In this book, Paul Raeburn, an award-winning science writer, gives us an eye-opening account of how the genetic manipulation of American crops threatens our food supply - and what we must do to try to avert this disaster.As consumers, we want our produce large, attractive, and unblemished. The problem, as Raeburn tells us in this harrowing tale, is that we are getting exactly what we want. But there is a price to pay that goes beyond what most of us can imagine. To accommodate our desires, our crops are being genetically altered to produce perfectly uniform, unmarred fruits, vegetables, and grains. This uniformity poses a serious threat to American agriculture - a danger that became evident as early as 1970, when 15 percent of our corn crop was wiped out by a fungus that thrived because of the corn's genetic uniformity.New threats to our environment - global warming, depletion of the ozone layer, polluted air - also endanger our crops. As the environment deteriorates, plant breeders are losing the means to adapt. The agricultural gene pool is being drained dry. The tropical and sub tropical areas where wild-crop relatives can be harvested are rapidly shrinking. And scientifically priceless crop varieties developed by peasant farmers over thousands of years are becoming extinct as the Third World discards them in favor of modern commercial crops.The Last Harvest is the first book to explore this important issue. Raeburn alerts us to the full scope of the problem and describes the scientific race to collect the seeds of traditional and wild-crop varieties that may be our only hope of averting catastrophe. Read Less