When I lived in a beautiful, wooded area near Georgetown, California, I made friends with the local founding family, who harvested trees, performed tractor work, and were the all-around people to go to for the basics in the area. Their names were Cal and Deed. Yes, real names. They knew their business, and took care of the forest. Then, along came the Spotted Owl. No longer could they harvest timber, their main livelihood. And we talked about it.
In 1990 the owl was placed on the Endangered Species list. This meant that due to the forest being their habitat, the trees had to stay. All of them. The interesting part is, Cal and Deed had lived there all their lives, and they were no spring chickens, and had never once seen a Spotted Owl. Not once. Never. In all their lifetimes.
And so the timber stood. And when it fell, a permit was needed to harvest the dead wood. And so most of it lay there. Piling up. And do you know what that pile-up is called now? Fuel for rampant wildfires. A problem created by government regulation of a problem that did not exist. An owl that wasn’t there.
©2019 Barbara H. Peterson
Tags: california, endangered species, fire
The sheer size and scope of the deception, the con, the fraud, the criminality is truly breathtaking. Over the course of 100 years or more, many generations, they have spun their web of lies and subterfuge. As far as the masses of people are concerned they have well and truly boiled the frog by ever so slowly turning up the heat.
With the success of every lie and deception; of every hidden crime that has not seen the light of day, they have become more and more emboldened, turning up the stakes to embrace even treason, secure in the belief they can get away with it because they have got away with so much for so long. They have turned the world into a huge crime syndicate, a giant protection and extortion racket!!! Using democracy as a cloak of respectability they have cooked up their criminal schemes involving the most petty to the most heinous crimes.
The system is broken and must be replaced and the criminals must be held to account.
The deception extends across the whole world and all paths lead back through the Federal Reserve and the Banksters to, I suspect, something even more dark and sinister.
This video features a normal Aussie bloke who has made it his business to delve into this whole question addressing a group of concerned citizens in Perth. He traces a path of almost unbelievable illegal connivance and deception over decades to undermine our constitution and lawful government. It involves the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) out of the U.S., In fact, the whole rotten scheme is deeply enmeshed with the U.S. and only God knows who else. All I know is the people of both countries, and in fact, most of the world are in deep doo-doo at the mercy of these criminals. It is well and truly time for us, the people, to wake up.
Honey bees – nature conservation with genetic engineering?
Gene scissor CRISPR being used to produce pesticide-resistant honey bees.
Christoph Then
Test Biotech
3 July 2019 / In February 2019, the first paper on using CRISPR technology to produce pesticide-resistant honeybees was published in South Korea. Ostensibly, this is intended to ‘protect’ the bees from insecticides. This is further not just a one-off case: more and more stakeholders are interested in promoting genetically engineered organisms to ‘protect’ endangered species. Ultimately, it means that wild populations might be replaced by genetically ‘optimized’ organisms.
One goal of the Korean research, written as an MSc thesis, was to make honey bees resistant to the insecticide spinosad. It cannot be concluded from the thesis whether this was successfully accomplished or not. Another paper published by US scientists in 2019, shows how the CRISPR/Cas nuclease can be used to investigate and manipulate the development of honey bee queens. This paper also discusses the possibilities of producing pesticide-resistant honey bee colonies.
“The problems in the conservation of species cannot be solved by replacing them with genetically engineered organisms. If we want to protect honey bees, we have to encourage the protection of wild populations and their ecosystems,” says Christoph Then for Testbiotech. “Given the complex biology of bee colonies and their manifold interactions with the environment, such interventions on the level of the genome cannot be justified. We have to set effective limits to genetic engineering applications.”
Most recently, the number of projects aiming to intervene in ecosystems via genetic engineering has increased strongly. For example, the release of chestnut trees with blight resistance is being discussed in the US. Furthermore, there are plans to manipulate insects and rodents via gene drives in a way that whole populations could become extinct. In the near future, mosquitoes could be infected with a transgenic fungus that produces an insecticidal toxin to prevent malaria. The use of insects to broadly spread genetically engineered viruses in the environment is also under discussion. Some of these applications are also discussed in a recent report of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), also commented by Testbiotech.
There is a general problem with these applications: if genetically engineered organisms persist and propagate in the environment, the biological characteristics of their offspring can be quite different from those originally intended. In addition, their reaction to environmental impact cannot be predicted. Christoph Then adds: “In regard to the precautionary principle, it is important that releases cannot be allowed if there are no effective methods available to prevent the uncontrolled spread of the genetically engineered organisms. We have to make such standards mandatory by including them in regulation.”
Further information:
Factsheet – genetic engineering and honey bees: www.testbiotech.org/node/2383
Testbiotech comment on the IUCN report: www.testbiotech.org/content/testbiotech-comment-iucn-report-conservation-synthetic-biology
Tags: biotechnology, conservation, environment, Farm Wars, farmwars, genetic engineering, GMO, nature, pesticides
The site is undergoing badly needed updates after a long hiatus. Thanks for your patience!
Barb
