Permaculture Blog

The dragonflies in the pond of one of my clients are dying. Not just dying but they are failing to molt into adults correctly. This looks to me like they are being poisoned by molt inhibitor pesticides. This client would never put anything like that into their pond. The most likely possibility is that they were sprayed by Los Angeles vector control.

We were looking at all the dead and crippled dragonflies (see the video and pictures)

https://youtu.be/ivVOXITt17o

and he seemed stunned that Los Angeles is actively aerial spraying molt inhibitors to protect us all from dragonflies (sarcasm intended) and so I told him that I would send him some links and then decided to do this blog post.

LA county very carefully does not say that they won’t aerial spray mosquiticides (likely molt inhibitors) when and wherever they feel like it. Link1

And LA spent $461,820 in 2021 and $492,300 on 2022 on Chemicals & Compounds.
— Nearly half a million dollars on biocides at the wholesale price. I wonder where it’s all going. Link2 click on the PDF for the current year and for 2022 it is down around page 28. Account number 5210 Chemicals & Compounds

Molt inhibitors are completely safe for humans right? Link3
Link4

Molt inhibitors target only mosquitoes right? Link5

I believe that the residents of Los Angeles and in fact all the counties of Southern California need to find an environmental reporter who has the willingness and the clout to obtain aerial spraying documents from Los Angeles Vector Control. Vector Control obviously has a database of the chemicals, prices, amounts, and locations where they have been used and it would not be hard for them to publish the list and amounts . Yet try googling that. It would be nice if the Sierra Club would assist or participate.

I am a fan of community gardens!! Community gardens are a library of information about how different people, and even ethnicities have found ways to do a variety of different gardening activities and grow food that work for them.

Community gardens provide permaculturists a way of interacting with the environment in a healthy beneficial way even if they only rent a small apartment.

The smartest thing you can possibly do in first getting a plot at a community garden is going to any work days with a plan to work at improving your community as a whole -not _your_ plot- and also talking to other gardeners about how they garden. If you’re an introvert with difficulties in initiating conversation the only thing you have to do with a gardener is simply walk over and say; how did you grow that? It’s not hard :-)

I like raised beds. If you are interested in raised beds, I would suggest putting wire mesh down on the ground in just the footprint of the bed. I don’t like burying sheets of wire mesh in the ground! It’s impossible to get out. If you lay the wire down on top of the ground and then put some stuff over it like described below, if you move the box you can just pick the wire up and move it too.

Place your raised bed frame on top of the wire mesh. That saves you wire mesh material as you are not putting the mesh down in your paths, only where you are planting. Use mesh of a size less than 1 inch. Young gophers, mice, and voles can use the gopher tunnels and then get through 1in mesh. Make sure your wood frame sits on the wire so that things can’t get through around the inside edge. I also like raised beds that are high enough that I don’t have to crawl around on my hands and knees too much but in my opinion it must sit on the ground and not have legs. If it’s too high up in the air it’s just going to have the water sucked out of it by the breeze and sunlight.

Then put old clothes (that are too beat up or stained for Goodwill), cardboard, old mail, house plant trimmings, anything organic. Several inches of his material will also act as a sponge to help keep your water in your raised bed. In 2 years it will pack down and decompose to half an inch or less.

Now put your planting material in. Some people buy a lot of bags of material from Home Depot, but try to make sure that it’s organic. If you buy bags of material try to also take dirt that’s in your area to about 10% of the volume of your box and mix it in. Some of you will think that it is crazy to do this because of weed seeds but the soil will contain bacteria and fungus native and endemic to the micro climate zone and will be a benefit to your garden box. And it’s really easy to pull out a few weeds that have come up from seeds and you don’t have to do it year after year.

I particularly advocate raised beds of this type in areas with gophers as I am against killing them. http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/?s=Gopher I much prefer the red-tailed Hawks and the owls and the coyotes and the weasels. Even herons and roadrunners will catch gophers. I like the biodiversity. If you can’t outsmart an animal whose brain is the size of your thumb and you have to kill everything that’s in your way you may have a small problem.

So that’s my two cents for now on community gardening with raised beds.

Oh and one other thing you might look at this information as well
https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=C1027-3&title=Raised%20Beds%20vs.%20In-Ground%20Gardens

The best to you all

The movement to bring DDT back after its ban found a curious ally: Big Tobacco. But the endangered industry was after something bigger.

Source: How the Battle Over a Pesticide Led to Scientific Skepticism

” according to Bate. A revision of its history would accomplish what few other stories about science, health, and the environment could.

“You can’t prove DDT is safe, but after 40 years you can’t prove it’s guilty of anything either,” he wrote. Yet DDT had remained “such a totemic baddie for the Greens” that if you could pin a moral dilemma to it, it would pit liberals loyal to the environment against those devoted to public health, he argued.

It was, he said, an issue “on which we can divide our opponents and win.”

There is a science to logic. It is provable that a statement to the effect that without DDT we must have malaria is faulty logic. The entire argument by big tobacco is faulty logic. But it sounds good to sheeple. I have said it again and again that big tobacco will never again try to prove that tobacco does not cause cancer but that so many other things “might” — they will simply muddy the waters. Put advertising budgets in the millions of dollars into paying off researchers desperately looking for funding that suggests that any of 15 other things might be the cause of cancers as well. Generate as much mud as possible. Make anything a reasonable doubt and thus impossible to stop it in a court of law. Oh my.

Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents.

Source:https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html

There are so many subtle ways the biomedical industrial complex manipulates language in order to convince us that all bacteria are bad and that even their habitats are bad “breeding grounds”.

Natural habitats of bogs, ponds, and other areas –that we look at from our “the sun revolves around the earth (us)” standpoint –are not just breeding grounds for bacteria.

Instead: look at these systems as natural environmental resources. Environmental resources that we desperately need to protect. California has lost 98% of its freshwater biological resources. Yet it is becoming clear how important those lost resources might be as more and more scientists begin studying the bacterial diversity found there and the benefits that those bacterial ecologies can give us.

This is an awesome article and illustrates again the point of old growth ecosystems. We need the biological diversity found in these old growth systems. Most of us have no idea what an old growth wetland is \and or\ looks like. As I have said in other places most of us would scream bloody murder if a developer wanted to destroy an old growth redwood forest. Plow it under, stick a few branches in the ground in another location and say “trade you”.

Yet that is exactly what our city county and state governments are doing with wetlands. The developers are trading 1X old growth wetland acres for 2X old golf course. It is not a fair trade and is not sustainable. The tie in back to the article is that the bacterial diversity in an old growth marsh is mind bogglingly more diverse than the microbial diversity in a golf course that has been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides multiple times a year for a decade.

It is not sustainable to destroy our old growth microbially diverse habitats.

I would like you to take away three points.
1) There is a a huge amount of microbial diversity that we are bulldozing away.

2) This microbial diversity could have moon landing benefits to us if we put in the time to study it.

3) As the phages in the story show; using the permaculture ideals of learning about our environment and using it is a model for bettering our systems is a far more sustainable way of approaching a variety of medical issues then simply spending billions on a new chemical cocktail biocide.

The best to you all my friends.

Interesting commentary on drought conditions and public policy. And if you convert your swimming pool to a non-chlorinated system you have a mini dam in your backyard. You then have that water available for your use, in addition to the benefits you do for the environment.
www.puravidaaquatic.com/ 310-429-8477

Here’s why.

Source: Agriculture Is Killing Way More Bees Than We Realized, Huge Study Reveals

Source: Glyphosate is toxic to aquatic invertebrates and human reproduction

The European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as being toxic to aquatic life with long-lasting effects but the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate as a carcinogen, as a mutagen or as toxic for

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_59fcf247e4b076eaaae26f87

The deleterious effects of this cocktail of poisons are deforming and killing wildlife, though scientists have yet to study the mixtures of so many poisons working together.

This is a serious problem and is not being addressed adequately in today’s regulatory climate.

Snoopy dancing in the rain

Source:
https://patch.com/california/lakeelsinore-wildomar/300-acres-riverside-county-targeted-spraying-against-mosquitoes

Anti-mosquito spraying involves the use of chemicals approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Pesticides are emitted as a mist dispersed from machines anchored in the backs of pickup trucks.

Well the chemicals are approved by the EPA! I feel great now. Oh wait so is Roundup.

According to Department of Environmental Health spokesman Brent Casey, concentrations of mosquitoes that tested positive for West Nile virus have raised concerns about the potential for it to be transmitted.

Well there are important concerns about West Nile being transmitted so it is OK right. But ….

No human WNV infections have been documented in Riverside County this year. Statewide, two infections have been recorded, in Central and Northern California, according to the California Department of Public Health.

No, it’s not okay; as the quote above states no cases in Riverside county and in the entire State … 2.

Our biomedical and pesticide industries are comfortable with collateral damage if there is enough profit involved. Successful lawsuits as with Roundup cut into that profit, but the focus is not to make a safer product but to make successful lawsuits more difficult. Make it hard to get accurate information on where the treatments are taking place and specifically what chemicals are involved. And while I enjoy the Patch they are not the LA Times. They are not the San Diego Union-Tribune, or the Sacramento Bee. But by everything under the Sun the politicians are not withholding information or making it hard to get, it was published in a newspaper!!!

Breakdown products — we have no clue as to the effects of the break down products of many of these chemicals. Is it possible that companies could be required to spend a small portion of their sales on independent studies of breakdown products and possible consequences?

Drug interactions and contraindicated treatments or procedures. When you go to a doctor they work with computerized information as to when a treatment or drug is not recommended alongside another condition or drug. This is a good thing! But experiments had to been done to find all those interactions. Those experiments are not profitable for the pesticide industry. Is it possible that companies could be required to spend a small portion of their sales on independent studies of toxic interactions of their thousands and thousands (20,000+ approved) of products and possible consequences? http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/agriculture-is-killing-way-more-bees-than-we-realized-huge-study-reveals/

As of today only one side of the equation is being funded. It’s impossible to have a fair discussion when that is the case.

http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/dead-dragonflies/

http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/pesticides-animal-models/