The Women Warriors

[RawMahdiyah]

The Roots of Our Immunity

To begin to understand the plant's immune system and its design of resistance to disease, picture a plant growing in the soil. Along the roots of the plant grow offshoots called rootlets. Growing on the rootlets are hair-like fungi called mycorrhiza. Mycorrhiza are fungus, yeast-type substanced that are very delicate and potentially quite toxic, similar to the tiny insects that has a concentrated poison. These little fungi, mycorrhiza, secret small amounts of highly toxic chemicals.

Mineral-rich soil is full of microbial life. It contains millions of bacteria. The primary function of this microbial life in the soil is to break down anything that falls upon the land, and break down mineral deposists into available food. You might take an apple core and throw it on the land. When you come back later - if an animal hasn't yet eaten it - it's decaying. When you return still later, it's gone. The microbial life of the soil has returned to Mother Earth, but she reclaims it in its elemental or component form. This process is called the soil cycle. By analogy, the land does not want words, it wants the alphabet. If you drop word upon the soil, it breaks down into letters. The soil wants these elemental parts in order to reconstitute them into other life forms.

This bacteria is extremely active; it is busy breaking down organic matter to release the minerals. Although bacteria suffer from constant bad press, another stubborn fact is that the overwhelming majority of bacteria is good, healthy, friendly bacteria. Why, then, doesn't this devouring bacteria attack the growing plant? The reason the plant is safe, and its roots are not attacked by the bacteria, is the mycorrhiza.

These mycorrhiza, living along the surface of the plant rootlets, secrete highly toxic protective substances that are anti-bacterial, called antibiotics. Can you think of an antibiotic that was found in a fungus? Penicillin. In 1929, Dr. Alexander Fleming discovered this fungal secrertion when he noticed that a bacteria specimen living in a dish of culture medium had been destroyed by a spore of a mold. When the mold had matured, the surrounding bacteria had died. Fleming had discovered the anti-biotic, penicillin, "the wonder drug." ("Anti" means against; "biotic" means life.)

Nature gave fungi and bacteria an interesting relationship. They are natural antagonists. They keep each other in check through their competition. Each has a realm within the Earth kingdom that keeps the other in balance. Soil bacteria would otherwise attack the plant and break it down, but the plant has an immune system. The plant supports a fungus that secretes antibacterial substances that we call antibiotics.
The plant, thus protected, is free to absorb the minerals that soil microbial life has released without fear of infection from soil-borne bacteria. The bacteria and the fungus, as nature would have it, live in conflicting harmony. Not only have we found that these little mycorrhiza secrete antibiotics, but they participate in an impressively intelligent aspect of the plant, as well.
Let's say the plant needs the comparatively rare trace mineral copper, but is living in minerally imbalanced soil. Let's say there is an abundance of zinc and calcium and phosphorus in the soil, but very little copper. It has been shown repeatedly that the mycorrhiza help the plant to make an intelligent selection. These rootlet fungi help the plant to chelate, that is, bind minerals to protein for absorption. This helps them to pick up the copper. When the plant loses its mycorrhiza, it tends to get inundated by the minerals of abundance. The plant is then going to show some type of deformity or deficiency. The mycorrhiza help the plant to make an intelligent selection by chelating certain minerals and drawing them into the sap or protoplasm of the roots and thus up into the chlorophyll, which is the "blood of the plant."


Senario for Self-Destruction


Nature has an excellent means of preventing inferior plant growth. Maybe the plant is, for some reason, weak, puny. Maybe it's been cut and is bleeding (plants bleed chlorophyll the way veins bleed blood). Maybe it's been damaged by a hail storm. Perhaps there was a week of 110F days - anything you can think of that could physically injure it. Nature is a perfectionist and does not like second-rate products if 'she' has anything to say about it.
Thus, the mycorrhiza will actually turn against and attack the plant if it is unfit for consumption. This is a protective, self-destruct mechanism. If you see a fungus growing up the stem or leaf of a plant, it is a self-produced fungus; there was something inferior about the quality of the plant. It's a self-destruct mechanism in which nothing gets wasted. Nature grows a fungus on this inferior plant, it dies, is broken down by microbial life, and begins again - until we get it right. Like a recycle center, nothing is lost; nothing is wasted. When the plant dies, only the outer form changes. The material comes back reused.


The Modern Approach to Agriculture

How does today's high-tech farmer deal with weak plants? The modern farmer looks down from the air-conditioned cab of his $100,000 John Deere tractor and says, "What's this?" He sees a little fungus growing on the plant and says, "We ain't gonna put up with this. We know how to deal with the likes of you!"
He gets into his pickup truck, heads down to the agriculture chemical supply station, and returns loaded with barrels of chemosterilants, with skulls and crossbones on their labels. Now he's ready to treat the plant. In the back of his pickup truck are barrels with labels that say things like: "Use extreme caution - do not inhale - use in well-ventilated areas - do not allow any contact with skin or hair - do no dispose of near water - keep away from livestock and feed - may cause blindness or death if taken internally - read all instructions carefully - federal law requires application in accordance with label data," and he thinks, "This looks good. Let's apply this to our growing food."


The Killing Fields

Remember the more than 3,500 people killed in Bhopal, India (2,000 of whome died overnight) and the two hundred thousand more who were maimed? The victims were exposed to the deadly seeping of an insecticide, methyl isocyanate (MIC). This tragedy, the worst industrial accident in world history, took place at an insecticide plant, and people were killed by a chemical that was actually meant to be sprayed on food to be consumed by animals and humans.

As a farmer applies the fungicide to the plant, it drips down the plant and descends into the soil. He returns in four or five days and the fungus is off the plant. The soil is now sterilized, no mycorrhiza. There is no more fungus on the plant, no more fungus on the rootlets, and there is nothing to prevent the bacteria from saying, "Come on, let's eat this beet."

What is the next symptom he is likely to see? The plant becomes feverish as it begins to develop infection. Plants develop infections just like human beings do when the bacteria count gets too high. The plant is now the unprotected target of all this bacteria. So the farmer's got to go back to the Ag store to get a new drug. This one is a complement to the fungicide. It is often applied with the fungicide. He sprays it on to kill the bacteria that is breaking down the plant.

He's killed the mycorrhiza, and killed the bacteria subsequently attacking the plant. Now the plant is not absorbing minerals properly and the soil is not making minerals available. The plant has lost its resistance from below. The soil ecosystem has broken down; Nature now calls upon the next line of defense, the above-ground sanitation squad - the insects.

"I don't want to produce second-rate products," says Mother Earth. "So, if you've destroyed my first line of defense in the soil, and you're still trying to get me to produce second-rate goods, I will send aphids, I will send grasshoppers, I will send mutant bugs that you ain't never seen!"
The bugs say, "We don't care what type of drugs you put on us. We'll just mutate - because there's only one thing about us insects; we don't care about bein' ugly. We don't take a long time to mutate 'cuz we don't care how we look. We just get the job done."



A Losing Strategy

Modern bugs just keep on getting uglier and meaner. Sometimes I see bugs that I have never seen before in my life, in areas that I've been in many times. I look and wonder, "Where did you come from?" There is confirmation that insect species have grown, in spite of efforts to quash them. According to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures, crop loss due to insect damage has doubled since World War II, from 7 percent to 14 percent. Incecticide use is up over ten times in that same period.

If you think this is an overstatement, consider the following. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), malaria-bearing anopheles mosquitos that are now immune to the pesticide used to control them - dichloro diphenyl trichloroenthane (DDT) - have existed all over the world for many years. WHO distributes maps on which they color in certain sections of the globe where there is virtually no control of malaria, even when extraordinarily toxic concentrations of DDT are applied. These mosquitos began to develop immunity to DDT within just a few years of its agricultural introduction after World War II.

By june 1956, the WHO Executive Board issued this foreboding statement: "The conclusion was that the development of resistance to insecticides has become a serious public health problem. Thirty-two countries have reported insect resistance to DDT and other new insecticides."

Is the insect kingdom laughing at our folly? Think of it in this perspective. To equate the scale of evolution of mosquitos becoming resistant to the unimaginable toxic DDT, to put that on a human scale of evolution, would be akin to saying that so many human beings have died from bullets, human beings are now immune to being shot. You can shoot them in the chest and they're fine because so many of their species have been exposed to bullets that they mutated and are now immune to harm from bullets.

The bottom line of all this is quite simple to state and is backed by the numbers and facts: Chemosterilants (insecticides and related man-made products) do not do the job their designers envisioned them to do. In fact, they breed larger number of more resistant insects. They are often carcinogenic to birds, animals and humans; destroy the soil ecosystem; and contaminate our limited supply of fresh water. They promote dependence upon a system of agriculture which is incompatible with the goal of producing healthy food.

[It always shocks me as to why people can't understand the reason to eat Organic Natural foods!]

Dr. Bernard Jensen



RawMahdiyah
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"Cast down what is in your right hand. It will swallow up what they have wrought. Verily they have wrought only a sorcerer's stratagem; and a sorcerer does not succeed (no matter) from whatsoever (skilled group) he may come." (Quran-20:69)