Modern environmentalism is more about promoting distrust and fear than it is protecting the environment. Even when it comes to something basic like Golden Rice, activist groups take the demonize and ban approach. They hate science more than they love children.
In the apolitical segment of science media - yes, it exists, albeit smaller than its corporate face leads people to believe - the running joke is that the only science environmentalists accept is climate change, and only then because it feeds into their Doomsday narrative and says that humanity stinks.
Mark Lynas is a famous environmentalist who had to walk away from a lot of his friends because of that double standard - scientists must be dismissed as "tinkerers" or corporate shills or stupid, except about global warming. It happened because he set out to actually learn the science behind GMOs and not just demonize it.
He notes that it wasn't wrong to be concerned in the early days - and he's right, so was I. Genetic modification prior to precise methods in use today were things like mutagenesis, which are far riskier than GMOs. Yet, strangely, a lot of countries in Europe, where GMOs are banned (except in food for animals, which makes as little sense as most environmentalists about biology), have gone backwards to more dangerous mutagenesis because it does not fit the legal definition of a banned GMO. If GMOs were just more mutagenesis, the slippery slope said it was a bad idea.
Hundreds of studies over decades have found no problems, so there is the precautionary principle and then there just being loony because paying donors need to be terrified into giving and that is where environmentalism sits now, always searching for the next way to raise money.
Writing in Cosmos, Lynas sums up both the anti-science mentality and the political demographic that is common, though corporate media tends to focus on positions where the American Republican party is against evidence: "Anti-GMO environmentalists are thus betraying not only progressive values, but the same environmental cause they are pledged to defend."
Environmentalists’ double standards By Mark Lynas, Cosmos
