Healthy soil and sustainable growing

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

Very interesting take on bacteria.  In The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, Lynn Margulis, whose accomplishments include requiring every science textbook to be rewritten to reflect the basis of her work, says that all life evolved from bacteria joining others in symbiotic relations and becoming another sort of being from doing so.  So using man made chemicals at this level of things is a direct assault on the web of life.  It seems like a case of scientific idiocy, to me, which seems to demand a "paradigm switch," as Thomas Kuhn called it in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

Smiles.
Tommy 



On 7/21/10 4:15 PM, John D'hondt wrote:

In my experience I think that pathogens are not at all a problem. We have a septic tank overflowing into a small water purification area. I have seen all kinds of animals drink from that water at different places and not one sign of disease has been seen.
Under good circumstances pathogens are eaten out of a living by an overwhelming mass of non pathogens. The only way you can select for pathogens is by using man made chemicals that often kill off the others. And onfortunately that is the paradigm we have been fed with our mother's milk. Don't try to kill bacteria for you will fail and don't be too clean so as to keep plenty of non pathogen species on standby.

The water that comes out of the wetland shows no signs of nitrate or phosphate loss. It is clear and even in little pools no algae show up.

We harvest plants like comfrey and bullrush there and maybe 10 more species for animal food. Again never seen a problem and how could it? Pathogens are not taken up by plants in a cold swamp to be transported to an edible part. That simply does not happen.
john

Several people on the list have mentioned the use of human waste for agricultural purposes. I'm interested in what peoples experience has been with this and what kinds of precautions people are taking to break the pathogen-human cycles in order to avoid disease transmission. The World health Organization has done a lot of work on this and their guidelines are available online. http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/wastewater/gsuww/en/index.html

This appears to me to be one of the crucial linkages that will have to be established in a steady state economy. Nutrient recycling is a fundamental ecosystem function/service which must be integrated in the closed human-earth system. Of course pathogens have evolved to exploit this system and we have to assure a reasonable level of safety.

Phil Bunch
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