EPA SCIENTISTS PROTEST PENDING PESTICIDE APPROVALS

Also see what is going on inCanada re: pesticides <a href="http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060515053809213">http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20060515053809213</a><p>---<br><br />
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."<br />
(Albert Einstein)

I think the measures that are taken in response to mistakes we've made are normally bigger mistakes. I think of the way the beetle infestation in BC's forests is being handled. If we thought about the "power" of Mother Nature to heal herself we may consider that when there is an infestation of insects that kill a certain organism then an influx of predators will take hold and bring the balance back to order. But, our knee-jerk reaction (and money making it is), is to cut down all of the infested trees destroying any natural habitat any potential preditor would need to survive in order to do its job. Cutting all the trees down is not helping and the evidence is staring me in the face as I look out the windows of my home. Clear cut patches all over the mountains and red, dead trees surrounding them. And now, the rivers are swollen, in part, I believe because the trees are being hauled away by the truckload. The problem is that the money grabbers cannot wait for the time it could take for nature to do the work for us. It's too urgent and they are too desperate to save their portfolios that they cannot recognize the additonal harm they are injecting with their fear of loss.

Observing what happens in a garden or a forest and how Mother Nature "works" is really the best teacher we could have. It's completly awe inspiring. If I ever need a "fill up" I go into my garden and watch it live. The problem is that there are not enough "holistic" scientists. Things become so specialized and there are not enough people doing the puzzle. What's funny to me is that the puzzle is finished and always has been, it's in the garden, someone just needs to go out there and look at it again.

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

I agree with you 4Canada. The name of the game is divide and conquer. They make you specialize so that you won't see the big picture. A buddy of mine used to tell me that what he was learning in University was "more and more about less and less".
They cut down the trees and then there is nothing to hold the water in the earth. Erosion and floods are the result and then they blame the weather instead of identifying a solution to work towards.

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"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
(Albert Einstein)

Observing what happens in a garden or a forest and how Mother Nature "works" is really the best teacher we could have. It's completly awe inspiring<<

I agree to that and witness it daily however, the Pine Beetles will destroy a cycle for generations. They may be a natural event but their abundance is not. Man had disrupted a natural cycle to cause the flux of beetles. No forest fire is left to burn anymore. We people have to much to lose during that cycle. It's no longer just big logging firms but real estate companys that now control a natural habitat. Suburbia is considered progress as it grows and signs of a good economy. Natural fires are replaced with weedacides and pesticides. People can't sit in their back yard with bugs and out comes the spray bombs. Replace marshs with paved roads and groom the turf using the best of chemicals to make it just right. We are the biggest PITA mother nature has to contend with.

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Expect little from life and get more from it.

Amen or omen?

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"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
(Albert Einstein)

As a victim of the Green Revolution who has gone through hell, suffering and being paralyzed from the sprays we used without any protection, over 50 years ago, assured by our Cambridge professors that they were perfectly safe, I can only refer to what my old friend, George Happy Kester, with about 4 years of schooling, said one day about 1953-54, when we were having lunch:

"I'm telling you Eddie mate, the only thing were're doing here is breeding fucking superbugs!"

And he was right. I quit just in time, but George was killed by multiple cancers not too many years later, as have others of our workmates and we now have more and better bugs than ever.

I spent 14 months in a primitive German MASH hospital after WW2, first as a wounded and later as a volunteer orderly. Most of the time we were doing amputations and reamputations as was the practice at the time.

Conditions were primitive. The hospital was located in a former mountain artillery training camp of wooden huts, wooden floors.

We were starving, hardly had any medications, the bandages were either paper, or washed a hundred times and reused. When we were operating, I was holding the legs of the victims, anesthesia was applied by a nurse by sprinkling ether onto a mask on the patient's face. Only the doctors had rubber gloves, again washed time after time, nobody had masks. I was in my old uniform, covered down with a sheet, holding the leg of the patient poking through a hole, as the doctors were operating.

To cut the story short, we started with about 600 patients and have not lost a single one, neither did we have any infections, or any outbreaks of any illnesses under the most primitive and, for a hospital, unsanitary conditions.

An American friend of mine did the same work in a proper, well maintained army hospital in Minnesota during the Korean war, under the most sterile conditions, with all the medications and antibiotics and the best of foods available at the time. They had a 30% rate of serious infections.

Now we hear of resistant bug outbreaks in our hospitals with patients and staff sick and dying, Things we've never heard of before in the bad old days.

There are billios of people who have never tasted a single bite of decent vegetables and fruits. They all taste like medications. My wife and I just had an apple each and they were horrible. Nothing like apples should taste.

In other words, like my friend George Kester said, we created superbugs with our potentially great, but misused technology. As we are doing with all kinds and levels of technology for profit purposes.

What the new, proposed farm pesticides will do is cause more reactions, ruin more agricultural land, grown more junkfoods, more and bigger problems and more and bigger profits for the manufacturers. Which is the only purpose to begin with.

We grow our vegetables without any artificial fertilizers, or herbi/pesticides. They taste great, we have no bugs, no epidemics. Our chickens are running free on a half acre, heavily bushed yard and get no medicated foods. They're healthy, their eggs and meat taste like eggs meat should. The same for our cattle, raised on grass, without grains, shots, antibiotics, hormones and steroids.

In other words, these poisons and practices are not needed and are causing more and more illnesses and problems.

Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC

This reminds me of a documentary film I saw years ago called the Hellstrom Chronicles showing how insects will be the last living creature on the planet. They adapt and evolve better than any other creature apparently.

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"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music." Friedrich Nietzsche

I have friends in Peru that made it a practice to wash their vegatbles in iodine and water. The practice there then was to use human manure in the gardens.(20 years ago) I have an old Popular Mechanics magazine from the 1930's. In it they describe this new pesticide that will kill all the fleas if you wash your kids hair with it. The new pesticide was DDT. My dad worked for the Dept. of Highways in Alberta. The department would spray DDT along all the highways and it got on my dad's clothes. My mom noticed that all her indoor plants would be dying because dad had sat next to them before he changed. Modern Man still knows best, untill time tells differently.

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Expect little from life and get more from it.