BD in NYT
biodynamics mentioned in NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/29/garden/29cutt.html June 29, 2003 CUTTINGS In Search of Meaningful Companionship By ANNE RAVER ... Companion planting, or using one species to bolster the health or production of another, has been part of garden folklore for centuries. But proving what works - which companion plants attract beneficial insects or repel pests, and which enrich the soil - is about as easy as finding a cure for the common cold. (It's almost like the mind-body connection: if you believe that basil helps your tomatoes, it will.) As Arthur O. Tucker and Thomas DeBaggio point out in "The Big Book of Herbs" (Interweave Press, 2000), the idea was popularized in the United States in the 1940's with the introduction of French intensive gardening. Rudolf Steiner's biodynamic principles paid similar attention to the soil and to the exchange of gases, nutrients and compounds. [snip] _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ BDNow mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can unsubscribe or change your options at: http://lists.envirolink.org/mailman/listinfo/bdnow
GE "Foods" and Basic Human Rights: H.R. 252 coming to a vote Tuesday
Dear Christy, All, Thank you for your "page-turning" summary of the Biodevistation7 conference in the 6/8 digest (and at http://www.theruralcenter.org/ ). I am forwarding it to one of my MCS lists, where a recent posting gave the URL for a website where one click can send an email to one's congressrep to protest GE foods/seeds. FOI (For Our Informtion), I enclose that info here: << Dear Donnie, Thank you for posting this info in the 6/10 digest, about action we may take by (or through?) this coming Tuesday, 6/17, to let our representatives know (in the context of standing up for Europe's right not to have this happen to them) what we think about corporations forcing GE food down people's throats*. (* I am indebted to Christy Korrow at http://www.theruralcenter.org/ for this turn of phrase) You wrote: - Original Message - << GM food action alert We have received a request from Representative Dennis Kucinich to have people immediately call or e-mail their House Representative to oppose a Resolution that will be brought up in front of the House of Representatives on Tuesday. Here is a link to send an e-mail: http://www.thecampaign.org/alert-house.php The resolution is H. Res. 252 - "Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives supporting the United States in its efforts within the World Trade Organization (WTO) to end the European Union's protectionist and discriminatory trade practices of the past five years regarding agriculture biotechnology." As you are probably aware, the United States has brought a WTO case against the European Union over their moratorium on genetically engineered foods. Representative Kucinich and The Campaign oppose the WTO case and oppose this resolution in support of it. This is a "Suspension bill" which means there can be no amendments, 40 minutes of debate and 2/3 vote to pass. We only need 145 votes to defeat the bill. Please call or e-mail your House Representative.>> - end of original Message - (As a quick aside, one can reach both Senators' AND Representatives' offices using a tollfree number: 1-800-839-5276 and then <>[I have not tested this procedure for current workability but it worked a pretty short while ago when I used it with another issue]) Going to the site you gave us Donnie, gives, on the very first page, a very easy "click here if you want to send an email" which automaticaly sends a to-the-point mesage to one's State representative (automaticaly chosen by the site based on your zip code). Short and sweet, it reads: << I am writing to ask you to oppose House Resolution 252 which will be brought up for a vote on Tuesday, June 10, 2003. This resolution supports the World Trade Organization case the United States has brought against the European Union over their moratorium on genetically engineered foods. I don't think we should be forcing genetically engineered foods on the Europeans. And I also think we should have these biotech foods labeled in the United States. Please oppose H. Res. 252. Thank you! >> Here's what I would have written if there hadn't already been a message there: << Dear Congressman, As a freedom-loving American, I find it outrageous that, not satisfied with forcing genetically engineered foods down the throats of Americans by taking away the power of choice that informed consumption (labeling of GE foods, which industry refuses to do) in OUR "free market" would bring, NOW corporations have managed to get the US Government, formerly a beacon of freedom in the world, to bring a case in the WTO against the European Union over their moratorium on genetically engineered foods. Do not the European peoples, have the basic human right to determine what goes down their own throats*? And the basic human right to keep out crops that will contaminate non-GE crops and bring ruinous lawsuits upon them (a la Percy Schmeiser) for unknowingly "hosting" rogue GE plants that have strayed from their owners' fields into the fields of their unwitting *and unwilling* recipients? Unless you believe that free trade means the violence of forcing others to purchase that which they consider to be poison to their lifeblood, I expect you will vote NO to H. Res. 252, and to any other proposals that infringe upon basic human rights including free choice and self-determination. Respectfully, P.S. I have just noted that the resolution makes the folowing claim: << Whereas Americans have been consuming genetically-modified corn and soybean products, which are subject to a rigorous Federal review process, for years with no documentation of any adverse health consequences; >> Gee whilikkers, how can one *document* ANY kind of health effect when industry's refusal to label these products makes it imposible for consumers not only to draw any conection between symptoms and consumption of the product, but even, in most cases, to even be aware of the *posibility* that
PS to <>
P.S. I beg your pardon(s) on the url for the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem; it should have been http://www.janushead.org/4-1/windhover.cfm One must go to that page to see his line (inacurately rendered in my email as << No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion >> due to my computer's inability to translate accent marks used by Hopkins to make "new words") as Hopkins meant it to be seen. Another of Hopkins' gems is at the same site. I see its message as echoing this (from --no doubt faulty-- memory) in The Matrix movies: You (we, each of us) are The One . As I paraphrase that to myself: Unique purpose individually for acting in concert with universal harmony in the grace that humility brings as instruments of divine will and power, as we live Reality-based Truth. http://www.janushead.org/4-1/kingfisher.cfm Gerard Manley Hopkins As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim and roundy wells Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came. I say more: the just man justices; Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is-- Chríst. For Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men's faces. ca.1882 After reading the above, I am lifted on a wave of feeling to believe that Steiner himself would nominate Hopkins poet-laureate to *Life*, let alone simply to the anti-GP movement! (please forgive me if I "blaspheme") _ STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail ___ BDNow mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] You can unsubscribe or change your options at: http://lists.envirolink.org/mailman/listinfo/bdnow
Terminology as Medium as Message: GE/GM/GR/GP
Dear Allan, Steve, Peter (All), Thank you for your end-May replies (below) to my question on when to use the term genetically "engineered" and when "modified". I am in accord that, rather than those two rather value-neutral terms, the ones you suggested -- "hacked", "prostituted", "raped" and "muddled" -- express the truth that this meddling with the very fundamentals of life is at "best" intrusive, at "worst" violent, and along that entire range, ending in confusion and destruction a la The Tower of Babel. (On that note, could it be that this Biblical symbol foretells what happens to Nature -- MUDDLED -- when information units of DNA get scattered/inserted ultimately willy-nilly into lifeforms they never were meant to inhabit, as they whisk across the countryside in the form of rogue genetically modified pollen that has escaped their fields of origin, and pollute "nontarget" lifeforms?) "Hacked" seems apt in its sugestion of unauthorized (=not in the spirit of life as it has evolved/been created) intrusion and manipulation of others' "intellectual property" -- namely the IP of God, or of the Universal Life Force (or however you want to conceptualize/feel it) and, ultimately, belonging to the Earth's peoples and animals and all lifeforms that depend for their/our survival, on Nature's Code as it has evolved over eons. Hacking can be seen as a "sin of pride". "Sin" can be/has been, defined as, *separation* -- from God/fellow beings/divine order/Reality. "Prostituted" likewise suggests perverting and thereby damaging a holy lifeform (in the Christian tradition : "The [all] body[/ies] is [are] the Temple[s] of the Holy Spirit"), by taking what when in its apotheosis is the ultimate spiritual experience -- lovemaking -- and, by placing it in a one-sided market context, thereby debasing it. Prostitution is "sin" in its participants' separation from their own integrity as holy (integrated) bodymindsoul beings. "Raped", suggesting the violence of taking what is not one's to take, and damaging -- perhaps beyond repair depending on the extent of the intrusion and the degree of strength both of the victim (human or animal/plant) and of the victim's outer support system (surrounding social in the case of humans and/or biological environment for both humans and animal/plants) -- also seems quite apropos. Rape is, short of murder, the worst sin of all, as it can completely ruin and destroy the "ground" of its victim such that the full, joyous (or miserable, but "naturally" so) life that victim was equipped at birth to participate in, becomes impossible (short of a miracle). All these terms, in short, seem to me very applicable to substitute for the more value-neutral "engineered" and "modified". Not that anyone asked me to, but may I, however, propose that using "genetically polluted" in place of ANY of these (either conventional/neutral, or more truthful/value-imbued) terms, could have value to enhancing the penetration/carrying capacity, of "anti-GE/GM movement" messages? First of all, and perhaps least importantly, every time I write "GE" or "GM", I think of General Electric and General Motors. As egregious as some of the activities of at least the former entity has been (e.g., PCB pollution of the Hudson River), they none of them rise, IMHO, to the level of destruction threatened by changing Earth's foodweb so fundamentally. These companies do not "deserve" to be implicated, even if only incidentally and only linguistically/acronymically, with the tarred brush of Genetic Pollution. Genetic Pollution, or GP, is a term that every Earth Citizen who has any awareness of the downward spiral of ecological destruction that our environment is sustaining (and it is said that most do have this awareness), will grok. The depth of one's bodymind understanding of what it means to his/her bodymind to live in a *chemically* polluted world, will, I believe, intuitively and naturally carry over, in the "masses", to form the "ground" of an understanding of Genetic Pollution's threat to their and Earth's "bodymind", on which the structure of "it's harmful because of gut lesions" (and whatever else the evidence shows GP food to do/be capable of) can be elaborated. I hope for feedback on this proposal (with apologies if it's already been made elsewhere). Now, as long as I'm proposing stuff, how's about electing Gerard Manley Hopkins, poet laureate of the anti-GP (I won't say "forces" as that has violent overtones, and we are a peace-loving people) hosts (as in "heavenly")? See, for example, this paean to the purity of (unpolluted) Life: http://www.janushead.org/ Gerard Manley Hopkins The Windhover To Christ our Lord I caught this morning morning's minion king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In hi
ELF - Extremely Low Frequency Magnetic Fields
Dear Alberto and list, Regarding: << ... seeing what they do empirically, and kind of sounding the alarm on my own head and seeing what they do empirically, and kind of sounding the alarm on what we are now experiencing. By Dr Robert Beck. President United States Psychotronics Association, 1985. >> Is this the same Dr. Robert Beck who wrote The Body Electric? thanks _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Re: Perry's recent posts
Thank you, Perry. (You wrote: < To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Perry's recnt posts Date: Sun, 2 Feb 2003 16:10:16 -0500 Hi, Different in that I'm not using the bucket anymore... I'm using a large tank, making my own Barrel Compost to inoculate the "tea" along with the compost and trying to figure out how to use it on our whole farm, not just in the garden. Perry - You wrote, << I'm doing it differently now, but with the same idea... of low cost. >> -- different how if you'd care to detail?>>) _ The new MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
OT: "The real tipoff to his [Resident's] intentions..."--NYTimes editorial
<< http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31FRI1.html January 31, 2003 Empty Promises Everyone expects a certain amount of hokum in a State of the Union address. But for artful misdirection it's hard to top the three paragraphs in which President Bush promised to protect the environment while promoting energy independence. Set aside for the moment the meagerness of his menu, as well as the plain fact that he has spent the last two years rolling back laws and regulations that have long guarded the nation's air, water and public lands. The real tipoff to his intentions lies in the three proposals themselves. Whatever their long-term promise, none would do much good in the short term and some would actually do harm.>> [snip] Nothing new here, really, other than editorial reinforcement of what we already know is going on: an agenda to enrich the rich "By an means necesary" -- even to decimation of our ecological and individual health. Peace. _ MSN 8 helps eliminate e-mail viruses. Get 2 months FREE*. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/virus
OT: the rush and push to war
Check out the double "seig-heil" (sp?) in the photo of the true "power bhind the throne" at this url in today's NYTimes: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/politics/31CHEN.html Wonder who he's saluting? Maybe there's a hint here: < and Exchange Commission for its accounting practices. He has also repeatedly declined to identify the people who were consulted by his energy task force in 2001.>> (BTW, ever notice how everyone in or supportive of this administration seems to "decline" (not refuse, oh no) to answer questions in which they are requested to account for their actions, to the people who they supposedly are serving (us)??) And perhaps there's another hint (one linked to the afore-noted refusal to ID corporate energy-co. insider influence?) here: <<"Mr. Cheney has been consumed by planning for the political reconstruction of a post-Hussein Iraq. The plan, so far, is for an American military commander to run the country alongside a civilian administrator, with an eventual transition to an Iraqi-led [puppet] government.">> (oops, sorry, my fingers slipped and inserted that [extra] word.) Or maybe here? < now pursuing a plan to offer government incentives to drug companies to develop better smallpox and anthrax vaccines.>> or here? < the president's economic plan, the elimination of the dividend tax.>> Heck, "power *behind* the throne" seems naive somehow; here's what Rep. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican says at the article's close: "You feel when you've talked to the vice president you've talked to the president". With that kinda power -- but without the pressure that would over-strain his heart (<> -- who needs the figurehead hassles of an official presidency? sorry, just had to let off a bit of steam. Peace. _ Tired of spam? Get advanced junk mail protection with MSN 8. http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
Pluto-inflicted? (was: Re: to Jane Sherry)
From: "Garuda" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ... Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 10:02:46 +1300 Re: to Jane SherryYes Moon Venus Saturn Pluto is the next few days Power issues, control, emotional sensitivity, bottom lines are challenged all this week. Any persecutor, victim, saviour issues should be on display. Relationship hidden or delayed, cum denied matters all come to a head. Keep an eye on the MArs transit to follow around the 15th Feb. (Can georgey boy keep his finger off the trigger from then on?) Here is the rest of the worlds chance to keep the US back in some form of box. CAn we do it??? The perrennial question of Pluto inflicted people - how to manage the raging self obcessed psychopath that lives in the basement?. GA GA, Is our Resident Pluto-inflicted, then? I thought the problem was a combo of brainwashed-to-value-money-mongerers/grubbers-above-all-else (c.f. decimation of envt'l regs/elevating of corporate enrichment schemes) and a reported IQ of 88. Jane Parker wrote >Is it possible we are acting out of the macrocosmic paradigm right now on this micorsosmic scale? Please we are brothers and sisters here, and I would urge and invite us to request of one another and ask of one another not point fingers or blame or sound condescending etc..in our communications with each and the other. _ Protect your PC - get McAfee.com VirusScan Online http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: Perry's recnt posts
Perry, Oustanding site: <> thank you! -- looks like I can put together the bubbler at the link you provided earlier(www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/airwaste/wm/recycle/Tea/tea1.htm) for a grand total of less than $US12.00 (not counting the 2 5-gallon pails, which I already have, s/h for the aquarium supplies, and $ for the molasses). That is: $6.95 for air pump part#TL2 2.45 for aquarium 3-way gang valve part #810333, and 1.75 for 5 feet of aquarium air tubing part #FT316 A sweet deal indeed for a compost tea maker! You wrote, << I'm doing it differently now, but with the same idea... of low cost. >> -- diferent how if you'd care to detail? ---original message--- Perry Clutts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Re: Perry's recnt posts Thu, 30 Jan 2003 16:11:15 [snip] _ Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE* http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
digest mode ...dust, and drought
Points well take, Martha and Friendly Moderator :), regarding digests vs. individual posts, but since i'm lucky if i can do email as much as once per 24 hrs, I don't think my conversation will lag much more with digests, and w/my slow modem, it saves time to open only one document than what lookslike 20-30/day. Regarding dust and drought, this shocking article: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/environment/story.jsp?story=372786 Huge dust cloud threatens Asia By Geoffrey Lean in Washington 26 January 2003 Gigantic dust clouds swirling over China are threatening the world's most populous country with the first-ever "ecological meltdown", experts here warn. The clouds which stretch for thousands of miles over Asia and have even reached across the Pacific to North America are rising from a rapidly growing dust bowl in northern China that far outstrips the notorious one in the United States in the 1930s. It threatens to drive up the price of food and greatly increase starvation worldwide, and could lead to tens of millions of desperate Chinese environmental refugees. "No country has ever faced a potential ecological catastrophe on the scale of the dust bowl now developing in China," says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, based in Washington. "Merely grasping its dimensions and consequences poses a serious analytical challenge." Dust storms have been recorded in China for at least 2,700 years, but they are now increasing alarmingly both in size and in number. The Chinese Meteorological Agency says there were just five major storms in the country in the whole of the 1950s. This rose to 23 in the 1990s. But the first two years of this decade have almost equalled this figure already, with 20. The storms which peak in late winter and early spring can blot out daylight in Beijing and other cities, make it hard for millions of people to breathe and destroy hundreds of thousands of acres of crops. They have closed schools and airports in South Korea and Japan, and caused a Korean car factory to shrink-wrap its vehicles as soon as they come off the production line to stop them being spoiled. They have even occasionally crossed the Pacific: one in April 2001 covered the west of North America from Canada to Arizona with dust. The clouds sweep up millions of tons of precious topsoil from Chinese fields and pastures. Gone in a single day, the soil will take centuries to replace. But this is just the most dramatic symptom of the accelerating spread of deserts across the country, which is home to nearly one in every four people on the planet. Between 1994 and 1999, the country's Environmental Protection Agency reports, the Gobi Desert expanded by 20,240 square miles, to within just 150 miles of Beijing, New, smaller, areas of desert are erupting all over the country. In all, this "desertification" is affecting 40 per cent of the country's land. Partly as a result, harvests which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 1998 have fallen sharply, even as China's population and appetite grow. In Ganzu province alone, some 4,000 villages are facing being submerged by drifting sands, and the Earth Policy Institute believes that throughout the country tens of millions of people may be forced off their land, dwarfing the migrations of the "Okies" from the American dust bowl. The institute blames "over-cultivation, overgrazing, over-cutting and over-pumping" for the escalating catastrophe. Marginal land is being increasingly pressed into cultivation, but quickly turns to dust under the strain. The country's 290 million sheep and goats strip the vegetation off grazing lands. Cutting down forests removes the trees that bind soil to the ground. And excessive pumping of water from underground acquifers dramatically lowers water tables, drying out the earth. China is belatedly trying to get to grips with the crisis. It is planting 26 million acres a tenth of its grain-growing area with trees. But many die because the soil is already too thin; and, say critics, too many are being planted around Beijing so as to try to "green" the city and clean the air before the 2008 Olympics. As the crisis continues, Mr Brown predicts, the world will soon feel the pinch. So far China has compensated for its falling harvests by eating stocks, but soon it will have to buy massive amounts of grain on world markets. He warns: "Grain prices could double impoverishing more people in a shorter period of time than any event in history. It would create a world food economy dominated by scarcity rather than by surpluses, as has been the case over most of the last half a
Perry's recnt posts
Hi, Perry, you gave some appreciated info in 2 recent posts... here's a
couple followup questions:
<<"Perry Clutts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
BD NOW!! subscribe/unsubscribe
Date : Tue, 28 Jan 2003 07:56:01 -0500
The BDNOW E-mail list is open to all. Subscribing is easy: ...
To unsubscribe from bdnow, simply ... >>
***Perry, is there an equally simple way to get a digest form of the list
emails?
<<
This list is archived at:
http://csf.colorado.edu/biodynamics/
However, I found this site that has a much better search
http://www.mail-archive.com/bdnow%40envirolink.org/
Perry>>
*** Excellent indeed, thank you!
<<"Perry Clutts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Re: NYT Article/Homemade Compost tea Machine
Hi Merla,
Check out this site.
http://www.dep.state.pa.us/dep/deputate/airwaste/wm/recycle/Tea/tea1.htm
It gives good instructions (w/ photos) on how to build a small
tea
machine... not really a machine, but a bucket bubbler. The
instructions show a manifold and several hoses. I just use a
long
airstone that fits across the bottom of the 5 gallon bucket.>>
*** What is an airstone?
Thank you for this URL.
Also, does anyone know of an online source for the gang valve ("manifold"),
aquarium hose and pump called for? No aquarium shop anywhere near me.
TIA :)
_
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