Here’s my proposed New Year’s resolution for well-fed Greens in wealthy countries: Quit starving or condemning people to malnutrition.

Let me explain. I don’t fault those who choose to die for their religion...provided they harm no one else in the process. Thomas Moore, Joan of Arc, and others who preferred death to deviation from their divine principles may merit admiration.

Far more problematic are those who exercise their faith in ways that impose dire consequences on others. Consider, for example, parents who, driven by religious doctrine, withhold proven, life-saving medical treatments from their stricken child.

In cases involving parents and children, however, the incentives are usually well aligned. Parents generally want the best for their offspring. Their question is that of balancing the unknowable spiritual against the probabilistic physical, e.g., “I believe my God prohibits a procedure that has a high probability of saving my child’s life.”

Several religions in the U.S. entail such prohibitions. I can only agonize for and sympathize with those so conflicted.

It’s really quite different when one’s religion imposes costs on unknown others. Homicide bombers are the easy case. The November bombing of two synagogues in Istanbul by Islamic militants killed 25 and injured over 300. One must be a savage or quite deranged, more than half a bubble off plumb, to defend practices that randomly kill or severely injure unknown others in a misguided mission of religious duty. Among sane, civilized, and educated folks, such heinous actions are inexcusable.

Turning to biotechnology, the situation becomes far more complex and subtle. Here’s my take.

Some otherwise intelligent and reasonable folks have a Druidic, pantheistic, or naturopathic aversion to applying biotechnology to increase or improve food, fiber, and medical production. I realize some opponents simply want to minimize risks of experiments going off the rails. But others have objections of a fundamentally religious character, i.e., “It’s wrong to mess with God’s (or Gaia’s) work.”

While most medical applications of biotechnology are well received, agricultural applications often provoke near hysteria, especially in Europe. Some people claim they don’t want a trace of genetic modification in their food, while at the same time accepting insulin and other medical products made by genetic engineering.

What are the consequences of avoiding or prohibiting applied biotechnology? The answer is easy: We kill or condemn to poverty millions of people in the Third World.

We have ever more and ever better epidemiological data demonstrating the adverse human effects of malnutrition, e.g., low birth weights, mothers dying in childbirth, increased infant and child mortality, river blindness, etc. In addition, agricultural biotechnology increases in sophistication and soundness, making it easier and safer to improve the nutritional quality of staple food crops in the developing world. As a result, environmental zealots who would block biotechnology will find it ever more difficult to claim the moral high ground.

Those who protest that “traditional” agriculture is the only path to sustainability ignore reality. In the 1960s, Indian peasants used mixed crops, their own seeds, and few chemicals. Yet those were the “port-to-mouth” days when only huge imports of American grain under our Food for Peace program saved India from mass starvation year after year.

Today, India produces 204 million tons of grain annually. To produce that quantity with 1960s techniques would require cultivating three times as much land. If India had stuck to traditional methods, by now it would be seeing millions of deaths from starvation every year while simultaneously losing nearly all its wildlife habitat.

Some advocate preservation of the traditional way of life in rural parts of developing countries. Do they know that in traditional India one child in three died before the age of three? As Richard North wrote in Life on a Modern Planet: “Peasant life is only admired by those who have never known it, or those who have never known anything else.”

Sheer arrogance characterizes those who impose their vision on helpless, voiceless others. These conservatives seem willing to kill other people for their own religion, be it fundamentalist Islam, anti-globalism, or fundamentalist environmentalism.

Such groups are profoundly anti-democratic and misanthropic. Like Stalin and Mao, they sacrifice millions of the worst-off in pursuit of their utopia.