There are an estimated 45 million landmines still scattered around the world. Not only is this an incredibly dangerous situation, but they are typically found in areas that are quite fertile, disallowing the use of this much-needed land for farming and cultivation.

A Danish biotech company has developed a rather ingenious way to detect the presence of landmines. They have genetically engineered the thale cress, a flowering weed, to detect the presence of nitrogen dioxide in soil. When explosives have been buried for a period of time, nitrogen dioxide is a by-product of their presence. The genetically engineered variation of the weed, when growing near a landmine, changes in color from green to red.

Here's the conundrum: Landmines are bad, and everyone's got their knickers in a twist over genetic engineering -- but the world's food supply has to triple by the year 2030. Someone has come up with a way to detect landmines using bio-engineering, establishing the opportunity to clear usable land for farming and cultivation. Where is the good and where is the bad?

If you read the two posts in this blog on Karma, you'll remember that we discussed the idea that Karma, or action, is neutral and consequences are what need to be considered. In the second article, in particular, we considered how something that we may expect to generate a bad consequence can have a good consequence, and something that we expect to generate a good consequence can have a bad consequence.