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PETER AND THE WOLF

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In 1995, after 27 years and two children, Raven divorced his second wife, politely saying their interests had diverged. In 1996 he married Kate Fish, an environmentalist who went to work for Monsanto the same year and is now their director of public policy. The two met on an advisory committee charged with helping Monsanto clean up its environmental act. Today, both navigate the mainstream in trusting partnership with Monsanto -- and they're infuriated by any hint that Fish's job might influence Raven's attitudes. "It ought to almost be a moral question whether people start labeling people because they are married," explodes Raven. "I have been a very well-regarded scientist for all my career and achieved everything I wanted to achieve, more than most, and I didn't do that because I was married. Kate, if anything, is more of an environmentalist than I am. She works with public acceptance, listening and bringing people together and trying to find ways Monsanto can operate effectively and well with public approval. Her job is not selling or convincing people of anything."

Fish, who spends much of her time in Europe setting up "stakeholder dialogue" with biotech's critics, answers more calmly: "The reality," she says, "is that corporations have the biggest influence on these kinds of issues." Government's role is shrinking; nation-states plod too slowly to react to global change. Besides, she firmly believes that if corporations ignore environmental problems, "it will ultimately erode their profitability. So at some level there is -- there should be -- a convergence between corporate interests and sustainability."

Her husband agrees. "One of the bottom lines is, it's not in the interest of any company to do harm," he says. "Why would a company want to do that?"

Er ... why did Monsanto produce Agent Orange? "Well, nobody knew, did they?" he fires back. "The government said, "We want Agent Orange.' Unless you adopt the extreme point of view that you are not going to cooperate because there might be some bad environmental impact later....

"Major companies will be, are, a major factor if we are going to win world sustainability," he concludes. "There is nothing I'm condemning Monsanto for."

The Garden received $3 million from Monsanto in their last fundraising campaign (almost one-third of the total contributions from Civic Progress companies). Monsanto also contributed land and a large chunk of the $146 million startup money for the Danforth Plant Science Center. Monsanto matches its employees' contributions to the Garden ($225,000 last year) and contributes to the operating fund ($25,000 last year). Trustees give privately, too, and in past years the Garden has had Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro, Monsanto vice president Tom K. Smith and Monsanto research-and- development director Howard Schneiderman on its governing board. Now the Garden is collaborating with Monsanto's nutrition sector on a food library, collecting samples of all plants used worldwide as foods and medicines. (The World Resources Institute lists Monsanto as a bioprospector since 1989 and lists its collector, as of 1993, as the Missouri Botanical Garden.)

When Confluence, an environmental quarterly, criticized Monsanto, the Garden's PR woman pulled it from their literature table.

When we asked Raven whether he's ever criticized Monsanto, he says, "Hmm. I can't really remember. I may have. I think I probably have. But I can't really remember."

Environmentalists make cracks about Raven's blinding ego and corporate-sponsored sex life. But underneath, they're genuinely puzzled. He's still, after all, a member of the Sierra Club -- and this August, Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope wrote President Bill Clinton to demand labeling of GM foods; extensive research into long-term effects; and removal of antibiotic resistance genes from all GM food crops. Ken Midkiff, director of the Missouri Sierra Club, says that environmentally, "Raven's done many good things -- but this is one of the things where he's not so good. As a scientist he should view (biotech) with great skepticism. But there are a lot of scientists who normally would be calling for more studies, and in this case it appears they've decided to let money dictate where their mouth is." (As for biotech feeding the world, Midkiff notes that the Green Revolution had the same rationale -- and India's still starving. "By importing our brand of culture and food to indigenous communities, we have destroyed agricultural systems that sustained them for millennia.")

Longtime St. Louis environmentalist Kay Drey thinks St. Louis is lucky to have Raven: "He's done more than anyone else in the world to educate people about preserving rainforests. And I love everything about the new Monsanto Center except its name. But I'm very concerned about GM organisms and the manipulation of crops, and Peter is just not concerned, and I don't know why."

"He's a fine scientist," notes a nationally respected biologist. "I think he's just lost his critical judgment on this issue. The ecological and evolutionary down side is so obvious, and he just brushes it aside. Is he dazed by Monsanto, has he swallowed their line? Or has he made a decision that the future of the Garden, and Washington University, depend on a close relationship with Monsanto? He's a good biopolitician...."

So good, in fact, almost no one will criticize him to his face. "He's got an elephant's memory," an acquaintance mutters, "and a newborn's tender skin." After 13 terms as home secretary for the National Academy of Sciences, Raven wields enough power to scotch grants and poison carefully nurtured projects.

Still, purists call him an old-fashioned reductionist who'd rather bring home little bits of the vanishing world than protect whole ecosystems from being plundered. "He operates out of a kind of Teddy Roosevelt view of the world, a stuffed-animal-in-a-glass-case model," remarks one activist. "A rainforest is an extraordinarily complex system. To say that grabbing a dozen or even 100 of its pieces will save it is like saying if you chip some flakes of paint off the "Mona Lisa' you can preserve the masterpiece."

Raven pronounces such criticism "ridiculous. What we do is try to understand it, then put that information in the hands of people in the countries where the forests exist." He warms to his subject, and soon it becomes clear: He is thoroughly resigned to what his friend, writer Bill McKibben, wistfully named "the end of nature." Raven thinks it's too late for a hands-off ecology that honors nature's rhythms and apologizes for human arrogance. "Human beings are already totally dominating nature," he says. "People are really managing the world." Does that sadden him? "What makes me sad is that the world is going downhill and becoming less and less interesting," he replies crisply.

Hence his hopes for biotech, and his carefully concealed contempt for the farmers, consumers, European activists and scientists who disagree.

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