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  • From: Keith Johnson <kd.johnson AT insightbb.com>
  • To: Market Farming List <market-farming AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Market-farming] The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World
  • Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 17:51:46 -0000



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 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.

[MonSatan, I mean Monsanto, now owns 70% of the seed industry].

--
Keith Johnson
"Be fruitful and mulch apply."
Permaculture Activist Magazine
PO Box 5516, Bloomington, IN 47407
(812) 335-0383
http://www.permacultureactivist.net
http://www.PermacultureTradingPost.com
Switch to Solar Power the Easy Way
http://www.jointhesolution.com/KeithJ-SunPower
http://www.PowUr.com/KeithJ-SunPower
Blog: http://kjpermaculture.blogspot.com/
also Patterns for Abundance Design & Consulting
http://www.permacultureactivist.net/design/Designconsult.html
also Association for Regenerative Culture
http://www.ARCulture.org
also APPLE-Bloomington (Alliance for a Post-Petroleum Local Economy) It's a small world after oil.
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/applebloomington
also Bloomington Permaculture Guild
http://my.calendars.net/bloomingtonpccal/
and: http://bloomingtonpermacultureguild.blogspot.com/
also: Bioregional Congress
http://www.bioregional-congress.org



  • [Market-farming] The Bacterium That (Almost) Ate the World, Keith Johnson, 02/02/2008

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