Tom Vilsack a "schill for agribusiness."

Obama is about to unveil his selection for Secretary of Agriculture Agribusiness. It's Tom Vilsack, Democratic governor of Iowa, a man that The Organic Consumers Association said "has a glowing reputation as being a schill for agribusiness biotech giants like Monsanto." That's exactly what I don't want to hear.

In principle, I am not opposed to genetically modified organisms. That said, I think that our proclivity at manipulating our environments has led us to think that because we can manipulate the environment that we should. We are ambitious animals gifted with foresight but crippled by impatience and a lack of humility. The unintended ecological consequences of GMOs and agribusiness and agriscience are easily overlooked and ignored.

Consider the blight on monarch butterflies whose fecundity has likely been hammered by Bt genetically modified strains of corn. Pollen from the Bt corn drifts onto milkweed - the only plant on which monarchs lay their eggs -and is consumed by monarch caterpillars. In a 1999 study by Cornell researchers "monarch larvae that ate leaves sprinkled with Bt pollen grew more slowly, ate less, and suffered a mortality rate of nearly 50% as compared to monarchs in the same lab that were fed unsprinkled milkweed." That's alarming. The decline in some places was precipitous, reducing the population by as much as half from 1996 to 2001.

All that is very sad. And here, Obama - the voice and scion of change - has opted for more big business. Vilsack was named governor of the year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, cynically acronymed BIO. Here's what they wrote about him:

"Governor Vilsack has demonstrated a steadfast commitment to raising Iowa's visibility as a center of excellence for agricultural and life science research. His "Iowa 2010" initiative will help improve the economic climate for technology-based industries and illustrates his vision of Iowa as an important thread in the national biotechnology fabric," said Kelly.

"In May 2000 Governor Vilsack helped create the Governors' Biotechnology Partnership, a bi-partisan coalition of governors serving as clearinghouse for biotechnology information. Starting with only 13 members, the group now enjoys participation from more than half of the nation's governors. The success of the coalition is due in part, to Governor Vilsack's dedication to the biotechnology industry," Kelly added.

BIO represents more than 1,000 biotechnology companies, academic institutions, state biotechnology centers and related organizations in all 50 U.S. states and 33 other nations. BIO members are involved in the research and development of health-care, agricultural, industrial and environmental biotechnology products.

Notice that there is nothing in there about sustainable agriculture. Nothing. This is more of the same for big corn to shape us. I encourage everyone to read at least the first chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, Francis Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, David Orr'sEcological Literacy, or Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. Corn owns us. We don't own it. Corn quite literally runs Iowa. All of its possible permutations - corn itself, corn syrup, shelving, cellulose cups, ethanol, etc. - are exported from that monocultural state with disastrous consequences.

American farmers continue to plant much more corn than they need to, hoping to gain short-term profits from ethanol or whatever other boutique use might come from corn. This is a social trap. Ethanol’s long-term prospects are shaky because its greenhouse emissions in total after production are, at best, about .9 of petroleum production. That is a slim margin in the best-case scenario. Worst-case scenarios show that ethanol processing creates more greenhouse gases than does petroleum production. As corn production declines because of lack of profitability, we might expect even less corn on the global food market from American and Asian-American who cannot profit from it. However, corn production will continue on a massive scale that will cause billions of pounds of eroded soil from the American breadbasket, saturated with nitrates and chemical fertilizers, to flow down the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico. The total soil loss inevitably leads to infertile soil across the Midwest, massive river pollution, and the further spread of the dead zone off the boot of Louisiana where shrimp populations have been plummeting for decades. The pre-industrial Mississippi river landscape was once a great floodplain well-adapted to the Mississippi’s floods. Today, it is massively walled and blocked in, accelerating the rivers speed and erosion. Additionally, the enormous amount of carbon fuels burned in the agricultural process adds considerably to greenhouse gases. All of this Governor Vilsack endorses as the governor of Iowa and the new Secretary of Agriculture Agribusiness.

Though this is only a cursory overview of a massive problem, it shows Garret Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons.” We keep artificially extending short-term solutions such that at the end of the proverbial day, we will be faced with a lack of soil, a lack of energy reserves, a climate whose weather patterns have shifted far from pre-industrial times, and the destruction of untold numbers of species. All for the short-term arms races we precipitate with our desire to manipulate nature so that our appetites are satisfied.

We need to consider where these should lead us. There are some of us, like David Orr, who question whether we are "currently undergoing an explosion of knowledge.” Sure, computers and the internet have created spectacular means by which we can transport and save digital information.

But reconsider the topic: information. Planet Earth is going through the sixth great extinction event in its history. The last was when an astronaut hit the Yucatan peninsula about 65 million years ago and likely precipitated the dinosaurs’ demise. Note though, that extinction was precipitated by the mindless collision of two astronomical objects. Human beings with our appetites, our short-term predictive intelligence, our language, and our technology currently drive tens of thousands of species extinct every year with those animals most closely related to us on the tree of life like gorillas at the greatest risk. The polar bear and walrus suffer and dwindle as the habitats to which they have evolved to fit change drastically. Amphibian species the world over indicate how much industrial humans – homo technologicus – has poisoned ecosystems. The hemlock tree in Appalachia is dying out because of pests that lived farther south in the continental United States and the longpole pines in the west are on their way out too. They will be gone in just a few decades. There seems no technical fix at this point.

At least not a new fix. Instead, multiplot agriculture - not agriculture and agriscience that generate agridollars - that exists within the bounds of its soil needs to return. There are good signs all around us that this is happening. More people are buying local food and growing their own food (will we get our little patch going next year?) and pushing back against the command economy in American agriculture. Talk about corporate welfare. And whose the biggest welfare recipient of them all? Iowa, the home of corn.

We are faced with the very real possibility that humans, as Agent Smith from the movie The Matrix says, “are a virus.” Governor Vilsack is a champion of our environmental and inhumane virulence. Obama is seeming less and less like the change we need to see in the world. How sad.