Work for an Activist. Column in KomputerraOnline #94

I am struck by the indifference of the general public. Before our very eyes, people thinking only of profit are introducing a technology that is dangerous to the environment and to our health. Do not treat this lightly: the situation is critical. If our sense of responsibility is alive, we are all obliged to set aside immediate self-interest and resist the threat hanging over the planet!
The technology I wish to tell you about leads to the alienation of vast tracts of land. Natural ecosystems, occupied by sacred wilderness, are being destroyed. With the use of heavy machinery, wild animals and plants are being cynically annihilated. Biological diversity declines sharply, soils are subjected to destructive impacts and degrade. The implementation of this terrible technology leads to increased extraction and combustion of fossil fuels, to increased carbon dioxide emissions, and stimulates global warming. Where forests once rustled or steppe grasses swayed in the wind, the violated earth releases fresh portions of the gas of death and destruction — carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere. The businessmen who are killing the land poison it with products of the chemical industry. Washing into rivers with rainwater, these substances bring death to ecosystems…
For what purpose is all this evil being perpetrated? For the sake of products that destroy human health. How can people in whom conscience has fallen asleep be awakened? Perhaps by the spectacle of suffering caused by Gi-Herter-Heubner disease? Emaciated children, tormented by diarrhoea and developmentally delayed, are but part of the nightmarish price humanity pays for the use of this technology. What of the epidemic of obesity? And are we not morally wounded by the entire fortunes amassed by self-serving traders willing to sell people pure evil if it brings them profit?
Have you understood what I am speaking of? Of the cultivation of the most dangerous grasses — Triticum aestivum, Triticum durum, and their close relatives. With astonishing cynicism, the authorities of our countries refuse to ban the cultivation of these diabolical plants and to outlaw the circulation of substances extracted from them.
What is to be done? Are we to stand by passively while insidious evil destroys our planet and cripples people? No! We must bring this dangerous technology under public control. But where are we to find defenders of justice who will uphold the interests of wild nature without heeding the cynical arguments and Jesuitical ruses of the advocates of environmental destruction? Our only hope lies in hardened civic activists, ready to rush from one environmental campaign to the next. They, steeled by rallies, with voices hoarse from shouting slogans, having trained themselves out of doubt, possess precisely the required uncompromising spirit to shoulder the difficult burden of controlling potentially dangerous technologies.