Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents.
Source:https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html
There are so many subtle ways the biomedical industrial complex manipulates language in order to convince us that all bacteria are bad and that even their habitats are bad “breeding grounds”.
Natural habitats of bogs, ponds, and other areas –that we look at from our “the sun revolves around the earth (us)” standpoint –are not just breeding grounds for bacteria.
Instead: look at these systems as natural environmental resources. Environmental resources that we desperately need to protect. California has lost 98% of its freshwater biological resources. Yet it is becoming clear how important those lost resources might be as more and more scientists begin studying the bacterial diversity found there and the benefits that those bacterial ecologies can give us.
This is an awesome article and illustrates again the point of old growth ecosystems. We need the biological diversity found in these old growth systems. Most of us have no idea what an old growth wetland is \and or\ looks like. As I have said in other places most of us would scream bloody murder if a developer wanted to destroy an old growth redwood forest. Plow it under, stick a few branches in the ground in another location and say “trade you”.
Yet that is exactly what our city county and state governments are doing with wetlands. The developers are trading 1X old growth wetland acres for 2X old golf course. It is not a fair trade and is not sustainable. The tie in back to the article is that the bacterial diversity in an old growth marsh is mind bogglingly more diverse than the microbial diversity in a golf course that has been sprayed with herbicides and pesticides multiple times a year for a decade.
It is not sustainable to destroy our old growth microbially diverse habitats.
I would like you to take away three points.
1) There is a a huge amount of microbial diversity that we are bulldozing away.
2) This microbial diversity could have moon landing benefits to us if we put in the time to study it.
3) As the phages in the story show; using the permaculture ideals of learning about our environment and using it is a model for bettering our systems is a far more sustainable way of approaching a variety of medical issues then simply spending billions on a new chemical cocktail biocide.
The best to you all my friends.