Permaculture Blog

OTNP September 2024

Good morning!😀 Hope you all are having a wonderful month!
It is so easy to complain 😀 about so many things these days. Unfortunately most times the complaints have no real doable solution other than “change everything about government.” I believe that there is a _doable_ solution to our pesticide problems. I think there are three things, that are very easy, that we can do.😀 That will make things dramatically better for future generations. Just three easy steps

Elephants were not destroyed by pesticides … just thoughtless behavior and destruction of natural areas. Same behavior our US national parks are showing today

dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate is in the news these days. As the EPA is banning it after 65 years on the market. 65 years of the same side effects and damage to the environment that all of a sudden is now important to ban. We cannot continue to ban individual pesticides. We must and can start safe zones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_tetrachloroterephthalate#:~:text=roughly%2039%25%20of%20the%20fish%20tested%20had%20stored%20DCPA%20concentrations%20that%20exceeded%20their%20limit%20of%20detection%2C%20and%20the%20male%20fish%20had%20higher%20stored%20concentrations%20of%20DCPA%20than%20their%20female%20counterparts.%5B14

Roughly 39% of the fish tested had stored DCPA concentrations that exceeded their limit of detection, and the male fish had higher stored concentrations of DCPA than their female counterparts.[14″

That last line is interesting! DCPA has a different affinity for male versus female. I wonder how many other toxins we are spraying around have different affinities depending on whether you or your children are male or female? 🤔😀 And since most pesticides haven’t even been remotely tested in this respect, this is another example of why we need safe zones. We spent 10 years working to get Roundup banned. And we didn’t even get it banned. In the same 10 years hundreds of new pesticide products have been approved. And the adjuvants that are mixed with them are mostly not regulated (approved) at all.

the EPA said exposure to the pesticide, dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known DCPA or dacthal, can affect fetal thyroid hormone levels. These changes are in turn associated with lower birth weights and impairments to brain development and motor skills

Another source:

Studies have demonstrated that DCPA acts as a chemical disruptor by interfering with microtubule formation in exposed cells. This interference results in abnormal cell division. The abnormal microtubules affect cell wall formation as well as chromosome replication and division.[20] The key difference between DCPA and other mitotic inhibitors is that it often produces multinucleate cells.[21] It essentially kills plants by inhibiting cell division in this manner.[20]

Another source:

EPA said it consulted with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) on “alternatives to this pesticide,” and presumably determined that there were “alternative chemicals” that could be used in chemical-intensive agriculture.—while not considering “alternatives to chemicals.” This is the framework that is understood to be EPA’s process that keeps pest management on a pesticide treadmill

https://beyondpesticides.org/dailynewsblog/2024/08/elevating-the-urgent-need-to-take-action-drawing-on-the-epas-emergency-ban-of-the-weed-killer-dacthal-dcpa/#:~:text=EPA%20said%20it,a%20pesticide%20treadmill

Our Toxic National Parks will not tell you if they are spraying DCPA in our parks and on our endangered species.

We must get our legacy conservation groups involved and we must generate safe zones where all toxic chemical use is prohibited.  I started to say indiscriminate or careless chemical use above but then I realized that our big PR departments would argue that the use of xxxx under “carefully controlled conditions”  isn’t careless or indiscriminate. Even though by their understanding of carefully controlled conditions, it actually is.

There are more than 3,000 types of neurons. These neurons govern what we think of as our personality; language, social skills, empathy, and almost certainly hatred, jealousy, entitlement, animosity, and even certain social ills too. It certainly would not be impossible from my biological point of view that some of the pesticides and adjuvents being sprayed could effect these neuron types differently. The wars, political animosity, and even certain social ills of today could certainly be, in part, due to our increasing chemically toxic world, and not just people’s individual choices.

And if you think that because you get organic fruit and vegetables for your children that they are better off…. They actually may be more exposed 😮 Because adjuvants are unregulated.
https://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/pfas-widely-added-to-us-pesticides-despite-epa-denial-study-finds/

I believe we _must_ create safe zones.

The sierra club, world wildlife fund, and audubon society are well aware of the issues that I am regularly presenting. They are well aware of the PFOS contamination of pesticides and adjuvants. Chemicals used even for organic crops.🤔 I would assume they can figure out the danger these toxins represent to our native endangered animals. Until they create programs and publish pesticide use statistics from our _wilderness areas_, I will continue to consider them simply _enablers_ of the pesticide industry, and I believe you should as well.
Three little easy things

For past OTNP issues.
https://www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/past-ourtoxicnationalparks-posts/

@vidaaquatic on X

But you may want to start here. www.puravidaaquatic.com/wordpress/why-i-started-this/

If you have received this as a forward and would like to continue receiving it please email me “vidaaquatic@gmail.com”
And if you would like to donate as little as $5 to the cause, you can Zelle it to vidaaquatic@gmail.com. thank you very much. Bob

One of my best friends is very, very smart. But also very very opinionated.😀 I was trying to describe a complex biological process and he says “I don’t care” and walks away. Now he’s very very good at changing his opinion when he gets a new viewpoint. And that is why we are great friends. If he would make the effort to understand the process I was trying to describe I can guarantee that he would change his mind. But he can’t _yet_.😀

I would like to try to describe a biological system that some of you may be well aware of but others may be not. How do we identify carcinogens?

The newspapers tell you that science has decreed a certain chemical as “likely to be a carcinogen.” How does the news media’s version of “science” do that?🤔

It’s called the Ames test. And what Bruce Ames wanted to do was find a way to detect mutations. He took a strain of bacteria that could grow fine with basically sugar and nitrogen and some mineral nutrients. And then he damaged it’s ability to make an amino acid -histidine. Now this bacterial strain can only grow if you supply it with histidine.

Bacteria and our cells always have a background rate of mutation. If you take a drop of Ames’s creation (about 3X10^8 cells) 100 million! cells and spread it around on a petri plate with the basic nutrients and _no histidine_ the vast majority of the cells can’t grow however five or six cells will grow. These cells grow and grow, overnight all in one place, and become visible colonies. Five or six cells will form colonies in this case, because that is the normal rate at which mutations are occurring in 100 million cells.

You can count those colonies and count the mutation frequency. I’m trying to keep this simple and just give the idea behind it so don’t get too tangled up with numbers.

I googled and tried to find a “simple description of the Ames test” and unbelievably I couldn’t find one that I didn’t think was just way too complicated. But you can certainly Google it online. (Auxotrophs and heterotrophs geez what’s wrong with people 😀)

Now the DNA changes that make the bacterial strain unable to make histidine are _very specific_ and this is why Bruce Ames is given so much credit for developing it. There are a set of strains. Some strains have simple DNA changes and others more complex ones. But the general point is that if the cells are exposed to a mutagen and then (as above) 100 million cells are plated; 10, 100, even a thousand cells exposed to this mutagen will have been mutagenized and will form colonies just like above and can be counted.

At the lower end where it’s very close to normal background is where the fuzziness (maybe it is maybe it’s not) comes in. But if a thousand colonies pop up it’s definitely a mutagen. Most carcinogens turn out to be mutagens. if you get a thousand colonies the substance is designated a likely carcinogen.

There’s one additional trick. Our livers are trying to DEtoxify environmental chemicals. Unfortunately since they have not evolved with the latest greatest toxin they often metabolize today’s chemicals and drugs into problems. Mouse liver extracts metabolize chemicals as our livers would. And so to be sure that these liver breakdown products aren’t themselves carcinogens, liver extracts are required in the process. Turns out that there are a lot of cases where the original chemical was not a carcinogen but after being exposed to what our livers can do to it the chemical was turned into a carcinogen.😮

And here is my conspiracy theory 😀. 30 years ago my wife was in a plant research lab and started talking about some of her old research that was with plant extracts (like the liver extracts above) metabolizing common pesticides into carcinogens. I was interested and got reprints from her. Unfortunately I lost them when I lost my house. And, they are now gone from the internet. 😮 But the papers I read showed that plant extracts which had not been studied previously could metabolize common pesticides into carcinogens. I can’t find hide nor hair of the papers.🤔
Always the best to you all!

http://www.puravidaaquatic.com/

I have just made an excellent contact at
Wildlife Diversity Program
California Department of Fish & Wildlife
They say that they will forward emails supporting the protection of bumblebees to the committee as part of the official record. I am not going to put their contact out on the web. But if you would care to email any support at all for the bumblebees to me (if it’s kind and at all reasonable) I will forward it
Additionally, they say that

there will be several opportunities for public comment during Fish & Game Commission meetings when CDFW provides the status review to the Commission and they consider it (2 separate meetings).

I will try to get them to send me a notification when those opportunities for public response are made and will edit below that information.
The best to everyone.