Permaculture Blog

This morning I poured a bucket of gooo down a gopher hole that was heading for my Asian pear and had already gotten a bit too close for my comfort. A little while ago I went out, and stopped to see if there had been any repair work done. There had been, it had been worked on and there was a little mound of dirt. I cleared the dirt away and found a new tunnel so I gathered up some more gooo and poured it down the hole.

And up pops a big bubble followed by a small gopher.
Wish I had my phone on me to take pictures.

So I dip it out of the stuff. Poor wet, slimy, scared gopher was not happy. So I rinsed it off and just then I heard my name called.

The woman from across the street wants to talk ponds. Here I am all muddy myself with a gopher in a tray. And it keeps trying to crawl out or bite my fingers I don’t know which. If I was in its place I would definitely be trying to bite those fingers. I couldn’t pay attention to that many things at one time especially when one of the things had teeth, was wet, and really, really pissed off. So I let the gopher go in a bush way on the other side of my trees, and tried to find out what kind of pond she wants.

Well she’s already looking at me like I’m crazy and it turns out that she only wanted me to agree with her decision to put a little plastic Home Depot pond in her backyard for her red ear slider. She was not at all interested in the advantages of rain catchment and a larger pond :-)

She’s probably wondering about that lunatic neighbor she’s got.

The gopher is probably thinking that Asian pear trees are not to be trifled with.

:-)
Best to all.
Bob

A dragonfly larvae Maybe a month or two away from a dragonfly this summer.

But Grandma what big teeth you have.

The whitish triangle underneath its head is a hinged arm that can shoot forward and grab pray. This little guy alone represents probably thousands of mosquito larvae.

Best

Tiny ball-shaped noggins may aid research on Zika, autism, new drugs etc.

Source: With a few skin cells, scientists can make mini, thinking version of your brain

Hey very cool! Well it’s not as perfect as it sounds but it will get better as it goes. If we had cultures of different kinds of brain cells, we could test some of the insecticides and other pesticides on specific types of cells. There still would be a lot of potential toxicity that could not be studied because of the complex interaction between the cells. But it’s a start, and in twenty years, if we could develope a model of the human brain itself, we could test some of these other higher level interactions as well.

How big is a dragonfly _egg_?  How big is the baby dragonfly larvae that hatches from that egg? The dragonfly larvae in my palm above looks as though it should have come out of the movie Aliens. But when it started life it was smaller than a grain of sand. It has gone through several molts to get to the size it is. How big is a damselfly larvae?

If one adds any type of fish to a pond without providing habitat for the baby dragonflies and damselflies you will be removing the mosquito predators instead of the mosquitoes from the environment.

Vector control, by encouraging mosquito fish practically guarantees themselves a perpetual job.  Did you know that the Pacific chorus frog _tadpoles_ actually eat a lot of mosquito larvae? And the adult frogs eat a lot of mosquitoes too, but…

Hungry Minnow Run Amok?

Female hummingbirds need an extra source of protein in the spring for producing their eggs.  They eat insects. Lots of flying insects. I have seen many a hummingbird flying back and forth over a pond eating the midge flies hatching from the main pool.  Non-insecticide poisoned midge flies for the hummers :-)

The majority of mosquitoes in the environment are not coming from ponds. They are coming from trays of water under pots in people’s backyards. Mosquitoes can fly 8 miles in an evening.

Zika drives me crazy. Columbia has just as much zika virus as Brazil and just as many pregnant woman but had just 2 cases of micro encephaly… just 2… Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay — all have zika virus and mosquitoes but no micro encephalitis– think about that!

The picture below is from the European Centre for disease prevention and control in 2015.

The red circles are micro encephalitis cases the bigger the circle the more cases.

Now if zika and micro encephaly were actually linked wouldn’t the cases show up where there are mosquitoes zika and pregnant women? Anyone care to guess where there are mosquitoes? (Everywhere) Where there is zika? (Orange) OK, now a really tough one: where are there pregnant women? (Just a guess but in my opinion probably pretty much everywhere) and where were they adding an insecticide to the water supply? (probably just a coincidence but it’s right under the biggest red dot). But the scientific link is not to insecticides it is to zika. Go figure.

Brazil now has thousands of micro encephaly cases and just happened to be adding a mosquitocide to their tapwater/drinking water supply until they suddenly stopped.

Colombia: 3,177 pregnant women with Zika; no microcephaly

Many insecticides are neurotoxins.  Adding them to the water supply certainly couldn’t poison developing human nerve systems. Eye roll.

But you don’t hear much of this in the news, or from most scientists, or the CDC.  I would just hate to say that this is because there is no money in doing research to prove that it was stupid to add insecticide to the entire water supply in Brazil. The few cases of microcephaly in Columbia probably came from people visiting relatives in Brazil and drinking the water!

And for Americans: other than the fact that the brain damage in Brazil probably doesn’t have anything to do with zika, there are as of this date _no_ instances of mosquito-borne zika transmission in the US.

Maybe we should worry about stuff that’s actually hurting us.  Like the vector control departments that now want to do aerial spraying of insecticides to combat (nonexistant) zika.
https://m.facebook.com/groups/982959398459301

Wow how intelligent!  Instead of putting neurotoxins in our drinking water like Brazil we will put it into our air.  Hummingbirds, or any birds for that matter, won’t be getting toxin free bugs for their babies anymore. Nor will the dragonflies and damselflies be happy. More *destroy the mosquito predators and guarantee yourself a job* by the vector control agencies. Shaking my head and laughing. Crying too.

A chemical-free pond has habitat for mosquito predators. So instead of spraying toxins over your environment, and your neighbors as well, you will be producing lots of mosquito eating organisms that are simply fun to watch too.

A swimming pool generally has a fantastic glide path for a bat. Bats, fantastic mosquito predators, need to drink but do not stop and sit on the side like a bird. They drink on the wing and need to swoop in and grab a mouthful of water. So they need a 20-30 foot glide path, no obstacles, and no chlorine.

With a non-chlorine pond ecology established in a pool you will have a multi-tiered mosquito defense in your backyard. Pesticides are instant gratification, natural systems are not. But natural systems are so much better on so many levels in my opinion.
Best

—- Monsanto vs the EPA —-

:-)

Source: http://www.agprofessional.com/news/request-support-dicamba-use-monsanto-crops

Indications are that Monsanto is worried that farmers will be using dicamba herbicide products over the top of Bollgard II XtendFlex cotton and Roundup Ready 2 Xtend soybeans illegally, and that wouldn’t make the Environmental Protection Agency happy. To completely avoid such a situation, Monsanto needs EPA approval of this dicamba postemerge in-crop use.

OMG

TransCanada announced on Monday it’s shut down part of the Keystone pipeline due to a possible oil spill.

Source: Part of Keystone pipeline shut down over oil leak

And I’ll bet you that you thought the pipeline had not been approved yet :-) but that is only for the new and improved XL version there is already a pipeline moving oil from Canada 2 Texas

A portion of the Keystone pipeline that transports oil from Alberta, Canada to Cushing, Oklahoma will be shut down until at least Friday. The section that connects Cushing to Texas remains in operation.

They found oil on top of the ground over a buried pipeline oh my but TransCanada said “no significant impact to the environment has been observed.”

Oh My

A Thurston County judge has ruled the Washington, D.C.-based Grocery Manufacturers Association violated Washington state’s public disclosure laws in a massive money laundering effort.

Source: Judge rules food lobby laundered millions in state campaign

Story is about the money the grocery industry put into fighting GMO labeling. Yeaaa, one finally goes the other way. All the money spent fighting GMO labeling has to be hidden somehow.

Well another way of thinking about it is that when there is just too much money, it gets dirty, and you have to launder it :-)

https://m.facebook.com/groups/982959398459301

Group of concerned San Clemente residence trying to get some of the toxins out of their world! Good for them!

The Public Relations Specialists and salesmen for these insecticide manufacturers have targeted city council and vector control staff. The city council and vector control divisions didn’t decide to take up spraying projects for a lark. It costs a lot of money and some “salesman” has threatened them that they run the risk of being “zika” news headlines if they don’t act.
Horsehockey
It’s likely that insecticides are the cause of the “zika problems” even the news media chooses its words for the chemical manufacturers benefit. Why didn’t that headline say Brazilian State stops adding insecticide to their drinking water??? :-(

Click on this change.org link to sign the petition to get at least one city council to reconsider aerial spraying of insecti-(cide) you know something with those last four letters that means it was deliberately created to kill things.

California’s rice farmers pride themselves on environmental stewardship, saying their flooded fields provide habitat for millions of ducks and geese in an era when traditional marshlands have largely disappeared.

Source: Rice-growing experiment will cut water use but subtract from habitat

Why do you think that the average person believes that flooding one of the most pesticide laden areas we’ve got will generate a beneficial habitat for birds that :
1 At best eat the very thing the pesticides kill? And thus have nothing to eat.
2 or worse, eat contaminated material and are poisoned by the pesticides in these areas?
3 or nest in, and expose their chicks to these pesticide laden areas?

So tell me again why flooding agricultural fields is providing habitat.

So I sent the above to the author of the article and he responded:

Ask the environmentalists. They seem very supportive of flooding fields for waterfowl habitat.

Oh what a great answer! Boy that’s really doing your research. And thinking outside the box. He must work for a newspaper that gets a lot of money from advertising housing and the like up in Sacramento. Wow I may be cynical but could the all the “environmentalists” just be duck hunters that want to raise ducks. And aren’t really worried about providing h a b i t a t for all the other Wetland birds and animals.

If we gave away thousands of acres of Old-growth Redwood forest to a developer that then clear cut it, planted a few twigs and seedlings in the ground somewhere else, and said “oh it’s exactly the same thing” we would be justifiably outraged. And yet our city planners giveaway our old growth wetlands to developers regularly.

Flooding a toxic Rice Field to create habitat is the same thing as sticking a couple of Redwood seedlings in the middle of a cornfield heavily sprayed with Roundup and saying “oh it replaces the Redwood Grove that we just clear cut.”

The reason that we accept this with old-growth marsh habitat is that we can’t _see_ what makes an old-growth Marsh.

And contrary to what the news media would like to have you swallow, an old stable marsh removes billions of mosquitoes from the environment. And without poisoning your kids. Think about where all those dragonfly and damselfly and their larvae live. Have you ever sat and watched a dragonfly larvae or a damselfly larvae just pig out on mosquito larvae? It is fascinating and highly amusing. It’s our backyards that produce mosquitoes because we poison all the predators in our yards with pesticides and in addition, provide no real aquatic habitat for them either.

A false advertising lawsuit accusing Monsanto of misleading customers about its weed killer Roundup was thrown out by a federal judge Tuesday January 12th 2016.

Source: Monsanto Weeds Out False Ad Suit Over Pesticide – Law360

Initially I was not going to bother posting the information below. It is just so pointless to me anymore.

But then I realized in looking at my website stats today how many people from other countries will read my blog and get this post.
France
Ukraine
China
Germany
Virgin Islands
Sweden
Canada
Netherlands
Thailand
Brazil
Mexico
Taiwan
Great Britain
Vietnam
Spain
South Korea
Hong Kong
And others!:-) Thank you! Permaculture is about community and you are my community!

And so I decided to post some information for them. America, its rivers, streams, and bays are probably hopelessly contaminated. But here are some thoughts for those of you who are a little smarter. Or just lucky enough to live in another country without Monsanto yet.

It is quite well known in the biological and particularly microbiological communities that suppressing an animals normal bacterial flora will cause increased weight gain for a given amount of food consumed. This is the reason antibiotics are widely used in the cattle industry.( http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/3-reasons-no-4-reasons-why-were-fatter-than-30-years-ago/ )

Monsanto’s glyphosate ingredient in Roundup targets an enzyme that is found in many plants — but also in many bacteria. The enzyme is not found in a persons’ individual human cells. Hence monsanto’s label statement “glyphosate targets an enzyme found in plants but not in people or their pets.”

There is not a competent biological expert living today that doesn’t recognize that our gut flora is absolutely required for our health and well-being and that the individual bacterial cells in us and on us outnumber our own cells virtually 30 to 1

Glyphosate targets and damages these microbial cells. It harms our normal microbial flora and (for the same reasons described in the cattle industry link above) it is likely to be a part of the US obesity problem. Many of our ongoing diabetic and obesity linked health problems are likely to be partly due to the glyphosate found in our food and even drinking water.

So Monsanto statement that it doesn’t hurt people or pets is an absolutely false labeling statement. And if all of Monsanto scientists are so incompetent as to not recognize the difference between ‘people’ and ‘human cells’, then they are not competent to provide quality data for regulation purposes either. It is simply false advertising.

The federal judge in the lawsuit above apparently accepted monsanto’s argument that since glyphosate does not target human cells that the label was not incorrect. The judge apparently does not or cannot comprehend, or doesn’t know enough law to realize that “people” and “human cells” are completely different legal entities. This judge’s logic seems to me like telling someone shot through the heart that they are not really dead because their liver is okay.

A living breathing person is the sum of all his or her parts, including individual homosapien cells, DNA, organs, brains, skin, _and microbial flora_.

And guess what all you pet lovers out there, glyphosate is toxic to your pets’ microbial flora as well.

Monsanto’s glyphosate weed killer _is_ toxic to both people and pets.

And if this link is true , it is toxic to individual human (and dog, and cat, and reptile, and bird, and goat, and horse, and all animal) cells as well.

And Monsanto, in my opinion, if you do sloppy half-a$$ed research, ignore, and even vilify evidence that your research was half-a$$ed, and then you label a product falsely, you are financially responsible for the results. Just my 2¢

If there is any Karmic justice in the world this judge with a brilliant legal mind is consuming a lot of GMO foodstuff.

But to my friends in other countries reading this; my best to you all :-)