STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS
Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment
June 2003
Living Lightly
More
landscaping with nature
By
MYRTLE OSNER
For the second year, an all
day conference attracted natural landscapes lovers to the Stanislaus Ag Center.
Sponsored by The Ecological
Farming Association, experts from many fields gave information useful to home
gardeners and professional landscapers. High on the list of things to do was the
advice to follow principles of "sustainable landscaping." Even some
cities, notably Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, have design standards that are
sustainable.
How do you plant to do
this? To make your garden sustainable follow these principles: The garden must
be: minimally polluting, stable over time, in harmony with the local
environment, must retain water on-site (no runoff into the street), reduce
erosion, and use resources efficiently. Other desirable attributes include
creating habitat for wildlife and people, provide food for people, create both
heating and cooling of your home, and provide spiritual nourishment.
Amazingly, quite a few
people are already doing this. In many ways, the sustainable garden is the old,
pre-World War II way. For instance: planting trees in the right places makes for
cooler houses in summer, warmer in winter. In the San Joaquin Valley we should
be especially sensitive to this. Heating and cooling could be minimized with
proper tree placement.
85% of plant problems are
due to overwatering with the runoff going down the drain. People complain when
the city wants to install meters, yet the cost of water is the best way to save
the water supply. We are facing a water shortage right now, even in the
relatively water sufficient Modesto Irrigation District. All sorts of chemicals
get into the water table eventually, and we end up drinking them. "It is
all unnecessary, says Allan Lagarbo, from the City of Modesto staff. "We
can't afford treatment to remove those chemicals."
Modesto's response to the
water shortage is the "Be a Wiser Water Miser" program which took
effect May 1. The following rules will be enforced: Outdoor water use prohibited
between 12 and 7 pm. Odd-numbered addresses water on Wed., Fri., and Sunday.
Even-numbered addresses water on Tues, Thurs. and. Sat. No
outdoor water use on Mondays. Car washing only with a positive shut-off
nozzle. No hosing off of concrete, etc. And, there are penalties for violations.
For info call City of Modesto, 571-5103
Regarding water meters, new
legislation, if passed, will require them in California. Meters are installed in
all new subdivisions, but nobody is reading them since the rest of Modesto
doesn't have any. Installing them citywide is very expensive. But, right now,
water pressure throughout the city drops dangerously if we have a hot spell and
everybody waters at once. Whether it rains or not, the supply is limited.
Like last year, learning
not to use chemicals was a big emphasis this year. There are many ways to
discourage pests, and demand for organic foods is growing. You can grow your own
if you plant a variety of foods and pay attention (pick off the tomato worms,
don't poison them).
There was even a lot of
information on "grasscycling"—the practice of using a mulching mower
on your lawn, or at least incorporating grass clippings into your compost. The
use of compost and mulch to cut down on weeds and minimize watering was also
highly touted. You can make your own compost (see previous articles in
Connections or call Myrtle Osner, 522-4967). Both the City of Modesto and Grover
Landscaping make excellent clean compost.
Plant and tree lists for
drought tolerance were available at the Conference. There's even a teacher
training program for school gardens. School gardens, which some local teachers
have used, can incorporate many lessons into the school's subject matter. The
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center will offer this for teachers this summer. (www.oaec.org).
If this all seems
overwhelming, pick just one idea out of this article, and start NOW.
Why
be involved with activities planned around the June Ministerial?
By
CAROLINE MITTON
From June 23-24, the
Ministers of Trade, Agriculture and Environment from 180 nations will meet in
Sacramento at a summit hosted by the United Sates Department of Agriculture, the
State Department and USAID. This a key meeting leading up to both the WTO (World
Trade Orhganization) Ministerial in Cancun, Mexico in September and the Summit
of the Americas in Miami in November.
The summit is to promote
our system of industrial agriculture in order to ensure its adoption in the rest
of the world through the agreements at the meetings this fall. Without visible,
public opposition, the present agricultural trade policies that pit
multinational corporations against small farmers, ecosystems and food security
will continue and will be expanded.
What is called "trade
liberalization" has harmed small farmers, further impoverished the poor and
made their food supply even more insecure than before. One spokesman from
Ethiopia asked how their food supply could be considered more secure if some
foreign company owns it. The greater emphasis on growing food for export has
worsened the problem even further.
The Sacramento Coalition
for Sustainable Agriculture is planning a variety of educational and enjoyable
activities to be held near the Capitol during the USDA Ministerial to publicize
a better way of achieving food security and ending hunger.
++++++++++++++++++++++
More in the May issue on this topic:
Coalition will
confront big agriculture
OPINION: Industrial Agriculture
Washington
versus the European Union
By
CAROLINE MITTON
The Bush Administration is
seriously considering launching a World Trade Organization challenge against the
European Union's continuing moratorium on the approvals of biotechnology
products.
What's this all about?
The countries in the
European Union are concerned about the safety of genetically-engineered (GE)
foods, to which the U.S. says, "Nonsense! Our own companies that invented
them tell us they are perfectly safe."
There are a number of myths
about genetically engineered foods that are circulated by the companies that
invented them. Some can be very easily discounted.
1. They'll feed the hungry.
Fact: They cost more to produce and the hungry are hungry because they can't
afford the food that's available to them.
2. They're substantially
equivalent to the plant breeding we've been doing since we started farming.
However, the companies then turn around and say they are sufficiently novel to
warrant being patented. Which is it?
3. We can't feed the world
without these advances. Fact: Organic, small farms out-produce large mechanized
ones, and the GE plants have shown themselves to be even less productive than
our other ones.
How is genetic engineering
is done? The gene is attached to a virus which carries the gene into the cell
nucleus. Does this sound like the way farmers have been breeding plants for
millennia? There is no way to predict where the virus/gene will land in the
nucleus, and many of the cells die because of the procedure. Other cells produce
strange results, partly because of where the modified gene lands and partly
because the very idea of one gene producing one result is flawed.
Genes act in groups and how
they act depends on their surroundings — what else is happening, what other
genes are around to influence them. So, to think one can take a gene from a
completely different species, insert it into a cell and know what's going to
happen is absurd.
So, we get increasing
reports of things gone wildly wrong. The GE cotton, modified to resist the
cotton boll and planted in India was attacked more seriously by other insects.
The small amount of cotton that was produced was substandard. Other plants
engineered to constantly produce Bt, (Bacillus
thuringiensis) then produced larger insects, as they thrived on the leaves
containing the Bt. Superweeds have appeared as the pollen from the
herbicide-resistant plants drifts onto other plants, giving their next
generation of weeds herbicide resistance, too. There is now some indication that
the modified DNA from these GE foods is able to get through our intestinal walls
into our own bodies. This was not supposed to happen, and no one is sure what
its effects will be.
Clearly, this is a
completely unknown field and we should be proceeding VERY cautiously instead of
assuming we know what we are doing.
The European moratorium on
new GE foods, then, is not a restraint of trade access as the U.S.. claims: it
is an intelligent application of what is called "The Precautionary
Principle", — err on the side of going too slow when you don't know what
you're doing.
