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"You eat them every day and this year they will likely constitute 70-80% of all US soybeans grown. Commoner's blather does not hold up to this type of pure simple fact. IT WORKS.

"Blather" is right. What we must all remember is that Commoner last did any real science decades ago and has been, for about 40 years, a socialist activist. He's trying to do with genetic engineering now what he attempted to do with environmentalism back in the 60's and 70s': stir up hysteria and use his position as a "scientist" to give credibility to the social/political "solution" he is pushing.

Here is the section introducing Barry Commoner in The Apocalyptics: Cancer and the Big Lie, How Environmental Politics Controls What We Know about Cancer. (pp. 36-37) My comments are in brackets [ ]. Typos are mine, not those of the authors.

BARRY COMMONER: 1969
By 1969, the ecological "crisis" was part of the repertoire of many of those who were considered enlightened. Indeed, Senator Edmund [crybaby] Muskie, a major Democratic Party contender for the next presidential nomination, had made the apocalypse his own. He launched a series of Senate hearings to investigate the charge that American industrial technology was destroying life on earth; and one of his most startling witnesses was biologist Barry Commoner of Washington University in St. Louis. Commoner had been predicting environmental disaster ever since the early 1060s, and because he was a scientist he had aroused widespread interest. But this was his first appearance in America's most prestigious political forum. He testified before Muskie, accompanied by W. H. Ferry, Vice-President of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institution, who was also an apocalyptic.(60) Their testimony was reported in the New York Times of April 28, 1969, under the headline "Technology and Environment: Senators Hear Gloomy Appraisals." The word "gloomy" did not quite capture the revolutionary nature of their testimony, in either its scientific or its political dimension. Here is how the reporter, Robert H. Phelps, presented the story quite accurately:
Is the United States set on an irreversible course that will destroy the natural base on which it has built the highest standard of living in the world?

This is one of the questions that the Senate Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs, headed by Senator Edmund S. [crybaby] Muskie, has been looking into for months. While at least another round of hearings is scheduled, the answers so far are pessimistic.

The gloomiest appraisals of all came last week from Barry Commoner, director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, at Washington University in St. Louis, and W. H. Ferry, vice-president of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, Calif..

Both witness said that nothing less than a change in the political and social system, including revision of the Constitution, was necessary to save the country from destroying its natural environment.

Both agreed, too, that the peril came from uncontrolled technology.; In the process of creating new goods and services, they said, technology is destroying the country's "capital" of land, water and other resources as well as injuring people.

Dr. Commoner said, "Our present system of technology is not merely consuming this capital, but threatening--probably within the next 50 years--to destroy it irreparably."

Mr. Ferry...said, "We may have passed the point of no return in some areas."

Dr. Commoner cited the success of inorganic fertilizers, high-compression automobile engines and insecticides as examples of "progress" that damages the environment....

Referring to Dr. Commoner's testimony, Mr. Ferry asked: "What good will color television in every room and outposts on the moon be to the grandchildren, if their air is unbreathable, their water undrinkable and their dwellings half buried in their own debris?...."

Mr. Ferry offered what he called a "wildly absurd" proposal for a two-year moratorium [remember those?] on most technological research and innovation. He suggested creation of an international body to halt pollution of the oceans [they've finally achieved this with the equally spurious but equally suitable for hysterical exploitation "threat" of global warming] and a national ecological authority with wide powers over all major construction and technological projects [OSHA (1970) and many other regulatory agencies soon followed].

Noting that such proposals might be unconstitutional, Mr. Ferry suggested that the Constitution be completely revised....

Agreeing with Mr. Ferry, Dr. Commoner said...the problems are so profound that they call for "not a new legislative base, but a new constitutional one."

In response, Senator [crybaby] Muskie, referring to technology as "the modern Trojan Horse," told Dr. Commoner and Mr. Ferry that their proposals, even if they served no other purpose, would "open a lot of eyes that are still closed to the problem." This news story reveals the degree to which apocalyptic thought had penetrated the highest levels of the political culture of 1969. While Senator [crybaby] Muskie was careful to disassociate himself form proposals for "revising" the Constitution, he nonetheless had given Commoner and Ferry one of the most important political platforms in the land and praised their testimony as enlightening.

Commoner's conviction that the Constitution stood in the way of solutions to ecological problems was paralleled by his conviction that "our system of production" stood in the way of such solutions. That same year, he was invited to contribute a paper for the 13th National Conference of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO. The conclusion of a lengthy analysis of the same general problems he was discussing above can be cited here:
Our technology is enormously successful in producing material goods, but too often is disastrously incompatible with the natural environmental systems that support not only human life, but technology itself. Moreover, these technologies [remember, genetic engineering didn't exist then but as a gleam in someone's eye--Commoner is just trying to cram this into his bag of portending disaster and get control of it] are now so massively embedded in our system of industrial and agricultural production that any effort to make them conform to the demands of the environment [as given voice by Commoner, Ehrlich, et al] will involve serious economic dislocations. If, as I believe, environmental pollution is a sign of major incompatibilities between our system of production and the environmental system that supports it [see the Soviet Union for incompatibility between government system and the environment], then, if we are to survive, we must successfully confront these economic obligations, however sever and challenging to our social concepts they bay be. (61)
It was not until 1976, in a book entitled The Poverty of Power, that commoner explicitly identified the political solution he envisioned. To survive, he said, our society would have to repudiate its present productive system and substitute a system organized in harmony with the global ecosystem using the second law of thermodynamics as its guiding standard: "...it may be time to view the faults of the U.S. capitalist economic system," he wrote, "from the vantage point of a socialist alternative." (62)

In 1978, Commoner was identified by Rae Goodell in an MIT study of scientists who dominated the media as a "guerrilla" and one of the most "visible scientists" in the country.(63) And in 1979, he abandoned his primary identity as a scientist and founded a new leftist party in the United States, called the Citizens Party, which would direct its efforts to achieving grater government control of industry in the name of the environment. In 1980, he ran for President, as the candidate of that party.

Many people don't realize where the roots of folks like Commoner and others pushing the apocalyptic vision are buried and how the entire idea of ecological disaster that would bring an end to civilization as we know it unless we act RIGHT NOW because to wait to see if there really is a crisis will cause us to be too late, now an accepted image, was manufactured by a small set of largely socialist activists back in the 1960s. Even in the 1960s and shortly thereafter people were unaware of this. Here's an interesting description of this from pages 56-57 of The Apocalyptics:

In 1977, two legal historians got a serious shock. They were James E. Krier of UCLA and Edmund Ursin of the University of San Diego, authors of a scholarly book called Pollution and Policy. Both were themselves strong supporters of the "environmental" movement, their work had been generously funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, and they were analyzing the development of public policy in the realm of air pollution. When they sought to identify the origins of the "great environmental crisis" that had suddenly swept the U.S. with force during the years of 1969-1970, they found they were unable to do so. The reason, they said with some bewilderment, was that there had never been a "great environmental crisis."
And then there was the great environmental crisis; it most of all is a mystery. That, like crises in the past, this one contributed to further intervention seems unquestionable, but there similarity ends. Crises in the past concerned particular pollution episodes and generated, if anything, rather focused response. But that was not the case with the great environmental crisis of 1969-1970. Its roots were not in any specific cause, and it spawned not a narrow response but an entire movement (or the movement spawned it; the connection is hardly clear)--a general "environmental consciousness." Some observers appear to attribute the new crisis to the same forces largely behind the old; growth in population, production, consumption, affluence, and pollution. Surely these factors played a part, but more must also have been at work. For this crisis had no episode to trigger it (unless one lays it all on a few oil spills) and, in any event, if growth factors were the cause, why did not the crisis, and the movement, occur sooner--or later? We cannot answer that question ; we do not know what "more" was at work. We only know that this new crisis was different. Those of the past were crises in action; they merely signified that government should do more of the same, take that next small step in policy. The great environmental crisis was rather a crisis in thought....In this sense, the environmental crisis may simply have been part of a larger whole, a general "loss of citizen confidence in governmental institution...generating a crisis of its own." Whether the environmental crisis arose from this larger sense of unrest, or from efforts of crusaders finally bearing fruit, or from growth, or the need for anew issue now that the "urban crisis" had quietly died [remember that one?', or from all or none of these is an open question.(133) [Emphasis added by E.E.]

Efron's book goes on to thoroughly document the factors behind what the authors above called a "mystery". It's one of the best I've seen at laying bare the origins of the "environmental movement".