Civilization depends on our expanding ability to produce food efficiently, which has markedly accelerated thanks to science and technology.

We've gotten so good at growing food that we've gone, in a few generations, from nearly half of Americans living on farms to 2 percent. We no longer think about how the wonderful things in the grocery store got there, and we'd like to go back to what we think is a more natural way.

One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi.

In the last century, as we learned more about genes, we were able to devise ways of accelerating evolution.

We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people.

There are probably already too many people on the planet.

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We're wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We're now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate.