Jeremy Rifkin

The position I took at the time was that we hadn't really examined any of the potential environmental consequences of introducing genetically modified organisms.

In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn't have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture.

We are already producing enough food to feed the world. We already have technology in place that allows us to produce more than we can find a market for.

One thing I've learned over these last 30 or 40 years is that people make history. There's no fait accompli to any of this.

We now have an opportunity, though, to do something we didn't do in the industrial age, and that is to get a leg up on this, to bring the public in quickly, to have an informed debate.

To bring our human population in line with the biocapacity of the planet and transform our society from scarcity to sustainable abundance, we will need to address the great disparity in ecological footprint between the rich and poor, while simultaneously lowering the overall human population on Earth.