livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
List archive
- 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
--
PERMACULTURE EDUCATION PROJECT
The Permaculture Education Project is part of the Projects Network of the
Permaculture Association (Britain) Charity Reg. No. 1116699
We are slowly developing our website which you can visit at
http://www.terraper ma.org.uk
for all things permaculture visit
http://www.permacul ture.org. uk
1 Eureka Terrace, Bovey Tracey, Devon TQ13 9HG
Voice & Fax: +44 (0)845 458 0194 [local rate] / +44 (0)1626 830604
Mobile: 07766 023975 or 07825 450352
PERMACULTURE = PERMANENT AGRICULTURE = PERMANENT CULTURE
Practical strategies for land, buildings and people
P Help us save paper - do you need to print this e-mail?
>
>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
--
PERMACULTURE EDUCATION PROJECT
The Permaculture Education Project is part of the Projects Network of the
Permaculture Association (Britain) Charity Reg. No. 1116699
We are slowly developing our website which you can visit at
http://www.terraper ma.org.uk
for all things permaculture visit
http://www.permacul ture.org. uk
1 Eureka Terrace, Bovey Tracey, Devon TQ13 9HG
Voice & Fax: +44 (0)845 458 0194 [local rate] / +44 (0)1626 830604
Mobile: 07766 023975 or 07825 450352
PERMACULTURE = PERMANENT AGRICULTURE = PERMANENT CULTURE
Practical strategies for land, buildings and people
P Help us save paper - do you need to print this e-mail?
Make the switch to the world's best email. Get the new Yahoo!7 Mail now.
- [Livingontheland] dirt, Martin Naylor, 01/30/2008
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