Columban Father finds the devil in the detail

Another Life: It's getting on for 20 years since Bill McKibben's book The End of Nature summed up our fears of global warming and genetic engineering in human manipulation of the Earth.

In that time, many people have braced themselves for some planetary consequence, perhaps on the scale we have witnessed in the Indian Ocean. The fact that the undersea earthquake was a perfectly natural phenomenon - a periodic easing of one of Gaia's stiffer joints - has served to emphasise Earth's indifference to our species. It has also dramatised, for many, the coming threat of melting icecaps, spreading deserts, engulfing floods.

Its colossal impact has quite wiped from our attention an earlier disaster, elsewhere in the Pacific, for which nature alone was certainly not to blame. At the start of December, rainstorms in the Philippines brought mudslides from denuded hills to wipe out hundreds of people and leave thousands more homeless. They were coincidental and tragic illustration for the early chapters of a small, angry book, The Death of Life, just published in Ireland.

Its author, Fr Sean McDonagh, is a Columban missionary priest who has made a crusade of protest against human mistreatment of the Earth and its poorer peoples. The Death of Life (Columba Press, 9.99) is the latest in a series of books in which he has bravely challenged his Church, and Christianity in general, for their moral and theological neglect of nature - a revelation forced upon him in the Philippines some 40 years ago.

Then, he was helping the tribes of the Philippines' T'Boli hills to protect their primal rainforest, so central to their lives and religious traditions. Decades of corrupt and reckless logging, benefiting only a wealthy few, were to leave many of the islands quite bare.

The loss of the living fabric we have learned to call biodiversity is the chief concern of The Death of Life. Along with its plea for action to save species threatened with extinction, not just in the Philippines but in habitats across the world, he continues to argue for an "ecologically sensitive theology". "A truly pro-life stance," he insists, "would address what is happening to life in every part of the world, especially in rich ecosystems like coral reefs and tropical forests." Woven with this is McDonagh's shrewd appreciation of the ambitions of transnational corporations, agri-business and pharmaceutical, who would chain Third World farmers to production of patented GM crops and use trade agreements to pirate the biological and genetic resources of their countries.

His activism goes beyond books. Columbans are one of many Catholic organisations to express deep concern over the Vatican's inclination to support GM crops in the name of ending world hunger. McDonagh was at a conference at Rome's Gregorian University last autumn, called "Feeding the World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology" and sponsored jointly by the US Ambassador to the Holy See and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. The speakers, by McDonagh's account, were overwhelmingly Monsanto-allied and the atmosphere "not dialogue-friendly".

For the ambassador, James Nicholson, opposition to GM crops was "cultural imperialism". This did not dissuade McDonagh from challenging him from the floor on such issues as Kyoto, biopiracy and the subversive impact of GM technology and food aid on Third World farmers. The priest's critique of the Pontifical Academy's study document rehearsed a familiar gamut of objections to GM technology, but also contained a detail I found new and arresting. It dealt with some small print in recent American dealings in Iraq: "Before the 'transfer of sovereignty' in June 2004, the former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Paul Bremer, left behind 100 executive orders. Order 81 on, Patents, Industrial Design, Undisclosed Information, Integrated Circuits and Plant Variety, rescinds Iraq's 1970 patent law which prohibited the private ownership of biological resources. The new, US-imposed patent law introduces new monopoly rights over seeds through Plant Variety Protection Orders."

Is it mere paranoia to suppose that such an extraordinary priority somehow fitted in with the corporate marketing designs of companies like Monsanto? Like many environmentalists, I am beginning to wonder if concerns about the potential effects of GM foods on health have not been a fatal distraction from the real and present threat: the extension of transnational corporate power over the human food supply and its farming producers. In that context, even the cost to plant biodiversity, while grave, becomes almost incidental.

American aid is now pouring out to the tsunami countries. It is neither ungracious, unappreciative, nor anti-American to hope it does not carry too many hidden, long-term, corporate strings.