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  • From: Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Save the flowers
  • Date: Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:15:35 -0500

While realizing that I may repeat myself a bit here, I feel compelled to inform people of conscience about the latest results of my inquiry into Colony Collapse Disorder. Please forgive my repetitions. For many, I suspect they may be background information.

Thursday, a House Subcommittee held a hearing on Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious phenomenon that, by this spring, had disappeared up to 85% of the domesticated honey bees of the "pollination industry." The "pollination industry" became necessary after the feral pollinators crashed by 95% and crop yields plummeted. It's good to hear that some are staging comebacks, but the places where that can happen (organic farms and Permaculture designs, etc.) are far less than 1% of the total farmland in the US. 57% of the US crop was GMO in 2006. One witness said that a complete disappearance of insect pollinators would not bring about famine. There would still be enough food to keep the caloric intake up, she said. But there would be no vegetables, fruits, or flowers. Our diet in the US would be grains and meat. Never mind that most of us are, apparently, allergic to gluten, and that the ethics of meat turns many people off. This inspired me to look even deeper.

I don't know spit about genetic science, but I have two Masters degrees (in Writing and Consciousness, from New College of California in San Francisco, not in science) and New College encourages critical inquiry, even offers a MFA in Creative Inquiry by one of the founders of the Writing and Consciousness program. Hemingway said the critical component of a writer was a good "shit detector." So I've been inquiring. For three years there has been an increasing amount of brain power going into resolving CCD. The CCD Working Group seeks a single cause. Scientism, unfortunately, reigns.
Horizontal Gene Transfer is GMO genes crossing species boundaries. What a few people now suspect, and makes a lot of sense to me after researching HGT, is that GMO genes have crossed into the bacteria in bees' guts. This suppresses their immune systems so that they seem to have AIDS. The next common pathogen they contact kills them. The problem with HGT is that we don't yet have a way to detect it. We know it happens. It's what made penicillin obsolete in less than 50 years. It happens a lot. We just can't detect it. We can only see its results.

The EPA allowed GM crops to go into the landscape because it could not detect HGT and see the harm it might do. The Precautionary Principle was not employed. HGT can go in every direction, and we have no way of telling that it's transferred to another species until we see the results. Thus, biotech is distorting nature, creating change it has no plans for. We know that the soil is a single organism containing a world of other organisms. GMO HGT threatens nature's balance. Have we, the people, the power to take GM crops out of the landscape? Brother Bill Clinton ceded the FDA to Monsanto as a reward for their campaign contributions. A federal judge has said that biotech is functionally unregulated, currently. Aren't we in deep trouble? This disappearance of the insect pollinators is but the tip of the iceberg. What do we do next? In India, farmers burn fields of GM crops. I can only imagine the consequences of that in the US. It feels like the 1950s, training for a nuclear attack all over again, to me, only this attack comes from within US society, from people who call themselves conservative. What do these conservatives conserve? How do we save the vegetables, the fruits, and the flowers?






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