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  • From: Martin Naylor <martinwnaylor@yahoo.com.au>
  • To: Livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] dirt
  • Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 08:14:40 +1100 (EST)

Hi
some research on dirt from another list
martin

Fwd: The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World

Posted by: "george sobol" terrafirma@gn.apc.org   georgesobol

Tue Jan 29, 2008 10:42 pm (PST)

FYI

>
>Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2008 16:13:15 -0500
>From: Keith Johnson <kd.johnson@insightb b.com>
>
>Subject: The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World
>
>Oops, sorry, we didn't mean to eliminate ALL terrestrial plants.
>
>[MonSatan, I mean Monsanto, now owns 70% of the
>seed industry. This is illegal. ]
>
>Please share broadly.
>You can also read this and other articles at
><http://kjpermacultu re.blogspot. com/>http://kjpermacultu re.blogspot. com/
>
>From:
>Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies, Sierra Club Books
>
>Elaine Ingham would never treat soil like dirt.
>She reveres it, as we all should, since this
>precious substance is the thin brown line
>between plenty and starvation. Given the
>necessity of topsoil to human survival, you'd
>think we'd have legions of soil biologists on
>the case, but Elaine is one of only a handful of
>serious scientists deluging into this
>microcosmos that feeds the world and helps
>support life on earth.
>
>Until recently an associate research professor
>of forest science at Oregon State University,
>Elaine has twenty-five years of experience in
>microbiology, botany, plant pathology, and soil
>and ecology research. She founded
><http://www.soilfood web.com/>Soil Foodweb Inc.
>and is currently president of the Soil Foodweb
>Institute in Australia and research director of
>Soil Foodweb in New York. She serves on the
>boards of several sustainability organizations
>and is an active member of numerous prestigious
>microbiology and ecology associations. She has
>done stints as president of the Soil Ecology
>Society and program chair of the Ecological
>Society of America and has penned over fifty
>peer-reviewed scientific papers.
>
>Elaine speaks to groups around the world on how
>to grow plants without the use of toxic
>pesticides or synthetic fertilizers while at the
>same time increasing soil fertility and crop
>production. She has led countless workshops and
>training sessions at which farmers are taught
>highly practical techniques for building soil
>health, using sophisticated composting methods,
>and enhancing microbiological communities for
>crop production. Unquestionably one of the
>world's leading specialists in soil health, she
>is an exceptionally creative innovator who has
>made major contributions to our understanding of
>the soil food web (as she likes to call it) and
>its structure and function in terrestrial
>ecosystems from arctic to tropical climates. Her
>research spans agricultural. grassland, and
>forest ecologies, where she has analyzed the
>action of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes,
>and mycorrhizal fungi from over 30,000 soil
>samples.
>
>When a scientist of Elaine's stature warns us
>about the catastrophic potential of topsoil loss
>and the escape of genetically modified organisms
>into the already compromised environment, we do
>well to pay close attention.
>----
>Unnatural Selection: The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World
>Elaine Ingham
>
>IN MY PROGRAM at Oregon State University in the
>early 1990s, we started testing the ecological
>impacts of most of the genetically engineered
>organisms being produced at that time. The
>question our lab was asked to ad¬dress was, Did
>these engineered organisms have any impact out
>there in the real world?
>
>The first fourteen species that we worked on -
>microorganisms, bacteria. and fungi - were
>organisms incapable of surviving in the natural
>environment. Putting them in the world would be
>like taking penguins from the South Pole and
>dropping them into the La Brea tar pits. Would
>there be any ecological effect if we dropped a
>penguin into the middle of the tar pit? Probably
>not; the impact would be rapidly absorbed by the
>system.
>
>These first fourteen species of GMOs that we
>tested had a similarly negligible impact. On
>this basis. the USDA Animal and Plant Health
>Inspection Service, the regulatory agency that
>was determining U.S. policy on genetically
>engineered organisms, set a course that
>essentially said that a genetically engineered
>organism posed no greater risk to the
>environment than the parent organism does.
>
>GMO number fifteen. however, was a very
>different story. Klebsiella planticola, the
>bacterium that is the parent organism of this
>new strain, lives in soils everywhere. It's one
>of the few truly universal species of bacteria,
>growing in the root systems of all plants and
>decomposing plant litter in every ecosystem in
>the world.
>
>The genetic engineers took genetic material from
>another bacterium and inserted that trait in the
>GMO to allow Klebsiella planticola to produce
>alcohol. The aim of this genetic modification
>was to eliminate the burning of farm fields to
>rid them of plant matter after harvest. The idea
>was that you could, instead, rake up all that
>plant residue, put it in a bucket. and inoculate
>it with the engineered bacterium, and in about
>two weeks' time you would have a material that
>contained about 17 percent alcohol. The alcohol
>could be extracted and used for gasohol. for
>cleaning windows, or for myriad other uses:
>cooking with alcohol in Third World countries,
>for instance.
>
>The genetic engineers thought this
>transformation would bring huge benefits. We
>would no longer have to burn fields, we would
>breathe better in the fall, and both the company
>and farmers would get a product that could be
>sold. There was actually a fourth win: the
>sludge at the bottom of the bucket is an organic
>fertilizer, and there are no waste products from
>that material. So what's the problem? Suppose
>you're a farmer and you've got live,
>alcohol-producing Klebsiella planticola that
>you're going to spread on your fields (which
>might be easier than gathering up all the plant
>waste and putting it in buckets). Can it wash
>into the root systems of your plants? Most
>likely. Once it's there and growing in the root
>systems of your plants, it's producing alcohol.
>What level of alcohol is toxic to plants? It's
>one part per million. How much alcohol does this
>engineered organism produce? Seventeen parts per
>mil¬lion. Very soon you will have drunk dead
>plants.
>
>We did this experiment under controlled
>conditions in the laboratory be¬cause I wasn't
>going to take this kind of risk out in the
>field. We constructed three kinds of microcosms
>of a field, filled them with normal field soil
>as a growing medium, and planted wheat plants in
>the three separate systems - each consisting of
>multiple units - and put them in an incubator.
>In the first third of the units, we added only
>water. We added parent, non-GMO bacterium to the
>second group and the engineered Klebsiella
>planticola to the third.
>
>About a week later, we walked into the
>laboratory, opened up the incubator, and said,
>"Oops, what did we do wrong?" Many of the plants
>were dead and were turning into slime on the
>surface of the soil. In all the units with just
>water in the system, the plants were doing okay.
>In those that had been inoculated with the
>parent Klebsiella planticola, the plants were
>even bigger, because increased nutrient cycling
>in the root system makes more nitrogen
>available, causing the plants to grow bigger.
>Clearly the parent organism was a benefit to the
>plant. But where the engineered bacterium was
>growing, all the plants were dead. Later we
>tried this experiment using several different
>kinds of soils, but the result in every case was
>dead plants.
>
>Take that information and extrapolate it to the
>real world. Given that the parent organism lives
>in the root systems of all plants, what's the
>logical outcome of releasing this organism into
>the natural environment? Very possibly, we would
>have no terrestrial plants left. Some plants,
>such as riparian and wetland plants, have
>mechanisms for dealing with alcohol production
>in their root systems. But the logical
>extrapolation of that experiment is that we
>would lose terrestrial plants.
>
>I have attended some of the United Nations
>biosafety protocol meetings. At the 1995 meeting
>in Madrid, the U.S. delegation was the strongest
>in saying, in essence, "Don't worry, be happy.
>Trust us. We don't need a biosafety protocol.
>Why would biotech companies ever do anything to
>harm people?" To me, their words echoed those
>we've heard before from tobacco, pesticide, and
>fertilizer companies.
>
>At one such meeting, I related the story of
>Klebsiella planticola as an example of the lack
>of adequate testing for the ecological impact of
>genetically engineered organisms. The biotech
>companies object that it costs too 'much to do
>this kind of environmental testing. In my view,
>that's just hype, because I pointed out that our
>lab spent a very insignificant amount of money
>to do these simple experiments, especially
>considering that if this bacterium were let
>loose in the environment, we would have some
>very significant problems with our food supply.
>
>No one in his or her right mind is going to test
>for the kind of risk Klebsiella planticola
>represents because once you release an organism,
>there is no way to get it back. How far does a
>single-point inoculation of a genetically
>engineered organism spread in one year? An
>engineered Rhizobium bacterium that was released
>in Louisiana in the mid-1990s spread eleven
>miles per year and has by now dispersed across
>the North American continent.
>
>At these United Nations meetings I warned that
>corn pollen is going to move a lot more than
>three feet away from the plant. "Oh no," said
>the biotechnology representatives present. "Corn
>pollen falls out of the air three feet from the
>plant." I would say, "Wait a minute, you've
>never heard of bees? How about birds? and
>insects? and wind "Oh no, it falls out of the
>air within three feet of the plant." Why do our
>bureaucrats choose to to believe these
>"scientists" ? Just open any plant textbook and
>you find that corn pollen can be round in the
>Antarctic and the Arctic. But if you listen to
>Monsanto, corn pollen can't possibly be there.
>
>Armed with the knowledge of this peril, we need
>to convince members of Congress that appropriate
>ecological testing must be done prior to
>releasing GMOs into the environment. If this
>happens, it could help keep the problems that
>are already starting to occur from getting worse.
>
>--
>Keith Johnson
>"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
>Permaculture Activist Magazine
>PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407
>(812) 335-0383
><http://www.permacul tureactivist. net>http://www.permacul tureactivist. net
><http://www.Permacul tureTradingPost. com>http://www.Permacul tureTradingPost. com
>Switch to Solar Power the Easy Way
><http://www.jointhes olution.com/ KeithJ-SunPower>http://www.jointhes olution.com/ KeithJ-SunPower
><http://www.PowUr. com/KeithJ- SunPower>http://www.PowUr. com/KeithJ- SunPower
>Blog: <http://kjpermacultu re.blogspot. com/>http://kjpermacultu re.blogspot. com/
>also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
><http://www.permacul tureactivist. net/design/ Designconsult. html>http://www.permacul tureactivist. net/design/ Designconsult. html
>also Association for Regenerative Culture
><http://www.ARCultur e.org>http://www.ARCultur e.org
>also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a
>Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a small world
>after oil.
><http://www.relocali ze.net/groups/ applebloomington>http://www.relocali ze.net/groups/ applebloomington
>also Bloomington Permaculture Guild
><http://my.calendars .net/bloomington pccal/>http://my.calendars .net/bloomington pccal/
>and:
><http://bloomingtonp ermacultureguild .blogspot. com/>http://bloomingtonp ermacultureguild .blogspot. com/
>also: Bioregional Congress
><http://www.bioregio nal-congress. org>http://www.bioregio nal-congress. org

--
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  • [Livingontheland] dirt, Martin Naylor, 01/30/2008

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