American Education Studies Association Annual Conference, 2014 Genetics in environmental education: Three challenges Ramsey Affifi Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / UT With the explosive growth of research and development in biotechnology, the mechanisms, quality, diversity, and rate of change of the evolution of life is set to be radically reordered. The consequences of this transformation are as existentially and ethically significant as climate change, yet it has received scant attention by environmental and social justice educators. Transgenic technologies, synthetic biology, artificial life, de-extinction, and the like, are poised to unleash myriad organisms into the biosphere. This means that the very process and logic of biological creativity in the self-organizing biosphere, and our deepest senses of our place and purpose in the world, are both at a bizarre and harrowing crossroad that is largely left unmentioned, undiscussed, and unprovoked. Meanwhile, resistance against the biotech revolution is being fought by a community of food activists with little understanding of these larger consequences, who hinge their concerns precariously on whether or not genetically engineered foods have been proven safe to eat. The pedagogical challenge is threefold. First, environmental and social justice educators need to take the biotech revolution seriously. In this sense, for those of us already concerned, there is a critical need to educate the educators. This means, in part, developing ways to foster a deeper understanding of the extent and likely consequences of possible worst-case scenarios, such as the one where food activists have become either silences or pacified and the biotech industry is given a carte blanche to reconstruct the world's living systems. But it also means that educators need to invest some time into understanding how the science of genetics has been re-conceptualized in the past decade (Jablonka & Lamb, 2005; Griffiths & Stotz, 2013), when it has become increasingly clear that there are deep ontological fallacies inherent in the biotech project and its assumptions about the structure and behaviour of the genome (Shiva & Moser, 1995; Ho, 2000). Developing a genomic literacy is necessary so that educators can argue effectively not only on the socioeconomic effects of the corporatization of life, but also on the erroneous scientific paradigm foundational to the technological viewpoint that its adherents assume. The second pedagogical challenge concerns the soldiers working on the ground. Food activists are the loudest voice on the cautionary side of the biotech debate. Although they have successfully slowed the release of new biotech crops and animals, they have put themselves in a corner in that they are increasingly reliant on cherry-picking scientific studies that raise some doubts on the proven safety claims of existing commercialized biotech products. Without much understanding of the science of genetics, nor any contextual sense of the process of inquiry in the sciences, they are fighting a battle they are probably destined to fail. It is possible that scientifically based safety claims on existing crops become sufficiently rigorous to appease most of those presently concerned. Whether or not consumption of the products of biotechnology is "safe" should not be the primary focus of the resistance against the biotech revolution. Activists need to better understand and articulate the broader social, cultural, ethical, spiritual, and evolutionary consequences of biotechnology, which are all likely to be much more impactful to the human condition than are the currently perceived correlations to possible health effects. Connected to this, educators need to help food activists become better educators. While activists present their side of the biotech issues with fervent one-sidedness, they rarely evokes the emotional and intellectual responses that they desire. Environmental educators need to engage with activists and challenge them to evolve more meaningful and effective forms of advocacy. The third pedagogical challenge asks that we consider how to integrate a deeper understanding of genetics and the possible consequences of biotechnology into the curricula of our formal and nonformal educational institutions. For environmental educators, genetics should be reconceived as an