permaculture

[Tommy Tolson <healinghawk@earthlink.net>]

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?