of Liberal Arts at Christian Heritage College located in Brisbane. Founded by Dr. Ryan Messmore, former President of Campion College, the Millis Institute offers a Bachelor of Arts in the Liberal Arts in which students can choose to major in Philosophy, Theology, History or Literature. It also endorses a 'Study Abroad' program whereby students can earn credit towards their degree by undertaking two units over a five-week program at the University of Oxford. As of 2022, Elizabeth Hillman is currently the President of the Millis Institute.

A new school of Liberal Arts has been formed in the University of Wollongong; the new Arts course entitled 'Western Civilisation' was first offered in 2020. The interdisciplinary curriculum focuses on the classic intellectual and artistic literature of the Western tradition. Courses in the liberal arts have recently been developed at the University of Sydney and the University of Notre Dame.

Here’s how wild headlines advance the ideological agenda of science-rejecting advocacy groups

Kevin Folta | July 21, 2023

Credit: Ultimate Dog

Scrolling through the news has become a game of “What Great Horror Did Glyphosate Wreak This Week?” Variations on “Study first to link weed killer Roundup to convulsions in animals” regularly blaze across the internet. It only took this breathless news release from Florida Atlantic University accompanying an open access study in the journal Scientific Reports.

The headlines and stories that resulted appeared uncritically on hundreds of many mainstream websites (e.g., here, here, here, here, etc.) and on YouTube.

Anti-biotechnology activists had a field day, as you might guess (here, here).

The entire paper and the hysteria-grams were based on a study focused on…worms.

What’s the context?

Over the past fifty years scientists, many of the activist inclination, have been feeding the weedkiller Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate to rats, mice, worms, bees and any critter they could jam it into in the mostly futile hope to find something nefarious. The finding most celebrated by critics of the weedkiller, and which is still circulated today, was retracted. Why? Because it manipulated science to try to prove an ideological point — and the authors got caught.

Over the years, in an attempt to ‘prove’ glyphosate’s danger, scientists delivered massive doses through tubes directly into the stomach and injecting it directly into the abdomens of rodents. In the hundreds of papers in which  animals have been exposed to these unrealistically high doses there has been no mention of convulsions, except in some case studies where people drank huge amounts of the concentrate in failed suicide attempts. A systematic review of 27 studies released last year focused on whether glyphosate had any neurological effects in animals, published in June, shows little reliable evidence of impacts. 

On top of that, while we’re constantly reminded that there is more glyphosate applied than ever before, there are no trends of applicators and farmers breaking out in seizures (if there were, you can be assured they’d be the subject of high-profile lawsuits).

So being the “first to link” glyphosate to animal convulsions either means: (a) everyone else must have missed it for half a century; or (b) it could be an observation dependent on the experiment or the organism being tested. But presenting a measured analysis and making it clear that literally no other of the 3,000+ studies on glyphosate over more than 50 years has reached a similar conclusion, is not nearly as much fun as a new horror story. 

What did the report really say? 

The headlines suggested that the herbicide was “harmful” and was “linked” to convulsions in “animals”. Is that true?

The report by Naraine et al examined the recovery of C. elegans (a laboratory version of a ubiquitous microscopic soil worm) after an electric shock. When the worms are pulsed with electricity they go into a seizure, breaking their normal swimming behaviors. The time to recover from the shock was recorded. The researchers observed that shock-induced paralysis lasted longer when worms were bathed in glyphosate. In other words, glyphosate did not cause the convulsions as many headlines inferred. 

Credit: Bob Goldstein / University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The researchers then went on to test recovery in the presence of specific drugs or genetic mutations that could block or hypersensitize discrete neurotransmitter receptors in the worm’s rudimentary nervous system of 302 neurons. The results were consistent with glyphosate interfering with a specific neurotransmitter and/or its receptor, the GABA-A receptor, to cause the augmented recovery time. The scientists used both genetics and drugs to affect the response, a strong approach that helps pinpoint a mechanism of how glyphosate affects electroshock recovery.  

Unlike other reports where researchers pack animals full of herbicide and measure effects, the researchers here were careful to test a series of glyphosate formulations at relatively low concentrations, some that a nematode might realistically encounter in an ecological setting. They also independently tested the surfactants: the detergent-like molecules in Roundup that help the herbicide penetrate the waxy coating of leaves. These didn’t extend electrically-induced convulsions. Glyphosate alone did, even in the absence of the surfactant.

My major criticism of the paper is in the easy-to-misinterpret presentation of data in bar graphs that overlaid the individual data points. There is a lot of variation in the response between worms, and the researchers only reported an average. When looking at the data in most experiments they appear almost random, with wide variation in worm behavior in both glyphosate treatments and saline controls. The average recovery time was longer in the presence of the herbicide—but that seems to be dependent on a few worms convulsing longer, not all worms showing a change. Measuring the timing of worm wiggles might be tricky business, and larger data sets might refine the differences observed. 

So, let’s give the benefit of the doubt to the authors and conclude the glyphosate treated worms convulse longer and do so in a way that is dependent on a specific neurotransmitter. But let’s ostracize the sensational headlines about “dramatic findings” and the thousands of social media references and retweets hyping the glyphosate-seizure link, especially those claiming it is a basis of convulsions in “animals”.

Nova Southeastern University, one of the schools involved in the research, wins the award for irresponsibly generating unwarranted concern. Here’s its news release;

Before even introducing the study, Nova unscrupulously hyped a totally unrelated routine CDC release in July that found more than 80% of urine samples of Americans contained micro-traces of glyphosate—data blown way out of proportion, as I addressed in an article on the Genetic Literacy Project here.

Then the release breathlessly moved on to the worm study. Did the researchers really find something earth-shaking as its coverage suggested? Is glyphosate “potentially more dangerous than previously thought”? Should we rely on a study in an invertebrate model that does not match what has been observed in more complex animals with nervous systems much more similar to humans?

Other compounds known to affect specific neurotransmitters have been tested in C. elegans and show similar results with recovery time, so this is nothing new. What earth shaking nugget of information did the researchers in this case actually find? That “glyphosate and Roundup … generate concerns” over how they “might affect soil-dwelling organisms like C. elegans”—microscope soil worms. That’s the substance of the conclusion before the anti-glyphosate attack market went into high gear. To speculate that based on this study that animals including humans might be at risk is a long stretch.   

We will never expect contextualized coverage of this otherwise forgettable worm study by advocacy groups like GM Watch, which predictably hyped the study in headlines accompanied by wild implications from one of the news releases, that glyphosate “could lead to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s”—findings not found in some 3,000+ studies on glyphosate to date.

That’s not what the study addressed, and nor can its impact on other animals or humans be inferred from sparse data obtained from an electroshocked microscopic worm bathed in herbicide. That’s pure speculation, and irresponsible. 

What are we to take away from this all-to-familiar glyphosate-will-harm-you “news” melodrama? It means that serious readers—and editors of responsible news publications—need to actually read a scientific paper before writing a headline or pushing out a tweet. 

Kevin M. Folta is a professor, keynote speaker and podcast host. Follow Professor Folta on Twitter @kevinfolta

This article previously ran on the GLP Aug 30, 2022.

 

Sustainable farming advances: Global movement to ban pesticides and GMOs spur next-generation biotech pest controls

Cameron English | July 28, 2020

Their target remains GMOs—a range of agricultural products made with modern techniques of genetic engineering, from eggplant grown mostly in Bangladesh and modified to resist insects to corn, soybeans and cotton that tolerate exposure to weed-killing herbicides. Anti-biotech advocacy groups are waging a battle against GMOs in America’s courtrooms, and they’ve been emboldened by a string of recent successes, as the pro-organic Center for Food Safety (CFS) brags on its website:

CFS is preventing the mass approval of GMO crops and foods! We’re in court fighting some of our earth’s biggest polluters: Monsanto, Dow Chemical, and the agency that gives a green light to these polluters—the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) …. Our team is here to stop the use of dangerous pesticides that threaten our health and the health of our planet. If we work together, we can stop the next generation of dangerous GMO crops!

Bayer’s decision in June to settle some 95,000 lawsuits alleging its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer for $10.9 billion is perhaps the best indicator of how effective this litigation strategy is. The settlement, one of the largest in US history, was Bayer’s way of putting the breaks on a legal fight that was crippling it financially, though it appears the biotech giant may still have to defend its flagship weedkiller against many more plaintiffs after part of the deal fell through. In mid-July, the company also lost an appeal in the first Roundup case that went to trial, a 2018 suit brought by a California groundskeeper.

What’s emerging from the chaos of years of litigation targeting Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) and other makers of agricultural chemicals is that industry antagonists are not finished. Advocacy anti-GMO groups, now partnered with the tort industry, are poised to go after other chemicals in the conventional agricultural toolbox, including other herbicides, insecticides and synthetic fertilizers.

Credit: Walsh Family, father and son

Just last week, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the family of golf course groundskeeper Thomas Walsh could proceed with its civil case against a dozen major chemical manufacturers for allegedly causing his leukemia and eventual death. Glyphosate is technically not on trial here, as it has not been linked in any studies to leukemia. But a handful of studies have shown some correlation between glyphosate and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in long-term users, while the vast majority of studies have not confirmed any links. Rather, the focus will be on a range of other chemicals used to control pests.

Beyond glyphosate

Success breeds copycats, and the windfall generated by anti-biotechnology activism has primed the litigation pump. Since many popular weedkillers are paired with genetically engineered crops that resist their herbicidal effects, activist groups or trial lawyers they work with are filing a slew of lawsuits alleging that other pesticides pose serious risks to human health or the environment. Their goal is to force the manufacturers to pull their products off the market or get the EPA to ban them. Eliminate the pesticides and farmers have no incentive to plant the herbicide-resistant seeds.

Dicamba drift damage

Environmental groups led by CFS have recently convinced a federal court to ban another popular herbicide, drift-prone dicamba, and are trying to get the same circuit court to vacate the registration for Enlist weedkillers sold by Corteva Agriscience. Activist groups are also agitating to block EPA approval of Bayer’s new corn variety that withstands exposure to five different herbicides. True to form, CFS executive director Andrew Kimbrell said victory in these suits could “massively reduce” the use of GMO crops.

Europe exemplifies where US anti-GMO activists want to take America. Cultivating biotech plants is tightly restricted and thus effectively banned across the Atlantic (although they are widely imported for animal feed). A single variety of insect-resistant corn is only the such crop grown in Europe today. The EU could also ban the use of glyphosate as soon as 2022 and mandate that 25 percent of its farmland be converted to organic production by 2030. European regulators have already banned a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids because they allegedly are responsible for a swath of bee deaths, though the evidence doesn’t support this conclusion.

If successful, activist efforts to push the US in Europe’s direction could leave American farmers with access to only subpar pest-control tools. The problem is compounded because consumers watch the courtroom drama play out on social media and demand access to “more sustainable” food options. Such developments prompt an obvious question: will the US follow in Europe’s footsteps?

New technologies on the horizon

The answer appears to be no, for two reasons. While anti-GMO groups have been successful in court recently, the American public is far less ‘precautionary’ in its view of chemicals, seeking a more evidence-based balance of risks and rewards. But there’s another twist to the story. The drumbeat of legal actions in recent years has begun spurring the development of a new generation of sustainable pest-control tools that will just be harder to ban.

Striking evidence of this trend surfaced in early July. “Conventional pesticide makers, including Syngenta and Bayer AG, have been under pressure in recent years over their products’ impact on the environment and biodiversity,” Bloomberg reported, “as more and more consumers grow more …. distrustful of pesticides used to produce their food.” In response, these biotech giants, alongside smaller startups and university research groups, have taken a variety of approaches to develop products that address sustainability concerns—everything from new seeds and pesticides to genetic technologies that reverse herbicide resistance in weeds and protect crops from pest attacks.

Gene-editing technology, which allows scientists to make specific changes to DNA,  is one of the best tools researchers can use to tackle farm sustainability issues, and some early results are promising. With the help of tools like CRISPR, researchers are devising new combinations of herbicides and resistant crops that will give farmers options beyond the pest-control systems currently in the activist crosshairs. An herbicide-resistant canola variety developed through gene editing has been available in the US and Canada since 2016. And other crops, including corn, rice, wheat, soy and even watermelon, are also being engineered to withstand exposure to a variety of weedkillers.

Image: iStock/monsitj

Gene editing can also be used to immunize plants against attacks from insects and deadly pathogens. Significantly, these crops possess insect resistance that isn’t dependent on chemical spraying. That makes them more akin to transgenic (GMO) Bt crops already grown by farmers all over the world, such as eggplant in Bangladesh and cotton in India and the US. The resistance trait is bred into the plants themselves, so spraying is often cut to near zero. As they become available, these new plant varieties will rob anti-GMO activists of their current favorite line of attack: banning synthetic pesticides meant to be used in concert with biotech crops.

Natural biopesticides, typically developed from plants and microbes, are another important part of this effort to make farming more sustainable. GLP reported on the dramatic growth of biopesticides last summer, including a weedkiller known for now as MBI-014. The bacteria-based herbicide is effective against weeds that glyphosate and dicamba can’t control. In field trials completed last fall, the bioherbicide

… demonstrated control of a target weed approaching that of a current post-emergent chemical herbicide. At commercial rates across multiple trial locations that used uniform protocols, control of palmer amaranth was evaluated at three stages of growth, 7-to-10 days after MBI-015 was applied. Control ranged from the mid-70s to the high-80s percent ranges.

Palmer amaranth: Credit: Howard Schwartz/Colorado State University)

Gene-edited crops and biopesticides may prove to be especially important because they’re generally easier to get through the US regulatory system than transgenic plants and synthetic chemicals. In Europe, where gene-edited plants are regulated just like GMOs, biological pest controls may be the only novel technology capable of navigating the EU’s byzantine regulatory system.

But activists are not expected to suddenly drop their opposition, even though the environmental and health effects of these technologies are minimal. They will warn of “unintended consequences,” of course. They are wont to complain, for example, that developing new pesticides, natural or otherwise, and resistant crops fuels the so-called pesticide treadmill. “Patented GE seeds are designed for use with specific pesticides, leading to increased use of these chemicals,” warns Pesticide Action Network (PAN), another plaintiff in the lawsuits alongside CFS. “And widespread application of these pesticides leads to the emergence of herbicide-resistant ‘superweeds,’ which facilitates the need for more herbicides and GMO seeds resistant to them.” Yet many of these products are designed specifically to address the threat of pesticide resistance.

Farmers do rely on pesticides season after season, but utilizing a variety of weedkillers and insecticides alongside non-chemical strategies can help mitigate the risk of resistant weeds and bugs. That’s a key reason why the activist lawsuits to ban effective pesticides are counterproductive. The fewer chemistries farmers have access to, the more likely it is that resistance issues will arise. Moreover, two decades of research show that biotech crops have cut pesticide use by 776 million kilograms since their introduction in 1996. Despite these important qualifications often overlooked by activists, pesticide resistance remains a real concern for many farmers. Fortunately, biotechnology may yield a more direct solution in the coming years.

Reversing pesticide resistance

Beyond introducing more pesticides, it may be possible to re-sensitize weeds to chemical treatments they’ve become resistant to using modern genetic engineering techniques. Two approaches called virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) and Virus-mediated overexpression (VOX), for example, would allow scientists to turn off herbicide resistance in weeds. A team of scientists at UK-based Rothamsted Research demonstrated how these techniques work in an April 2020 study:

The team first inserted their gene of interest into a virus, and then infected the weed with it. During VIGS, the plant tries to defend itself and in the process shuts down production of all genes coming from the virus – including the weed’s own copies of the inserted gene – whereas during VOX, both the virus’ and the inserted gene’s copies manufacture proteins for the plant …. This made previously resistance plants susceptible

A similar technology, developed by Monsanto several years ago, involves treating herbicide-tolerant weeds with glyphosate and an RNA-based substance that shuts down their tolerance to the herbicide. Gene drives, which can be used to spread specific genetic alterations through targeted wild populations (of, say, weeds and crop pests), could also be used to eliminate pesticide resistance.

Center for Food Safety, Pesticide Action Network and their ideological allies won’t have a sudden change of heart on biotechnology. As they readily acknowledge, they’re on a campaign to promote organic farming, and that won’t end because we devise a long-term solution to herbicide resistance, especially given their recent success in court. What’s more interesting is that this extremist wing of the environmental movement has been gradually pushing itself into irrelevancy by attacking the technologies that make farming more sustainable; these recent biotech-fueled innovations are just the latest example of that process in action. As science writer Matt Ridley has pointed out:

Far from starving, the seven billion people who now inhabit the planet are far better fed than the four billion of 1980 …. Remarkably, this …. has happened without taking much new land under the plow and the cow …. Nor have these agricultural improvements on the whole brought new problems of pollution in their wake. Quite the reverse …. I was wrong to be pessimistic about the environment in 1980, and it would be wrong to give young people a counsel of despair today. Much has improved since then, and …. much improvement from here is not only possible, but likely.

Cameron J. English is the GLP’s managing editor. BIO. Follow him on Twitter @camjenglish