In case you missed the coverage and commentary yesterday (the Twitter flow is here), you can now watch Mark Lynas, the British writer and environmentalist who once helped drive Europe’s movement against genetically engineered crops, apologize for those actions and embrace this technology as a vital tool for ending hunger and conserving the environment. He spoke yesterday at the Oxford Farming Conference at Oxford University. (Many other fascinating presentations are now online.)

An excerpt from Lynas’s prepared remarks is below. Here’s his remarkable preamble:

For the record, here and upfront, I apologize for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

The arc of Lynas’s fascinating career is in some ways neatly encapsulated by two acts at Oxford — throwing a cream pie in the face of Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptic of eco-calamity, at a book signing there in 2001, yelling “pies for lies” (see photo below), and now echoing more than a few of Lomborg’s assertions in his lecture at the Oxford Farming Conference on Thursday.

In doing so, he has displayed an encouraging — and still rare — capacity to shed dogma in favor of data. His valuable 2011 book “The God Species” (a host of reviews here) was the first big sign of this transformation.

After “The God Species” was published, Lynas explained his shift this way in an interview with Keith Kloor:

Well, life is nothing if not a learning process. As you get older you tend to realize just how complicated the world is and how simplistic solutions don’t really work… There was no “Road to Damascus” conversion, where there’s a sudden blinding flash and you go, “Oh, my God, I’ve got this wrong.” There are processes of gradually opening one’s mind and beginning to take seriously alternative viewpoints, and then looking more closely at the weight of the evidence.

Photo

In reading the text of Lynas’s speech yesterday, I asked him if he’d reassessed the pie assault. His reply showed just how willing he is to endure slings and arrows from old allies by invoking another name that is anathema to many traditional greens:

Bjorn was always the perfect gentleman about that incident. I have apologized properly over email to him, and we’ve had a couple of phone conversations since. These days I read his stuff with interest but I do think he could make his case more strongly by avoiding his own tendency to confirmation bias and being rather selective with his sources, to say the least. I only recently discovered the work of Julian Simon, who was Lomborg’s original inspiration, and I think it should be required reading for all enviro types – some vital wisdom there.

Before we get to Lynas’s talk on genetics and agriculture, it’s worth posting my reply on Simon:

Simon was too demonized for sure (his relevant work is online). But he was wrong on one thing — the need for more people to make more progress (more geniuses), as I wrote here: “Julian Simon’s 20th century notion that population growth was good because it raised the odds of generating a fresh batch of breakthroughs was half right; you just don’t need the extra billions if you expand access to education and tie brains together with communication (and translation).”

Read on for an excerpt from Lynas’s speech (as prepared for delivery), but please read or listen to the whole thing, and then to dig in to “The God Species,” as well: