The Student Environmental Council sponsored a tour of the Bayer Research and Development Facility for students Friday.

Bayer (formerly Monsanto) focuses on crop science through technologies like genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Students received a tour of Bayer’s labs and greenhouses and attended a panel discussion where Bayer employees from different departments answered questions about Bayer’s practices.

The Student Environmental Council (SEC) planned the event in conjunction with their upcoming Trending Topics speaker event featuring environmental activist Vandana Shiva. Shiva will speak at 7:00 p.m. in Graham Chapel on Wednesday.

SEC chair senior Hannah Schanzer said that they wanted to sponsor the Bayer trip along with Shiva’s talk to engage students in learning about GMOs.

“We wanted to give people the opportunity to learn more about the science behind GMO technology, so we did the whole tour and got to see a lot of the crops up close and hear from the scientists about the work that they’re doing,” Schanzer said. “Also Vandana Shiva is a very outspoken anti-GMO activist and we wanted to hear the responses that people who work at Bayer have to her message.”

Senior Ivan Ginsberg said that the tour felt “very surface level” and that the panel was meant to convey the company’s message.

“What it honestly felt like to me was the people up in the front of the room were just four PR people meant to portray an image of the company, ready with answers to questions they probably assumed we were going to ask about all the ethical issues and controversies surrounding that company,” Ginsberg said. “The message that was conveyed, which I can’t blame them for, [was that] they are a business and a business’s purpose is to take money, but the delivery of how they showed that message was kind of problematic at times.”

According to SEC president senior Sydney Welter, GMOs are an important environmental justice issue.

“GMOs are one of the more controversial issues in the environmental sphere and there are a lot of different issues involved, not so much with the science side of GMOs but more with the practices of GMOs, how do these affect farmers around the world,” Welter said. “We brought [Vandana Shiva] to campus because she’s outspoken about the need for environmental justice and making sure that in addressing these environmental issues we’re thinking about concerns of people in the developing countries, concerns of women and other marginalized groups.”

According to Schanzer, Shiva’s talk will be titled “Earth Democracy” and will focus on viewing environmental issues as human rights issues.

“I hope that people take away from the talk that environmental issues are not just the concerns of the birds and the bees but they’re issues that impact people’s lives every day,” Schanzer said. “The most marginalized groups in society usually deal with the most environmental burdens and I hope that after her talk, people will link those two things more easily.”

Ginsberg said he thinks the tour is a great contrast to Shiva’s talk on Wednesday, as the students asked Bayer directly what the company thought of Shiva’s platform.

“They said her platform is supported by misinformation,” Ginsberg said. “It’ll be interesting to hear both sides and ultimately fact-check both sides on my own to see if I can find anything that’ll form my opinion. I think both sides are going to have a very, very one-voiced narrative. It’s two different camps on GMO issues, two different sides that’ll be a fun narrative to watch them play out especially after Wednesday. I’m hoping for a third event where students can come together and talk about it.”

Welter and Schanzer hope that the talk engages members across the Washington University community as well as the St. Louis community.

“Our hope is to have this talk be as interdisciplinary as possible, because no matter what your field of study is, what your interests are, what your background is, environmental issues overlap with that in some way,” Welter said. “We’ve been lucky to also have the support of different groups on campus; we’ve had help from Ashoka and Student Union in pulling this event together, which has been great.”

“We’re hoping that this event is not just for students on this campus, but [that] people around the community will come and engage,” Schanzer said.