Elaine Meinel Supkis
The promises of genetically engineered plants are falling apart due to Mother Nature's horror of a vacant ecological niche. Insects evolve very rapidly and are very industrious creatures. The multiply like mad, as I witnessed this spring, for example, and they go many generations in a mere few years. Get rid of one insect, another one hops up and takes its place!
Bt cotton uses just as much pesticide as non-Bt cotton, thanks to evolution.
Independent: Supporters of genetically modified crops claim the technique saves money and provides environmental benefits because farmers need to spray their fields fewer times with chemicals.However, a detailed survey of 481 cotton growers in China found that, although they did use fewer pesticides in the first few years of adopting GM plants, after seven years they had to use just as much pesticide as they did with conventional crops.
It is odd that insects don't have 'brains' yet they are pretty clever. Just try swatting a fly, for example, or battle a bevy of wasps. We can co-exist with them like we do with Monarch butterflies. They are back this year after a disasterous drop in numbers, I have milkpods--their favorite egglaying plants--growing along the fence lines here and the butterflies dance in the air on the mountainside, mating.
Some insects are very useful and we keep them as pets. Bees, for example. Not cockroaches. They are super pests. Ick.
"Bt farmers in 2004 on the average have to spray pesticide 18.22 times, which is more than three times higher compared with 1999."Detailed information on pesticide expenditures reveals that, though Bt farmers saved 46 per cent of bollworm pesticide relative to non-Bt farmers, they spend 40 per cent more on pesticides designed to kill an emerging secondary pest," they say.
Secondary pests, such as a type of leaf bug called mirids, are not normally a problem in cotton fields because bollworm, and sprays against bollworm, tend to keep them in check.
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem. You evict one bug, another one moves in. You kill most of them, the survivors multiply and move back in with a vengence. This is true of germs, too. This is why nature creates a super abundance. So even if many die, many live. The more care an organism has in reproducing, the fewer offspring. Humans have very few compared to cockroaches, for example. Yet we dominate the earth. Trees and plants, on the other hand, have zillions of seeds over their lifetimes and scatter them about, they even have evolved to attract eaters, in order to spread their seed.
My apricot tree next to the office is giving us delicious, golden fruits. I eat the outside and then bury the seeds where I want future fruit trees. The tasty outside of the fruit evolved to attract eaters who can't crack the very hard nut inside, so they spit out or pass through the digestive system, the future fruit tree.
This is the whole, wonderful harmony of nature! I sometimes wait too long to pick the apricots and the ants climb the tree and make a hole in them. Then, the birds smell the sweet fruit and pick bigger holes and then Sparky, the horse, comes ambling by and sucks down the messed-up remains and he carries off the seed to secrete it in a nice pile of fresh manure, in his pasture.
We humans are disrupting nature, trying to overexploit resources, cotton being a prime example.
The destruction of the Aral Sea ecosystem has been sudden and severe. Beginning in the 1960s, agricultural demands have deprived this large Central Asian salt lake of enough water to sustain itself, and it has shrunk rapidly. Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and other Central Asian states use this water to grow cotton and other export crops, in the face of widespread environmental consequences, including fisheries loss, water and soil contamination, and dangerous levels of polluted airborne sediments. It is generally agreed that the current situation is unsustainable, but the poverty and export dependency of the Central Asian states have prevented real action, and the sea continues to shrink.2. Description
It is no exaggeration to say that the case of the Aral Sea is one of the greatest environmental catastrophes ever recorded. Humans have made use of the waters of the Aral basin for thousands of years, borrowing from its two major rivers: the Amu Darya, which flows into the Aral Sea from the south; and the Syr Darya, which reaches the sea at its north end. As the twentieth century began, irrigated agriculture in the basin was still being conducted at a sustainable level.
The Aral Sea disaster is a warning to us all. I grew up in the land of the famous Pima cotton. This is a long fiber cotton of fine quality. I used to see wide fields on the West Side of Tucson and heading towards Picacho Peak. I liked going into the fields and picking a few balls of cotton nestled inside their dark, hard shells that open up like flower buds. After harvesting, they would burn the field stubble and it would make a dark, smokey cloud.
Now, the fields are scrubland for water is so precious, it doesn't pay to have it irrigated and besides, thanks to free trade, the Aral cotton and cotton in China is displacing cotton in the USA. Indeed, the recent Doha rounds of trade have floundered on the rock of cotton and sugar subsidies.
Jun. 22, 2006 (Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News delivered by Newstex) --The water-wasting ordinance adopted Tuesday by the Pima County Board of Supervisors is a cotton-candy public-relations move: very sweet but full of air and with little substance.
The ordinance, which would go into effect in about 30 days, imposes increased restrictions on water use depending on the state of the drought, the Star's Erica Meltzer reported Wednesday.
Present conditions would be Stage Two -- no misters, public fountains or turf overseeding. Stage Four would mean no filling swimming pools, carwashing and no watering grass, according to Meltzer's story.
If people want to live in the desert, they should live like they are in a desert. And no water-flush toilets, either. Outhouses! I remember outhouses. We kept a bottle of Black Flag in there to spray the scorpions and black widows. That would scare away all those people who don't understand how nature and humans have to interact. Heh. And save the elf owls and other desert fauna, too. I didn't mind living like that!
But then, I lived for ten years in a tent on a mountain up here! With an outhouse. And spiders in the outhouse. Not to mention, mice. Thus, the cats. No cats deal with spiders. Maybe we could breed Gm cats that hunt spiders.
30 years ago had a college professor mentioning how very few cluster flies there were on his dad's dairy farm the year DDT was used. In time the DDT was useless, the flies returned like before DDT usage.
Posted by: Sarah R | July 28, 2006 at 12:48 PM
My oxen hated face flies! And there was only one solution: to provide them with deep shade which the flies hate during the hot day and give all my horses and oxen Shaker string headdresses that would cover their faces like bangs.
Except Sparky, the draft horse, liked to pull off the strings on the boy's fly swatters. He also stole their brass horn tips, too. These fascinated him.
Posted by: Elaine Meinel Supkis | July 28, 2006 at 04:28 PM
A huge discovery actually, i am spreading this one.
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