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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> Bev, and any other chemists on the list, what is your reaction to this?

Not a chemist.

'James was a chemist
 But now he is no more
 For what he thought was H20
 Was really H2SO4'


Not a chemist, but the premise of that article is pure BS and the writer must 
surely be on the take from chemical companies or else permanently brain 
damaged by their products.

The human chemistry rids itself of toxins by means of 'chemical channels'.  
There is a specific chemical reaction, for example, to heavy metals. The body 
knows perfectly well how to rid itself of arsenic, lead, mercury, etc. and 
those elements in their toxic form are present in food and water and always 
have 
been.  Nor are the effects cumulative.  If you are exposed to levels of 
arsenic 
below what the chemical channel can handle, it is exactly the same as if you 
were not exposed at all.

The damage comes from two things:

1.  Over exposure, swamping the chemical channel.

2.  Exposure to a chemical unanticipated by our biology and therefore there 
is no way of handling even microscopic amounts of it.

To the first, that is why eating tomatoes and potatoes poses no risk, and yet 
nightshade will kill you, and years of over exposure to tobacco will give you 
cancer.

But substances that don't occur in nature at all and to which we have only 
been exposed for 100 years, or 10 years, or 10 days, can be immediately toxic 
and carcenogic.

There is also the phenomenon that the most used natural pesticides such as 
pyrhethrin and rotenone, although they are very toxic, their toxicity lasts 
for 
a very short time.  Natural pyrhethrin is the main poison in those wasp and 
hornet bombs that knock the bee right out of the air in mid flight dead as 
four 
o'clock.  And yet a few hours later, the residue isn't toxic at all.  However 
many chemical pesticides remain toxic forever, or close enough that it's 
little odds.

To be sure, one should restrict the use of pesticides to the bare minimum no 
matter what the source.  Here abouts one sees people's gardens with a 
snowfall-like crust of Sevin or some such over the potatoes, beans, and 
everything 
else.  I even came upon a neighbor whose peach tree looked as if it was 
decorated 
for Christmas and was told that she had been advised that it needed 
"something" sprayed on it and what she had was a 4 lb bag of Sevin so she 
dumped it on 
the poor tree.

I can go over the 4' x 12' plots of October beans and pick off the bean 
beetles and rup out the eggs with no pesticides at all.  But if I had an acre 
of 
them, I couldn't.  The more "efficient" a farm (in the agribusiness 
definition 
of efficient), the more it must use pesticides.  But flea beetles will eat 
the 
eggplants to the ground.  There is a small sprayer with pyrhethrin on a stake 
beside the eggplants and during the growing season it's either mist the 
eggplants every other day or they die.

About half the destructive insect damage in my gardens is checked by use of 
BT in its various forms.  Nearly all the rest is done by hand picking and 
with 
practice a gardener can get quite good at it.  Maybe 2 or 3% need some toxic 
solution.

Gardens raised for food (as opposed to 'for sale') need only address 
substantial damage and needn't worry about cosmetic damage.  Most industrial 
agribusiness toxins dispensed are to prevent cosmetic damage and don't 
improve the 
quality of the food a bit.   </HTML>