

# An Invisible Chain of our Time.

###### Iam Willgreen

##### A critical insight over the assumed changes that we have done and do, which have never had any logical basis.

##### Reasons to change the point of view about our way of life: health, food, time, relationships, work, home, as well as all are related.

##### What feels and thinks an environmentalist that is lacking within all of us.

Published by Iam Willgreen at Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Iam Willgreen

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 9781301771356

Some pictures are under public domain or attributed. The own pictures are under license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported. This book does not follows nor promote the copy-paste. The text is under license Safe Creative. The 82% of total incomes from the book, once paid all taxes, go to projects checked on little communities where environmental and social agreements changes can be fulfilled. The 15% goes to maintain the own general costs, and web. The book could have free access to a website, which will be improved along at least 3 years, but slowly.

# Introduction. Open your ears, please (words from the author).

This book is headed to common people: to students who are making that they imagine as their own future; to industrialists who naively believe to be in the edge, the peak, or to be going on the way; teachers who have such wonderful things to tell their students; to simple farmers who do not know exactly what to do, whether to go ahead or go back, if leaving out all, perhaps go to the town; to those persons who come questioning what might make sense. I am sure people has the capacity to think, but the thinking and reflection are sleeping among a muddy mix of what is a supposed information. In this regard, that is the common sense, stop for a while and think about. This book is headed also to you, laboratory technician, researcher, written from a humble floor: to you, who goes for years thinking and assuming that everything is clear, you are walking by a clever trail, despite the outlook we already have seen. Said outright: you may think it awhile, before continue ahead. Thereby this book is not headed neither to politicians nor bankers: make money do not needs think the right things, only complicate and make it necessary. Somehow, I would like achieve you to understand that there are two fields that need a thorough review from below, not from above: the economy and the technology. That review will begin in the hands of people who glimpse despite the noise that goes against that idea. If is well done, including some issues as are the role of both sexes and the behavior, it will affect positively the other fields.

Could be we healthiest, quieter, happiest and less stressed spending a few minutes to think? Perhaps since one time in your life you have sold your thought in return of something called well being, which now is disappearing slowly; a bad business! Could you recover this? Maybe, if you make this little effort.

Since the first time that one voice showed up disagreeing with the use of chemical compounds, with possible and later demonstrated effects over the health of so many beings -the voice of Rachel Carson (Silent spring, 1963)-, doubts and disagreements not only have increased, instead have been extended and have been known in very different fields. Still some fields are barely mentioned, like it would not exist: the slow, large, deep, or the complex and hidden cycle of seas, this huge drive chain. Despite this, a simple and understandable relationship between issues from different fields and its natural connections, has been pointed vaguely, but never has been clearly recognized, no one attempt has been performed sufficiently for it, it is very costly. Some names, as has been the "brightly" name of Monsanto, could seem to be the only central point by to the we could be worried, but that is history: nowadays things are more complex yet. Honesty is a free choice, and allows us to tell to others, what is blatantly true and real. See the world with only this threat over the food is too simple, so everybody forebodes it in private.

Anyway, the true is a commercial product. My fourth engaged work as environmentalist was the investigation of a company, which was suspicious to not accomplish various environmental and safety rules, and the customer was a strong environmental association. Two people worked on it. Who does not meet the rules finally ends confidently relaxed, and this allows to knowing him fine and deepening into their performance. The contract tied me to secrecy, and I understood the aftermath of give away the results of the report. Three weeks after sign the initial contract, the task was finished, and I was sure about weight and evidence of proofs, and the clear forethought from the firm: the breach was known since the first time internally. The shocking surprise for me was to be silent witness of the client response: until now, I never heard anything about this matter, and I saw grow up and strengthen itself the association, living comfortably a few executives, claiming to a green world. This gave me a clear and simple: never leave in the hands of others nor decisions or knowledge involving risks to life: money is too strong and may be camouflage, so do yourself responsible.

Try to connect some modern things as chemicals, with changes in our nature, the up and down of diseases, scientific papers, and target objects as organs, functions or ecosystems, is a strong work (I would say a monstrous job), not impossible, but needed from workgroups strongly committed. That could be the aim of some book, hopefully, and whatever the case it never could be achieved easily. That book does not pretends it, because attain establish those relationships that could exist (maybe that we can say actually exist) it requires besides a big effort, research, and time for it, as well a difficult thing to find: an honest attitude, in front of the possibilities there are arising to make a living without make face to music, all those questions that keep buried unexplained.

I only try to make a sketch and connect things like the vegetal surface on the Earth, its simplification and modification, the build of new anthropogenic systems, the overall effect of all this over our lives, the zigzagging course of many diseases, the lifestyle, the rate and sort of consumption, and especially the notion and subtle degree of ignorance with what we enjoy this, could not have brought us other outcome than a long list of doubts and reviews, some of them being collected on the book. We do not need to talk so much about ecosystems and wildlife; we need talk a lot about us, the evils in the story.

### Could be possible another title?

This book could have been titled Citizen 0, another way to say what I think: now we do not own our lives, mainly because the exchange accepted: enjoy life in return of be able to think but do not decide nothing. That is why we are a 0. I written this book with one aim, as is made when the village is joined to talk about the last storm, the loss of cows and the poor harvest (only a bit more seriously): what is happening? Everybody crosses his ideas, and each one heats the common heart. Everything comes to light. In the same way, I hope at the end you can know how much may do yourself, despite not everybody believe it. You could lead your life with criteria and personal decisions, without need of free advices from the best advertisers. I do not go talk about publicity, exactly: I go talk about the huge amount of words that do not seem to be advertising, but really are, and already are present in all fields of the life. I hope you notice it is a radical approach as attitude, but not a radical approach about religion, culture, race and other issues. I never got inside me this pose.

As I am an environmentalist, my eyes need to see things that could be applied to everybody everywhere, or almost: partial laws are not laws. If this is not so, we could suspect something could be wrong. Could we be better by agreeing with Nature? I think so well, I guess it would be our best partner, but we never have agreed nothing with Nature as at the present is clear. Perhaps you already are grinning with these words. Other name for an agreement could be "common sense". Do you rely in common sense?

I hope you listen the sound of words and facts, really just from heart. I learnt that everybody can add a bit of common sense, and surely you have a lot of it, but hidden under a large number of beliefs that you acquired sometime and somewhere: a lot of beautiful beliefs are available flying in the air waiting to be chosen. Once we start to thinking, and we go discovering those bricks that we do not need in any way in our life -and there are a lot of that-, life is not completely easy, but a little easier. Please, do not put your criteria in strange hands. I thank you for your patience reading and after think... a bit: do not mind if you are religious, scientist, performer, or student.

Thank you.

# A foreword: what is here, how was written this book.

As is essential, a report must be conducted following a fully structured script, but this is not another report more. Some time ago, when I was writing the first lines, I tried organize the book, reflecting the teaching and training that I received, neatly, like everybody needs and likes, this kind of order that make us feel very good. But it was not possible, why? I noticed a strange feeling of disconformity, a shake inside, and my own voice saying: too perfect, too neat, too logic, too... marketable, and I know perfectly that is not what I am feeling! Stop and think: you are already aware of all those things that are waiting to be connected by a sort of strings, and light up the whole ensemble! I am also aware that is a hard task, it cannot be coped alone, but yes put a face. And I said: "it is true, sorry, let's go write as really I am thinking, what I am suspecting!"

And this was the result: sincerely, I cannot lay out the thoughts in other way, exposing lacks and muddy matters in the story. Thereby, you will see the chapters and sections go as passengers in a train, in a trip that I called "invisible chain" as many things we live with are part of an invisible chain but as we can see currently a real chain. Thus, order stays for my own work, where I need it for working with caution.

The purpose for this book is connect, within a humble conditions and the means that I have, various fields of interest and concern, collecting events and facts, and touching it with two hands (I would like you to remember this issues one year later after let it sleep): a scientific hand, because nothing can be accepted unless it is demonstrated; and a common sense hand, which recover the sense of things there where ability of some folks has hidden. And with both hands try find when are connected and when not. Yet more, to make noticeable that we could finish accepting every stupidity that is created or said, and lead us to behave anything as addicts without control.

You will find that each chapter is warmer than the previous one, and sometimes the words are strange and hard; I think you will see throughout all of them the string that connects what I wrote.

## Chapters

Imagine that those who you must persuade do not need money, no religion, no wage: they only need space and be able to eat someone or something, are not humans and only know react to natural laws: they cannot be purchased. You depend from altogether them, and all together. You should be "very cogent"; they will not understand anything other than natural laws. Hence, the chapter one "The Baseline from scratch" collects the operating bases of living beings and natural systems which form, and belong all of them, and a few points that permit understand how is coordinated our life with its environ. They all together are the partners we have to persuade. There is a lot written in black over white, and a lot is being rewriting continuously; but focusing on some issues from a distant point of view, looking for the whole forest, it allows settle pillars and references that due their weight, define and draw clearly how runs the life. Is it unnecessary? I do not think so, I am tired to hear stupid ideas, like this one of have converted one-third of the Earth in a surface of dead ground, and more by seeing it.

Once we have touched this basis with the hands dirty, then will appear all those enormous things with we are enjoyed in the Earth (with a sting of a bug, I am sorry): all the wildlife. Over all this, like an arrogant king, one day appeared the mankind as such -the older bones have 200,000 years but we could have presented here 1,000,000 years ago-, and started to change some things. From there, this is the moment for see what we have done. The chapter two "The color of our human world" points to the ensemble of processes, phenomena and resources that have been of human interest, in front of those others that being part of the system were forgotten, pushed aside or undervalued. Our attention has been focused in only some issues by some motif, and others are been scorned despite it contradicts the definition of a system, which is formed by all the pieces, relations and processes that belong to the defined system. To note this deviation may light up and make touchable the purpose of the book and questions posed. It is remarkable for me the idea that launched one day a biologist: "who exerts pressure, the crowd or the dominnt minority? The ants are neither intelligent nor disorganized".

After doing all this transformations that we call always proudly development, we build for us an image of the world, our actions, and our footprints, neither always reasonable nor logical. The chapter three "Trying connecting the strings" is a proposal of relationship between the bases, all changes performed and factors which press over us, and our present and future lifestyle and purposes that at least we assume have in our modern societies. From this relationships should appear questions and conclusions, understandable for anyone, especially all those issues that are squeaking shockingly. Certainly, I am not neither a magician nor a genius, simply are squeaking in my ears the words of so many people responsible, who see from the distance the same stupid situation. And there are a lot of people responsible.

The chapter four "I am a little puzzled by all this" is a personal confession about the feeling that one environmentalist scientist may have keeping the feet on floor, knowing only a few about facts but rejecting to die saying yes to so many contradictions, nonsenses, hand games and beautiful words. All said of course with politeness and sense of humor (is that I wish), this wonderful pill that our body provides us. Are collected a list of possible amends and corrections: of actions, self-criticism, approach of technologies, and a criticism of the same scientific notion, questions that could not continue being indefinitely forgotten, at least consciously. I guess that a biologist, an agronomist, a physician or engineer could have a feeling akin. At the end, some stories and links that I think can offer something positive to all this.

The reader would ask how I am letting aside the great amount of references that habitually go with this sort of texts and are needed: well, I thought keep the obvious ones -I should include as necessary at least 1,300-, but could be it understandable and useful for a shepherd, just when what must be valid for a microbiologist who traces the genetic map finally must be also valid for him? Perhaps have we assumed some kind of difference between them? It is not necessary anyone can understand it?

I do not agree that thinking way. Because all this, I will mark some references that there are aside in the web. One day I was on the countryside talking with a herder, and after almost two hours listening to him, I learnt how much can understand a man who never gone to the school, and reason out when he is not polluted with TV and press (he has not the time to waste on this). The tricks are not valid with these people, and that is good. Many decades ago that which was a sort of Kabbalah knowledge, today is nothing absolutely, everybody understands that the Earth is round. And the herders, they understand immediately every true explanation about nature, if it is simple and direct. No more references here, that is for projects or papers.

Some explanations are attached to graphics or pictures, including links to websites (always safe), to the extent that allow to visualize things or phenomenon that are invisible, are so distant, or we cannot see directly, despite being part of our lives all of them.

# The Baseline from scratch.

We already have knowledge about our relationships between beings, those big and those small; we are not utterly ignorant. We are not paying attention to this, because almost two-third of us have moved to live within cement beehives, and at least one generation has not smelled a blade of wildlife. How will understand we that we depend from Nature as other beings if yet we do not know how it smells?

If a bird is quacking, it only crosses our mind that the bird will attack us. And the free fields seem to us to be as gardens forsaken. We are misguided, clueless and brainless.

The further away we are, the less we know.

The less we know, the more we need believe.

The more we believe, the less we need to know.

The less we want know, more we belong to other.

The more we belong to others, less we do in the life.

##

1. The basis for almost everything: the soils.

### A meeting point, the soils.

Likely we could say that the most important of ever elements that belong the Earth system is the water, but the soil is the most important for us, is the place where the water can run. The soils hold the processes which allow us feeding and living, and depend on them if not two, one of the vital needs that we have: eat. Here meet all the important phenomena, which altogether allow and provoke the life. That probably which seems you do not have sense (then you belong to 50% of population who thinks so), do not serves to nothing than produce food, seems to do not need care, is being in fact the base for all the life and resources we enjoy, except the seas. As the two-thirds of population only live surrounded of sidewalks, roads, and parks for leisure, all these dwellers of towns consider this goods as natural, and so they only ask to have parks. Thus, the state and importance of soils is an invisible issue.

(The expected evolution of surfaces uses and state in the coming decades)

The soils have been continuously degraded, unconsciously, in a steady rhythm for centuries, what is today unacceptable, not only as theory but as a fact. Just in a few years it will be reached the point of inflection in the extension of surfaces in the Earth that could be exploited by the first time: along the wealthy extensions of Amazonia, Indonesia, Borneo, and Africa, has been developed a massive transformation of pristine and primitive forests into crops and pastures for livestock (not really for saving nobody from hunger), while the total surface of degraded and abandoned lands has had a continued increase. By so, it continues being profitable the first action (the logging) in front of the second action (the restoration) for the loggers and industrialized farmers.

Let me point out a first key point; this profit will not be for you, the rest of humans. The maximum edge, the pinnacle, the peak in numbers will be roughly the 2040: on this date some trends will reverse the global stage (as shows the chart below). Until now, the arable surfaces have increased thanks to surfaces from emerging logged forests, and at the same time the bad use and overuse of lands has turned out in the increasing of degraded lands, which already have reached a 30%. Despite the afforestation in some countries, the total forest surface decreases steadily. As forests cannot be completely cleared (I guess the governments understand), more new lands will not be available for longer; the total surface of arable lands will be starting to decrease whilst the degraded lands will continue increasing as result of those aggressive practices promoted from big companies and followed by big and medium farmers; and the total surface of forests either will continue declining or barely will keep stable (I am sorry, I fear not be sure at all of the second guess).

And all this while we are on the way to be 9,000 million inhabitants, all hoping and wanting to eat. In fact, the lands that have been so exploited will end belonging to the group of degraded lands: then it will start a new business, the recovering of lost lands, and this will be announced and presented as a great action, humanitarian, salvation, in spite of have been made consciously. Between other "nuances" within this, one of them will not have the humanitarian nature: get ready for it, the price for the recovering will belong to a new model of high value business, and it will be a new theft. This is not an augury, is a fact that will be consummated.

You can ask yourself, how came we to this pointless? Better is, I think, that you know what significance have really the soils. Know it and know all the doings about it, provokes silence and counter emotions. If you travel across the world, you could see a lot of differences between rich and poor farmers: one is the form of enslaving, by higher costs and technologies in the firsts, and by lower prices in the seconds. But it is only a small link in the chain, and never mattered what could say an honest agronomist about it.

### A layer that makes almost everything.

Well, sure that you have heard once the word ecology, this nice word, which seems to be protecting us, talks about nice gardens, healthy food, birds singing and machines that do not pollute. Actually, was a zoologist called Haeckel who created the word ecology that later some scientists developed on the study and understanding of the homes where we live the living beings, what means all living beings: whoever we be the being, the way we live, or where we live. Between the ensembles of systems of Nature, a big, huge and fantastic home is the soil. The soil is a very big Meeting Hall, a kind of Convention Center for living beings, materials, processes, and relationships (please, never forget this idea). It is not the only in the world, others are the seas and continental waters, even the complex systems as are the forests, fields, reefs and a large number of those called "ecosystems". Every history that you might know about one living over the firm earth has almost been initiated here.

Is not necessary a large lesson about soils (I promise), only realizing that soils are a brainchild without deviser, which includes the mix of minerals, deposits, presence of water, rocks fragmented, gasses, the structure conformed by the ensemble, climate, spontaneous and balanced natural chemical processes, and the hidden subsoil which bases all this. Surprisingly that works, this sort of salad of weird beings and materials and phenomena that works! And allows other things also can work. But even more, in good conditions, every part is there (the upper and lower, humid and dry, aerated and compact) is connected with another, and each one influences each other... at least when conditions are not changed bluntly.

Above, below and within this permanently changing space, the first dwellers essentials to promote life are mainly the bacteria, fungi (that really means to be a pioneer), and with them this material not-live that we call viruses, but certainly from biological origin. These are everywhere, are ubiquitous, are invisible ... millions and millions in each cubic centimeter of soil. This two main groups (taxa) and viruses are present widely in every environ (are always in the air, water, soil, your hands, your body, your gut, on surfaces, on the food, everywhere, belong to everything): bacteria can be framed into complex colonies and communities; the number of species is extremely high, do not being known today neither the 2% from species living and interrelated into soils. And viruses are only active within cells.

You could ask: can we dispense with them, and clean the soil? How is it possible, the soil so dirty?

No, it is not dirty: actually it is healthy. And you also have it around and within you, and you are not dirty, you are healthy ... at least when the most dangerous bacteria or virus are not there. A second key point might be that: thanks to them, the ground exists like you see and need it. The kingdom (realm) of bacteria is making a lot of things, without awareness that all those tasks are profitable for the next beings as we are. Its activities comprise the catching of energy from the Sun (photosynthesis), from inorganic materials and reactions from soils (chemical nurture), and from organic compounds of beings that have gone to better life (biological decomposition). Over them, grows up and lives a long and fascinating ladder of upper organisms, like lichens, fungi, the protozoa, and afterwards with the terrific group of silent recyclers it comes a vast army of arthropods, plants and animals. All this is accurately interlaced. And like all systems, the adjustment may break.

When you are seeing a local natural system near your own home (for instance a pasture, steppe, peat bog, grove, lake, the bank of a river, mountain side, scrub hill), the complexity is not casual: ignore the meaning and position held by each element in the whole, does not allows do without it if are not paid the consequences from its elimination. This is a lesson from the Ecology, and no the opposite, the done along this badly called Green Revolution for 60 years: kill everything has been there on the soils. This is the idea that has been sold to farmers until the present time: simplifying systems is controlling, and this did not was truly a good idea.

Thereby, I am shocked when I read some scientific study which aim is demonstrate and assess the effects of better levels of organic matter into soils, facing to use of chemical fertilizers. This is our world, yet you must demonstrate that Nature is more efficient. It is another joke more for the circus: I fear that there are not being sold fertilizers, is being sold a lazy agriculture.

A big change for soils began with the appearing of a new concept in agriculture, what was called New Agriculture. And immediately it was seen as the Green Revolution, what 50 years later proved to be only one more of the follies done, this one the most spoken, but staying many more silenced in a subtle way. What was the Green Revolution? I will try to say it with good manners.

Here, in this field, there are a lot of species, but... do you need all of them? You do not, do you? All out, are weeds, are "bad" plants! And these bugs, these insects, what are they doing? They are eating, feeding freely! It is unacceptable, all out! This is a business, it must be profitable, efficient, the rest is romance, utopia! Let's go plant one strong species, selected, defined, specialized, and lonely. The bigger will be the field the better will be the harvest. Do you need maintain the productiveness in your soil? Do you need maintain the yield in your fields? No problem! Follow me. Here is a lot of chemical manure that we have produced, a big effort, bringing it from far away, elaborating a smart mix for you. Have you still some insidious insect, any pest? Do not worry about! We already have a comfortable product for spraying, and leave nothing in sight. You will be the most advanced in the area. Do you need a more powerful machine? Do not worry about, of course, because we have... we have ... we have... you will be the bigger.

Pioneer communities increase the complexity of life according to conditions that allow the different soils.

Thus was as clever businessmen have persuaded a huge mass of farmers without knowledge, those we supposed always have known the countryside, they believed it all: and years later, vast tracts of land were completely depleted, with a full loss and running out of soils; they depend today fully from high intakes of chemicals, special seeds, but today even a mild drought diminishes the yield of these farms.

In any case, The Green Revolution did not only broke some element in the trophic chain, community, arthropods, but also were "eliminated" a lot of species and elements far from crops, and even currently we start to understand that disappeared many allied of us. Furthermore, the waste of treatments will remain everywhere along decades, in fact is there, each analysis again and again comes back and keeps showing it in too many places: we do not know how big was the change in this "salad of bacteria and their products" that we have eaten in the past, and what now we cannot eat more. Now we are slowly recognizing that our problems of health have had as causes our lifestyle, not only the food. Actually, the foods suffered also the lifestyle of humans, mainly by black waters and lack of hygiene, the extinction of some species, and the sentencing of other species to oblivion, and currently by modern practices. Perhaps we have killed in the same way than a Holocaust, all that what was a lot of microscopic friends who lived in foods and our body, and have protected us from an important percentage of unbalances and diseases, and its lack has eased the appearing of others diseases. When this is talked with some microbiologist, he always squints his eyes.

A scientist who could read this guess might ask irritably: where are the proofs? Well, then, this is not new, there are already studies about this inkling, but the definitive are coming; myself would be charmed by achieve this purpose the next years. The last places in the world where the less developed tribes (under our concept) base their diet food in natural seeds, untreated meat, fiber, and have not suffered yet the pollution, nor steep changes in their lives, might have some natural diseases even local diseases, but rarely those generalized among the occidentals: never will show the emerging or complex diseases that are dime of dozen in our developed world. And the proportion of diseases drawn from there in front to our diseases, this could point out that this prediction is not foolishness. Of course, you do not will able to find only one microbiologist or bioengineer who want spend one minute about it, despite the tacit recognition that everyone does about it. Usually, a scientist goes to work and get his future in a safe lab desk, one from the seven bigger companies in the world: not all of them are working on your health.

### Why is so important this "hall" of microorganisms?

In the XVII century, was A. van Leeuwenhoek who found by the first time what then was something unseen yet: protozoa and bacteria. A huge bunch of researchers and students has seen this later, but all together are an infinitesimal share of the mankind. Unfortunately, the rest does not know it, and thereby they cannot imagine how are these invisible and amazing processes and beings, which are more numerically, and by production of energy than the rest of us. The following studies of Fleming, Jenner, Pasteur, Koch, or Ehrlich, amplified different insights of this microscopic world, which live within, with us, and throughout the environment.

This first contact reveals that, our relation with the microscopic world has been a full ignorance along centuries, what is comprehensible, and becomes more respectful and humble while are being unveiled some issues that explain what relationship are there with health and farming. Still it is a little amount of points known, against the whole amount of relations that we suspect could exist. Could we name it functions? If there is some kind of mutual adaptation, then we should say: yes! The same way as the bacteria communities are allied in our gut, they take and give us some important functions. Something what is usual and a rule in the Nature, we thought that would be reduced to only a few relations, but not, this is only the onset. Once more, our notion is constrained by our ignorance, even now in the XXI century.

Was the British Martinus Willem Beijerinck who defined the pathogenic agents in plants that he found as viruses (in latin, poisons), and also the nitrogen fixation by legumes. Well, as it seems, the human eye has been able to see yet more, but other sort of eyesight is the deduction that comes from look and watch... and measuring. After the large times of work that spent Gregor Mendel, and his skillful deductions, came the appearing of new tools, as the electronic microscope, the X rays, or the scanning electron microscope. In its viewfinders it was discovered other world, completed later with a deducted vision of the genetic material, the DNA helix. Still there were more surprises with the new understanding (still we are with diapers) of millions of processes that every second happen within the cells: the way which a cue wakes up the cells to produce molecules, and signals which travel towards the other side of the body, provoke reactions and control the functions, and so a lot of relationships which go along a string.

The surprising and important thing is that, along this chain of events, there are found organisms, molecules, processes, relationships, and mathematical laws extractable that define it. And a big part of main molecules, processes, information used, is shared among all species, so that even an element or process is possible to find, or can be used in different species with such aim or likely aim. In other words, it could be like a mobile phone that can be used in different countries by changing his net, interface, and of course the charger. In this case, the partners at the end might be talking the same or different language with different results. The functions that many biological molecules produce are known, but despite it, it seems not to be a worry for nobody the loss of microorganisms and complexity within and over the soils of our lands. Is very weird to see any mention into scientific papers about the impoverishment of soils and organisms. Does not was noticed this? Has not been feasible this research? Certainly, many scientists point the need to preserve biodiversity, between other reasons because is a living source of information about biological molecules and its functions.

The research that you could imagine as an army of scientists who are protecting your life, actually is an army of scientist who are working to finish projects with a profitable goal, either a medium firm, a big company, or an international enterprise. Among thousands of millions of processes that exist in nature, they are only studying those that have a profit, not those really could be desirable and also profitable. The rest is forgotten, likely forever. Thus, soils are mute for us, and we are losing a truly richness. Of course, the few studies are aimed to perform solutions for strong economies, where people has the money enough to pay, and has been trained for wanting and say yes to every new fantastic discovering. You will say: "yes, that is true, but there are a lot of medicinal plants still, there, which can be used!" All this slowly is disappearing despite the huge stores for seeds that have been built along the world: the trending of people is accepting every "technological improvement" performed, when these improvements promises good profit, less work, and more safety (only for the developed).

Research and medicinal plants... yes, it sounds to medicine. Should be we against the medicine? Said it plainly, absolutely not. You would never have wanted to be one those who suffered the poliomyelitis, medicine is not an enemy. However, a science off balance is a trouble that has brought up already in our lives, fully. Is this actually science, forget and pass over these relationships into bacterial communities that we have "cleaned" from the soils? I do not think so.

Still more, you have heard already about viruses, as sort of terrible raiders that nobody knows where are they coming. Actually, viruses are made of genetic material, are commonly transferred between cells and organisms, and have activity within the cells -in our genes, they are the 8%-, as genetic material are sometimes wrapped, but are organic material. That means, we know now even less than that written some few paragraphs before. Only one action, the spraying of a pesticide over hundreds of all kind of beings, has had effects consequently over hundred of natural targets (another recent note: 1): those targets may have been cells, tissues, organs, molecules, genes, bacteria, arthropods, and viruses... because the interaction of molecules is a natural event in the chemical and biological level, although always specialized somehow.

Spread a molecule leading it against only one being in a world where every living beings are sharing millions of genes, and saying it will not affect to other targets, as we all were hoping, is it credible? It is a giant joke, as giant is the surface treated, and huge the number of people who have had trust on the modern world. It follows the vagueness of the terms modern world, or advanced technology we may be interested only words like respect, fair, desirable or achievable, or expressions like proper use.

By other side, a company does not need be worried about this because contrary to logic, are the consumers who should show and demonstrate and elucidate if things have been wrongly done. And it has a big cost, is a millionaire figure, our problem is the huge amount of money necessary to elucidate each one of those troubles that were and continue being originated. Who go spend time and money on it? Oh, some legal complaints are so expensive! I hope you understand now how microbiology and genetic engineering, applied like technologies, are a round business: you never will have control over this. Another joke more: the tobacco has roughly 800 compounds identified, 30 of them dangerous, carcinogenic, but ... just one of them may be guilty? Would not be guilty the combined action of several of them? How many of them, how will you find out this? This is an essential base in Toxicology, but it seems to be forgotten when companies reply to claims.

(1) Pedro Gómez, Angus Buckling. Bacteria‐phage antagonistic coevolution in Soil. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1200660

The routes to transfer information, to replicate molecules, to produce, to signal processes, are shared in different degrees between viruses, bacteria, protozoa, plants and animals: the basis of relations in the chemical level is always within a being living, and the main place where it happens is the soil and its settlers, all of we, living beings. The concern what we may have is this one: all these companies that we think are science's machines, have thought that the natural soils are dispensable with all the included inside. I think honestly like many people who is working for make the farms can be healthy, we should be concerned about it, this time definitely, and change personally our vision, one by one. Let's follow forward with this film but into the field, not in a ward or in an auditorium.

### Soils are a meeting point for almost all microorganisms.

Barring some species of bacteria adapted to extreme conditions and organisms from seas, almost all communities of bacteria, algae, protozoa, have a common place in soils, and on the water, this last an element included in some degree: afterwards come the list of upper actors: plants and animals. There is one special actor, the man, who has taken part for long and intensely. Let me go back in time and remember a story.

Was Pasteur in the XIX century who fought against the transmission of diseases in humans and plants -from him come the works about silkworms, anthrax and rabies-: thus your own pet now is safe, if you vaccinated it. He created by the first time the first colonies of bacteria, which were deliberately weakened by him, and were an initial kind of vaccine: he determined the reality of the transmission of diseases among species. Later, was Robert Koch who identified what is the infectious agent of the tuberculosis, and established the principles for determine when an agent may be considered as infectious, the known as Koch's postulates: (1) the microorganism must be found in abundance in all organisms suffering from the disease, but should not be found in healthy organisms; (2) the microorganism must be isolated from a diseased organism and grown in pure culture; (3) the cultured microorganism should cause disease when introduced into a healthy organism; (4) the microorganism must be isolated again from the inoculated, diseased experimental host and identified as being identical to the original specific causative agent. However, this has changed someway currently. Today we know it is more complex and there is more possibilities.

Other infectious agents you may have heard are Anthrax, caused mainly by Staphylococcus aureus; the tuberculosis by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Koch); and cholera by Vibrio cholerae; three bacteria with a long history of close relation with mankind and animals also but that only were the incipient onset of microbiology. As many parasitic or infectious diseases are strongly linked to bad conditions of health, as it was usual and even now is common in many places of the world: poor lighting conditions, non potable waters, lack of hygiene habits, high temperatures, and opportunities of colonizing for this little bunch of species. And these facts lonely are not science, but should be a goal for the science.

(All photographs are a Creative Commons source)

For many years, in addition it was suspected that the evolving of this group of bacteria, beginning from the colonizing of other beings and ending on the colonizing of animals and humans, being known its jumping over biological barriers. It was implemented the use of antibiotics in the fight against infectious diseases (W. McDermott, M. Finland, L. Weinstein et al.) from the 40s. Only since the 60s (J. Lederberg, T. Watanabe y E. S. Anderson, N. Datta, H. W. Smith) it was recognized the horizontal transmission between species of the resistance genes to antibiotics. It was the first time it was clearly known the opposite effect to desired: emerged that we had caused a change we had never desired.

Years after it, also were checked the infections by Campylobacter jejuni and Escherichia coli in humans with evident resistance to quilonones, whilst Salmonella sp. and Staphylococcus aureus coming respectively from birds, cows and pigs. The quilonones are an antibacterial drugs that avoid the breeding of bacteria, discovered in 1962. The use of these drugs in poultry has had among other consequences, the transmission of bacterial strains resistant to the drug to humans who consumed the birds (these strong strains were called Clostridium difficile) and the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, which provokes the hospital-acquired infection or HAI (nosocomial infection), this last is becoming a widely spread infection in hospitals. All these discoveries go to the same bag: as beings, as part of a complex ensemble of beings and relationships, bacteria have changed and change continuously, by natural causes and also by human causes, evolving like all being to survive against their own disappearance. The use of drugs cannot stop this phenomenon, so at the same time are creating new problems, some known, but are all? We cannot say that the research is useless, but we should start to decide what supporting with our payments, with our purchases, in every field of our lives. The tools sometimes can counter the goals, or the goals change and increase according to changes provoked by tools.

Then, why we would not think the soils would not have been affected by such as strong changes, chemical treatments, simplification of specie, introduction of modified genes and organisms, loss of nutrients and communities? And all this in the most important meeting point, the soils? Precisely where every being keeps in permanent contact with others (though invisibles for us), and relationships are basis for life or death, as we now know, for everybody.

Not, it never was forgotten, instead it was belittled, despite the high number of compounds applied over fields or expelled into the atmosphere, over 2,000, not only the dirty dozen. What to believe? Well, then ... the earth is round and rotates; the interchange between species is fully open, more than Internet. Tired of read? I am sorry. I would rather you go for a walk and let stand all this a bit: should see it from afar, listen and look better after putting distance: we have not yet reached the core.

But amidst all this events there were two World Wars which were the second opportunity to develop chemicals with "great purposes," as were the chemical war agents or CWA (the first time it was used massively the chemical war was by the hand of the Spanish Army, in the Riff's war in 1925, where was applied the mustard gas), and the developers were the chemical companies. This history is so intrincated, so I have believed convenient to explain it into a map: The chain of chemical companies. Is a conceptual map constructed and gradually revised, as a part of a bigger conceptual map that will need at least two years to be fully developed. You can view it (fully operational) by using the free program IHMC CmapTools. This story gathers actions from chemical companies in one issue that affects not only environment but also economic and health issues, and already was shown across films and reports, unfortunately, sometimes as way to move people up and down. However, it is a link in a larger chain. As well as in other matters, the core of the matter is that nobody will be worried about if does not know anything relevant, and it occurs with the 99% of population in the world. It is very easy for people to not strain.

### The attacks against the soils.

What are the main threats that suffered and continue suffering the soils? Some years ago, it was necessary to define where this occurred: nowadays, hardly is necessary because it is widespread.

Now are known very well the stronger threats: soils have suffered successive destructions. It began from the bad practices as depth tillage and subsoiling have led the increase of water and wind erosion, specially when some terrains were fully dismasted: the coverage removal and consequent loss and weakening of structure soils; an over tillage when soils needed a rest; the high decrease of organic matter in tropical soils that have lighter and faster turnover in its carbon cycle; the compaction by the overweight of hundreds of passes that tractors make over it; the loss of soils, which are carried mainly downhill by strong rainfalls, displacing tons of minerals and nutrients, destroying structures, in a progressive, cyclical and yearly action; the loss of organic carbon, key player, which decreases simultaneously with water and coverage; the loss of biodiversity, by the former events and by monocultures, by weedkillers and pesticides, by invasive species, or by weakness appeared with the changing climate conditions; the salinization or sodification, as result of various actions, as the excessive withdrawal of underground waters, a bad irrigation, and a more intense evaporation roused by bad practices; the pollution by pesticides and fertilizers, which have leaded to establish law levels of nitrates and sulfates allowable in soils, when the removal of those ones is already unaffordable, and are available for any creature, and you can find in every little stream running; and in some areas, the contamination with metals, in different degrees of intensity, and the pollution of hidden waters that keep in depth or running under the earth.

With this scenery, nobody could say that microorganisms do not react to this changes: and not only microorganisms, also arthropods (bees included), yes, mammals and ... Us!

Do we know why it occurs? Yes, of course we know. Do we know what we should do? We know it perfectly. Are we studying and working on it? Not only that, but also spending tons of money and time in investigate the already known, again and again, reporting papers and studies and research, and creating databases and maps, creating systems to do the already done (it was exhausting, but an intense searching of organizations, groups, joints, programs, etcetera, returned me the fantastic and staggering number of at least more than 7.000 different groups in the world, and hardly fifty are actually doing a good work): we know perfectly the solution, but the responsible for make the change principally are you, as customers, purchasers or as farmers. As customers, our habits for eating, work, make business and purchase, can draw all that could happen in the market and in the origin of the chain. As farmers or peasants, we can decide what means we want live with, and how we want preserve and improve our lands and forests, all are ours. Nobody could prevent us from doing that actually. We can only prohibit us the change, mentally, and culturally.

### Could hold once again the soils its mass alive?

That is a very good question. And the answer is: if we do not press it so much ... then swiftly, to the extent to be allowed the dynamic recovering of their natural processes. Resilience is a property which either soils as the ecosystems have, and some trials of recovering have shown the ease when disappears pressure and, besides science, is applied the common sense. It has been the case in the Guanacaste National Park in Costa Rica. The "green restoring" began with a couple of Americans, the son of a US Fish and Wildlife Service

Director, a PhD. in biology Daniel H. Janzen and his wife W. Halwachs (both ecologists). With an initial intense deforestation suffered by tropical forests, were recovered habitats of the Guanacaste region that existed before the American colonization: it was considered the returning to biotopes existing valuable, where coexist arid dry forests, covered forests, tropical rainforests, creeks, mangroves, rivers, tracts of scrub. He conducted the education, training and awareness of local community, passive restoration through fire control and livestock, and an active restoration by dispersing seeds and propagules of native species. But sensibly, the starting premise was to achieve an area that could inflect the preservation of biodiversity and local economic activity never disregarding neither nature nor local economy.

Excepting the special sites as the industrial polluted places related in the Superfund, or extremely polluted rivers or lands in some areas (Japan, China, Nigeria) the beginning is to not pollute further, then provide a little help, a bit of support, leaving those incredible practices we have done. There are no need of complex manuals, huge teachings, costly techniques, and so: only firstly stop "doing bad things the bad boys". Do not spill oils, do not cut each tree you see in the field, do not farming with aggressive and miraculous chemical packs, do not digging tons and tons and tons of earths everywhere modifying the natural shapes, and many more stupid actions. First, not to befoul, do not pollute. Afterwards all this, give back to lands all we have stolen.

### Some results of all this, and what could come.

As consequence of the treat that have had historically the soils and the recent quick changes that have taken place in farming practices, the current outlook is motif to take action by all the world, regardless some few regions which remain still in an acceptably state of health, what do not avoid a severe prognosis for the next 30 years. We will notice this in prices, in what kind of foods that will come to our hands, in the price that water will have, and in the politics, what will show who and where will struggle for the resources. Let's go establish clearly some key spots. Another fundamental issue that I think has even more significance, will be seen briefly in a forward section, and in any case requires a thorough treatment, in another text: its relative weight in the overall economy.

The use and spreading of chemical fertilizers has been carried out along 7 decades intensively, and the route has been always the same: from farms, throughout subsoil and streams, towards rivers, lakes, interfluvial plains, estuaries, river mouths, reaching the continental shelf, being finally transported and diffused with the currents to the seafloor, partially deposited on sediments. Added to this went other chemicals as metals, drugs, compounds of low volatility, or sulfates. The sea has been receptor of other gifts, but these last ones came by other way, the waste carrier ships. In summary, the waste of lands will be the new long-term bomb in the seas. That is the first mistake.

Currently, we have traced a line which divides the world in two games: from one side, the big industries enslave to big farmers to produce big harvests for flood the market and force the prices; in the other side, the big population in the world of farmers practice the survival to pay a bit of food for try keep sowing for continue with less of their meager tools. As these last cannot continue longer, the rest of the world will use the money piled to purchase the rich lands and ensure their future food... and their business. It is noticeable that the cheaper task force never will lack. In other words, already we have achieved this, we have sunk 400 millions workers (1/3 of peasants in the world) into the misery. And we have erased all that is not maize, soya, wheat, rice, cotton, coffee, cacao, or even hemp, the more profitable. This is a second big bomb for the future, this time on land. That is the second mistake.

Furthermore, the increased sales of cows and sheep as source of high valuable protein food, took a bigger part of crop productions, resulting in a chaining of industries which lead and head the rules in the market. There is no doubt about the food this livestock will feed with: it will be transgenic, the quick way to grow this business. And the way to feed the farmed fisheries will be nearly the same. The "natural animals" are going to be "Martians". Saying it thus is fun, eating it next time I think not. That is the third mistake. We have changed the speed of energy consumption in the world at a large scale, in the long term, by everywhere, and the worse, without attain to stopping it or decrease it to a feasible level.

Good, there are trees... had wood, was timber. Forests have been turned for intensive farming, where are grown energy crops and raw food crops for the industry. In tropical regions, thin and weak soils -with short cycle of renewal\- last a few years. That is the fourth mistake. But this is not a problem actually, because the year we were desperate looking for new soils for growing, any huge company will make the recovering and will offer us it by a highly valuable price. We will see this roughly in the 2040. The 2050 and further will be a dried world, a "dorld".

Am I against technology? Am I a radical ecologist? Not, I am an environmentalist, thereby I observed that we have strayed and misguided from and intelligent use of technology: as we have a lot of tractors and bulldozers, let's go to flip the mountain! And this has a price, as ever.

By other side, a fact that only recognize some professionals and farmers aware and trained is that the organic farming is not only possible, but also has another benefits; is directly related wit a stronger control of local economy and countryside; is possible everywhere in some degree and form; can recover a turnover currently flowing upwards in the commercial chain; can recover many jobs very much improved; is a fundamental change in the beginning of the consumption chain, eliminating an important part of harmful compounds existing; significantly improves the efficient use of water consumed; retrieves health of soils; improves very significantly the associated biodiversity; enables greater use in combination with cattle; and can be adapted and recommended for cities.

There are more features positives, but are more subtle issues. Somehow, the possibility of this economic revolution, returning the control of so important good to the small and medium business and communities, requires the knowledge of the consumer: his decision can change the economy in a few years, if is sufficiently intelligent and independent. It depends on you, as a consumer: you have the key. And I assure you that I am not a farmer, nor do I have any interest bond.

Now, let's go see what is the scenery with plants and forests.

##

2. Biological engineers; the bacteria, fungi and plants.

### These folk invisible, the good boys.

I promise do not write a lot about forests and all those impressive things that are over there as panthers, sequoias, chameleons or bonobos, for example. I go talk now about a hidden stupidity that we, common folks, are committing and scorning everyday. One day I dedicated the day to tell this issues to a farmer, his attitude changed, and today I know that two children have returned with him to his farm, delighted with their new work.

Finally we are over a surface with minerals, water, tiny and invisible beings, and more folks comes to live here, becoming in a square where everybody talks and things are exchanged, like a souk or market. Today is raining a lot, and all is soggy, oxygen is lacking, and someone is happy in one corner; yesterday was a sunny day, and the air blew and flowed everywhere, another being was happy in other corner. Tomorrow we will see someone capable to be happy in an acidic environ, with water, with drought, with each opportunity: this is the way that has followed the life from soils, towards communities more complex included within greater communities, which we see with our own eyes directly.

Some actors become now helpers of bigger beings as plants or trees, the mycorrhizae: in a relationship that control the plants, fungi get nutrients and protection, and plants get carbon, and greater strength over other plants that are not infected by these fungi. The mycorrhizae generate a glycoprotein (glomalin), a molecule resistant and recalcitrant that lasts up to 40 years, and gives consistency to the ground structure. Glomalin acts as glue into the soil, retaining and agglomerating materials and organic carbon. Mycorrhizae are digested by some springtail, and in turn kill other; certain bacteria help these fungi (mycorrhizae helper bacteria) or plants (nodulating bacteria). In forestry, a fact already evidenced and checked is the change observed in colonies of bacteria and fungi as a result of full clearing in tree stands in forests; they disappear completely when the forest is cleared. The mycorrhizal fungi and communities of bacteria around and into trees and plants, has been studied in order to understand and take advantage of this kind of relationship between organisms, as symbiotic relation that it is.

This is not new and it is good, we have finally learned to do some things, at least some professionals or farmers learnt it. However, it is difficult find some report or paper that would light up it or would show the weight it could have. Only was interesting the implementation for the increasing of growth, or the afforestation of dismasted lands, but never for understand like principle of actuation, these emerging properties among organisms which implies a mutual transference (defense, immunity against infections, health): despite this, for a virus or bacteria it would be hardier to infect a complex ensemble of organisms than a simple organism isolated. The first experiments with vaccines were performed with weak colonies, and it always has been known. We have 180 years knowing that the plants in a diverse environment give us strength, and well used are very powerful allies, and currently we accept passively do not make use of them, no planting, no cultivating, even prohibit them, eliminate some of them, and rely on a pill that we had a day on television. Can we be more stupid? So deep is sleep? Here are some of the reasons for the fight among economies: the Chinese that produces medicines with plants, and the US-UK-Germany-Swiss industry that produces chemicals.

Let's go continue. Whichever could be the creature that could be there, will find many other creatures that must understand or deal: this may result in cooperation, symbiosis, hunting, die, and other relationships. Each living being that we find in a field, forest, lagoon, river, has signed many deals with other "folks" or "enemies" and has a place, a nest, its own little kingdom, and defends its life, family and food, in the conditions he is able to live (the ecological niche). The more is the number of beings are there, the more complex is the ensemble, more resistant will be the place for strangers. Instead, in front of impoverished or simplified places, will be easier colonize one being or the whole place. My friend, my reader, good colleague, this is what happens with pests or infections: sites, ecosystems, fields, forests, or impoverished living beings, are more easily attacked by a stranger, actually a regular being who come to grow when the opportunities allow it.

Because of this, biodiversity is like a diamond, and a word that hides much wealth. When the soils of the chapter one are filled with a troop of foreign compounds and these ones are not degraded, roots store these ones more than other tissues in the plant, and for longer. When you are seeing signals in the leaves, are a mix of these compounds, and other environmental conditions as temperature, presence of gases, balance of nutrients, humidity or stress. The same happens in animals as us, who accumulate compounds in all kind of tissues and organs (and some of them are modified into, and become more dangerous).

The global ensemble of species that we can find in every place, before being a weed is a teacher which shows us how, where and when to be adapted to what exactly, and what offering around (all photographs by the author).

Plants are able to defend themselves: thus, has been discovered the phytoalexins molecules, or the pathogenesis-related proteins (PR) that directly attack the cell walls of pathogens, or the production of substances such as the salicylic acid which derivative is the aspirin of Bayer (from the willow), which can result in systemic acquired resistance to fungal activity. Otherwise, a plant can defend of specific strains of a pathogen (one might call this pathogen race) using a gene-for-gene resistance: in genes has one allele of a gene (R gene) that corresponds with one gene of the pathogen (Avr genes, avirulent), favoring the first's resistance, and the second decrease the effectiveness of the pathogen. This has been a way of intervention in plants through bioengineering, but unfortunately not for learning and adaptation to it. This can be mediated on the middle by a protein, what is called "the guard hypothesis".

Anyway, is clear a fact today: the greater is the genetic variability and the genetic and specific diversity, the more correlated is with a higher genetic resistance, while the homogenization and impoverishment of the gene pool of a species and the low diversity favor the weakness to pathogens.

### The unseen biodiversity.

We follow on the floor... The soil community performs continuously the processing of organic matter, adding it into the soil, retaining water, and arranging it as nutrient for plants. Thus the plants find a place to live. And also come other different beings, and the complexity, number of species, trophic levels, until herbivores and carnivores: but no one here is dominant, in any case some may be predominant. You could find there in the soil roughly 8 tons of bacteria each hectare, fungi and algae (10,000/g), protozoa, and then will be the invertebrates, a big step of specialization in many tasks. Sure you already know the nematodes, this group of worms with 2,000 kg/hectare (great mixers and oxygenators, enhancers of land productivity, though rare in the tropics); or the mites and springtails, whose troops vary between 20,000 y 400,000 individuals/m2, also very sensitive to chemical aggressions. And arthropods: an ancient family of winners worldwide: spiders, mites, scorpions, harvestmen, centipedes, millipedes, water fleas, copepods, mealybugs, Protura or Diplura. And insects, those weird bugs: ephemeral, naiads (who live only in clean water), dragonflies, damselflies, cockroaches (which were always controlled as delicacies that are by birds, lizards, centipedes or wasps), termites, mantids, earwigs, flies stone crickets and grasshoppers, stick insects, leaf insects, gladiators, lice, mites, thrips, aphids, raphides, lacewings, beetles (more than 400.000 species), fireflies, weevils, flying deer, scorpion flies, fleas, flies, mosquitoes, caddis-flies, butterflies, moths, peacocks, sphinxes, bumblebees, wasps, bees, ants, snails, spiders, harvestmen, freshwater prawns, and many more. Over all this can grow plants, plants, mosses, ferns, shrubs, trees, and other higher animals.

The main "jobs" that have those little bugs are eating, process the earth, control the population of bacteria or plants, recycle waste of all kinds, and in turn being eaten by other. This is how we end up finding the tree species that have interested us, herbivores that have become cattle, the plants that we have used, or products we collect today: and also the compounds containing these beings, which have allowed us to know some products used as drugs. Forests are not meaningless site.

The estimating of total amount of matter flowing among compartments (sediments, water, soil, atmosphere, biomass) is an approach that allows to estimating what is the dynamic balance for one system. Thereby, we can understand that there are a flow of energy, partially studied in the case of the nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, water, phosphorus, potassium, but implying other cycles, like the cycle for the organic matter, flowing between living beings, cadavers, litter, humus, and nutrients are again living organisms. For us, theses machines of life that are ecosystems, are like sprockets functioning as crimped together, depending from other factors: the sun energy, the temperature, the water. The initial basis formed by bacteria and fungi, is transformed in a bigger machine by plants, resulting in complex systems that support to animals, a carbon warehouse, and the specialization derived from many species live together.

If the soils are the basis, the water allows and carries many events along the forest chain. Despite you cannot see the chemical processes, into soils and streams, the waters that are continuously crossing minerals, deposits, surfaces, forests, crops, towns, all in its route, those waters are reacting chemically, sometimes transporting substances, sometimes depositing compounds, sometimes allowing its degradation, but distributing wherever they go and where they arrive thousands of substances that never existed there before. Chemical analyzes have continued finding them today: do not be fooled. The sea, the final sink, already is saying us something about. Still, both the forest and riparian vegetation are able to eliminate much of the contaminants if present.

We have not even been able to maintain in the crops at least some of the most beneficial elements: earthworms. Being the up-graders, aerating the soil and regenerating the subsoil, the worms are a clear example of bioaccumulation of toxic pesticides, herbicides, and soluble molecules: dissolved accumulate in fatty tissue being difficult to degrade, are accumulated on tissues increasing their concentration; the same way follow the heavy metals from drugs or fungicides (copper), which increase the urea concentration in the livestock or slurry, and provoke the disappearing of microorganisms, and earthworms.

Well, since a lot of years ago, a lot of people farming, a millionaire numbers of inhabitants, all have been persuaded that is better to have a layer of absolutely nothing, pour a lot of brown-red liquids, killing every possible survivor insect, and after it go eat happily. Once again, we are stupid.

We can call this set either "forest" or prairie, or wetland. In the balance of energy flow, forests or vegetable coverage fulfill a big role, and its state influences greatly one of links into the chain of energy flow: the atmosphere. Where are forests? Europe holds 1,000 million hectares, whose 80% is in the Russian territory; Central America and Caribe both keep the half of total surface of forests with rampant logging whilst grow severe erosive problems; Asia lost a great amount of forests in two decades, and now are being planted big masses of trees in Vietnam, India and mainly China; Java, Borneo and Indonesia have suffered an intensive logging, emerging instead biofuel crops; meanwhile in Africa continues increasing the logging despite the fake statistics; Canada and the US, have the 25% of primary forests, linked to bigger water reservoirs in Canada.

Watching closely the mix of logging, biofuel cropping and mining into the Central Africa, every map that can be issued will show the same scenery: a puzzle of little granted licenses and concessions, the most for almost 20 occidental companies, and a micro-world of illegal logging operations which trade however completely at low prices. Forests are receding mainly in Africa, with 3.4 million hectares from the 5.2 in the world, for the period 2000-2010. Is this sustainability? Not, this is more of the same that was made in other places, changing uses with no control. The fresh trending now is hire a company which establishes the while and place to go and pay with locals the start of business, al this with a green face. There is always one alibi that can be chosen to have a green face: carbon storage, local development, cooperation, does not mean, no matter that be, actually never works.

Our century, the century of the information management, is the time when we are saying things fully dumb and outright, as could be that: "the local tribes are owners of carbon storage rights from their forests", and I must reply now and here, loudly, talking you: do you really think so? Are you able to digest this nonsense? Can you imagine for a moment, telling yourself a community of 2,000 people, in the jungle, they must defend their rights of carbon sequestration? I wonder: we will not stop manipulating life to ridiculous extremes? It will not be that stupid things that we have done to ourselves, we do it out of spite and with total impudence these tribes? This is mi while to say: please, please, please!

I know someone will say immediately that I misunderstood what it means to sequester carbon, or encourage the care of the forest, and so on: I hope you understand me, I am calling for common sense before applying reason, not after.

The official reports from the UN do not offer information about issues also important: final state of logging areas, not-wood products extracted, losses in biodiversity... that nor local governments offer. These data are always known time after, when another organization must go there to initiate the restoration programs, the following business in the chain. Please, instead of knowing the latest skirt or stupidity of an artist at the peak, take a while to read closely any of the reports officially issued - here are more than the bees that remain in the countryside buzzing-, and try to figure out how the information could have been obtained and drawn.

In those places, nobody watches what you do, what you make or what you deal. On the contrary, some foundations are free for make up the maps of soils, crops, properties, water resources, and are supporting "innovative tools", which "could help" to those better crops in... where really? They do this in the new free lands where rights and newspapers never arrive! That is what comes. And the need of biofuels has three great customers: North America, Europe and the tandem China-India, being the crops the sugar beet, oil seed crops, jatropha, cassava, and sorghum. This is your world, our world.

Letting aside other issues that will be mentioned later, I go focus the attention over the basis for every chemical compound that we could know today, and the aim which all of them accomplish in the Nature. Why it? Because I think, you will be able to have a comprehensive vision of what is happening with many issues noticed here, mentioned in the news, hidden on drugs, and more. The most important proof today for us of communication tools that we have the beings (specially important for the matter), which are using plants and animals as us, and we exchange in many ways, is the huge troop of substances "naturally produced".

The best advantage that has been done with this has been learning to interrupt it, the communication into living beings, chemically or by introduced genes. Could you imagine that your fantastic computer or tablet losing your communication? That is what has been done. The weedkillers, the insecticides or fungicides make that, interrupt the growth, the respiration, unbalancing processes or the behavior in animals, for example: but not ever it occurs when was liked, but in many more targets there around and even far, as easily as happens. For years, people have believed confident that kill these little critters affected only to those we wanted to eliminate: that easy!

(Plant diversity in the Mediterranean area, photographs by the author)

Are known approximately 10,000-12,000 compounds produced by bacteria (this is what is officially accepted and visible like the icebergs but the databases from industries contain more), fungi and plants, which are used for different purposes. Plants have revealed be armed species to deal with others, what does not prevent its end on someone stomach, however. Let's go see some of them.

### The first chemical company in the world: the Nature.

Exactly, yes, this is the first largest chemical company in the world, the Nature: from this one has born the human chemical industry. All that you go read now is actually the World of Communication between living beings through messengers: is only a quick and compressed version.

A set of substances comprises the group of main players in the natural interaction between living beings. We go now see the main of them.

Surely you know the alkaloids (a pair of very smart websites which explain the way drugs operate when are introduced in our body and the effects caused, are the funny Mouse, and Jellynek). The most noticeable stimulant and anesthetic effects are shown on the nervous system, can you explain what they can also have effects on other organs, since they are controlled by the nervous system, are enervated. Include compounds like nicotine and anabasine (from Solanaceae as tobacco); cocaine (from the coca); caffeine (from the coffee); berberine (from the barberry); psilocin (from mushrooms), which operates over the serotonin neurotransmitter; morphine (from the opium); ephedrine (from the Ephedra family); vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle), a mitotic inhibitor, used in stopping of cell division in strong leukemia and other cancer; reserpine (from the snakeroot); galantamine (from the snowdrop) used in some phase of Alzheimer's disease; theobromine (from the cacao); theophylline (from the tea); codeine (from the opium poppy); quinine and quinidine (from the Cinchona); coniine (from the yellow pitcher plant and poison hemlock); atropine (from the Deadly Nightshade or the mandrake); vincamine (from the periwinkle); cyclopamine (from the corn lily), which produces the cyclopia of lambs by its teratogenecity; bufotenin (from the Vilca, Breadnut, Velvet beans and also toads); scopolamine (from the Jimson weed, Black henbane, Corkwood tree); aporphine, psylocibin (from many mushrooms); sanguinarine (a strong destroyer of cells and tissues, obtained from the bloodroot); and yohimbine (from the Yohimbe and Niando) used in diabetes 2, and a large list of other derivatives and compounds. Some of the ways, pathways and targets that can be "partners" with theses substances (like the next ones), will be exposed later.

The Glycosides are carbohydrates linked to another compound of different chemical nature, usually stored by the organism, activated when should be used. A metabolite usual from its decomposition is the prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide. One way that the body has to excrete some poisons is the linkage of poisons with the glucuronic acid, creating a glucuronide, more soluble in water (then in blood, and filterable in kidneys). Sure you know some of these compounds: the salicin, which becomes into salicylic acid (obtained originally from willows or osiers); the coumarin, which has demonstrated have toxicity in animal livers, used as enhancer for aroma and foods, and medicine (warfarine is a derivate used as anticoagulant, which easily crosses the placenta), rodenticide, obtained from the kumaru, vanilla grass, sweet woodruff, the velvet plant (American natives have used it as paralyzing because of its content of rotenone), the Chinese cinnamon (which also contains the hazardous styrene, and cinnamaldehyde used as flavorant, antimicrobial, fungicide, and corrosion inhibitor), the sweet grass, being converted by fungi in the poisonous dicoumarol (that causes the hemorrhagic disease of cattle recognized in 1920), or the sweet clover; the derivatives from anthraquinone, from the tropical senna, rhubarb (that also contains oxalic acid), or Aloe (with aloin), and also found in luminescent bacteria that are harmless and lethal pathogens symbionts for insects, and kill them living in nematodes that parasite the insects; the amygdalin, a compound present in trees of the Prunus family, as apricots, peaches, apples, raspberries, crabapples, black cherries, almonds, yuca, and roots of sorghum (was used with B17 vitamin as cancer cure treatment, fully ineffective, a strong case of quackery); also are known other as prunasin (from the oriental bush cherry, the hard Pear, the Miyama cherry, and Catclaw Acacia), or the lotaustralin (from the Golden root, austral Trefoil, and white clover), the dhurrin (from the sea arrow grass), or the linamarin contained in lima beans, flax (linseed).

Among these compounds, the bioflavonoids are secondary metabolites, not directly implied in growth or development, but strongly involved in the defense of plants. As attracting signals for insects are widely present in plants as pigments, and help on the infection of Rhizobia into roots. Most interesting is its suspected capability to modify and response to allergens, viruses, bacteria, diarrhea or carcinogenic compounds. Today flavonoids are intensely studied for their antioxidant activity (in vitro but not in vivo), inhibitors of cancer and use in treatment of cardiovascular diseases. It is not clear the action into the body, perhaps effects are not directly related to flavonoids, and even the body response is this of get away from them. Examples are the quercetin (from onions, citrus, buckwheat), cyanidin (from grapes, apples, blueberry, loganberry, elderberry, red onions, bilberry, blackberry, cherry, cranberry, red cabbage and hawthorn), genistein (from the dyer's broom), hesperidin (from citrus), quercetin (from citrus, into the whine), anthocyanin (into the whine), rutin (from citrus), Luteolin (from ragweed pollen, barks, clover blossom, and the Asian yellow Myrobalan, and into the navel oranges, oregano, peppermint, rosemary, olive oil, chamomile, celery thyme), delphinidin (from larkspur and violas), theaflavins (from the tea), tannin (from the tea, into the whine), taxifolin (from the açai palm, Himalayan cedar, Chinese yew, chir pine, or Siberian larch), catechins (from tea, cutchtree, into the whine, cacao which contains also theobromine, and chocolate), epicatechin (from the cocoa, tea), and dihydrokaempferol (from the Siberian pine). Also saponines: the compounds found in licorice, used as adjuvants in vaccines (enhancers), or the steroidal glycosides (from Scilla or foxgloves).

(Some photographs Creative Commons, other photographs by the author, all unrestricted)

The group of non-proteinogenic amino acids are, in front of the 22 amino acids encoded by the genetic code, compounds derived from other origin: can be neurotransmitters, intermediate cell products, toxins, or man-made. GABA or gamma-Aminobutyric acid, known initially as metabolic product of plants or microbes, plays an excitatory role in immature brains, and inhibitory role in mature brains into the nervous system of mammalians: regulates the growing in stem cells and embryonic cells, and also neural proliferation, elongation of neurites, formation of synapses, migration, and differentiation. It is synthesized in the brain from the main excitatory neurotransmitter, the glutamate. The 2-Aminoisobutyric acid or AIB, which is produced by some fungi; cystine is present in mammals; homoserine as intermediate of other amino acids; the djenkolic acid present in the Jengkol. Anyway, the list of compounds in the group is wide. Some of them imitate properties of proteinogenic amino acids, thus acting like toxins: is the case of canavanine (found in legumes as defense against herbivores), thialysine and quisqualic acid.

Quinones are known as part of the electron transport chain in photosynthesis and aerobic respiration in plants. Particularly, the phylloquinone is the vitamin K1, needed in various processes of the body.

The group of natural organic tannins was supposed as defense of plants from animals, and is related to the tanning of animal leather by humans. Are widely present in many trees, as ergastic substance implied in support of material and cell walls (as also are the starch, cellulose, cutin, gluten and wax). Today is known the control that tannins have over decomposition, nitrogen cycle, and carbon cycle, and is known also their potential against bacteria, virus, and pathogenic parasites. Anyway, the tannins when condensed inhibit the digestion of plants consumed by herbivores making it difficult, and interfere with the protein absorption. Can be found in berries, nuts, persimmons, cinnamon, vanilla, thyme, cumin, cloves, chocolate, chickpeas, many legumes, tea, wine, some juices, and beer.

The monoterpenes are molecules spread by trees, which have antibacterial properties, and once on the air form aerosols (participate in condensation processes when humidity invades the forest, especially at dawn and dusk, increasing the reflection in clouds and lowering of temperature). A special case is the group of pyrethrins: originally extracted from the pyrethrum, other compounds have been synthesized later since this one (the called pyrethroids). Between all insecticides, natural and synthetics, the pyrethrins are biodegradable and disintegrate in sunlight, being toxic only for fish or cats, but is hydrolyzed and degraded by acids that contain the stomachs of mammals. It appears the pyrethrins make its work with other substances and have a deterrence effect on insects, meanwhile its concentration decreases when decomposes naturally on the air.

A group about you already has heard are the sesquiterpenes, a kind of pheromones that trigger the social response in members of the same species (with allomones that affect to other's behavior, attractants, kairomones or repellents). The kairomones are semiochemicals that give information to other species: it can be "I am here, be cautious with me," and other can be "There are someone who is food for me". This is the case of kairomones that permit beetle predators find to beetle herbivores, which meet in a Ponderosa Pine. In the same way, an animal is afraid smelling the odor of its predators. The pheromones inform about a possible mate or a lucky sex, dangers, food, the need of make mobbing defense, the territorial nest (epideictic pheromones), excite others to action or actions like the breast-feeding, shoot the arousal, mark territories, print trails for communities, make the peace, and more, but that are not warn always consciously.

Today, we are used to listen a group on the News, the steroids, whose names are common: cholesterol, estradiol, testosterone, and dexamethasone. All steroids in fungi, plants and animals come from two sterols, lanosterol and cycloartenol. A steroid that controls the moulting in insects is the ecdysterone, present in arthropods.

Androgens, estrogens and progestagens manage the processes of reproduction and sex differentiation. The group of corticosteroids produced in the adrenal cortex, have effect over many functions, as are the responses to stress, behavior, regulation of protein catabolism, immune response, and metabolism of carbohydrates. For example, aldosterone control the levels of electrolyte and water, influencing the kidney function; corticosterone in turn is needed to produced the aldosterone; cortisone which responds to stress and reduces the immune system and its responses; hydrocortisone (cortisol) has as function the increase of blood sugar; the cholesterol belong to the cell membranes when is needed the permeability and fluidity, and is needed to produce vitamin D and bile acids. The levels of cholesterol and its types (of low and high density, LDL and HDL) influence the appearance or strength of some diseases; phytosterols are produced by plants and are related with lowering of blood cholesterol, but at the same time can develop other disease as the phytosterolaemia (and the consequent coronary atherosclerosis). The brassinosteroids (initially extracted from rapeseed) are related with signal transduction, resistance to stress caused by drought or cool, differentiation, senescence of tissues, cell growth, cellular division and regeneration. Statins are used for lowering the levels of cholesterol, and have centered a controversy by its overuse and overprescribing, mainly when was discovered the payment received (from pharmaceutical companies) by doctors who recommended its administration for reduce cholesterol. Furthermore, are related with adverse effects as myalgia, diabetes, cancer, myositis, and myopathy.

Nearby to our daily talking, by one side is the progesterone, which conducts the menstrual cycle, pregnancy, protection of the neuron system, and very important, the embryogenesis; by other side, the testosterone, whose role is reproductive or the prevention of osteoporosis; furthermore, the estrogen is involved in the fetal development, reproduction, sex, metabolism, functions and health of reproductive female system, balance of salts, synthesis of proteins, modulates the gene expression, gastrointestinal functions, ovulation, estrus and receptivity in females, behavior and a large list of functions. The anabolic steroids are leaded to two goals: the increasing of the bone synthesis and the increasing of muscle mass.

Hearing about essential oils, we find the terpenes, produced mainly by conifers but also from termites or swallowtail butterflies, and compound the base of resins and the turpentine. Terpenes and modified terpenes (terpenoids or isoprenoids) are again the basis of essential oils. According to the number of main molecules that compound the terpene (number of isoprene units) we find since the hemi-terpenes until poly-terpenes, a very large list of them: thus, you have a large list of odors that come from those molecules.

That is a very little and initial occidental vision of what has been known from plants. But use and knowledge of plants is ancient and widely spread, as also has been the ignorance. Sure you have heard of Chinese medicine, the most shinning, whilst other regions have had their own compounds and treatments and shone less. The union of medicinal plants with religion or spirituality has not had other reason than the status of beliefs and knowledge in each region: however, plants are only plants, and like in other cases that we can see, the use is the difference.

### Different economies, different use.

Each continent and country somehow hides its own way of doing and think, barring you travel or can be there with open eyes and mind fully open to learn. After a first impression, the first sight or touching, we can start to notice the similarities and differences, that we are always looking the primates. A rule that is met everywhere is the existence of the proportion which covers each "kind of medicine", being in the non-occidental countries at 100 the patients by healer, and roughly 10,000 by medical doctor.

The African medicine of shamans, diviners, midwives, sometimes making use of sympathetic magic, voodoo, the Egba ogwu, are joined to religious beliefs, with very important presence of the animism, making use of traditional medicine or healing in Sub-Saharan Africa nine out of ten people; the Indian subcontinent keeps a large tradition of herbal medicine, sometimes being proved an uncontrolled manufacturing of compounds, with knowledge about surgery, hygiene, toxicology and always a relation with hinduism, buddhism, physical and mental practices, and all this fused with a very big and growing population, mix of different ethnic cultures. Today India is the bigger provider of cheaper-line drugs and vaccines for humanitarian organizations, despite the fighting of companies as Bayer against that.

The same occurs with Native Americans, Amazons, Australians, or Eskimos. The traditional Chinese medicine is distinguished by the massage, acupuncture, diets and exercise, joined to a wide and extensive treatment of plants and other animal products, again by a big population whose needs are fulfilled by similar percentage of practitioners than other regions, and the five phases theory, the cosmological notion of ying-yang, the different conception of diseases (as disharmonies). It uses around 13,000 compounds to formulate up 100,000 recipes. All of them, mental practices apart, must use plants or its chemical basis, as Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, Novartis and others must do. The origin is the same. Other occidental compounds are not in their list of drugs... like many diseases.

What has been doing essentially every culture has been to use all those plants, minerals and animals that have had nearby, the cheapest way, accomplishing a social function, with the knowledge inherited from ancestors, charmed as everybody feels the traditions, and sometimes mistaking things, and ignoring the true like still we are doing despite we believe know a lot. Whilst, the plants continue growing around us, keeping its potential, waiting for some clever animal go to inspect them.

What can tell all this to you? This has various renditions, according with the facts of industry (pharmaceutical, alimentary, chemical and agronomic) of the 50 former years.

(1) First of all, you can understand now where come from all those compounds produced, the already known, initially discovered into plants and fungi, bacteria and animals, and all of them fulfilling a function on the Nature, at least until a few years ago. And you can understand where the chemists found the basis for their synthetic drugs, and where and how they look for applying all this (in animals and plants).

(2) Every time we modify, block, accelerate or stop a process, by introducing a compound, actually also there are already a troop of compounds, systems, processes, all around this modification; and communication continues but with a new component between less of the former ones.

(3) The success or failure of any trial or experiment, which looks for an intervention on Nature (into the body, organs, crops, etc.) needs an important and truly scientific method, statistically proved, which follows being a strong way to learn and decide. But still, none of these trials could from far take into account all the possibilities that actually occur in nature, and this failure is clear and evident, can be demonstrated statistically (the environmental history speaks enough of it), and has not been taken into account rather than an obligation to repair, but not for future research. When more severely the experiments are required, is when they must demonstrate the harmful effects, when we as customers are claiming.

(4) As history shows with so many samples, the science, industry, research, are not bad boys, but are valuable tools and friends. However, the true enemies that we have include the uncontrolled use of knowledge, the uncontrolled use of science, the uncontrolled use of techniques, and the comfortable ignorance with which we accept all this. All this sounds to ethics, liability, when is the major leak in our world.

(5) Today, you are not eating that you think is; barely you will see a true forest in your life; and almost you will not have the chance to see for longer a great bunch of very important species related to it, about 600 species of all kind. You can only see it if you go to the museum one day, where is currently the only and bigger log of biodiversity that we have, in shelves, still and quiet. It is shocking that we are keeping wildlife in closets, prepared under the ice, or in sealed buildings, and accepting this as normal, prudently.

But there are other issues more to talk about, animals; and is not a simple matter. They are suffering many years ago the same threat that plant will suffer exponentially in the future. Follow me, please.

##

3. Animals: so diverse, again simplified.

### Always beginning from the bottom.

The beetle above, clever worker, is only one among million of species -only the beetles are estimated to be roughly 400,000 specie-, but are not the beetles the most threatened, at least until the current time.

We do not see this but is there: upon a clearly visible beetle of 13 cm which "wanders" over the stem bark of a plant -like the beetle above-, perhaps with the aim of eating somebody, or perhaps taste the leaves, go more passengers without ticket on his back and belly: it could be a mite, another parasite beetle, from 2 mm long until 0.2 mm or less, and also the thousands of thousands of fungi and bacteria, whose sizes range from millionths of a meter to the ten millionths of a meter. These are hundreds of thousands and millions. Then, it is not only "a beetle," a "simple beetle," it is more: there is going a complex machinery of beings, each one with its biological formulas. It is clear that nobody cares, but it is necessary, essential and even beneficial. This entire kind of tiny people that you do not see, although being invisible are working for all of us, from the tiny till the bigger.

The bugs around us are normal, are not a disaster: the opposite would be a worry case. However it seems to be. People hate a strange thing called insects, they do not know what it is for, and what are doing, and why are there. For most of people, insects are only annoying and unpleasant things. Also all little arthropods, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals are normal. Not only are there, but are essential, are accomplishing a role in a chain, unaware of its role.

Our attitude towards the beings "that move," the animals, does not strays too far from the one we have with those who "do not move" or "are not seen". Simultaneously to our ravages, we are charmed to read the fabulous news about new species discovered, the extremely rare spiders in Borneo, the amazing monkey in Central Africa, the impressive giant squids, and so, all kind of "cute, cool things, colorful beings, riches that we have, strange animals which do strange and amazing things and sounds, the record taller, the record smaller, and so": but in other words, all this news pushed over you are toys; are toys with which you are gambling, the toys with which you are happy.

All that are illusions, strings of pearls from the treasure, but not the reality: in fact, despite your illusion, despite the amazing films, all that is disappearing steadily, is a nuisance and a hindrance for business. The enterprises support also charmed the organizations that offer and show some kind of beautiful world and hope. Meanwhile, the last natural places and species of the Earth disappear, slowly every day. Many directors of conservative projects, parks, programs for biodiversity, know it in a sheer way. They know clearly that this is a numbers game: they ask "can you awake millions of people who do not know you anyway, about issues they do not see, while they are solving their own problems?" Naturally, you cannot. If you let me it, let's go take a fast look upon these animals. Later, we will talk about whose of them have the possibilities to continue the trip of life with us, and why. We are only interested in something more than cattle.

When biologists or geneticists, or biogeographers started to build the enormous tree of life (of course incomplete), they gathered species very different between them, with some features not exclusive, but generalized: these features are for example, the mobility, the consumption of oxygen (aerobic organisms), the sexual reproduction, the embryonic development (pass through a blastula stage, an exclusive characteristic), the radiated and bilateral symmetry, all sort of features that draw how each one adapts and develops. Some of them are fabulous, amazing and lovely, cool, but common sense can says you that are only news of colors. Many of these features are interesting by other reasons: for example, understand the evolution.

One interesting feature for the common people between those features is heterotrophy. Asking and looking to the why of some features, we can understand how, where, and the when of other facts. The way an animal has to feed is not only a word that defines a function, is an inherited large ensemble of features that difference him from others: and one widely expression of the way for eating that plants and animals show, is the infection, parasitism, symbiosis... relationships where at least one is eating something from other, or may be breeding. As we approach the upper and more complex species, rises sharply the number of possible relations with the living environment. These features are not fixed, are variable in some groups or taxa. Ii is completely impossible say the basic about this realm, the animal, in few lines, but some key spots may be summarized here in order to focus facts that explain what can we hope about our biological nature. It so because, I guess you do not believe possible to be alien to these biological laws, do you? You may be sure, even when an exception occurs, we can find a biological law that explains it.

### Eaters.

Heterotrophy means that us, the animals, live thanks to obtain nutrients from other producers, and even from other heterotrophic animals. When we eat, all that is going with the meal ends inside: minerals, proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, water, bacteria and virus, and other microorganisms also; and it occurs naturally, and then meets with more inhabitants of our gut caverns: and everything tastes good.

There in the inside, an organized chain of events allows the good use of something just arrived, and the blocking of others: sometimes it is not possible; some foreigner being that has arrived cannot be stopped or destroyed. But this cycle that implies mutualism, predation, attack, growth, having problems, fend, and occasionally that someone changes and evolves, this will never disappear: that is the essence of the contact, relationship and the rubbing between beings, what is more complex for complex beings as us, heterotrophic eaters.

A story in parallel that occurs with us is the story with arthropods, which are breeding from other animals and plants, and also suffer the pollution in the food (all photographs by the author).

The higher is located a creature in the consumption chain, the greater is its dependence on others, the wider is the exposing to others, and more important the control that exercises over the lower ones. A mammal has a lot to defend, many systems, many routes of entry, many organs, many different kind of tissues, many processes, many specialized functions, many possibilities of being an object of desire for others, or an easy target.

Every change introduced in this chain, as can be a molecule like a steroid, for sure could have effect not only over one target, but over many more; and the words "dose" and inherent toxicity do not need reflecting an immediate action, spectacular, as a snake poison, rather acts slowly, diffusely and secretly. The transmission or transfer routes for beings, or parts of them like may be the information that contains a chemical molecule or a virus, are a lot, and specialized. The more complex and intrincated is an animal, the more number of routes, ways, mechanisms, relations, specific mates, links and bounds will be found in this animal. And we cannot despise this ability and adaptation that could show this animal of be embedded with his environ, and be capable of response to opportunities and threats. But in Nature, nobody is essential, nobody is here forever, and every living in the Earth has limits in his adaptability, as we humans also have it limited.

Surviving to some flu is a great success, and not surviving to other flus is expected to occur also. Well, mankind is heterotrophic specie, the clever specie, and over all this is the "mega" and "super" omnivorous specie when eats more than exists in Nature, because creates their own food composed. Thus, increases enormously the ways to incorporate every substance that flows on the chain, despite eliminate many known threats, those natural: for example, its own compounds, the xenobiotics. Currently on speak of roughly 100,000 industrial compounds, widely used 7,500 of them. In foods, the more likely average figure is not even tested.

### The good state of health.

A giraffe or a rabbit they get all their dietary needs by eating only plants, and... the same occurs with the rest of animals, barring the few carnivore predators. How is it possible? Will be the giraffes or rabbits weak or ill? Do they need some vitamins, perhaps? We should improve their food, all the wildlife? Laugh, yes laugh, which is what I do.

Not, they do not need any improvement, they are perfectly, it is not essential meat, but we are used to believe it, as many more things as this one, rather stupid. As we eat from all kind of sources of food - I am sorry, but I should say clearly it is in Occident only-, we are also exposed to all kind or sources of poisons that really us and no one else have put there. Do you know how animals know what to eat? They use the tasting, the smelling, and decide unaware, because its brain and genes tell they what they must choice.

In our case, humans, we are used to eat what we see in front of us, today in the shelves of malls. Do you know how it smells and tastes? Almost all you taste and smelling there is a design, it is not real, there are no one tomatoes nor potatoes that can taste naturally, all has been designed and modified to lead your habits. And finally, you end losing the ability to discern what you have in front: you have been trained to want what you buy. The rest is forgotten, is gone. I am sorry, ask it around, some mate of yours from an alimentary industry, you will see what is done.

For the producer, the story has another reading: "as I am a big producer, if you have many more food available than that you never has needed, the only way to force you to buy my product, will be that my product can talk you as you like hearing it". Now, you can go and find a library, asks the bookseller for something that is titled "The Great Book of Advertising", read it (or rather see designs), come back, and you will realize that there is not need to explain more. Even when you want your pet eat, you do not need change the food, you only need change its taste: the same way we are taught to eat. So let's move on.

### On the food.

I am not a radical in any sense; nonetheless what concerns me is the acceptance we make of things as supposedly normal. We hear that the maximum allowable concentration of a compound in the water, on the ground, at sea, in the air or in food, are safe and are allowed: clear, already cannot be removed, it would be incredibly expensive! And we accept it as if Life were really like.

Why could you be concerned about the tuna? Because the same way the tuna absorbed the mercury that was diffused on the seas, in its muscles and fat, also will be incorporated into our muscles and our fat.

Why can you be concerned about the hamburger? Because the cow ate you do not know really what, a sort of "improved" forage, a mix of minerals, plants, drugs, hormones, and was treated as residue of meat (please, do not think this stuff could be the best part of beef), with a lot of nitrates into, was frozen, was thawed, and finally you go and cook it by roasting and almost burning: it means to have at once all tickets for cancer, the diabetes or the heart disease. It is your lottery, really, an issue of statistics.

Why can you be concerned about cyclamate, talin or aspartame (note 2)? Because not being a poison, this sugars change your inner balance, above all makes the food palatable, crazily desirable, with quite less fiber, is in excess in all foods, acts slowly but along years unbalancing your inner energy storage, increases the cholesterol and triglycerides, and harms you especially if you are a young, because you will inherit this dangerous habit.

Why can you be concerned about your habits? Because you are doing many strange things at once, everyday, like do not moving, drink not water but beer or sugary drinks, smoking, breathe hot gasses cooled, suck dust, and fill the body with fats really unnecessary.

(2) A good review of the sugar substitutes production and use comes from the honest book "Pure, White and Deadly", by John Yudkin (Penguin Books, 1972, 1986)

If today we take for granted the existence of many compounds in such concentrations inside all natural compartments, what really do you expect in the future? Really think that international organizations are determined to stop it?

Instead, the company message, when it is accused of producing or distributing a product harmful is always the same. You distrust of my wonderful product? Prove you are right, do an experiment with 1,000 or 2,000 human (you know that with rats will reject your claims, it is not enough in your case, but enough for me), for at least ten years, pay the costs of the research, and shows that a sufficient proportion either has died or gotten sick, or has had a serious trouble for it. Maybe you go to jail for it, by trying to prove.

Moreover, at that time we will change the product, we will have a new patent, and you will have start over. But try, if you can.

Now we go see the world of "our animals" since other point of view: the natural diseases in animals, as expected, have been transmitted to the mankind; where they have been reduced, have been replaced by others, and where they have not been reduced, are causing misery for those who need them to live. It seems that neither well developed nor be very fair, however it is the real plight. Anyway, there are other real point of view, like job and source of food that needs many people.

### The natural way for diseases.

The coexistence with livestock and poultry has had its place where other options have been lesser, where conditions have allowed the herding or the human habits accompanied this practice. The extensive herding and the crops aimed to the intensive livestock have made an overuse of lands, resulting in a decrease of predators of many kinds: reptilians, arthropods, amphibian, mammals and birds. This can ease the introduction of colonizer and invasive species, and the simplifying of biodiversity in the areas where it has been conducted. Every invasive episode is related mainly to human induced changes, as have indicated many former studies (Lodge, 1993; Elton, 1958; Hobbs, 1989; Lozon & McIsaac, 1997).

But the coexistence is extended to more beings: the zoonoses have an important role in health and economy; all are diseases that can be transmitted among animals and humans. That is why we need control these diseases at least to levels that permit manage the livestock as support for household, and avoid the high mortality or disabilities that produce as the history has shown us. This is a real task in which work as none other, or at least should be done everywhere. Between diseases, the percentage of those with zoonotic origin that are already humans diseases and emerging diseases is in the range of 55-60% and 70-75% respectively. The groups of zoonoses include prions (it will be seen below), viral, bacterial, fungal, and parasitic diseases.

This job of control has been done, but in the "North" only. The results of development in treatments and programs on the field, have been different according to the world zones: the developed countries are affected by emerging and newborn diseases; on the contrary, in poorest countries or even developing ones, the natural route for zoonoses diseases continues being strongly related with conditions of poverty and hunger in areas and communities that keep the livestock. Sometimes, I realize how difficult it is for Western people realizing this: each time is removed the cattle or a small orchard from the hands of the people in these countries, this means they left with nothing absolutely, absolutely everything is taken away.

The areas of livestock as way of survival cross the zones among the Tropic of Cancer and Ecuador (Africa) and the Hindustan, remaining in the area of India (India, Pakistan and Bangladesh), the highly populated and conflicting areas of Nigeria, Ethiopia, Congo DR, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and the area of China and Indonesia (including Myanmar and Vietnam).

Naturally, and according to the scientific and technological level and means allowable for the control, when we talk about emerging diseases, are the US, UK, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Japan, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland or China, the first countries detecting new outbreaks. When we talk of natural zoonoses, it affects to roughly 2,200 millions inhabitants, 1,000 millions of them in extreme poverty, which obtain its intakes of proteins (a third) and incomes (from 25% to 55% of earnings) from the livestock. Furthermore, an important percentage of livestock in these places suffer diseases which decrease the production roughly a 7−11% (trypanosomiasis, brucellosis, bacterial food-borne, Q-fever or leptospirosis) and some of them concerning also humans (as tuberculosis or cysticercosis).

(The main groups of livestock worldwide. All photographs by the author)

A feature of zoonoses is the intermittent occurrence of outbreaks, as it seems to be by following climate changes, droughts, floods, but other feature is the increasing of areas along the last 30 years, in parallel to change of average temperatures and the increased livestock density. Also the jumping to new species breaks the link with the original focus or specie: thus, some diseases today are "considered" only human diseases (influenza, malaria, HIV, dengue, measles). As a side note and topical issue, recently a study leaded by scientists from Illinois through a little community of Biaka tribe in Africa, seems to showing that this tribe living in forests near the apes has genes with resistance to infection and development of VIH -the Rhesus macaques were supposed to be the first source of infection, SADS, what provoked the VIH/AIDS-, probably inherited and carried into genes and likely acquired hundred of decades ago. The populations, before the appearing of other vaccines and the change in lifespan, may have died naturally.

Why is it staying in these wide areas? Because currently, the most important areas and populations affected, where are being affected, where this is a deep daily trouble, have not the support or help from very strong programs, donors or international policies, despite that could appear to be taking place. The pharmaceutical companies support publicly these diseases with barely an 8% of its budgets, in only the 15% of the implied areas. The public image instead shows a big effort that does not match the measurable reality on the ground.

As ever, the measure of things shows us the reality above the official reports. I must remember very clearly a study conducted by a team of the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya, published by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) in 2012. The comparing among the official data noted and the real cases has a very important and transcendent meaning, and with bigger scope: the fact of the difference between the real cases and the cases statistically noted, in some diseases show disparate figures in more than a million cases (as says the study and demonstrates), clearly saying that in areas where these diseases occur there is no actually surveillance. This is not new; a walk through these fields can be very instructive.

I must say now, against my desire, but following the common sense and the real need that the human chain of programs, efforts, staff and disbursements, allegedly applied and implemented in all these countries, actually is lost every day by the way, both financially and in time, in different places, always ending up where it should never go. Yes, the reports and image of the chain are showing year after year the same vision: things are getting best. Is this take the time, effort, knowledge and means?

If you, reader, you have had known of these programs, you do not need even a single explanation. You can get a rough idea about the world census by looking through the reports of FAO, here in the World Program for the Census of Agriculture. This is not an impediment for some of the countries involved have military budgets above $20,000 million. Actually, the real interest is beyond people's cattle, but in the land and mineral resources.

I say all this because, is not important but essential to understand the real road that those diseases develop. It is a matter of common health, for the animals and for us, the human. Only reckoning human deaths, we have 2,7-2,9 millions people which die yearly, as result of the 2,5 billion yearly cases of illness globally. Thus, the gastrointestinal diseases produce the main number (2,3 billion) worldwide, but a selected "team" catches to 120 million people (the dengue fever, cysticercosis, hepatitis E and Chagas) among 25 main zoonoses.

You can ask now: why his man does not write about wild animals? I will explain you now my way to talk and tell you all this: that is my way to say what is the true interest and goal of some humans: in front of just 5,000 last wild elephants here, 3,500 there, 8,000 bonobos there, 2,500 here, and so in all the cases, the real interest stays in the value of livestock in the market only where it has interest, of roughly $1,4-1,5 trillion, directly supporting 600 million people, but globally working 1,400 billion people. The meat (apart the dairy and other products) is the bigger line of business that uses extended resources as forages, water and space, and the carbon emissions are not the main worry that we should watch: being this last always a worry, it is bigger the pressure over crops and lands, and the detrimental effect of price's control in the market (and then over people). How can we say that there is some interest even for elephants and bonobos? There are none.

It is sure that, if you are living in the "north" sure you have on your table three meat dishes a week at least, ad your intake of proteins and other nutrients as sugars and fat, by this way is not only sure but completely excessive. The 600 millions that depend on livestock barely complete its needs, coming from livestock at 30-50%, not ever, sometimes losing its animals by some disease (20%), and never covering their minimum nutritional requirements. But we still think we have advanced, as never.

As you can see, we are talking again of invisible things, at least for common people. What is really sad to me is that in nine out of ten analyzes, we always ends up finding a kind of problems very evident (we will see it below), either in soil, food, air, water or any tissue: the residues of compounds that are the harmful footprint of treatments in animals to produce more with lesser costs. Anything that you cannot see, you think that does not exist, or it is inoffensive, or has not any effect. The worst circumstance I have seen is this one: the alimentary companies have managed to convince people that promote large production and distribution chains is equal to live better, when the reality is the contrary: it has turned out in less jobs, less small business, higher prices for less actual amount of product, less nutritive value, and bigger dependence in the more wide expression. And the recent 153 million tons of meat, worldwide produced in the later years, that means more than 50% of agricultural GDP. How many people could have been producing and living out of dependence from the restricted industrialized way?

And the former conditions that could have led us to become firstly farmers and later carnivorous, or perhaps upside down (we cannot be completely sure about), leaving the diet of fruits and herbs (droughts or extreme cold), somehow indicates us we are following a wrong direction in spite our ancient history that gave us a gold's opportunity: a history which gave us to be more adaptable, evolve, to eat not only fruits but also meat, and the most important, the ability to adapt to more different conditions. And the conditions now are turning on, the numbers can say us that we should eat less meat and more vegetables, a clever decision as never before could have been, a balanced solution for a world that have... 7,000 today, but 9,000 millions inhabitants barely in 30-40 years (and this is like saying tomorrow).

And all this occurs because we already have the knowledge, and unfortunately also the business lobby that has never cared about this, or never will care in the slightest. I will do it, again, repeat the point: the question is the use, never the knowledge or the tool. Maybe you would like reading an interesting story about the animals, meat and food. I hope you can do a rough idea of how many things are not seen, but we would need to take into account.

### An unseen story within men and cattle: the prions.

That means talking of upper animals, and human induced changes produced in the "biological chain," and afterward talk back about the bad called lower beings and other human induced changes, those than the next decades will become unthinkable challenges. What did happened with the called prions? What were they? Where they came from? And, the question lost in oblivion, how did they operated? I only hope this story could be enjoyable, refreshing and revealing for you.

As I have writing about zoonoses, I will start from upper animals, we selves, mentioning a zoonotic disease. The kuru disease was reported the first time on the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, developed via cannibalism as it was checked later. It is a degenerative neurological disorder that provokes tremors and pathologic bursts of laughter like very clear symptoms. A scientist Hungarian-American called Daniel Carleton Gajdusek joined the hospital where the patients were attended. He injected tissues from one youth man dead there into chimps: well, two years later one of them developed the disease! At this moment, the scientist called this as slow virus, and it showed him the transmission between species trough biologic material, therefore crossing barriers. Well, again it is a natural event, as it will be forever. In any case, he knew it was not a viral infection. Later, Igor Klatzo pointed the similarity of symptoms with the disease of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, formerly described by Hans-Gerhard Creutzfeldt and Alfons Maria Jakob in 1920.

Afterwards, an American veterinarian called William Hadlow knew in London an exposure of tissues coming from the kuru disease, and noticed the strong resemblance with the scrapie, that disease of sheep and goats, which provokes collapse, lip smacking, and compulsive scraping of the fleece against trees or fences. In this case, he already knew the disease was able to be transmitted as infection, but never thought it would not be possible it was a virus. Was Stanley Prusiner, American neurologist and biochemist who discovered later the prions, described as a kind of infectious self-reproducing pathogens, which could primarily or solely be composed of protein. Only a protein, is it true, and infectious? Yes, with nuances.

He was sure the called "prions" were lighter than virus, because these prions showed to be resistant to ultraviolet radiation and nucleases, so there were not nucleic acids. Even it is very resistant to heat, ionizing radiation and disinfectants that usually inactivates viruses. This agent does not affect to immune system, or inflammation, and is detected by the state of tissues affected. However, it can be inherited, transmitted or being appearing and hide out.

All this, after the outbreak on one variant of this group of diseases (the mad cow disease), nowadays we know the prion is the non pathogenic state (the PrPc) of a protein which accomplishes some functions in our brain (despite that we do not know too well it): in other words the prions have a job inside, related with acetylcholine, neuron development, metals management and others. The PrPc has expression in the liver, brain, muscle, heart, and pancreas. The primary structure of the protein is shared in all species, but it changes later: once one PrPc is modified erroneously or naturally (we call it then pathogenic PrpSc), the modified PrpSc is more resistant to digestion and starts to be accumulated as aggregates of amyloid plaques, becoming very strong and resistant. One prion PrpSc produces the conversion of other PrPc to PrpSc, and it continues increasing the number of this bunch killing the nearby neurons while grow. Prions enter in the body by being absorbed in the gut and are carried to the spleen, lymph nodes and brain. The triggers of the modification might be three amino acids (methionine, cysteine, and valine), or perhaps the substitution of proline by leucine.

The story of prions, and the human and cattle diseases.

Also, all the kinds of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy are related, as the mad cows disease, or the phenotype of the beer yeast, or in deer or mink. About its normal activity, it appears that the prions could be involved in formation processes of long-term memory, genome evolution, and immune memory. Currently some studies are aimed to elucidate the growth of amyloid plaques in Alzheimer disease, and the suspected relationship with the aluminum absorbed from alimentary packages, for example: these diseases may be tightly linked with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's, and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

The disease may be transmitted through a blood transfer, but cannot be detected: then, with an incubation phase of 20 years, that takes up the attention about a possible epidemic and outbreak in a future. Thus, you can imagine how must be watched closely the alimentary chain, and its industry as only big source of troubles.

As conclusion, we can say that there are a gene PRNP (Prion-related Protein), which allows the production of a protein with a task in the body, and originated by a still unclear cause, it may be turned on in a modified form, which provokes the degeneration of some tissues. It may be transmitted hereditarily in some kinds, may be transmitted by ingestion of brain tissues or by contact, by transfusions or iatrogenic contact, and is capable of jump over species barriers in both directions. These proteins are shared with little differences by all species. In all the studies, has not been possible assert as sole and exclusive cause prions, leaving fully open the possibility of other agents that trigger the disorder, such as viruses or metals. In fact, nobody could figure out how a protein could replicate itself (at least that is what we believe to know currently). As in many other cases, it took many years the discovery of the proteinaceous origin for this disease, but still is unknown clearly the mechanism of activation. In this case, the disease affected also to cattle meat trade, what implied a serious investigation and research years ago. And all it may have some parallelisms and differences with other diseases, but always are the same basis there fully opened by definition to these kinds of events and phenomenon.

Now, it may be even more interesting to talk about the changes that we provoke into the animals.

### Meat that is effective and productive.

Some time have you wondered why we do not improve the wild beings, also? You will reply quickly this is a full nonsense; we must let animals to be as they are, nobody could controvert it, and it is fully pointless... unless it can provide some profit. Then, we are at the same point as ever: profits. This word that you can find in third position by average when you search keywords throughout the scientific papers of economy, biology, genetics, pharmacy and more. Try it.

The same that was done with soils, was done with plants, was done with insects, and was done with animals, and so with livestock. But there are differences among kinds of livestock and its way of breeding, and its health, and thereby our health, and the health of soils and streams where livestock lives: again we are seeing another sort of chain more.

As it was made with forests, the establishment of rules to extract, ordering, valuing, assessing, and controlling forests with the only profitable aim along 200 years (thus was as born the forestry in the Western Europe), the same way has been for the livestock: principles of feeding by mixes of different forages, addition of minerals, control of diseases, metabolic supplements, "support" with growth hormones, "selection" feed "enhanced", control of the digestion efficiency, and many more things, some of them stupid, and why not, some of them smart decisions. The essential control of diseases as those that we have seen formerly, is a very clever goal, but as we have seen, it is only applied actually where some companies have a big amount of customers with fresh money. Then, where is the sense? The rest of technical improvements have only an economical goal: more meat, less costs, whatever the way.

Let me stop for a moment to ask a question: is not really efficient cattle stomach? We do not trust the balance that has won over millions of years of evolution? With a little common sense, not much more is needed to answer this question.

All of these techniques in management of livestock were done with one goal: have the bigger rate of production, with the lesser costs, in the shortest span possible, strictly the same goal than the applied in every manufacturing industry you can see. This goal, applied over the various millions of livestock farms that are there, and the many million heads of cattle and poultry that yearly are passing by the slaughterhouse, does not fits really to what we would think and like is better for us. Things really develop as only can happen, and anyway it also has consequences.

Much wild specie could be treated as cattle in the future, increasing the current trend with cattle and poultry, and use of techniques related (all photographs by the author).

Numerous organizations have made numerous studies with numerous specialists, repeatedly focusing many issues, consuming numerous resources: and they all follow the same trend as always, the same rule, are provided by the scientific consensus (rather than discussed this among themselves), with the global information, with the dictates of the five main stakeholders in the world: chemical, medical, industrial, food and finance teams. But with such global information, the detail, the actual look, that which directly affects people, is really forgotten. We could ask this to most farmers medium-sized or small, they understand this very well and immediately.

If we go back and talk to old farmers in their eighties, which can recall their youth plowing the ground, and their barns and cattle fences, their replies will be the same always: they see many advances, many techniques, but only a few crops, many areas abandoned, and a complete dependence from suppliers which provide everything, from the wholesalers and a market that does not make sense. They cannot recognize any resemblance between their former products and what is being produced today: neither cattle, nor pigs, nor vegetables, nor fruits, nor crops, despite those greater productions that can be seen. This is logical.

It is not strange that the emerging diseases, or the unrecognized diseases, or the resistant-drugs infections can appear and be pointed in Europe and the United States mainly, where the meat trading, manufacturing, treatments, pollutants, the environmental conditions, the genetic selection, use of drugs, or prepared feed forages, are a mix of factors that have changed so strongly the biological dynamic of livestock so as it should be expected, in other words, at least a little percentage of theses diseases must appear forcefully.

### What more inside each day that dawns.

The cattle have had several changes in its management, with a marked industrial character: selection and isolation of races, focusing on the production of more milk and meat than naturally occurring; the disease control by modifying and mixing of feed and antibiotics; improved growth by natural or synthetic promoters. While the use of anti-parasitic compounds and, in some cases tranquilizers for the slaughtering, could be seen as a clever action, the use of anabolic steroids, sex hormones, casting agents, and antithyroid (banned en 1981 in the UE, but not in the US) may have been the cause of a risky change in the whole system of production: it has had as counterpart the existence of metal residues, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated biphenyls, pesticides that come from the forage and pastures, and also from other kind of industrial fodder with animal origin. For example, the successive generations of cephalosporins (penicillin-based) have shown the emergence of bacterial strains resistant to them (which is naturally occurring), banned in the UE; the benzimidazole is used against parasitic nematode worms Ascaris, and is known the teratogenic and mutagenic effects, during lactation and first years of life. After using anabolic steroids, the clenbuterol was used to reduce body fat by 18% (according to the new trend of consumption), increase the water content, muscle mass, and treatment of bronchopneumonia: however may involve alteration of the thyroid gland, metabolic and metabolic disorders. Furthermore, the final effect over humans can be a reaction to compounds introduced (the anaphylactic shock), allergies, loss or unbalancing of the bowel flora, developing of resistant bacterial strains (and its possible transfer of resistant genes). You may being noticing that I am not including any scientific references pointing to all this: there is a lot of, any agronomist, forester, biologist knows that is not new, I am not talking about nothing that could be strange or new. All this already is old and boring.

Something very astonishing is the ease with which a group of chemists, biologists and physicians perform studies with "revised" results, all of them accepted: and the same scientific community, within the same dynamic corrupted scientific review, issued immediately after allegations against these studies, stating that are not sufficiently proven. And this makes one wonder: what confidence can offer hundreds of compounds used, if barely cover the minimum needed to apply safely, even in the same animal, and experimental designs that have been made are ridiculous from the point of a scientific perspective? Since I trust the scientific method, I am surprised to see how easily they jump over it in white offices.

If you are in a doctoral degree, please examine only ten - no more are needed - of the most important compounds used, and experimental bases and defense as such in to animals, discusses the design of the experiment, and then think again: what you are getting used to doing and what is the scope of?

# The color of the human world or what we have done.

Now is not time to say all that already known. May be the time to reckon how much we have done badly, how much we have lost, and how much it will cost us. Then would be possible to know by the first time a very important, valuable, useful word: responsibility. And common sense would be a very great help to it.

A work that should not exist is this one, the repairing of the environment, the over watching: why worsen the already knotty circumstances that we must face?

Two aspects of results that come from human activities: the left image belongs corresponds to debris deposited in the marsh of a national park in southern Spain: the surface brightness is that of thousands of crystals; the satellite photo below right, corresponds to the NOAA service (US), showing the movement of debris on the sea. The detail corresponds to plastic balls currently usual on the sea.

## 4. About some blatant follies.

Any would want to know where come the main troubles we have, would not you? As usual, the simple explanations are not liked, because these force us to change immediately, and that is really what we do not want. Anyway, we have heard the last fifty years incessantly that there is in the world a huge amount of problems that threaten us around us, as if world could be a hell, and seeing the life as a strange phenomenon. And stability and safety are seek, as well these could be a gold goal, when life is a permanent evolving and change. In spite all this, earthquakes, droughts, tsunami, are a very little portion of dramatic events, while human-induced effects are the true pressure, especially over the areas where the population is crowd.

We are the real hell, and not the Nature. Nature is changing, but the changes we have made within it, those are really the true hell. For find solutions, first we should accept our wrongs: and clearly without doubt, and not making excuses. Our behavior, social and individual, is the reason of our problems, not the nature. Is not valid to say that some things are scarce or that they have disappeared. We are those who have done it, we have created the scarcity, the "losses, holes and leaks". Yes, we have blame, but the essential is to know why and what we need to do, if we want to live acceptably: applying it to everybody, of course, because obtaining it for a few ones never was a mystery.

### Borders, but only for what we want.

We were divided in two worlds, and now in three, four or five stepped worlds, as pieces that perhaps we do not know exactly, those parts to which we belong. Those who belong to one side, the terribly informed world, and by other sides, those worlds that the first world thinks are misinformed. The world neatly ordered, and the worlds exhausted and wounded. One side of the ball is touching the mud, and the other side taking the sun. The world well nourished, and the world undernourished. This can be seen in the same country, within no many square miles, sometimes you climb a hill and in the ridge, you may take two different pictures from two worlds: one hillside shows you the shantytown, the other side hill shows you the skyscrapers. Do you know this? It is a shot picture for all the towns in the world with more than 800,000 dwellers.

Not far, not in other planet, really, there are worlds also in the other side of the reality: the world used to lie comfortably and easily in agreement, and the world used to remain hidden and silent with all this in its memory and backside, and lying for remain and stay united, if possible. We may continue with all those dichotomies, thorough lines and paragraphs and pages, but it is the way that I would not want.

Underneath, there are a real world, the only world that exists physically: has no more borders or divisions than the shores, or the moveable frontier between night and day, than this one which creates the ice, making frontiers and places where you could live or not, simply. This one is the only I recognize. The real world with real limits, the only that I can talk about. There are persons, the sunshine line pass over it as much as 24 hours every days and it never stops. It crosses the world without despising to anyone, offering almost the same light everywhere. We are living within the same world, but so differently along the latitude and longitude!

The following is not a mystery, is our social picture that we do not like to look, our own image, our accurate reflection. The permanent struggle of some millions towards a well-being state is made at the expense of the others who remain and continue into the poverty and misery. At this point, the word ecology loses its most attractive meaning, when points directly our responsibility. We continue doing basically the same that the young Egyptian Akhenaton did: who has the lances makes the war (the barbarian) with those who do not have it. What hurts me more, is the hope that has the common people, waiting and believing their god (whatever the god) will come one day to solve these problems we have: however, these problems are not divine problems, are exclusively human problems, and nobody will resolve this troubles except humans. Better believing in the real work, the only way to put one stone on another.

It results obvious, evident and shining that each practice or trend in an economical field of action, in each field of work, either could be advertising, infrastructures, finances, health, not matter what, if you go from one developed country with an ancient culture (one of those old wolves in politics and economy) towards those countries less developed with a social and political tenderness younger than the first, you will see that all the old wrongs and mistakes formerly committed at least 30 years ago today have been sold there as a sort of "new coming development and thriving", and are assumed happily: those countries start to run this road of wrongs step by step, one by one, no losing no one of them, like as advanced students. By this way, have been sold all the abandoned materials, techniques, ways of market, products, and I would say the ideologies.

You cannot find one solely country which do not has a blemish in its society: an example are the cocaine or the hashish: the Peru, Colombia, Mexico, the US, Afghanistan, Angola, Morocco, Spain, Netherlands, UK, Belgium... and many more, all are crossed by this market, with huge amounts, and one by one all the places, persons, companies, offices, public services, officers... everybody is clean! All of them will keep being clean, and nowhere is the money. A magic world is ours.

The most shameless of the recent political and economic, is the glaring contradiction between what is advocated and what is done: the only frontier, the only barrier, the only one that has not been difficult to break down, which has been easier to remove, has been the global trade, the extent of influence of each large company market directly to each of our distant neighbors. The remaining barriers "coincidentally" cannot be eliminated. Institutionalized crime turned politician and law, dressed in flattering agreements, is the last of the atrocities they have not only been created, but we have tacitly accepted one by one, remaining willfully ignorant. This is one of our shameless.

### Business schools, management, financing ... negotiating what exactly?

Another stupidity that we accept as a mark of our time, as a medal on the flap, is the status and title, the power and ability, that provides from High Management Schools. They know do things well, they are clever, and they are experts, and many more so. I am sorry by telling you this words, but those men are actually great managers, modern managers, I would say even they are "modern herders of sheep and goat with two legs, which today are million heads of human herds".

Really, they are experts, perhaps wizards, but again the use of knowledge is the question. As he said me once, after a conference of development, an executive from an Italian company who came to take a brief talk with only one person: "World is that, you find the right people, properly hungry of prosperity, and you will make a big business, you will get a big deal, you do not need work longer this year".

Despite the current crisis, the eye cannot see beyond that expectation, you cannot see the reality of the figures: a minority of people completely related, absorbs money that stupidly gives a majority willing to live without effort, seeing it away, from outside, the wonderful world of high-level life. This is just as you see the sharks at the Aquarium. The expectation of big deals, big chances of life, have big accounts on the bank, is the candy that attracts to everybody, as does the lottery. And as people usually bow to believe things are looking good, in the same way they believe some aspects and decisions can be the signal to reach the prize: "maybe the 22312 is my fate, maybe to be an engineer, and maybe I will reach," and thus they reach a year when they see that have been all their life paying lottery. The much lottery you buy, the bigger possibilities you have. After all this, you have lost your life pursuing your chance, losing your own life, not knowing what is around you.

But once we look the percentage of effort and risks, and the earnings obtained, in four economic levels in our society (worker, entrepreneur, great businessman and banker), then the result mutes your mouth: a huge population is actually working, and even earning but paying big amounts also, and globally are the 4% of money flowing, and a 18% percent is already going to upper hands; the 78% that left is perpetually in the hands of just 570,000 people, with a strong linkage between all of them, and no one link with you barring this one, you are working for them.

Imagine (perhaps you already have a sort of factory) for a while that you have an industry, with many sections working linked along a chain, where machines, inputs, outputs, workers, timeline, goods, are very well geared, so you was awarded by a business association. Your ensemble works well, very greatly well, and profits goes well also. One day you find a new partner, a new executive, who looks come with brilliant insights, very great insights. The new manager decides get rid of some machines, and some workers and inefficient processes that he considers useless. In the extent backyard, the pile of machines, boxes, cans, vehicles, pipes and other things, is watched from far by workers fired. In the inside, only a few machines remain running, to full time and speedily, but now the factory is only producing two things, and depends from other factories still more.

The next week, you sit down in a work meeting of the Board, and discover you are now as another worker more, you are not able to decide for more time, as many other more: today, your manager has taken control over supplies, he has changed the market so much so you cannot produce for longer the former goods, and now you must wait to her decisions. He has introduced your company in the future. You are his slave for life. And all hangs of some factories, which are providing you the raw material. He is their adviser, a specialist; he has enough shares to be more interested in the bigger industries, where he has a piece of cake. Do you remember the day you hired him? You thought that: "he is a specialist, a great administrator, a financial experienced," a good partner. And it was true, he is now who decides, but not liable. And you are forever slave for his decisions, whatever it is you want to do. That is what has gone on with everything in the world. It has gone on with business, and also with the resources of every kind. Today, you run the risks, and this perfect manager is handling it. Of course things and world are changing quickly, and also are going faring from you, each day the control remains in less hands.

The huge complexity that offered opportunities to take advantage of enormous different resources has been razed. The possibilities to live basing on manifold ways of crop, production, extraction and building, were deleted, although apparently have been increased: actually, are only expensive ways of buy always to same big companies, by some selected millions of inhabitants who have the enough economic level to make this. Take a look around you, watch for all, even you great industrialist, you are a slave, and you already know it. Today the opportunities are actually a way to run up safe: you let the people try business, take the risks, and if have success you will eat them.

Whatever the region that you can try to find in the world, you will see the same situation: is lost one's independence in return for being one more part of a greater greed. Well, perhaps this will not be a concern, perhaps will be. The exact road that events are taking up is a sort of world where even those who believe to be in a strong economic position will depend forever from only a bunch of world companies. Medium industries, as the customers, fell in the same blunder years ago, to become part of another bigger system and losing their own richness. Still even many industrialists are unconscious about it. Once you talk on to they about their maneuverability, then they acknowledge their slavery. Every day, falls an entrepreneur, and another comes to trying the same: thus is taken advantage every try undertaken, whose costs pays always the little business.

From different points have been explored the perception and response that has people in the world in front of some issues. And the answers were predictable: even the most experienced and capable people lose confidence in itself. A review of responses from people into the developed countries shows something that no one could believe: the resigning that shows the people in the developing countries, assuming the water, air and soils will never be clean again; and business are not possible without be part of the broken system, the control is a kind of frontier and agreed barrier, and all this is also present in the developing ones, and is a sort of law of the life in the developing and undeveloped countries. This is a universal referent: I am a puppet.

People are not so angry as might seem. People have accepted everything is coming, as a kind of chance or sort of destiny which they cannot decide, and is only learning and waiting the while and opportunity to bring the train of well being, discretely, accomplishing the gambling rules. So is managed the slavery. This feeling was the insight by blacks in XIX: do you want to live? Then come and follow my instructions. This rule to thriving is now a property for almost every culture.

A common idea is that with so many millions on the Earth, sure "I can be one of this who are on the ridge," but the numbers are stubborn and do not forgive, and tell you that your possibilities are only a 0,008%.

### Earth cannot support... so many people?

The earth cannot support so many people ... has not enough resources to grow the needed crops ... has not the water for all ... and more statements like these, are dime of dozen. Have been included all the factors? No, absolutely has not been done.

Perhaps, it is no true that we are wasting the potential of grounds and water in 60% of the cultivated land? It is not true that we are multiplying the price of meat and food by controlling the market, and selling a 40% of processed foods with a mix where meat is under a 20% in total? It is not true we have a 30-35% of lands degraded, which will increase until 40-45%, which could be cultivated? It is not true that we are wasting the waters, either on irrigation, in towns within our homes, or depleting natural sources? It is not true that the total of resources extracted, overcomes many times the needs of the only 1,500 millions inhabitants for whom are affordable, whom can consume it paying a price senseless? Can make it sense, of the 75% of funds aimed to cooperation worldwide, an average 60% keeps in occidental jobs, a 30% keeps in the target administrations, and rarely a 10% arrives the end? Of course, it is sure that the earth has a limit to support a measurable mass of living beings, but it depends of one concept already old, the balance, and it implies measure the flow of resources that are going in and out from every system: and this has a translation like consumption and use of resources. The rest is a big derision.

All companies and governments need to have a margin of maneuver, and for each resource some essential and strategic reserves. It is necessary to ensure continuity of the activities we paid and enjoy, and this have uses that we have never imagined. The use and the blocking of resources include manipulate the market, fix prices, lead the new trends of consumption, create new "repairing and fixing" industries, sell new opportunities of market where did not exist before, force agreements, as we can see when we read back again the last 20 years of politics and trade in the world, following closely the written in its footprints, the institutions that have been the tool for all this: the OECD, the WB, the IMF, the WTO, the trail of the GATT, the UNCTAD, the IFC, the AsDB, the AfDB, the IDB, and the IFC.

We can ask us, today, almost 70 years after the WWII, where are the intellectual property rights removed to Germans (it remains today the past (payment for crimes), used, and where continue being used, as true business tool? It is a good question. Please, are you lawyer? Are you economist? Be awake once, you do not know really what are you doing, despite the impression you have of freedom and power: you are a small bearing that allows direct resources "up" and no more, my friend. It takes cold blood to understand that businesses are addressed doing that the people who works for you, always will need you, they be thirsty. And is not required to guide the business, the economy you know. The world will never be fixed reading or spoken, but maybe you could fix yourself, and the world is composed of people like you.

### We are improving your living condition.

Is it understandable this, we repair some health conditions with expensive and inefficient drugs, whilst these diseases already have a cheap repairing, easy, rational, stop making mistakes like accumulate fats and sugars into the body, ingesting endocrine disruptors, chemical waste, stop fouling the air and water?

A fact accepted as something natural, feasible, reasonable, is that the water is a good plenty, and can be used as much as we like, and is not a trouble that some of it can be polluted, and all this can be solved applying clever techniques which improve it, being all paid, and it is not a concern. Truly, the water is a complex chain of things: rainfall average, available water storage, water quality, distribution network, sewage treatments, and the cleaning polluted waters: altogether has a price that increases yearly. It is pointless that you must accept the need of any appliance to improve your home water: why let pay more and more, when there are not reason to the water be dirty? On the onset of this problem you are like consumer, farmer, industrialist, who wastes the good and increases the price that you will pay anyway. I do not want you to be a green; just do not be a fool.

Have you ever thought why it is necessary to build parks into the cities, those "green lungs"? Is that to enhance the quality of life? It would not really stop destroying what existed? That would pay you, always.

Have you ever wondered why you have children who rarely you see, who actually are being educated by others, completely, with whom each passing year it makes you harder to understand and speak? Is that really quality of life, for you? Do you know your children, really? A bit? Think about, two or three weeks: a lot of teachers have a very different, sad idea on this.

Have you ever stopped to make the calculation of all the costs entailed all vehicles you have had? Did you do all the sums? The purchase price, gasoline, insurance, improvements, loans, parts, tolls, garage, final removal, repairs, accessories useful and useless taxes? I am very sure that you have never done, because when you know only half of these costs is secured a heart attack, and you will have another trouble more banned in your life: do calculations. But you like, you need, you will buy one more. That you do not know are the hidden costs of cars: the most of them have nothing to do with the petrol, the iron: you are paying also for roads, highways, patrols, control, high transports, delivery insurances, improvements, research, changes of technologies... every cost possible will be paid, you already are paying it. Even if it eventually breaks you will pay. You are supporting many companies...

Ever examined the drugs sleeping in your house? Did you test them all? You know how many servings, dose amounts of shock, different defenses impossible save at home? Such are you terrified? So did you really need to buy so many things, as has happened to you -except for 2.5% of the population if required, according to the company's own figures?

Unless you live above a parallel that really makes it difficult living away from home, have you noticed that, willy-nilly most of the time of your life should be included in a home running, and thus do something like watching TV around four hours per day? That is life? That is quality of life? That is not living life locked by system, between a job and a concrete box -at least for the 70-80% who have gone to live in "the city"?

What about your make-believe? Can you tell me (a manner of speaking, of course) how many things, foods, clothes, activities, places, you have not seen if it is not necessarily on the TV, or today into the network, the net? You do not know what offer your neighbors, of course, neither what is there near you, in less than five miles: you do not remember what mean joint tasks. Do you remember some? Do you sound this? Of course the most of times not, it only remains in traditional cultures, and it is actually tradition, contact, the contact with nearby people, whatever be the reason. That is what? Where is this?

What means actually the expressions "quality of life" or "living conditions"? Here I stop, that is enough, although the trunk is full of similar things.

### Inside the minds of leaders.

A situation repeated in every field of work in the life is the specialization that achieves each professional. It would seem a perfect goal, an attempt that everybody should struggle. However, this mental isolation has consequences: everyone that eventually knows and ends mastering only one field of life, does not know nothing about his surrounding, the connections with other fields, the underlying links, and thus acts in his own field without considering the reality (not theory, not), the rest of the world. This applies to many professions, and specially to any technician or recent graduate specialist who has never seen any connection to other areas of life, except for a possible economic and salary. Everyone assumes that somebody somewhere or at some position establishes the right connections, but the only established connections are the commercial and at the best price, discounting some costs that are never included, as we are seeing at this point. This way, a professional may remain throughout all his life buried in his tasks, knowing nothing about how his job affects actually to others.

This becomes worse when you are talking with a politician. It is then, the day you must deal and reach a comprehension with a politician, when you discover the reality about this, wherever be the place, whatever the issue, whatever the level, whoever the officer. You will discover forever the same, again and again, every attempt you make: they know virtually nothing except their inextricable issues, they do not understand nothing about any issue you can go there on your hands; and have the look to be informed!

But after talking them along ten minutes (in the best of cases), they finally will make this universal and common question among politicians: what exactly is that you just said? At this moment you are witnessing the arrival of an asteroid from the other side of the Universe, impacting smoothly over the subject's head in front of you, and illuminating their inner neural network for short millionths of a second, like particle collisions in the European particle collider.

So you now could understand, how difficult are some phenomena like seek the Higgs boson, or achieve that someone can be aware, or know something about things that actually happen on the real life. You may not trust this, likely you will do when you read or hear closely some sessions and meeting minutes from Government decision-making or legislative meetings. You have a lot there waiting you, publicly issued, because transparency means mainly that nobody will read anything.

##

5. If we are not unbalanced ... then the Earth is flat: talking about feelings.

### We always were tribes.

Each of us may talk about the World from our own look, our eyes; mine are stained by the color of my profession, my passion. At the present, everyone calls it the "environment," a naivety more we have. Actually, we should maintain live the ambience, that huge and large complex net of beings of which we are part always, by which we live and are: our home, we should call it our "Common Home," so it is really, we want or not. But environ is not only touchable things, physical things, are also the relations and processes as our activities. Actually there are diffuse frontiers between living beings, and this is not as we have thought like isolated departments.

With time, I learned to discriminate between knowledge and science (are not the same), between consumption and use. Now, the neon signboards of scientific papers do not misleads me so much, nor the rewarded academicians, nor those chains of medals that someone puts in her shoulder for reaching an upper position in a big firm. This yet more when I discovered the ease that is there to make a thesis by paying the work to others, despite that you must be careful with translations, and erase some idioms that the black writers cannot avoid. I hope one day one of those startup companies will implement the seeking on line of "traces of language," those traces that can be found into hundred of scientific papers.

What really feeds work or knowledge is the direct contact with reality. It is essential an initial exercise of clearing of dust and straw in the closet of beliefs and thoughts: first of all, recognize the stupidity and double-dealing we have learned to embrace in our daily live; our common weakness on thinking, always accepting it easy: how we supply our life with fantasies, all kind of fireworks, and we finish bored forgetting the reality which waits us down our feet.

Something what never could be denied is the basic survival with dignity, so share the life in our earth implies to eat, to drink, to stay warm, to sleep being sure you will see the next day, to have the natural relationships we human and animals have, to have access to possibilities, and the acknowledgement of responsibilities. These needs are altogether universals.

The extent lack of this sharing in the Earth can remember me easily the bursting phrase from a woman into the Bombay's slums twenty-five years ago, telling to young people who was learning a bit: "When it hurts to you, finally you will be able to understand the others, if you like it" (or something like that). She did not learn it from her religion: it was the continued touch, the daily rub, the dealing with people what learned by Mrs. Teresa (Hindus called her "Trrisa"). That was what said and she was Trrisa, an uncommon woman: a very efficient executive woman devoid of titles or degrees in MBA.

The called development has shaped our lives intensively. Necessarily, our daily time is spent reaching important goals, (as would be to have two cars, two homes, other properties, the best body, the best TV, the best...) do not left time for something which was known as relationships: an evident fact for those who are not from occidental countries is that in the "north" we have lost the feelings among us: here is not time for it. And the relationships are poor; jelly, small, inconsistent, feigned, calculated, contingent, conditional, and faults always the true confidence. The feelings are always in the tail, and instead the competence is a value in the pole of values: thereby a lot of things that we do not see and do not touch, are there in our deepest soul, in our animal structure, in our genes, and keep calling us; and muted and buried are provoking us anxiety, stress, depression, insanity, and much more strange threats.

An issue forgotten too times along all the studies made in anthropology, is the final weight of women role in groups, by addressing the size of this groups, and the influence reached by other cultures that came to the place. And the more impressive for me is a constant that you can check out when you reach to have contact along a span of time with this groups isolated, not only in the "wild world", also in the modern world where remain some few places with isolated communities which retain its organization: the smaller is the community and more preserved its organization, despite the first insight that the occidental thinks find, the women have a very weight role on the group, and are the source of solutions for the worse troubles.

Thus, the disfiguring scars that have inherited the wounded people, provoked by the large and deep wars in the central Africa, such as the massacres between relatives (Hutu and Tutsi), slowly but surely have been cured by the organization and determination of women, and its clever mix of feelings and reason.

In our social behavior, in the tools that run underneath, and those rules that we use consciously, in the life way acquired which defines our needs, limits and possibilities, there is possible find the factors which define the fate of our environment, and hence the ours.

Another constant is the different way of living for women, and for men. Although we do not like, is a fact that the secondary role of women for men is a sort of natural law or natural rule that I would say is a sort of "male rule". It is not new for you, I guess and wish. But be cautious: is not only Pakistan (it is only one example) where men daily harass women, not. I say that there are a degree of intensity which may be measured crossing each country in the World, perfectly, and what never has been said is that: the more safety and bigger is the role which have the women, the stronger is the economy, more extended is the health, more rational is the consumption, lesser is the waste, usual the learning, and stronger the links and cohesion that have the groups.

What is actually balance, what is equilibrium?

### Where are the feelings?

The mix and merge of reason and feeling is not a crazy, is a need. And the recipe is not fix, may vary, need vary. Even we are different, some features are universal for everybody, and it allows make decisions that can be universal. Basically, a reasonable and sensibly decision may be applied everywhere, always suited locally. A decision that has not a universal basis may be suspicious to be unfair.

Think around it: sometimes you are listening someone and thereafter you can recall the meaning of the talk without understand him. Nevertheless, you can sense perfectly its feelings, if the person is angry, happy, uncomfortable or disturbed. You remember more strongly and easily the shown feelings than the sense and content of words. Really do you think you can understand to anyone without consider feelings? It is important, and we have forgotten it for long, here especially in Occident. As I know, Brazilians, Chinese, North Americans, Malaysians, Swedish, German... all have brain, two legs, two hands... and feelings. I would never forget this.

It takes a big sense when we talk of some kind of jobs, those jobs with the others: the occidental trend of "doing rational and logical, measurable and predictable every step we that take," loses the need we all have to be treated as humans by a human. Perhaps, as such huge amount of rules, laws, protocols, defend people from the responsibility they do not own when someone claims something, because in our world the word responsibility has in fact almost strictly commercial significance. Then, where can stay the relationship, the comprehension, the compassion, the attention, and awareness of others? There is not place for this, unfortunately. This is our more extended disease, our lack of feelings.

All too often, you could see some projects of called development that are performed on a place for a time, are carried a lot of things, and afterwards all finishes with a bye, never with an "I will stay here working for longer with you". What is truly necessary is understand and feel in place that the things force you to keep the feet on earth, but never only nice words.

By other side, the former years have pointed out the need of a fulcrum, a crisscross of roads where different viewpoints, jobs, experience and concerns, converge and enrich the understanding of current problems. This clashes frontally against the feeling of competence, and hinders the seeking of solutions if not blocks it. Viewed from the point of view of a company, some strange company has done it years ago: with 1,600 employees, including the staff and board of directors, created two teams of work, held informal meetings along a year, drawn up a full list of troubles and misunderstandings, wrongs and risks, and recognized the beliefs and assumptions taken. After all it, they found a time of laugh, by reveling their own nonsense fight in the past, and started to change completely the way of work, buy, sell, remunerate and share their jobs and future. They became cooperators, they became coworkers, learnt to leach the useless beliefs, they smoothed the conflicts becoming into relations.

They say today "we have left the boss's face". Currently, five years later, the company has 4,500 people working, all associated and, what is the more impressive; the rate of profits by worker was stabilized by an internal decision. They are selling their products above the international prices, inasmuch as local folks notices perfectly a healthy taste and smell of honesty, and over all this a common sense in a firm that is appreciated, and envies learn and copy. I will not say the name, but you can try finding it, over there: I am not an advertiser.

### If roles would have been the opposites.

The people who can understand more the need of feelings into decisions, in the daily life, its remarkable effect, and were set aside off the road for centuries, are the women. Despite the apparent (when it was apparent) logic in the words of leaders, the natural order which always pushes up from the feeling has been kept by women, survives within them, and no one of us can avoid its sounding and whisperings within us. In my depth inside, I suspect many women can understand easily these words, which are not a theory.

If this century could be the time for a more natural way of reasoning, forsaking behind the roughly way of the menfolk that history may show you and figure out trough any look to, this way would be womanly: it would be a reasoning simultaneously from a prospect affective and a natural vision of life. We would be better. Have we any criteria, a natural wisdom about how share needs and limits? Women have it naturally: then, a possible new role for man it would be avoid conflicts, and not to provoke its. Could they do it? I am not sure... since I am a man, and I know well how and what men hide.

### Each day more isolation.

A circumstance that turns on people into machines with no contact with his surrounding is the kind of home, and I promise it is not a joke. Think about: what do you need or like to share actually with your neighbors, if you live in a building of amongst 20 and 150 floors, for example? Sure you do not "need" anything at all. All services, tasks, spaces, all is outsourced, all belongs to responsibility of an external company, and thereby you know nobody. The more you are there, the less friends, any exchange or helping you have. You are lonely.

By contrast, in the villages, it keeps being a daily rule, a fact that can be repeated every season, and a need where see to others, talk to others, agree with others, and share tasks with others, is the daily bread. There is also a rubbing for many reasons, but almost always are somehow solved. In those places, there are not need of community programs, there are not need of create reasons to share the space and tasks: the life way and duties that has the nature leads the folks to share many things, bounds are tangible, links are closest, and feelings have an important function, an amazing role: produces cohesion, make the group, make the frame for living. That is an identity that we all need.

The question now is what links are between persons who meet by only economic reasons? Those links will never be the essential (despite to be necessary); there is not other kind of need on this links but the money. I never would prevent that we continue building relationships for economic reasons that would be stupid, but remain poor living in relationships that are not strictly economic: only causes problems in yourself, and in the whole.

The things that fail in one side of the world have been controlled on the other side; the troubles in this one are not there. That is what one day he said, the Beatles guru there in the peak of Mount Abu in India: "You do not come here to learn yoga, you come here to repair your broken links, your broken hearts, your broken heads, fleeing of riots and labor follies, fleeing of your marital fights, of your silences, of your loneliness, of your gambling with life: you need and want to come here because you have lost your children, because you do not know how to talk to them, and things so".

Wherever you go to live, you will need to be known, the people will not be satisfied only with the size of your purse. People needs be able to trust you.

##

6. War all-out against weeds! All are suspected enemies!

### Magic wands everywhere.

Once you learn something from great books of history, when have passed the facts and you are not exposed to distort the events, becomes easier to see what has taken place quietly. Thus we easy understand what happened with empires, colonization, wars, economies or the health. Even having passed the time, some stories are particularly makeup or forgotten, probably because they are still connected with the present. So, is difficult talk about facts so recent as these ones that are being treated here.

I say that the bigger joke that never was said was the division of plants in the usable ones and the weeds, and is the bigger joke you could tell someone; we will see why. The lies in the tales or jokes can be funny when appear suddenly, you understand the absurdity and laugh; on the reality the lies have not any fun, but are like drugs, artfully and slyly are hidden, and after stumble with them, and accepted the promises that offer, you cannot leave them never. There is no turning back. That is the history of technological agriculture, exception made for Industrial agriculturists, the bigger farmers who will be able to continue their business in the pyramid of agriculture world, but investing forever.

There are no magic wands, are there? Some of those magic wands that were sold worldwide are these ones (pay attention, please, do not miss, it seems have a lot of sense): (1) the human genetic selection that selected species that have needed the help of (2) pesticides that are herbicides, insecticides and fungicides, for kill, set aside arthropods, get rid other specie (as weed), make impossible the presence of microorganisms; all that has leaded to need and be helped by (3) chemical manures or synthesized fertilizers, which are extracted from far places that increased its cost as well; and all this needs the help of (4) a truly important mechanization, with continuous improvements, new tools full of all sort of branches, more weight, more oil consumption, more repairs, but that also now can be improved with new (5) management technologies as the spreading, watering and sowing control by GPS. What do you hope that could come from there?

You can wait the next strange feat: one day will be planted little boxes with all the necessary for each plant along one year of growth, by new machines specialized, with a new mix of growing nutrients, with its water intake included, its own populations of selected bacteria, for each new modified species, and related services of maintaining. Uh, I forgot the last, the new affordable price... for the higher industrialized farmers; unfortunately I must tell you that this is today being developed.

There are other viewpoints for all this. As usual, a path is directed to concentrate benefits on a few companies.

(1) We might have learned a lot from the species that naturally reached to adapt to places where we are cultivating them, and at least keep some of them which have been "bulwark" species, the most resistant and protective than the rest in the community; and we could have combined groups of species that coordinate with the others in their use of space and nutrients, promoting the continuity of soil. This would have conferred more strength to the entire system (not only the farm) as has been tested and proved already in too places, and thereby in consequence, we must deduct that never has been done any truly ecologic selection or evolving adaptation. That has been only an interested simplifying.

(2) It has meant the transformation of extensive estates into brown yellowish layers of dust and mud bricks with dead appearance and missing life. In these lands the natural structure to keep the soil organic matter, the water and productivity has been persistently depleted. Of course, all the carbon in the soil is now somewhere moving in the atmosphere or as energy, but not where is needed. Be partners of the companies which created the Orange Agent, it not means to be warriors or guilty of wars, but means to be stupidly deliverers of coarse inventions as has been the chemical progeny of war chemical compounds, what always showed what corporate culture have led inside those companies. Thus, currently we cannot be surprised by lack of arthropods; even those that we call essentials and friends, like are the bees.

(3) Whoever would be honest, should accept that the manufacturing of chemical manures by taking it from the other side of the world, paying for it miserably, and including the pollutant processes, the consumption of water for it, is pointless barring for manufacturer, which lose nothing, only earn. Furthermore, these magic products have a very impressive complex composition, which have nothing to do with real and natural manure. However, they have persuaded farmers of the magnificent composition (the NPK wizard) and properties of such nasty liquids. They never said more than the 50% is lost in the soil (so it costs twice), and runs down to the subsoil and waters.

(4) As if that is not enough, this is the best opportunity to sell more things: tractors every year more capable and powerful, bigger and more complex, with coolers for the beers, radio, conditioned air, a little TV for the boring time, an average of 12 farming tools since the subsoiler until the drill, with many thousand dollars by the road, repairs, thousand of liters of diesel fuel, assurances, for what? To bring millions of millions of tons of tomatoes, potatoes or corn to the market, as quickly as possible, and sinking the rest of markets in the world by lowering prices? Sometimes, the same rich farmers they get rid from technologies and go they back towards a clever agriculture (like some aware farmer in the US, tired, angry, and willing to recover his life).

(5) Everybody try entering in any purse, by making the difference. This is the new case, the landing of informatics over the farming: assessment, data, positioning, remote control, advise on time, measuring of doses, and saving of costs... by introducing new costs, this costs, changing each year.

Not pretending to be radical, waiting for a new reasonable use of technology, I must say what thinks my deeper soul: if the Ganymedes folks have already come, they could not understand how we can be such cretins.

### Do you like a business in the black darkness?

Good: jump and land in Africa. Things seem be so different!

People do not hope go loaded to the market: think on eat all days, keep the properties, and pay new tools renewing the old and meager goods. Even they feel not to be capable to translate properly the properties and profits that have up 3,000 plants that we call weeds. Shocking, it is not? I told you this some lines earlier, two worlds in one world. People like and is not ashamed to farming, and always they were sure of keep the ownership; when they increase their knowledge they pamper the earth. They are able to learn to share herding, pastures, farming and be careful with use of streams. Their problems are not the ignorance, are that we think they live in a called third world. Africans have a record, are capable to make live a vehicle ten times. They have not much but learn and know how repair; they leverage everything several times, any drop, no piece is lost. When it is possible, when they have the opportunity, they are efficient. But farmers never have been able to take root in armed sites. This is not a Lesson of the farming teaching. And is very sad to see how seeds that come from nobody knows where, and some help, goes in and out, ups and down, changes of hands, acquires a new price, diminishes the sack, and finally must be paid in the market. Is this agriculture? Is this the aid? Is this the international cooperation? Really, what weird thing is this? What joke is this?

This is our blinded insight of the world. This is what newspapers never have said tell you, never tell you, and never will say you. That is what TV agencies never tell you. Where are the journalists, do you know it? In other chapter will see other regions, as Asia, Central Europe, Central America or the South America. This is also environment. People also are the environment. That you have is a kind of public uproar that exists everywhere, very dangerous, with which nothing can be done, and whose origin is unknown.

Recently, a new wave of high value ideas have disembarked into the more unstable and unprotected countries of Central Africa, Indonesia, and other countries, but the most have taken place in Africa, of course. These ideas consist in the buying and grabbing of lands, and their waters, either that will surface (like the rivers), either it will underground (those that you cannot see). Now companies are going to exploit the scarcity, either lands as well waters. That is the new deal. Recently, has been performed a new database of deals and contracts with lands around the World: it needs a continuous improve (I do not think it could barely keep up with so fast events), because is not easy get data there out, but the ensemble of organizations that are constructing the database they know something about: is the Land Matrix.

Truly are mistakes? Maybe all those mistakes are a clever stealing, based in the brilliant idea of the improving: "We need improve, and be more valuable for our investors". Let's go recap, all those things that are been made in the seventy former years have been the gathering of resources in a few hands, dropping little prosperity's candies and peanuts in the mouth of people. It is not a vision; it is the true testable in situ. The aim of those industries newer was to fight against the hunger neither secure the food, nor help to anybody. So, do you want continue affirming with head, saying all is right, buying for highly elaborated and "balanced" foods, buying for controlled seeds, unbelievable technologies, and the taking of lands from hands of peasants? It is kidding to say that was development, it was a wolf called enrichment, with a dress of sheep called development.

It will be possible turn on an imaginary TV or leafing trough a newspaper or magazine, which would show other overall scenery as this one in the picture below.

### The green slavery.

Thus is this knotty issue, and this is what are already reading peasants there, looking stunned and perplexed what will be the fate of properties that they are losing, to become part of those nearest huge farms. They understand perfectly what is going on, that: the higher production, the less costs. A data that could lead us to think is the number of inhabitants that are hanging from agriculture: roughly 1.200 millions work into (please, pay attention, I written 1,200 millions people, not 1,200 people), but is the half of the world the number of people which is bounded with agriculture as main mean of living. The real struggle is for 500 millions of peasants, which continue working as it was six centuries ago. Yet we say development?

Rewind the story a few centuries back, try to find a time that has not been repeated again: it is not so difficult to see that our time follows the same trend, with different media today. I am now remembering the sincere opinion of Marcel Mazoyer, and the hard work developed by a strong minded woman friend of mine, who developed a little village in Pakistan of the note 3 (not a miracle, only real work with women, mainly, and men from the place): the same farmers which twenty or thirty years ago were selling their yields, and then bought their essential food, tools and clothes for their families, today they cannot subsist for more, as prices have increased to upper levels leading them to endless poverty, seeing how their means are been reduced day to day. Is it the green revolution, or the green slavery? We are talking again about indebtedness, the principle of bank matter.

Also the same farmers, when locally speak around seeds and cultivating, they cling to see only their local habits, but it is just an infinitesimal piece of what has been for us the agriculture.

(3) The Hushé project was developed in a village nearby the main mountains in the Himalaya by a charity organization form Zaragoza, Spain, along ten years or work for a little team of volunteers who spendt their own money to go there and work one month yearly.

The different soils linked with weather and flows of water, compose a map of crop's diversity, techniques, means, which reaches more than 1,400 different main forms, that never would be reached by any industrialized technique. This adaptation to the local and regional shaping also has had mistakes, but the worse were always human troubles as wars or desertification. However it, naturally, the resilience and recovering from disasters those natural systems show is strong.

By doing this, we are breaking many things. First of all, we know that in every ecosystem where are living 1300 species (an extremely simplifying as such example) from every possible branches of life, and we get rid 500 of them in one blow by changing some essential condition (as could be temperature, their presence, acidity, humidity, the adding of some gorgeous biocide) would be 1500 - 300 = 1200 the remaining species. We would say: ¡It still remains enough! But it is untrue: actually, we have vacated the space occupied by at least proportionally 800 specie, dismissing these specie and the relations and bonds it had with others (at the average of 4 or 5 strong relationships for each specie with other beings); and we have put it in a new ensemble of condition unknown for these specie, and created a new free space for new colonizers, which come delighted with so desirable opportunity to getting a new home. And it is in this way for every kind of being, bacteria, arthropods, and so on. Thus born new relationships before inexistent, and we can be witness of the detour that the ecosystem suffers towards another state which is unknown for us, which never existed before.

Nature is not an army of assailants. Every being is struggling to be there, making what knows do or could make; and every being considers a competitor whose are grabbing the food it wants. Could you dispense with every herbivore, and every insect? Certainly we would not. Despite it, it is precisely that was and is being done currently. The common folks have accepted this idea: many beings are dispensable, despite it is a mockery to common sense, is extremely ridiculous.

### Believing by laziness.

Although so, are not making the fool those who base their economy in the solution of problems that they selves created formerly, and solutions what improve the solutions, and solutions to transform problems in business, and always the same kind of new brainchild, but basically and underneath of all it, always reducing the toll of species (crops and livestock) to a range of as much 15 different and no more. We, the common folk, the consumers, we are making the fool, completely. And we learnt to believe this kind of lies; we learnt to mistake the meaning of reality. We are learning this each day that passes in our developed life.

A way of agriculture was developed in the world according to natural floods and conditions offered by the regions: different hydraulics systems that allowed as well rice based plantations as well zones of influence among interfluve areas, and even plantations in mountains. It is currently visible en Southeast Asia, Egypt, Guinean. In Europe, along the centuries, the initial slash and burn that opened lands to farming, using then already the fallow, was substituted by farming-herding based agriculture, and the appearance of the ard plow (the chisel plow) increased the cropping. The use of animal-drawn was a strong push ahead in agriculture, but the precipice was the recent appearing of monoculture and intensive cropping with no fallow. Here we can find a very big disturbance, when soils were not only forced but also converted to only planting surfaces, neglecting the natural cycle in soils. Those processes has had as consequence a trouble, but this keeps buried: a study to relate strongly and clearly with facts well linked the chemical use with health problems, needs an effort that only few people would be willing to take, although there are strong tools to reach it. Thus, so quiet there are the large companies. Other important changes have been the crisscross and mix of crops from tropical an intertropical zones between America, Europe, Australia and Africa: some of these crops even have driven out the original crops. It was at least two centuries ago when the stronger change has been a full substitution.

### Here is my brainchild, it never existed before. The genes.

The genetic pollution is other concept that hides the misconception we have about nature. It talks of "pollution" in this case as such process do not expected, and it is absolutely untrue. The transmission of genes among species is, although it has received little attention or publicity or rather telling it to you clearly "it has been sentenced and hidden," an event natural and even logical, when organisms try by many ways to improve any relationship with other organisms, which could give them some advantage. It always was ridiculous do not accept this fact, more when it has been already shown in the worst case, as with GMO like Agrostis stolonifera (a grass of the note 4), which becomes once sowed in a new invasive from anthropic origin.

The genetic transference is not an enemy: the possible enemy according its use done is the human-induced genetic transfer, when hidden, when unknown, when its purposes have not any logic. But is not considered like an interesting area of study: is considered interesting like human way of production of new species adapted to also human selected conditions. Another question overflies this matter: how many changed genes are needed, of what kind, what must affect to, in order to be able to name it as new species? Nowadays, the concept of specie yet is not completely defined...

We have had the genetic transfer naturally in nature, and we could have left it working. It is ridiculous to forgetting the work of Gregor Mendel, and annotate in the manuals only their mistakes, or primordial ideas, because what matters already evidenced: the genetic transfer operates continuously, but we have not taken advantage of, and what I find most painful is to know that we have not done it deliberately, with full awareness. Now we go approximate to world of genes.

(4) L. Watrud et al. 2004, "Evidence for landscape-level, pollen-mediated gene flow from genetically modified creeping bent-grass with CP4 EPSPS as a marker", Proceed.of The Nat. Academy of Sciences 101, p.14533.

###

Genes and genome, a sort of library of recipes.

Did you ever known those ancient drugstores managed by an apothecary, where a lot of shelves keep a large row of ceramic boats with plants and remedies? Well, easing the metaphor, let's go imagine that there are 10 shelves, and in each shelf there are 100 boats, thus we have 1,000 different boats... with plants or minerals. Our genetic code is a code for the genome, is an ensemble of 23 shelves doubled (two pairs of chromosomes, two copies of genome), each of them contains portions that can conduct the production of molecules (that can work as work those portions of code into your computer), influence in other portions, mutate, be inactive, become active in some conditions, to be a signal, and all sort of biological functions all of them developed in the cells of every beings: all the beings have the same genetic code (barring some little differences), and the differences that make the species different are the complete list of portions called genes and its activity: some gene what is there is not here, there are some gene here that is not there... There are more than 3,000 millions of base pairs, which form (still we do not know it exactly) 20,000-30,000 genes (plants have approximately 50,000). Proteins are able to implement almost all functions in cells.

Continuing with the story, the druggist inherited the pharmacy from his great grandfather, and he knows the use of just 200 hundred boats, between the 1,000. Once, he can only take up in his hands a bit of them, a bunch. That means, we know or believe to know the function of solely a limited number of genes, but we have observed some of them are not indifferent to cell processes: also we know sometimes act lonely, some times by couples, some of them belong to different part of vital processes, thus be able to make other different proteins indirectly. On the contrary to initially believed, the portions that were supposed junk material -do not codify proteins, do nothing-, a 98,5%, are active part in some degree, not very well understood. Among these genes are portions that formerly were viral material (Human endogenous retrovirus).

After all this, the neat drugstore usually issues recipes for its clients of only a plant, sometimes three plants, and other times a plant followed by other: he has a lot of recipes anyway. Simplifying, each gene has the ability to start or indicate the accurate production of one molecule of biological interest, a protein: these proteins can be an structural material, an agent defensive, a carrier for other compounds into the body, a catalyzer of reactions, a stabilizer of internal conditions, regulator of activities, a flexible link of tissues, a protection, and as you already guess, a signal, receptor or transmitter of signals.

In fact, a plant is a library with 50,000 boats as these ones. And its genes are talking with the same that we are using inside our body. Similar bricks of information relate Genes, chromosomes, proteins produced, tissues constructed, organs, and functions, all. And the way that our bodies are organized is by transmitting information between the parts, receptors, transmitters, chromosomes, tissues, organs, cells, every second it pass, gathering and balancing the inside information for the chemical functions, the aims of the whole organism, and the environmental information.

A simple change in only one gene, or as much five genes, seems to be an inoffensive change, but it implies not only the reach of the resistance to one harmful fungal (as example), but also other changes still unknown but sometimes all of a sudden discovered, possibly where is not expected, but in front of the number of other actors and processes in the cell level, statistically very high.

If you love the biology, start to watch up your own knowledge closely, very closely; you could become an isolated technician who does not know what is doing.

##

7. A big solar plant in the world.

### An ancient mate in our life.

The wood in the world has given us a lot of goods, and also has suffered its reckless use for different purposes: first, for make space for the initial orchards and crops since the onset of our mankind; second, for the build of war fleets along some centuries, made with wood mainly; third, for the opening of big spaces for grazing of livestock, in our recent time; fourth, for the trade with noble or poor woods becoming industrialized materials, this last always; fifth, for the mining of underground materials, as shows the map of routes throughout the mines that the Romans made many years ago, where planted chestnut; sixth, as fuel wood for the appearing of stream engines.

But the manner to understand the forests as groups of stands (mass of trees with constant features), is a utility to extract goods with an economic aim, but that never is the manner that understands the nature. As other sciences and techniques, forestry has had a lack of connection with concepts of ecology. By other side, has been a way to manage and care forests, when it has been thus. Following with concepts and descriptions, forests have been divided according the uses have had: when are not used by the man, are considered as a pristine or primary forest.

But why this is so? The man is another animal more and forever, and we are using always every forest, each day, because we are breathing also thanks to it. This concept is pointless: actually, we must protect in some point every forest. We are already making use of all of them.

Forests conduct a portion of the hydrological cycle, control the runoff, retain water into soils and roots, slow and bridle the effect of wind erosion, balance the equilibrium of CO₂ and O₂, give support for all the creatures there, and stabilize the local climate, sending back the wet towards the environment. The landscape in the picture above is a beech forest, modified rather more than the most forests in Africa or South America. A common fact is the slow, continuous, unapparent disappearing of complexity, mammals, birds, reptiles, and arthropods. If you never knew these forests, you never would be able to notice these changes. That is the question. How could you understand what is happening if you cannot see anything?

Deforestation is a human-natural event that appears when farmers or miners clear the land of trees and shrubs, finding more surfaces for crops or diggings. It is largely the result of called slash and burn agriculture and mining exploitation, and nowadays, a little bunch of minerals gather the interests of industries: cassiterite (tin), gold, wolframite, platinum, and columbite-tantalite (coltan). Many of these areas were transformed along centuries, sometimes rightly, in farms or rice lands: from any point of view that we could state, including the economic, is an eyesore, when soils naturally determined the most suitable vegetation. Due to these actions, and the fragmentation of space, the lack of intelligent planning in construction, the whole drylands in the world almost have reached the 30% of global surface. This figure is at least one of the few that did reliably know.

This is not an issue of some countries, some cultures, or continents: the history shows that each former colony has been there before, has its unique story of loss of lands, and every action along years has been added and inherited into the next action. Thereby we are sharing a common plight, following a similar trend, and the developing ones are making the same wrongs that the developed done.

### Sustainability, a cool word vacuous.

Today, a new culture of seeming sustainability, is printed in many packs and goods, where a label which says things like "this was made by fulfilling strong environmental rules, that allow the strengthening of traditional villages and establish a fair trade with them," do that you can breathe easy thinking you are a great person, and meet with others, with the jungle, with the birds ... with everything. I am sorry, the only way to make things a little more green or ecological could be as I make with this beautiful computer, which goes running eight years ago, and does very well.

A small group of standards from different organizations, promises good governance by implementing revisions, adequacy of working procedures and management of forests, but all that, as expected, refers to productive forests, either because they are -crops forest-, because are exploited, or because will be soon. That is necessary, however is not ever the way that the forests follow, even when managed with these standards. The environmental management systems seems to be a tool focused in the pursuit of a minimal set of rules, of a corporate culture and learning, and particularly legal compliance. But many voices are already saying that depending on where they are applied, are no more than a transfer of operating licenses in terms of the image that is achieved, neglecting basics wherever does not exist really monitoring.

First of all, forests have not any base as such a skeleton that could be a standard: the standard is a tool for human interventions or activities. Not all the forests are into the more complex category among ecosystems, but are some of them, and of course, it is right for all those tropical forests in both sides of the Atlantic Sea, included in three biogeographic regions: the Neotropical, Palearctic and the Ethiopian regions. And has been pretended the applying of same standard to all forests.

In both sides, are currently occurring two things simultaneously: there where still remain forests (Central America, the northern of South America, Central Africa and some regions in Southeast Asia), the lands are being again slashed and burned, for the extracting of minerals and cropping of biofuels and intensive forage for livestock; by other side, the mapping of those areas is other intensive and selective activity that support a few number of philanthropic organizations. Due it, therefore, after these two main activities appear the organizations that study and measure the erosion that occurs and extends over these areas, and the increasing problems arising therefrom, that we discussed earlier. In parallel, all what may have lived there, disappears: after all this sorts of events takes place each of them with its convenient "programming and environmental review policy," what comes is the management, the sustainable forestry, the "well managed forests," what means in other words, mono-crops, tree farms, industrialized fields of wood. And of course, around all this have been deployed a lot of improvements for the communities, rules, deals, agreements, and more of such things. So ends like having the repopulated forests behind fires, where there is not the slightest interest in recovering the above, and just set up a business.

Manage a forest has costs, and requires a knowledge, but over all this requires a proper use, what is finally the very true, actual management. Surprisingly, the most of original communities which have lived in those places, have had a kind of management accurate, and when we have seen an inadequate management it has belonged to practices introduced by colonizers, the inclusion of these communities in foreign works as mining or drilling, and the dependence from this last. Most troubling is the idea publicized and scattered in all the great reports about the forests, issued subtly, and at the end the only one is listen: is actually completely a blurry notion, false and far from reality

Like so many other times, not saying the whole truth, and saying only a small part, is a huge lie. The advertising tagline is "forests are carbon storage, and stop the climate change." Well, this is true, forests contain and store carbon, but this is not the only "task" that they are accomplishing: so it takes more than a mass of logs monospecific uniform carbon stores. Perhaps, this one is not the most important "task or function" that forests do. Why then do we insist both? Because to effects of the climate change? I do not think so, I prefer think that is because, taking advantage of this matter is possible open a market of forests, that of course with time will be modified and will evolve to other new goals, and thus we have a green card for go everywhere with a green and sustainable aim, and a business.

Following the six maps (obtained from ForestWatch), the map 1 shows the forest concessions when requested (yellow) approved (orange) protected (green) or canceled (gray); on map 2, concessions in violet and purple indicate they are more recent; the map 3 shows the progression of the forest planning (realization); on map 4, the total mining concessions, most of them are families; on map 5, the declining of vegetation cover; on map 6, the red areas show the recent forest loss.

What happens about retention of water? What happens about biomass? What happens with all species living there? What happens with the soils that are under this canopy? What about the regulation of temperatures, the buffer effect over heat, and the attraction of rain? What happens with all plants that are there, and its effects over the nearby fields? It looks that nobody remember this... Currently vast extensions along tropical areas show many surfaces gridded into rows and aisles, which already are a large and monotonous monoculture: you can go in and out throughout easily by that sustainable forest, and even you can choose the SUV vehicle you will drive. Is this a sustainable management? I am sorry, again I must say that: this is a tease, a hoax. Anyway you can follow believing what you like.

Thus, with this manners, so easily, and even with clever and sustainable planning and deep management, the woods are becoming in great crops of a kind of giant maize with trunk. I do not want to tire you, reader, I will show you just one example of map showing how things are done: it belongs to Africa, and you can see how intertwined legal timber holdings, the illegal mining industry of Western companies, mining individual legal or illegal, the immense intensive crops ... and in the midst of all this, small isolated forest fringes that are no longer pristine, from which you can see around, even toxic waste everywhere flooding already half of Africa.

And all this is being called sustainable!

On the other side, the changes realized in Brazil: following the six maps (obtained from ForestWatch/IMazon), the dashed strep (map 1) defines the biome; in the map 2, en yellow the reserves, in white the sustainable areas; in the map 3, the green areas are forest (ten years ago), in gray the deforested, in brown the logging; in the map 4, the human settlements and crops are colored respectively in red and purple; in the map 5, the mining sites are in orange; finally, in the map 5, red and orange colors show respectively the recent and former fires.

I am fearful truly that we could lose wholly and definitely the 85% of natural forests, leaving only a few spots of wildness along the world. Yet worse, I am sure it will come in few years, less than twenty years. And we will hear in spite this that we have afforested many areas, we have achieved our goals. Still more subtle lies. You can ask Google an answer by some key words, using different locations (so different profiles), and you will see that the results are so different. According to your location, you will find a new vision for each point from where you are seeking.

##

8. Fisheries: there is nothing above, nothing below.

### First of all, fishing: and later?

Between the teachings of religions, we could find one that could have been the exact opposite of that what has taken place in the current time: it belongs to Christians, and says that once "man-God multiplied fish and loaves". Currently, we literally have depleted, erased, razed, scared, weakened, persecuted, have made life tense, risky and impossible to fish. To be a fish is an unlikely life and risky life. Is a trending topic to talk about this issue in all mouths; the large decreasing of fisheries. That is something that someone someday will solve, we can be calm and continue watching the movie. Do not forget the popcorn.

At first glance, the sea might seem a thin cord of dancing waters surrounding the coast, and away ahead be nothing more except a passing whales occasionally. Your feet touch the smooth waves gliding over the shore sandy; your eyes discover a friendly world through your water glasses, but not more. If you have tried the taste of diving, you know something of what awaits below. You unfortunately do not see more because your life is on land usually, but eventually is possible to gaze at the world that is underwater. Those things are basically following the same rules, but the ways are other. The currents, temperatures, the gathering of large numbers of tiny organisms, the travel of shoals and the yearly changes in the amounts of algae, draw that we see as one ecosystem, and actually is an important number of differentiated ecosystems. However currently we see the sea as a single pool, as one element uniform.

At least, by one hand the sea is a huge chamber which transports the energy in various ways (changing its temperature, varying its salinity, by the growing of algae, releasing heat and steam, transporting conditions and nutrients, keeping minerals in its floors, adjusting oxygen and carbon dioxide, and containing a huge biomass of beings which are as susceptible as can be those on land.

On the other hand, is great the inertia that has such a huge body of water it is, has a high heat capacity, its currents are slow for the planetary scale, the whole acts as a controller buffer, but all this set at the same time makes it becomes a long-term storage of problems that we have led and stored -I should say discharged and thrown- into the seas.

Currently, it results very easy to gather in few lines the threats that has the sea as living system, and as a resource: constant releasing of chemicals, increase of salinization, unbalance of nutrients into currents, physical imbalance of nutrients vertically, storage of debris moving, depletion of fisheries, illness of sea prairies, decreasing of coral and reef systems, break of the trophic chain, intermittent spilling of oils, long-term storage of highly toxic residues... and some more that are under study, gaining medals to reach the first position. Seeing it from another side, there are two sources of "big problems," none of them natural: the human models of production, consumption, and extraction, and the lack of policies. Do not start looking where the habits or procedures to shift, please, are already known: not saved even one habit.

Who is affected by? "Everyone" is affected (I am putting on the bag to beings with fins, beak, wings, scales, chloroplasts, leaves ... and those with two legs and useless brain). But, what is the problem? Imagine your stomach or intestines are clogged with indigestible food, or you are choking with a belt, or a tape cuts off your blood circulation, or that you cannot have children more, or your skeleton is slowly undoing. These sorts of troubles are the issues that barely anyone faces.

Recent studies conducted in some sea systems, have shown a foreseeable fact: cyclically, the trend in volume stocks of marine fish has been linked to environmental trends of conditions as salinity, levels of nutrients, water flows, not always decreasing, but also increasing! And some voices specialized in aquaculture or water management now recognize that we have never made the slightest attempt to exploit the natural dynamics to favor us, thereby improving the life, health and availability of the seas as resources. In other words, we have not even planted: we only have "collected".

If you have the interest, you could read a strong report from Life in the World's Oceans. Is not the sole report, but is extensive: anyway, you have other studies even online disposable to see.

### Understanding it as a bug wet garden.

Is on earth? Really our life is on land? Does not have been our life also the fishing? If not, what is that we are selling and buying, taking and trading with, that we are eating in our dishes? It is not our "land" our aqueous land? Nobody will tell us clearly anything about this confusing play of words, because it implies to share and free the truly meaning of the assets, the resources, the commons: and that is just what is the sea, a Common Good, this kind of things that belong to everybody and to nobody at the same time. Quickly someone could answer me, that some resources needs a big investment to turn it into valuable and allowable goods to every. But the use we could have made from the resources influences largely over a complex assembly of aspects, which barely you and nobody has heard. The sea (as whole) is harboring a huge life-machine, and its overall operation has aspects about we know almost nothing. But we may understand some situations happening on depths. An example will help to introduce us about it.

This is an imaginary story: imagine for a while that you have a parcel planted with ten varieties of vegetables, which grow fast and forcefully, but an important issue forces you to leave the household and go away for a long time. You have not any sidekick, neither assistant or keeper, and you go out abroad for two years. What do you hope find at your back home? The half of crops? Some of them have disappeared? You are clever and do not need to think about it too much, you already guess perfectly that, at your back home you will find all crops destroyed, all got away, anything have left there. But more important is one fact you will notice: you will be able to see that a big part of the beautiful soles were thrown away by have been considered useless, disposable, unworthy, and still are there in the ground, decaying. The thieves took the best, and they threw what they were not interested. Your neighbors may understand you immediately, since all of you feel clearly and doubtless that the steal was made taking advantage of the lack of witnesses, so nobody could be witness. That is what has happened, and is happening currently today with all the seas.

Now you can understand what was of seas since at least fifty years ago, the time when appeared the improved technologies (background radar, factory ships, freezers, specialized networks, satellite positioning) and the flag of convenience acquired, its higher value. The figures of world fishing are terrifying. It has been, I am sorry and feels sad myself writing it, the theft of the forty thieves at the public pool. Once again, is not wrong the act, is wrong the use done: and the researches conducted have as ending goal into the upper offices as much set how much to reduce catches, never learn to manage.

Nobody can see anything. Who go come to avoid nothing? On the sea, we are all "amicable friends" somehow, we share some kind of agreement or deal, and we hide the ones each other. And the word "we" mean "all those who are fishing and selling fish," but only those ones. The rest of us only buy and keep unaware of the full loss of our "oceanic lands".

Imagine multiplied by three all the arable lands, waste lands, mountains, deserts, lagoons... all in the world, and now you already have an outline quite real of the steal and devastation practiced, before and now into the seas. Imagine for a moment that only remains just a 10% of arable lands, and no more. A question like "how many fish remains in the ocean waters" turns in a bad joke. A first mistake is the nonsense idea as such that the sea is only a place to find and bring fish so easily, and even you can go there investing a lot of money and grab all you can. Unfortunately that is true, and we go see now some key points about this.

### What has had a policy and what did not had.

In parallel to business groups, agreements, rules, and associations of commercial and trading character, were created and unfolded a lot of Conferences, Organisms, Organizations since the IUCN (1948) until now. Of course, all this has been accompanied by its linked funds. Some apparently clear ideas surged after all it: the transgenerational and transboundary character of environmental problems, and the new concept which has become a brand for new business: the sustainable development!

It is surprising the counter directions that we can see: by one side, the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) since 1993-1994 as binding and legislative accord; the Framework Convention on Climate Change since 1994 (UNFCCC) as accord over the atmospheric emissions of pollutants; the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) since 1994, which leads to fight the desertification and drought (on land). By the other side, the loss of lands, forests, wetlands, species, diversity, fisheries, has not decreased, but gone backward. Then, what works really? The answer is: business. Where are here the seas? Keep calm.

There are only a few principles in international law that rule: yes, states must be diligent in prevention in front of third parties; must protect and preserve environments; should standardize rules for behavior; must respect the primary rights from other states; must keep the control over private producers; should share and publicize the information, and inform about coming accidents, assess the impacts produced, to be cautious and prudent, do not transfer harms to others, and make the best practices making use of better technologies. All right, very good all this.

In all the cases the negotiation shows to be the most important tool for solve the problems among states (when they are rubbing). Good! That is good really! Although this set of accomplishments and proposals and so magnificent and strenuous efforts, have been emptied almost all seas. The pity is that the sea has not control far away of shore. There is not control, nothing at all. The sea is not in land of anyone. Yeah! It is our time; we have freedom for move.

Now we go reckon what has been written on black over white. The classic law for seas (since the XVI century) was modified in 1938 and 1958-1960 on the Hague Conference, and four accords were signed: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea or UNCLOS (the Law of the Sea Convention or the Law of the Sea Treaty); the Treat about marine shelf; the Convention on the territorial sea and contiguous zone; and the Convention on Fishing and Conservation of Living Resources of the High Sea.

Then already appeared concerns as the pollution generalization, and lowering and impoverishment of fisheries (furthermore of nuclear test on the seas by a few states, as you can see in this endeavored work here of Isao Hashimoto), and it was treated the limit of 3 nautical miles of coastal sovereignty. Also were defined the 200 mile exclusive economic zone, the 24 mile contiguous zone, and the double law regime for natural straits, with innocent passage and free transit passage in international ones. This means agreeing on what is interesting.

This 200 miles (EEZ) is place for conflicts -barring the African countries, whose shores has been almost free for everybody-, because all activities included in the zone must be done without blocking the traffic, but in the case of fishing this must be allowed when the coastal state does not has enough means to do it by himself -good, some of them have only meager tools for it. Finally, all that means all bigger fleets have been able to fish wherever they wanted.

Still more my friend reader, referring to highly migratory species (note 5) and straddling stocks: the states must protect these species only as duty as they can, but no more, so it is to say nothing. In addition, there has been no regulation around the fishing gears, neither in the more valuable zones. And, the mineral resources in the ocean floor... have not been regulated. And the polar area... has been sliced as a pie at triangular areas.

The International Court of Justice treats usually only the cases when the State resources are affected, there are effects over resources or health and losses, and fall over private or State assets. Even differences are striking among cases: disputes as the initial between the US and Canada, are far from the current Niger River case with the Shell company: when seas are the nucleus of trials, nothing is agreed. Still more? Well, we would think what is regulated about the pouring of waste on the sea, be nuclear residues or not. There is nothing about, nothing in the common space and invisible scenario. All this before your eyes, in your eyes, everything with laws on hand everywhere, with many conferences, with several studies and much intelligence: all because you cannot see anything.

Honesty, I must tell you "still more". Still more, the latest years we have been able to listen and "learn" about new techniques for the improvement of oceanic nutrients conditions. It sounds like a scientific and amazing discovering, a big effort, and a fantastic intellectual achievement. These are techniques and technologies for fix a problem, but what is the more amazing problem?

The fishing companies have not more profitable zones as those where they have been fishing, and at the present they are trying to feed fish into their free sea farms.

(5) Tuna and tuna-like species (albacore, bluefin, bigeye tuna, skipjack, yellowfin, blackfin, little tunny, southern bluefin and bullet), pomfret, marlin, sailfish, swordfish, saury and ocean going sharks, dolphins and other cetaceans.

Could you never have figured out there are easiest ways to recover the levels of fish populations? This has been there, always has been there. Nature is that, a complex assembly of beings that struggle for fill one place, one volume, one position, and one role.

And if we left them to grow, they grow. They do not need help to do this. They have been doing it not along years, but along million years. Nevertheless, they have not outlived to razing from the faster asteroid that has been known never on the Earth, the fishing businessman.

### Say goodbye to them.

The strongly decreasing of fisheries (it was not a sinking, rather a disappearing) affected to many common specie, some of them in the picture above: the mackerel, the swordfish, the sole fish, sardines, the delightful sea bass, the salmon, and specially the cod (so collapsed the eastern Canadian companies), the expensive bream and the tunas. But others are also being watched closely and continuously: sharks, seals, whales, crab, spider crabs, and so on. Please, keep it clear; there are no one species on the sea whose population has not been devastated. You can be sure about. It is as simple as the numbers are: it remains roughly among an 8% to 12% of fish populations in the seas.

Of course, when you open the Explorer and go there looking for a nice picture, you will find a lot of them: all were taken in parks, in wildlife refuges, paying the tax for entry and stay for some days. Only in my first five years as diver, I saw decreasing the floors of shores, slowly, as if I see it with a low-speed camera. But the reality is another different in fact. You could lean out over the boardwalk railing of Bombay, and taste the smell of Indian Ocean: it smells ... strongly wrong. Down from Bombay, you even could see an army of debris and waste, sailing to south. Looking to rivers and wetlands, some photographers have more pictures on backup, which show fishes many more than those real fishes that already have been lost. This is the way what you finish thinking all is right, seeing the beautiful pictures from natural parks, and imagining the places you have not seen as a continuation of same pictures, a naive idea of folk with goodwill, probably as you. All this is visible in the net of nets, very comfortably.

The lack of marine species, mainly the industrially profitable, has leaded the emergence of sea farms offshore and inshore. It is becoming since ten years on the source of food for people, implying some changes and challenges. This entire growing beings (millions o tons of fish) will need be fed, and you can imagine now that this food will not come from the sea. It is another intelligent process, another more. We could say another intelligent business.

You can know, as very much approximately, the actual status of animals and forests in the lands over the zero height, above the water level. Under waves, the hunting we call "fishing" is not controlled. Do you want another joke more? Even today, the European Commission, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Trade Organization and other institutions, they continue discussing when, how many, where, who, what stage they can fish, the about 8-12% of fish remaining in the oceans! It is an international joke, an official joke, a TV show, a lack of intelligence... or maybe another issue? Smile! Do not laugh you? And we name barbarians to ancient cultures! This is exactly like say that we are stupid, do not matter us to lose our seas, do not matter us if we eat fish with flavor that comes from bones and residues, do not matter us if some firm with a ridiculous flag (license for all as 007), clears, razes, and destroys shores and depths.

Do you remember the sixth paragraph, an imaginary story? It is not imaginary, is it? We notice easily when someone steal our farm because we can see it. However, we cannot believe that some firms have stolen our seas, because somehow we know us are guilty, we have paid all we wanted, we have celebrated Christmas with gargantuan amounts of shellfish, and paid nice jewels with shark tooth, we have lived in the heaven.

Neither the Martians nor the climate change are responsible. We are the responsible. And now, what can we do? Well, if you have a farm flat, and you do not see one leaf over the ground, you will go to seek the food in other place: both the African farms, as also are the African shores, for example. As we are so organized, you will leave everything in the politician's hands, the policy and rules of trading with Africans; you will rest blind and deaf; and you do not will ask anybody any information by years; and will pay charmed these delightful fish. And some years later, you will shout astonished; "where are the fish; where is our fish; what happened on the sea; who did steal it?"

Solutions? The same solutions as those that mathematically were applied by Nature as ecological law along the natural history: to sum how many goods are allowable to eat, and share it (distribute is a word that remembers suspiciously to pirates and loot, and so we have seen, it does not works for all). The looting of faraway resources is finally our global and common looting. I hope, one day, making the effort by five minutes, people will notice that some passionate scientists have been telling in many languages, in many places, to various attendants that: "we must slow down, we must eat but no devour anxiously, leaving the fish at least it can reproduce".

We have had the cheaper solution for get away the waste since the eighteenth, a "clever technic" that becomes one of best showing of how humans do things: our warehouse for waste has been for more than 200 years the entire whole of seas. It was assumed that the seas could transport all this away, for free, all floating or dissolved, disappearing, thinking that the seas already know what to do with this. Clearly, this has not been a great inspiration. There is no genius: where was the technology, where was applied science?

Today, we know quite about behavior of those compounds disseminated or propagated time ago, and about the behavior of currents, sediments, species, and relocation of compounds in this giant pond. It is another joke more hearing to say this: "the next decades, our children will see new opportunities to work and develop their careers, the research, and finding out solutions for all this problems". This is the peak of foolishness, idiocy, and insolence: and this is an insult to the intelligence of anyone. And this thought comes from some research centers, supported by the alimentary, fishing, financial, consulting, engineering and chemical companies.

Is this science or technology? Try to digest this, if you do it.

## 9. An arrow on the sky: the development.

### A statement with which I disagree: we dominate. Really we dominate?

Ok, it is right, some revolutions drove us towards a more "free position", as is usual hear to say: we have achieved a very impressive production of food, an important advance in health, a huge performance in manufactures, an extensive engineering development, and a list of goods of all sorts as may be energy, potable water, cars, schools, shops, TVs, clothes, travels, protected all this with an insurance. I think cannot be forgotten this, in addition to freedom reached there is the liability and the limitations that Nature has.

I would say this many times, again and again, never stopping: the same mathematics applies for your home and for the whole world: only change the player's balance.

I have heard that the environmental problems do not respect frontiers: we should say better "the frontiers cannot stop the environmental problems, neither mountains, nor laws, nor agreements". One of the guidelines in the classic agriculture, the green revolution, or the agrarian biotechnology, has been since ever the aim of "eradicate every being live which could attack, weaken, interfere or compete" with our crops. Then we could ask what believe those who took up their work to understand the relationships among organisms, or even better, what they know and what they do not know openly: science ecologists, soil specialists, engineers, agronomists, botanists, and so on.

I would wish you could understand that in a few words, that almost totally the amount of actions and changes realized along the last 200 years that run between the Industrial Revolution and the now day, making a business use of science and technology, have had two main results: (1) an improving of the life quality in some places, and a big productivity linked forcefully to (2) extended problems as well locally as globally, and very costly for everybody. The astonishing side of this issue is: these costs never assumed have been unnecessary absolutely. Nobody would reject a good practice, a true improvement. Why deny we that the use of the technology is not the proper? It seems to be easier watching the big infrastructures and opening the mouth saying wow! And not think beyond as this means in reality. Surely, because we have a lazy mind, which has been setup with a model of behavior learnt from televisions. I am sorry; I guess we are a pity of mankind.

Then, I must disagree with the repeated phrase as a mantra, on faith, as sacred taboo: "we have dominated the nature". I do not think so, the accumulation of nonsense that even today continue to taking place, that is not to dominate nature, that is being a bungling, and in comparison with the Roman hordes, taking us much alleged knowledge, I would say that we are actually unbridled and drunken.

### What has been managed?

Another question that has not need of much debate is this, what has been actually managed and in a significantly measure mistakenly, is the weapon's power, the industrial development, the building and trading: on the contrary, never were managed neither the human and political stability, nor natural resources. We could point many issues that draw the map of our footprint over the environment, but I think only a few of them may be necessary to explain and give an overall sketch.

For example, we must assume as is assumed by chemists working on it, that we have released on the waters by one hand, clearly and mainly 100 compounds, being among them the steroids, antibiotics, coagulants generic disinfectants, soaps, beta-blockers (which operate over the SNC, used in cardiac arrhythmia, infarction and hypertension), analgesics, or the SSRIs (antidepressants and as well as treatment for anxiety and personality disorders); in other hand, a large list of para-pharmaceutical drugs, that have not been accounted until now. Once are released, its concentration decrease, but the debugging capacity of rivers, and the average flow has dropped into them in a high percentage, thus being detected in analysis made along various points of control. The drugs can be degraded under certain conditions, or transformed in worse substances, or be deposited at the sediments or funds and fixed, or be absorbed by aquatic flora and fauna, remaining anyway its presence. Also can travel flying like an airplane, and reach other touristic places, as happens with some compounds.

The response to this issue from some scientists in pharmacy, was when less incredible: they told "we do not know if it react (the released compound), but it would be better that those substances do not react with the environment," what is a very clever reply. Then, the feminization of fish (as can be seen not only in Europe, also in Japan, India, US, and likely in all the industrialized countries) related to spread of steroid estrogens into waters, which caused the reduction of fertility, fecundity and reproduction, it only would not have happened. Of course, a few persons notice this, the rest keep watching to TV.

Other examples can be the following ones: the lead laid on the ground along fields and fields in two subcontinents (North America and Europe) killing silently million birds and mammals, if not were killed in the special points where the birds cross the continents (when they are migrating yearly); the poisoning of vultures which decline almost at 99% in Asia with the veterinary drug diclofenac, which consequently provoked the unbalance in populations of dogs feral and leopards; or the intake of waste micro-plastic (as nurdles), which became eventually in a constant in our days in half of beaches.

The future will bring us new kind of troubles as these ones, with other words and names: genes, and thereby target-genes compounds, which will act upon the genes. In medicine and pharmacy, things run differently according where we be: can be 13 the drugs applied in tropical diseases (therefore in poor countries mainly) in front of 1,450 widely produced the last 25 years. Where do they go the remaining 1,425? Those drugs go to the richest market, where we find residues everywhere: pollution in the tropics is of another type, previously banned in the West. Thus, the developed coasts are the main sources of chemical pollutants by many reasons.

Let's go see another kind of development also managed. An event about you probably has heard is the spill on the Niger Delta. Since the onset in 1960, the pipes in the complex of factories that has had Shell in the Niger Delta, poured on the environment tons of petrol along years in a list of events, these sites never were cleaned, and again in 2009 another last spill more occurred, encroaching continuously areas of marsh, riparian lands and reaching the sea. The company, desiring "help" to people, carried "a few bags" of tapioca, rice, beans, milk, sugar, peanut oil and even tea, to help some 70,000 people (as seems to be after read the Amnesty International report). Would not have dared to do this in the West, of course. At the same time that the oil has been withdrawn from the subsoil during 50 years never was developed any drinking water or power supply, two essential issues without which you, the reader, would not live. Less still were the health services. This situation would be unthinkable to happen in Western countries: or could it? It also happens with the oil, with the nuclear debris, with rivers, estuaries, there is a long list that is ongoing. When an activity makes the 80% of incomes for a Government, this is possible, and there is no development. Thus is not strange to see any individual or organized action taking advantage of the troubles, riots, conflicts and clashes usual: the theft of oil has many ways, like bunkering or the extraction from the pipes.

The picture (Creative Commons, by Socialist Ungom, SU) shows the disaster in many areas affected by operations and spills in the Niger Delta.

In either case, when profits do not reverse in the local society, hopefully that happens, trying to survive or take advantage of this wealth. However, the company acknowledged it leaks in 50% of the pipes: is not invested in maintenance and safety when they are not being watched. Trying measuring the facts, how much oil was spilled there? Are possible many numbers, but sure are between least 8 million barrels and 14 million barrels (along 25-45 years). We cannot let to talk of facilities over 20,000 square miles, the decreasing of fish, the weakening of marshes, the pollution of underground waters, the affection to birds of the Delta (and tourism is an income today), the spread along the trophic chain of oils and chemical soaps, crops depleted, and a large list of effects on the area and population. The poor countries, in order to earn something, must sell its safety, its resources, taking there, far from laws, all the wrongs and barbarities at low cost. Towards the towns in the North just goes the clean petrol. A map of all sort of big changes can be viewed here. A resource for teaching is here.

In Africa, the sudden whorls of violence have had as reason for fight whatever tribal squabble possible, but always underneath what is going on is hidden the allowance of natural resources to clusters of companies which provide services worldwide. This last fact never has been interesting for first pages. The resources are of many kinds, but somehow a bit bunch of them are the main engine that moves the trade and politics.

### The water and its guests.

An ancient story is this one of waters. I bring it here because it is closely related to something that we understand and see as development, as was the set of cities where our prosperity began.

Europe, only a few years ago, let behind its road of epidemics: since the Greece epidemics, Ethiopia or Japan, till the America discovering, and the Mexico outbreak, it reached out time with a new kind of epidemics. But until 1950, almost all big cities in Europe were visited in some degree by some of this burst of infections: Sevilla, London, Milan, Marseille, and some more. All the species were (and are supposed even in the first outbreak known) the cholera, typhus, smallpox, measles, whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza, bubonic plague, and tuberculosis. In addition to get rid from millions of people from this world, the more strong common factor that have had all this zoonotic epidemics (remember the origin) has been that all these diseases are strongly related with poor and bad conditions of hygiene in the daily living, where waters were always the vector transport, a kind of conveyor belt, home and nest of microorganisms.

Those centuries until 1950, were a period of comings and goings, ups and downs, with periods of death and survival, and sure all these crowds travelled to towns looking a better life and thriving: they saw the towns as the ridge of life. During this time, they never suspected that they were developing its lives mistakenly, never suspected that the waters are the perfect nest, the perfect home for bacteria, a vector of disease, especially when the waters are not well managed, when they are not smartly managed. Could think we today that we know absolutely all, we are on the ridge of knowledge already?

Despite this, we have a name, a sort of tag for the XVII century: the "Industrial Revolution". You can try and study patiently, spending a bit of time, looking the data provide by FAO about the global resources of water: not ever data are good, and must be scrutinized carefully, when are always related to other actors as could be the irrigation systems in a country, the efficiency in use, the waste treatments, the kind of crops and others so. But this database is at least wide and consistent: Aquastat.

As well as we can remember this, we can do as Stanislaw Lem did, write the future ironically with good mood, laughing at ourselves, and understand and recognize our current ignorance, our current sight of modern towns, our current acceptance of as nasty substances such as those we digest, absorb and breathe daily.

### Rectify and correct attitudes.

It is extremely rare to find a farmer who not recognizes that never was the main beneficiary of this agriculture; even they know what happened. A lot of them continue making the same and thinking: "I am old, the struggle will be for the following": their sons, who could be agrarian engineers, suited mentally to new high-productivity techniques. The harvesting, as such way for eating, the one of two basic needs we all have, has become globally in a pure business, in a hard, nasty, obscene and inhuman act.

That is what should be taught and learnt in the Universities in joint with other classes as like productivity and programming. That is learning, learning the reality.

Are you living in the North hemisphere? How much of you would yell if you could not feed your children? Ok, that is happening really far your home. The price of food supplies was the key for have done reach the market to this situation. Do not rely in these subtle stats which are like toys: 1/5 of population does not know what will go on tonight, if they go see the sunshine; 1/4 of population do not know when they will lose something, perhaps their lands, perhaps their lives, perhaps their home, perhaps an arm.

And all it because every resource which might be source of work, is actually source of business in the world, and are a spot to control in some way. And all the North inhabitants are agreeing and accomplishing with this practice. It is the reason for the low price of minerals, energy and foods that we obtain, barring some sources of oil smartly managed by their owners (where this is done) and despite the bad way they are spending it. Again, it is a pity, and it is a shame.

But is not a scandal: this shocks nobody.

In our sort of development, the security of ownership has turned out in anything, at least there where the properties are waiting its new owners, all of these in Africa. How is it possible? Clearly that is the road marked by an ancient deal, after the WWII. Africa, and also the Central America and South America, is a huge deposit, a giant warehouse of goods, assorted woods, minerals, animals, lands, oil, water... and of course also cheaper labor force, and will be exploited in a proper pace. Now is the time for Africa. It is not a new idea, and it already was checked: Russia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, have had the cheaper workers, the more extended lands, and the bigger productions by man and year, so it is the way for new projects, this kind of devastating development. Furthermore, unfortunately the cooperation has become in a bow from where launch the proper prospecting for finding new places to make business. The factories will be relocated year after year to back and forth, here and there, either the desert or the mountain, wherever it be cheaper. But never where it could be safer: wherever it is, the risky activities always are risky activities.

##

10. A brothers Grimm tale called economy.

### Things that are free everywhere, at all time.

An accountant, who was working for a former smuggler, once said me: "whatever you want to do later with the accounts, you need to point whatever happens, everything makes economic sense: and, if you miss some pointers, the accounts will not go well". It is true, one exception could be this points that belong to nobody, that are commons. Nobody includes them into accounts.

The way we behave has been very indicative of what we have considered since ever traditionally common resources, at least until they have stopped being free resources. This applies to forests that were not productive: waters near our facilities; the strip away from the coast and even the coast; aquifers; wetlands considered "useless and unproductive"; the same air; the soil that no was plowed; the soil of the cities, and of course every place or distant resources and unguarded.

As the students of Economics and Business digest while they study the "dynamics" of the economy, business and finance, naturally they assume that all this is usual, whatever you do, whenever the resulting benefit goes either to the company or to the administrator. The negative results that fall over the surrounding environ were considered as unforeseen or strange bugs, and only were seen as accidents when have harmed the health of people. Over the years, the first national Acts in the US initiated a slow condemnation of these incidents and accidents, as well as laws and agreements generated in 50 years, so that today the companies that stain or damage pay for it, at least in the rich countries. In spite of this, mentality has not changed in substance, has changed the risk taken to be fined or create problems with the society.

On the surface, not at the bottom, remain unanswered the following questions: where society is benefited by it? The only value is the money? Where are recorded the losses on health, environment or resources? Nowhere never has been made any effort or attempt in this regard.

I will tell you more about this question. A reasoning as cretin as soft, not only poor, hypocrite, cunning and without any hint of respect for people, is this one: how do we account for common goods such as air, and therefore air pollution, the value of air, water, soil, one species, etc.? I could reply easily, with a naive and humble calculation, asking the lower price ($1), pointing only real losses, as follows: is it fair to claim for the air, water and soils polluted, for each specie lost (at least 50 main species), for each great ecosystem that has been lost, for the health, the ruined and banned places as whole (there are at least ten important), the ruined seas as whole, each disease toxic proved (at least 20). Well, in this case, we would have 107 items, that multiplied by $1 make $107: these $107, multiplied by 7,000 million inhabitants, makes $749 billion. Could be it fair, by bottom? I am only starting to make calculations...

This is my way to tell you and ask you this: when do you go to awake and see all that you have lost? You do not notice anything, do you? Now already you know what are the commons, things nobody notices, things that nobody claims, free goods, free losses.

### How some men do make that things be astronomically valuable.

First of all, we must recognize some issues things that are squeaking: how is it possible that the western citizens have now earnings between 7-14 times greater than which have had the former generation of grandparents? Only petrol and machines cannot explain it, but by the way the people consumes and trades with things. Although you do not like, it has not sense, nor good end.

One issue that turns out to be really intriguing for me (I may be a weird soul) is the appearance or increase in value of things until levels quite astronomical. I keep wondering again and again how is this possible? How beginning from simple things as soils, cotton, cows, wood, emerge other things that also are simple (but specialized), and others more complex, but more ahead on the way, you just see things or services which finally reach an astronomical value?

One day I suspected the answer where I never supposed it could be, the greed as a mark of modernity. Over this, there are brimming words like are growth or development, and its sum: thrive. Greed is an individual portion of terrain where sow the complicity of others, which can be split into percentages, in commissions for the covetous and for whom are offering. Thus arises the value of some things in the world, those of astronomical value, which no sense could be related to anything that really exists.

(How the value of things increases as the services and goods are more complex, for some groups)

We could doubt, referring to the picture above, where to put the word security: perhaps the only "derived service" which should be between the "essential services," but according to our real world, is this one. Then, the shape of the pyramid would change.

With some cynicism, we could use physics to try to explain this, if possible. However, unless it has changed the first law of thermodynamics (I guess it continues fulfilling the principle of conservation of energy which says that "the energy can be transformed but cannot be created or destroyed"), is pointless how are there so much money in the world that does not corresponds to the value that could be obtained from all unprocessed and processed resources at one moment, which are the basement, the foundation, the bottom floor. In many points along the economic chain, the value is being multiplied by some factors freely (I would say happily), is handled by those who have control over the access to resources. The ecology shows that this kind of processes do not take place nowhere, are not possible on Nature, economically it could mean for Nature a burst of one population over the rest, imploding finally the whole. We understand easily that an inverted pyramid of population has not future, but seems to be never applied when referring to money.

I like math, because math show us a lot of things, and all can be universally applied if have a mathematical basis: and math show two worlds of efforts: by one side, a big part of the world follows the math's laws, when the transforming of resources and the value of goods produced is related to the effort made throughout the process; however, by other side at the economical and political top of society, the human processes seem to be rid of that law, at least for some processes and some humans. In our economy, not only basic goods and secondary goods have currently high prices: actually the chain of primary goods and services continues with a large chain of add-value services, high value services, high future value added services, services of goods of technological high added promissory value, and always with more and more adjectives, and goods of stratospheric value, when not galactic.

I delved a little into the accounts of the major interest groups, in the figures of the five main world business centers (five are a few, there are many more with a pull on the money), and even setting aside two important purposely, the German and US stock markets, you cannot find there any true relationship with primary and secondary resources that actually are produced, at least numerically, in order to find some correlation with the value of real goods. Perhaps it could be explained with a sort of name like "high value stratospherically cash of services of tertiary services for future improvement of yet undiscovered goods"? And counting the volume we produce for 4,000 million (the rest consume a bit or even just not consume because they just are waiting their opportunity) is very clear that the same numbers of international organizations do not hide as each ticket in the world is being swelled.

For every $1 million is moved, the 70% of this value does not exists in fact, never are translated into a real good, somehow the value of services are related strongly with the size of business done, there are nothing at the other side of the mirror: and within this value, the 30% is related to real services as professional work, and the rest is a fiction created to store the money in the peak of the economic chain, in the peak of the pyramid. This is a fiction that allows making quickly appearing and disappearing the cash resources.

In other words, beginning from 100 miles square where would have lived 1000 persons, currently we must produce money to maintain the costs of 10000 miles square, where are living 1 million people with different expenditure levels. One person can live in one mile expending just $100, and others can live in 50 meters square expending easily $30000. And I have not come to the ends of the line, there are very far situations from this samples. Very probably, $1000 price for a computer that could be a powerful tool would be affordable, equitable, fair, and right. But other goods and services are not in a just point, despite to be widely presents everywhere: every illegal activity as poaching, the drugs traffic, the childhood labor slavery, but also many specialized positions that do not correspond with their real possible value. Of course, when you see an iron or copper mine, you should understand that nobody eats either copper or iron, but these metals are around us in our homes and appliances, and the task of transformation, design, research, development, distribution and selling, all this has a value, has costs, and must be paid. But in this chain of transformations, there are kinds of jobs that do not suit very well, in terms of value.

Once more, we are each of us who participate and allow this way of emptying our jobs, works and life, day after day. And it looks that opposite lifestyles claimed may coexist at the same time, even in the same place. Those who claim a lowering of lifestyle and consumption, a smart management of resources, the control of population, and the others who claim for more marble in their homes, more noble metals, better cars and more appliances, more and more. Despite the different voices, in both positions are still desired and consumes with equal emphasis.

Seriously, have you ever thought that the value of some things did not made sense?

### A meeting in small committee, and the whisper of streets.

You already can know and suspect something about it, but very different is to be witness of this kind of jobs, the high-jobs: in the intimacy and remoteness of any curious ear that provide the halls of large companies, it always comes a time when executives already do not make more business, it comes a time for relax, they start... to gambling with power. This whiles, these chats about other companies, this "I've noticed there..." ... "Why we do not..." ... "This will be mine..." ... are mystic whiles, are the heaven of business, are other world, other power: and also are the power which grabs the work of parliaments, decides what will be done and what not, decides why you will have something and why not other thing. This power possesses something actually is valuable: our conformity, our unawareness, our wanting of live without understanding, but with this nice wellbeing.

As sample, one upper club of this mystics is the European Round Table of Industrialists (ERT): they know with cause what do you purchase, what do you like, what would you need in other circumstances, and what you must want, what should you covet, in order to grow and keep in the peak of power. Nothing strange, there are a lot of clubs so, an entire deck. This clubs decide what happens with the 60-75% percent of workers with your permission and fulfillment. In the section Invisible tools, are informing us, you will see who works for they and how they do: the genuine genies of persuasion.

The greed is in our hearts, and if not is sown. It has not pointless to claim a contract and a life that we do not like too much, whereas simultaneously we are willing to improve our price, as possible, oh yes, we like. Spain has been the perfect sample: the weird who said "this will not go well, it is a folly, we are going towards a cliff," was disdained and put aside, like a naive fool, whilst the motto in the chess, in the office, in the State, in the street, in the road, in the pubs, in the office, even in the kindergarten always was the same: "anything goes, and goes to more, take advantage, boy". Even now they are finding the new way to rebuild the same system and the same incomes, again: ¡to live thus, it was so beautiful!

Energy is a good that we cannot do without. As the water, it is. Costs from the new paradise of wind energy have changed a lot. Since the $0.45 - 0.35 / kWh in the beginning, the cost has lowered to $0.04 - 0.06 / kWh. And it continues being a weak business. Years ago (at least forty years) the solar panels were affordable by about $100 / watt. Currently, we are seeing other solutions, are photovoltaic panels disposable at prices below $0.40 - 0.70 / watt. Still is not profitable to run this energy, while others give more money. Once finished the WWII, the oil had a cost of $19 / barrel, but this has increased until the current price of roughly $100 - 105 / barrel. That is a business. And other energies will become like petrol, a profitable business, an expensive energy, be sure. Your children will pay all this.

We accept proudly that we are all related, as a kind of spectacular phenomenon for talk about on meetings: but, accept we that we are a guilty part of a huge injustice? Not, we do not, we only continue our travel back home, light up the TV, we make the buys, and afterwards we go to bed with our love, like our mate makes with us. We cannot do nothing, never can do anything, no way, except something we think deserve: to live how we are living, at high speed. Everyone has always a reason to support his blindness: we have studied! We have struggled so much! We have applied so much time and effort to reach our work! So we deserve the result: but nobody say nothing about our works, what are we doing really, how is affecting the world our portion of influence: how much would cost us everything we get so cheap, if their owners could be truly their owners? Do not claim for the price that Arabs or Venezuelans or Guineans set for his oil, is their property, as yours is your land. Of course, all this supposing that a true Government sets the price.

I am not sure whether the executives have the guilt, but I am sure they do not have remorse about anything, absolutely. Across the world, there are children like yours who also need dental care also need to sleep hot, just like at home. Simplify your economy, and you will see things change in a few years. Flee from wanting that everything changes quickly, changes take time, so go slow, but go.

A way to compare economies in real time -or almost it seems apparently\- is the real prices or hamburgers in different countries: the Big Mac. It is supposed, the hamburger is made with the same (nasty I say) components in all those places, then it allows know the exchange rate for money in different places, and thereby the overvaluation that have the things. That means Sweden or Norway have the higher prices and level (at $7.8), the Eurozone is more expensive than US (at $5), while China or India have the lower prices $2.6 − $1.7)... It is used as reference, one more, which explains what is really running in those wonderful minds that trade stocks and bonds worldwide. That is how they see you.

##

11. The question of XXI: what is that am I missing?

### Beautiful and useless stuff: let be no lack of anything!

Is really and accurately the question that everyone would do: figure out; look for the thing that could be lacking in our closet, in our soul.

What we lust to have? Absolutely all that might be created anytime, do not matter if necessary or not was. The other question is immediately what else is missing for selling?

As result of a contract among workers, consumers, producers and banks, we are running a race that is going down by bad way at the moment, of course never examined closely by nobody. Is infinite the shelling of terrific goods that we do not know exactly what are used for, which end being like the air we breath. Since the sixties, the capability to enjoy with our lifestyle of doing all these beautiful things as travel, work less and less (or that is what we think), to acquire almost all what we like, and not worry about nothing, explore, all this became a common occurrence, it was rare that someone does not have access to it. The word adventure ceased to have its original sense, you could go anywhere in the world, bathing in a pool, and have a beer with caged animals in the tourist park near you. That is the color and tone of our consumption. That was our dream, that of Westerners. We thought it was possible by our intelligence: we never have suspected it was a consequence of our predatory behavior, our voracious greed turned on business object.

Has been sometime reckoned the value of this spend of resources, the debit generated by all this, the amount of resources that have been left hanging by the road, abandoned, the value of all that has aged before being monetized, without even including the environmental value of it? This never has been, nor the least. One part that supports this huge consumption is the world of home and personal stuff. The numbers become terrifying, hallucinogens, could not make sense in a science fiction movie, but we live with them quite naturally. Please do not be alarmed with the numbers that I am giving, but they are real and have been verified in the area of developed countries. These numbers on average envelop your home or your personal life by 60%; the rest explains the variation between different sites.

In an average Western home, or in urban households in countries of high development, there is an average of 7,800 objects, while a mid-level home reaches the 4,500. The value of these objects (home included) varies between $0,45 and $2,4 millions. In the life cycle of a home developed, counted 25 years, the value reached by purchased or embedded objects is $187,000, and its loss in value is an 84%. It has an explanation, for each field of consumption.

The furnishings have become a kind of signal, a skin, a show of power, and a way to say that all goes well for us. Thereby, must be renewed according to the style prevailing and is expected to have successful people. Thus, furniture (8 out of 10) is on average changed after a period on the range of 3-5 years.

The appliances are a tribe of objects vying for attention without actually being doing anything important. There are not so many needs in the life of a human being to need to live many objects around simply doing "something". The total average number of current appliances offered for purchase cannot be exactly calculated: only an estimation from the number of patents, brands, categories and companies, has allowed a real approximation on the order of 4,000,000 different stuff clearly on the market (a pool of stuff, but not all, the whole is many fold bigger). The average number you can have around yourself on sale is 153,000. Sure you will ask how is possible estimate it. It took me almost two months investigate across the WTO, sectorial organizations, web companies, reports, and consumer associations; and after all it, contrast in numerous data-sheets the non duplication of the same data, and bring a real value on the bottom if possible. It was impressive, I never could believe this I learnt, but is not hidden and is very visible. I should clarify that I not intend to sell this information, is not my purpose. Anyway, it needs a stronger work in order to make it usable.

Hygiene (where feminine products are the bigger response existing) is a safe business: the average number of things for hygiene in a bathroom reaches the 350 stuffs, and you could not find one bath with less than 80. Your skin, your hair, your hands, your beauty, actually could be using only 14 different substances, that truly need in the worse of cases. And concentration for doses, creams, soaps or jellies, is three to five times that necessary for its proper application, besides being a completely unnecessary consumption. But if you do not see something dense, you think it is not effective. The worst, you do not know that, the most of times you are applying over your skin a perfect food for bacteria, the ideal bed for them. And even you are avoiding the light from sun could come to you, weakening slowly your whole health. Is better do not talk about babies: nobody will doubt never no one word, no one product, no one improvement, if are for the babies, must be good.

Actually, vitamins, herbs, are not a "better" or a miraculous repairing in your life. Vitamins are naturally in food (unless that food is not food), sunlight or when body runs well create and activate some of them. The natural way to obtain this is already established by Nature. When you cannot achieve it naturally, you can improve the absorption, achieve the help of compound treatments, as well as it was discovered time ago by the chemical companies that herbs can do. No one herb on the world is an enemy, it bad use only is. But miraculous processes, five shots, two weeks, three doses, four boxes, they promise that you can continue to live just as bad, but correct something with such ease, are nothing more than a gross sale designed in very simple way, allowing companies reach anyone.

No subtle marketing idea has been as smart as this: somehow, ¡you can auto diagnose, you can treat yourself! Somehow, also you can feel on the Nature taking some herbs. Please, like you need to take some herbal, sure you need to act and live again with more sense, and that is not sold in a gym or in a box, or in a medical consultation. More yet, do not be naive, companies spend money in reach beautiful colors, smells, and a perfect touch for every stuff. That pale pink is so pretty! The better touch is the one of your mate, not the cream. And herbs have been and are good tool for health, when needed, not everyday for everything in every time. Probably will come new lines of "helpers for your health" that will be named as Bio-2-Self-Young.

The world of games is a sample of how some companies make business. You will say quickly... ¡But there is a lot of people who is living thank to game business! Yes, as it is in other fields, that could be right. But say that "we need altogether to play games at least 21 billion hours weekly in order to solve the urgent problems of the planet, not only the poor billion hours currently we spend gaming," is a ridiculous statement, more so, is a sad statement said by clever persons like designers or chairmen from games companies! Do you will say it to Sazza Tiboulé, 3 years old, 3 years starving, who even do not know any vaccine? During this gorgeous weekly time, what do they go to eat? Terrible world, so different issues in different minds at the same time: only humans are capable to do it (say and say again) and later going dinner brimming satisfaction.

The cars are a fantastic world: on average, a car is changed every three years, and have achieved 12 different models, each of which progressively leads appliances inside as these ones of home, being able to do something more advanced technologically. And not being necessary or advisable to move at 80 m/h, the engines are made to go either 100, 120 or 140 m/h. So, it is not surprising you do not like walking, that this will recommended by your doctor.

The last specialist in getting a "high" that has appeared is the phone. The IT companies are truly skillful coaxing people. The wonderful change from fixed to wireless telephony, has managed not only the freedom to communicate, but the duty to pay an annual rent to a millionaire of people, roughly 6 billion lines, 6 billion people paying for ... What need suddenly, desperately so many people say at once? The Internet was built as an open communication system between computers, never closed: the data come and go, your data also, the most important data, data from real folks, real consumers. That is what you are actually giving off, your data, your likes, your economic capabilities, and the deep of your purse. And you pay every month for it religiously as a lover, really fallen in love with mobiles.

You are telling to someone you do not know where is, each time you touch the Enter, each time you pay, each time you press the phone, all the ways you could end be a customer.

### Where is the difference, what more does, where is elsewhere?

A new product needs than the previous one is despised, and that is the work for designers and advertisers. Then, this new hit could be liked. How many times do you use your things? How much money do you spend every month for every thing? Please, be careful and do not calculate quickly for all those things, you could have a heart stroke, or two. Between 7,000 million inhabitants, sure there are geniuses of the sale, can sell sand in the desert and persuade you to buy water bottles for the camels, sell ice in Antarctica, or shade in the Amazon.

Now, I am going to replace the chair of the soothsayers: in the future, you will be completely depending upon drugs of design, protecting you from everything, eating things you do not know now, avoiding contact with anything that is not tested previously, and most likely, you will buy purified air for your home, which is already a fact.

## 12. From the caves... to the crowding in lighted caves.

### The dictatorship of goods

The person who lives in a little city or village thinks that he or her will never be affected by some troubles that happen far away. Life is not so, everything is being connected now -globalization, I guess do you remember-, and if expenses grow there away, here something will end being more expensive each day.

Have you sailed along the Pacific, and clashed against dirty rugs of debris? It is also a spectacle. It is a parade of all sorts of stuffs. Do not worry if you did not have the opportunity to see the phenomenon; you will see it the next years near you, as rather usual event. The increasing of waste follows being big, enough to achieve to cover the 20% of seas in hardly twenty years. You already have got for free a ticket for the spectacle. This is only one feature more that comes from cities, aver all from the bigger cities.

Cities are receiving a 70% of the population, and have offered at least a point in the time, a job offer and prosperity, which dissipate today despite the image that is provided to them. We always think of our town, but cities with over one million people in the world do not follow the rules you will ever meet. They behave as centers of economic relations, and largely for working, but also misery for many of the dwellers: we must also take into account the slums. They have four major consumer lines: energy, food, water and mineral resources, and very few of them are assuming its environmental costs due its behavior, as it does a termite mound on the contrary, that we could use as a metaphor by analogy. Not all cities are like Singapore, not all have the muscled business centers that have this one.

The organic debris, the waste materials, is an invisible actor of this chain we have created. All this mix of things that do not belong to anyone, from which nobody is responsible, are reducing the chance that you have to get fish in your city, you can eat clean foods, or that the price of water will not double in a few years, or that left money to build canals for farming or drinking networks. If the dumps had to pick up only a 20% of the rubbish from cities, would be save a lot of money. Someone will say: but this also is work! Yes, but you could make other works better than this one, not just this work! Does not let anyone could train you not to think, keeping always sleepy, I beg you.

The numbers leave no place now to turn the head and look away: on one hand, we take enormous amounts of water, which in some cases is only properly drinkable, with its inherent high cost; on the other hand, a mixture of fluids returns to the environment, also rarely treated, and even when it is unavoidable to let substances extend within our environment deteriorating it slowly but surely: and we do so in quantities proportional to the number of inhabitants we are living.

The pollution was a problem initially, and after letting people get used to, now it is accepted and adopted as a counterpart of the good life. It is another stupidity more. High levels of pollution are discussed as spectacular news referring to some cities like Shanghai. The reality is different: in every big city meets a select group of highly toxic substances from those already considered as common and normal (nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide or carbon dioxide) to the whole large group of volatile substances coming from the industrial centers that surround or are nearby. This will never be completely restricted, and pricing it can continue to control the cost that each company must pay. But in any case, the company is seeing more profitable to pay the tax to pollute. Who pays the cost directly but does not protests is the citizen, who must assume it on a statistical mode: for every 100 people, it is sure that a percentage has a disease associated with this pollution (among others), but the remaining may be or will be pardoned.

Living in the city has costs: like it or not, you will be required to pay transportation (private or collective); the safety that require large crowds that always include crime; or each of these resources you are using without having to be aware how they are obtained -water, light, heat, food, appliances-, and a place where live; all that we want and enjoy with by day to day, has an added price just for the sake of being essential makes it costly. And so, urges the rest of the chain, and becomes more profitable this business of provide a wellness life. Who accepts this are you, you never taken the time to think how many other possibilities have been deleted explicitly, and still exist.

Between the habits that have the city dwellers, some of them could represent a lowering on the consumption of energy, goods and resources of an average 30%. The only advice about it comes from cities where folks who are aware can achieve very strong reductions on consumption, and it becomes today a worry for the power companies: the companies prefer to go ahead and offer ways to reduce consumption, which do not reduce as much, and give them benefits. That is, looking to educate not spend much, the 100%, and you reduce as much 5%: more for them could be a disaster. No one company in the world will show you nor teach how you could reduce your consumption, it will not.

This book never had the aim to be a place to offer all solutions, although in fact there are a lot of performed ideas already running, but only cause you to explore and think a little. Thus, I will show a little example, so usual. Do you like try a little experiment, yes, do you like? Let's go.

Every washing machine has programs, smart programs, and all programs go accompanied always with also "smart soaps" (at least nobody pretends selling us intelligent water): and every machine has a connection through a water pipe, because of course, the first and widely present dissolvent in the Nature is water. But the idea has never been let make that soap and water can work in the proper order, but has been the opposite: make soap essential above all, and thus more water. Only after half hour keeping the clothes into water, completely wet, allowing the water to a significant degree dissolve the dirt, you will see how is possible save the half of water that the program uses, save two out of three parts of soap that the program recommends; and with all this, reduce the power consumption to half, and save money and the dignity, your dignity.

Yes, I know, of course you are now thinking that with all these advances that we have, everything I have invested, everything I have, I must get rid of it, change it, throwing it away, and also try harder? This is the dictatorship you are carrying into, an opportunity cost. You are afraid to change all the done and purchased. You do not like seeing yourself like a silly. I said you this would be an experiment; I ask you no more.

### Everyone knows how to do calculations, or not?

You are used to spend, not to save. This is an important difference between the habits and attitudes that exist in the country and the city, a real cliff, and shows a gap in the costs that they incur.

When you are saving money for your retirement, you are setting aside a money that someone said you will rent to you (in fact is renting whom you give it), and you will live comfortably, or continue consuming in the same way in that future more expensive than the present. Thus, money exists two times, you have the money saved, and others have the money working, and perhaps they do the same again, and save the money in other hands, the Venture Capital hands (the money has then three or more lives). One day, as sometimes happened, people will awaken together, and will see this joke as is: common ignorance. I advise you deal nothing with some investment companies, the Big Cats, with more than seven lives (in its money).

This is not a mockery against the environment, also against you. The day you like, you will reduce your consumption by your own decision, and it will take place between rates from 30% till 60%. I have not the time for joking. That is a matter of save money, living better, and feel you owns your habits. Just ask yourself: how is possible that in one hand of the world some people can be able to live (survive, survive) with $2 daily, and in the other we cannot live with less than $150 daily? Easy reply: in some places things never are paid on its fair value, and in other places things never are sold on its fair price.

After this, everyone asks the same question: "I am... (a few seconds to think) one of those who pay, or maybe one of those who sell? I will reply you: statistically, you belong to 98% of those who are paying.

I am not the first saying this: the next years some small and medium enterprises will be able to dislodge or break the dependence of the people of the cities from the bigger companies, and generate local labor and business. It will affect to goods produced locally, locally consumed, locally distributed, and also the produced locally. It will not be an issue of ecology, only common sense and saving money. Already are being born a new kind of local banks, that saves money locally, with local partners, for local needs and business, for local younger generations, and do not allow the meddling of bigger banks.

### Crowds, easy to see: the more are people, the more are rubbing.

This tree above is a simplification of the picture shot by the photographer Arthus-Bertrand (National Park of Tsavo, Kenya) that shows how something can attracts everybody: it is a law, you will go wherever you can find that you need, or wherever you think to find whatever you think to need.

That is what has happened with the countryside and towns. According a better life became more accessible target and available, no one hesitated to go where this dream has been offered. The towns grew, growing also new kind of works: the services. Among these services, some are far from those former lands and dirty hands, are high-value services. A high value? So high so the value of this services is held upon a resource (lands, undergrounds and seas) that not worth even the thousandth part proportionally. How could be it possible? This contradicts the trophic pyramid, any balanced energy pyramid. Now let's go see what is thinking doing the world, the 9,000 billions in the future.

The next forty years we will see to be increasing the population of cities, as long as the lands will be expropriated or purchased. A recent reason to go to cities is to have been ejected out your home, your little piece of earth, leaving all back, hauling with your animals and poultry, having nobody to ask for help or defense. This one is the recent wave of migration to cities and/or countries, of people who drag a mix of bad mood, a flood of bitter emotions, a watchful feeling of not to be nothing absolutely, than sometimes kills the person. Let's go ahead, let's go, and let's go see how becomes the life for all. The countryside now is being arranged, organized, drawn and gridded.

There is some doubt about the risks that we have created, against which we have removed? Is possible say it, after going through the Moscow metro or the Beijing one, with 10 million passengers daily?

Something was called exponential growth many years ago. This means that: the 7.000 billion already we are, adding each year roughly 70 million more of people willing to enjoy here in the world, all both are walking on the same floor, and this one is each year a bit more tiny, cramped, shabby and messy. In 40 years, by the way we are following, it will be unavoidable distribute the goods. Other solutions are not drastic but deplorable, though not unknown for all we know.

The following is an example, furthermore is a reference for other goods as energy, coal, wood or food. A common good is the water (again talking about the gold liquid). When we have a spring water for drinking the countrymen, the flow keeps, hardly changes; when the whole tribe wants to drink, the boss must bring order, one goes thirsty, another wastes water, others drink as they want. When we are thousand of thousands people for sharing it, we do not share: then we control the storage, the delivery, the withdrawal, the price, the power, and continue wasting waters, selling, buying and making business with. You could live without light: hard, is not? You could live with no trees, as the "blue veils" of the Sahara's people: no livestock, not ... but never without water. In a ladder, the water is the first step, afterwards comes the health, food, learning, and growth.

We are not animals adapted to no water. And I will repeat this again: we are not animals adapted to no water! We need water. And is scarce years ago.

Where water likes to stay? Water likes stay where it has way to remain a time: hence water loves forests, water loves terrains covered with plants, water loves have time to go down to subsoil, and not hurry to run off downhill. All that the water needs is the opposite thing than we have proposed and realized. Today we already are paying the cost. And as water is the first step, the second and third and next steps depend all from it.

If the world population continues increasing steadily, to an average rate of 1-2%, with strong differences between watersheds, supposing all duties well done, we have 40 years to find where and how feed this plus of almost 2 billion inhabitants. It is no a small issue: an ensemble of business has already designed this road of course, and the Governments only are one tool in this market coming. World is not finishing, simply is running "in other range" for companies.

The closer we are, the more we are tightened, the more stressed and busy, the most we will leave in the hands of others the obtaining of basic goods, most will accept any loss of value, we will pay for it; and those who provide will make more business. The market of waters, lands, and the market of this struggle of folks for the well being, all those goods will be the new piece of a bigger cake. Wake up, open eyes, ears, and include also the heart. That is truly the future. You can understand that, any big company will make giant business with giant populations from towns, where will be the 70-80% of population, but never with the poorest settlers of field-factories.

Let's put the eyes on this: the current neighborhood among China and India is only an unstable balance of forces, where the disputes for ancient borders follow on latency, they share the like for petroleum wells nearby Vietnam, also are sharing the waters that come down from the Himalayan massif, and both are arming year after year: furthermore, altogether have the third part of world population. Here are reasons for any conflict, which suddenly can burst or be skillfully provoked. This sort of events only brings a high pressure over the whole system, economy and resources. In only four years, both economies have slowed from growth rates of 10.3% to 7.8% and 5.5% respectively, and this lowering has been roughly the same for Germany, Japan, Brazil and Mexico: whilst, the US continues growing at least at 2% steadily. Now, does it difficult understand any little war that bursts from time to time in the weaker sites with less population?

Sioux children, image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

## 13. What we teach? I do not recognize my children! Do you wonder why?

### No wonder!

This part of our lives I find it most appealing, probably because I know the importance has the way that we develop. According to what I see, it would be foolish to forget the skills that each child is about to develop, and just need to be encouraged, I am going to let a little digress, hoping you achieve intuit before understand what I am saying.

Something really valuable for everyone is the period of his childhood. And if you have been lucky enough to meet people like me with an open childhood around, you will have seen that the childhood they have had is even more valuable for the others: their attitude and way of deciding, before other values, generates around them a kind of wealth that cannot be measured or calculated, but enjoy. Nor is it a coincidence that what they carry inside the parents, is a land sown for what they can lead their children.

There are reasons to expect that along a period of 14 years, a child who needs learn to act and feel, will catch of his living environment everything necessary to feel at the end among others, is meant to others, which is integrated, which takes a place.

And the teaching that every day are catching silently children, is marked by adult rules coming less and less in the hands of parents: it is observable again in almost all cultures of Western-style, where the unspoken wish that a child runs as part of the "successful group" rules all that is taught. Pass the doors of schools and talking with children, let them to relax, breaking the initial ice, and they free what really learn to think, always listen to them, it is really educational. Furthermore, ten years living without heat, refuge, a known hand, a hot pot, a carpet, essential stuffs so this ones, makes children not confident, this makes them do not expect anything from life.

You can then discover what things they know, and what not. With what things have been in contact, and which are not. You can discover what distorted image slowly is being built in his mind of the real world around him, and of the world that they cannot see. This is even more educational, if you know different schools in different countries. An infinitesimal picture of them is able to show some of it: a photographer called Julian Germain caught it thus.

### They will be there in less than thirty years.

Likely, you would like your children learn things like be a quick learner, a worthy worker for others, a kind of clever key for business, and things so. Good, this is right, that is what is on the air now: be on the ridge, and be stronger... in all fields of the life. And that is just what children start learning everyday if you are teaching them as such kind of things; they also learn what they are smelling on the air, what they are scanning and peering despite your efforts to hide some things. Are fields like the sex, the relationships, labor relations, honesty, races, religions, or the difference between that is crime and what not. Other things as be honest, to be sincere, be thoughtful, be thrifty, be respectful of animals or plants are not maintained because they do not produce a direct benefit.

Anyway, there is no need to emphasize what to learn, they recognize themselves in the lives of their parents, and adults, what is really interesting: you are who teach them, unconsciously, inevitably. They will be as a copy. Maybe you remember the poetry of Gibran Jalil Gibran: let me recall a short piece.

...

You are the bows from which your children

as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,

and he bends you with his might

that his arrows may go swift and far.

...

We are teaching not into schools: we are teaching throughout what they can see in our streets, in our newspapers, in our TVs; all that they can hear in the other room; that they have listen there and here; what you said and I said; what you did and I did. Whatever you would deny, if it has been heard and seen, is a banned mystery, and a mark of the desired adulthood: everything that we wish and praise the adults, we yearn and seek, openly or covertly, are on view in cinemas, in magazines, on television, and ends being "at home and close".

Children learn to love these things, these relations and adventures, the thrill they can get with these things, more exciting the more forbidden, as you do. Beside the excitement, mummified things are indigestible for them from the beginning, and learn to meet them and avoid them. Whilst the world changes so quickly, while your home and your marriage changes so speedily, they hear that must learn things written in black over white, thereby they learn to hear what to do, and listen what like do.

Underneath all we want to teach them, they learn to read under white: they learn all unwritten insatiably.

Like a sack of wishes, as a marine sponge absorbing everything around it needs, the less with you they can find, the more they will look elsewhere: it is a lot more than a logic reaction, it is animal and required. We are not teaching what we collect into the books written on paper, or on web pages: we are teaching our daily behaviors, which are visible in homes and streets. That is what we are teaching to our children. And we teach it mixed with ideas, static and dosed them over a few years in school. Teaching mathematics or hygiene is not a problem; the problem is how to teach it and what use to make of it. I fear that in a few years during which the essential human body (that of a child) is completely predisposed to learn and build relationships and patterns that endure over time, these are precisely directed towards competitiveness, individualism, the collection of goods, but not in the direction that ought allow our children's personality. We transport our own vices to our children, we transfer them our own obsessions and lies, our tricks, creating something like copies of ourselves.

It seems that we cannot do anything but convince all our neighbors, our acquaintances, our coworkers, how wonderful is our life, and this is stupid. Life is not easy, sometimes boring, brings difficulties and obligations, that we should get used to calling responsibilities more often, we do not like too much, but once taken allow us to adapt or try. And this is seen by these observers eyes, they hear and listen it and memorize, and learn the subtleties of our lies, and just repeating faithfully, trusting education we provide. Then, how can we be surprised? All eventually learned behaviors are used and are visible with time: you cannot fail to recognize that everything we see, which makes a generation that takes the alternative, was not indicated in the genetic code; at least a 50% has been taught.

Such teaching fills all attitudes in life: which is very hard to admit to people is that it is not required to teach by word nothing, instead is required to demonstrate in fact, with our own actions, and now that is unlikely, difficult, fuzzy, blurry, distant. We do not want to do the same that someone should teach our children.

This is a key problem now: are our own contradiction, our lack of credibility, and our inconsistency. This lack of credibility as individuals affects all areas of our lives, is widespread: it is visible in our relationships, on the work, our professional attitude in all that we take for granted in public; or in what we stand or reject, in our attitudes to issues that are common (goods that belong to everyone, and anyone), and the worse: is reflected in our laws, and all those agreements that we agree with all its contradictions.

I remember clearly some of the considerations that were established to evaluate the mode of education offered by A. S. Neill, in his school Summerhill. This fear caused by a proposed education without lies or hiding places, seems to have preferred the current education: today, instead of a sex clean and devoid of nonsense, sex as a business is a powerful and comprehensive source of revenue in our Western society (I am sorry, actually it is a worldwide business, never was my aim offend nobody, this one is a global issue). Still is not enough obviously our contradiction?

So thus move the values and attitudes of parents to children: if we neglect trees and animals, they do not feel it; if we do not care how much you get dirty, how much we spend, what and where we throw away, they will do it with confidence; if they hear how to act wisely to get hold of the other and live like kings, will never find pleasure in anything but could be the same. Congratulations: we can keep quiet coming together, doing conferences at all levels, and by writing all sorts of wonderful choices and intentions, while making otherwise below.

What will your children inherit? Your children will not inherit anything, and it is not a problem, because they will not remember anything they never knew. It is easy. Do you understand why nobody is concerned really about it? Someone at the top of knowledge might say: please, talk about education scientifically! I suggest you try to do yourself this question: could you admit your partner to talk to your children's education scientifically? Do not feel you what is to educate? There is no sense in that? Can be packaged the education within 8 kg of colored paper? Can be packaged the entire world you must know in a perfect and standardized list of books?

Be careful, you may find once you reach the age of 50, you may have missed the opportunity to do something as natural and beautiful as educate your children and feel them. Children are fruits of one season: once mature, cannot re-grow. Too many women in the intimacy acknowledge it, and thereby too often times the distance to the man who was her supposed partner.

As an adult, you can make a very enlightening exercise: remember those beliefs and images saved from your childhood as you believed in, including those that you now know were hoaxes, and think: what you would have preferred to know? It is easier to treat children in the face; it is not?

### The universities, the research: still leaders of future?

Universities are a heavenly place, which offer something actually valuable: relationships. And what could be the catalyzing reaction to open mind of students, the relationship with professors, the contact with real tools, with real list of success and wrongs done, in many cases is becoming in a long period for build individually the business and commercial future of each student, each future successful manager.

These former universities or colleges from the XVIII and XIX centuries, on its onset were strongly influenced by its state origin, the surrounding world and politics, and religion. The XX century universities have less to be with all this: slowly have been banished the women exclusion, the religious nature, but not the culture around which remains into the foundation, as are beliefs, thinking, and male dominance.

Beginning the 1946 after the WWII, the United States absorbed a crowd of professors, technicians, doctors, physicists, all of them fleeing from the devastated Europe, falling in the warm places of more than 3,000 Universities. All those centers of knowledge, closely related with companies, with a concept of "campus" like a home where living and study and do everything without need of going out, started a successful road triggered with the inherited treasure of the German patents. The rest of the World reached different results: the same Philip Coombs (President assessor with J. F. Kennedy, and director of the IEEP of FAO) warned the poor results of expenses applied in education worldwide. The teaching systems that have currently success are all those focused to profitable lines of work (whatever the field) always linked to some business. The rest of works, the rest of education has disappeared. Even the more highly trained; when their fields of knowledge are "out of range," have no place out of this.

With all respect for the effort involved in research (which requires your time and give your life, which sometimes takes all the pleasure), I give you my opinion, especially if you are a scholar holder, fellow or doctoral student: when you are allowed and granted to start research, make use of millionaire laboratories, implement large-time projects, initiate trials, be supported with funds and legal support, wage, staff... you are making a kind of jobs that seems to be the only possible, those you think are worth and are valuable, and improve the common life; but nowhere is nobody which want support this if not be by following a profitable purpose. Benefits are healthy, necessary, vital for the business blood: but must or should be linked to reasonable goals and real world: currently some of them do not looks to be so. And large-scale benefits have nothing to do with welfare.

Welfare? You could not talk anything about this in a corporate meeting: there are always people who belong at the same time to venture companies, to investor companies, to financial institutions, and all those companies have lost their pretended social goal many years ago. Another vision around this could be the script of a story from a Walt Disney film.

# Trying connecting the strings.

It is not difficult elucidate that the main groups of beings that have been disfavored simultaneously: the tamers, the domesticated, and those that will not be tamed because they are not valuable for us. It is as easy as knowing who is the owner, the landlord. An owner who really does not know what has underfoot.

"A credulous mind... finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such."

Samuel Butler

## 14. Be informed.

### I lie to you, and you need me.

One century has been enough to develop a raft of skills widely applied in the market. From the initial calligraphy over trucks, through magazines and leaflets, panels, spots on the radio, arriving now to godless TV and the internet: the quickly way to be informed. It is shocking that a company has already grown to seek profits from plagiarism (Plagiarism Checker), or defending the authenticity of the information (HONcode), or provide it already prepared (GreenFacts). I guess you must already have some idea about the powerful tool that is the advertising in its various lines for herding people. When are been visited more than three countries in a year, is visible how any trending is a mechanical behavior digested by everybody.

You can choose how to design and advertising in today's market, the list is like no other ... endless: the image is design, is design the good behavior, are designed the rumors, are designed symbols that identify the successful folks, are designed revolutions; information is designed to influence you, and is collected the information of what people want and what people did not found; we design things that just something missing, and is designed the something that is lacking in things; are designed ways of seeing life, ways to recover the meaning of life, to be eternally young; the repentance is designed for businesses; is designed the time when will be released a patent, and is designed when you discover that it is harmful; are designed words, concepts, lifestyles, body shapes... everything.

Everything, everything is designed and advertised. In a democracy, there is no choice, everything is designed and sold, and all has a price. One phone rings, one voice ask for the becoming line of treatment: "still is not ready," replies the partner; "is not problem," anyway "is the moment to sow the hope," to tell "we are struggling," one day "this will come to light," says again the voice; "post it!" All is designed, every hope, the way you wait thirsty of solutions.

It would not fair go against every technique or field of labor, it is not the question: nevertheless, there is reason to have to choose a path, when a field of work is being part of a production and sales mechanism that we actually getting poorer, not only individually, but in the resources and the state of these. I am aware that is difficult the exhibit of some statements when these go against a corporate and social culture, assumed as something beneficial and desirable, if in fact has never been subject to revision or criticism, has never gone through a filter of responsibility: there is a small attempt to pretend this, between the associations of advertisers, but only due to desire for protect themselves of judgments or losses coming from certain cases that have been viewed minimally by society, and very little else.

You believe possible to be informed about what is taking place even in the other side of the world, by media, TV and mobiles. Are you sure? What do you know really? The half of that you believe to know is what you need believe, the other half come from other source, which talks following a rules that you do not know. One day, a journal talks about your neighbors, your street, your work, your school... and you are not sure what are talking about, if you can have listen wrong, it is not really true: then you become angry, and can imagine how much different may be the tale when sounding in the ears of foreigners or the far people. Thus, you can believe whatever, that people lives nude, people wants the war, they have five ears and nine eyes, and people eat its own children, but never logical things as that everybody has the same universal needs and worries, there very far from here. The information is a trick of cards. You are continuously giving your vote: that is what anyone would want more from you.

I am suspecting a long time ago, the great opportunity that have programmers by building good websites engines that could simplify the information given, and ease the management of data, when this may affect to public affairs. A feature more should be the touchable character of data, the proximity, and the simplicity, become understandable immediately.

The advertising makes appear things or desires where actually "are not" or in place of those that "do not exist". This labor follows doing the same I said formerly: create things and its values with higher values and prices, over real things and real values, and thus the total weight of all products what are cycling on the economy, are supported over the real resources. Is it not understandable then that the economy, the possibilities of development, can be jammed and leveraged, if we have tried to lift a balloon just economically devastating the takeoff runway itself?

### Always the best.

The different suit which separates us as much from our grandparents in the early twentieth century, is that we have been fed for long with movies, glossy magazines which show a nonexistent world, TV shows, sudden talks scored, faking enquiries to doctors expertise: briefly, a world of magic and imaginary, which so ends being as much alike with tarot or sorcery. I will show you some exceptional or extreme samples of ads, stuff, services and profits, aids that you have accepted as real things, which really never have existed, do not exist, and will exist never, be sure. Let's go with a short list of nonsenses.

(1) To get a "healthy life".

This is an illusion; this does not exist. There is no one being in the world (neither will be in other worlds) that has had a healthy life. Life is not this, life is the time your body passes trying to live, same time others beings try take advantage of your body, as could make a lion, a virus, the flu, even the time during you can end under the wheels of some truck. But is not more than this. You can try avoiding risks, acting with sense, but life is not sure, not perfect, your body is not perfect, and it is not a disaster. The major diseases that we have had to suffer have been all those that come naturally from Nature, and almost all of them are already possible to prevent. The remaining ones have other origin, not only its natural emergence (as also), so the costs of all this "whole of threats" could be different and lesser if we avoid all sources that are causing it. The insurance is gathering all kind of threats: the obvious, the traumas, the labor accidents, and the long list of diseases related to diet, lifestyle, pollution and habits, more than 68% of costs.

A portion of health care called health has another name: anxiety about not wanting to be outdone. Why go you pay along 70 years of your life a lot of money ensuring what is no actually insurable, but is sure will occur?

(2) Nature is "cottony".

Nature is not made from cotton as a white cloud where you could sleep. Nature is hard, sometimes unexpected, animals do not live placidly, they struggle every day for eat, keeping their place, breeding their cubs, do not being an easy prey, and so more. Nature is not a park, and those smooth and well-cut lawns are a kind of copy of a strange and aseptic prairie, but are not nature. Nature does not needs really enhancements; needs to continue their own evolution, and needs to breathe. The restoration or recovering must be a way to reach it, but never create a huge garden along the world. When an honest scientist began in Ethiopia the recovering of a vast river bank, only did what was necessary: follow the path that would have followed Nature, replant trees adapted to salty soil, thus allowing the waters were again purified, that cattle graze again, people grow, and revive the economy. Initially it could be seemed a folly, but really was the opposite, a common sense action, to drift with the natural inertia.

(3) Science is the way to thrive.

Science has allowed things like nuclear weapons, browse over the seas with thousands of tankers, find huge school of fish and wipe it fully, light houses, vaccinate your children; but not ever is the way to thrive. Anyone can understand how unlikely can be seen as good a bad use of science when it is applied in her backyard, and you must go away perforce, migrate away. The way to thrive is the use we make of things that we have or we construct, as can be also science and technology, and the sense with we apply. Without a proper use almost everything goes right. Are not small the wrongs made, are worldwide, broad... and deep. I do not want make this a place for a large list of events, nevertheless you can choice what kind, where gone, what gone, what time, what place, what was affected, what was lost, what disappeared, what was the cost, or what is now the cost. You will end tired.

(4) The Earth can support more, or its mirror, the Earth cannot support more.

So far, Earth has endured, at a high cost unrecorded. Earth can support pressure according to the mode with we intervene there. With our current way to doing, nobody is needed to explain what already is evident and obvious, a puzzle of follies. The contempt with which we have done and continue operating, is truly of fluorescent light, and would not surprise me that it could be visible from Ganymede or Andromeda. Once again, if we had not broken a 30% of the land, we had not destroyed an 80% of deep seabed, nor we would have wasted a 40% of the water supply, how much many people could live here? Could you imagine if would have been cleverly done? Anyway, to reach this, the "goals" should and even must change.

(5) The improving of products.

Not exactly: the products improve when the selling has reached its profitable top, or competence appears, and add some feature formerly stored in the drawer, becomes in a new line of selling. When we all have paid a step in the ladder, then appears the next step. As you could find some strange pieces of code into software, written ten years before, that now make sense when appears a new plus to connect on your laptop: it was on the drawer. In other words, the poultry cannot take all feed at once. Do not improve the products, the lives, the food, the clothes... that what improves is the account of profits. We can agree with this provided it includes all of the costs, and does not. By other side, you would or could or ought be more cautious when believe. That does not make sense that you need every week a new help to keep your life, a new enhancer, protector, regulator, complement, concealer, controller or preventive. So defenseless did you come to Earth?

(6) The development provides bliss.

Why are you watching to TV all the day, those top tanned bodies, top women, top men, top stars, top manors, top princesses marrying, top cars, top pools, and superb gardens? Do not you realize that the same movie with the same soft hands, the same bikini barely hiding their thighs and breasts, with a similar pair of shoes on the beach, the same sports car, looks exactly the same hours worldwide? What exactly are you choosing? You go purchase because thus you feel to be happy, sure, and that you buy all the best. What is clear is that you have not seen how are made those images you see, and how are built: it would be a surprise for you. When is not possible to sell tomatoes (those real things), it is sold an invention, imagery, illusions, the incredible products. The TV stars do not share anything ours, only are sharing audience or viewers. Development is other matter: in the onset is a baseline, which includes drink, eat, sleep, and work to live, preferably in your own country of birth: the rest is luxury.

(7) Put on the radio, listen!

Not ever need put on the radio or TV to learn something about, or make a decision. Quite the opposite, most often you could take your best decision without anyone of those tips. Rest, no matter, do not be afraid, you can make decisions by yourself, you not need forever to be advised, each step you take. If you listen carefully only one day the TV, read a web, you can laugh with all those silliness that are said with a complete shamelessness. It is common, a dime of dozen. Even you can learn to talk thus, saying nothing. Nobody who talks on the screen will be there near you to be responsible of anything: on the contrary with your family, friends, neighbors, important links can be established even over the long term.

(8) The experts of the beyond.

We find it easier to believe that an invisible soul protects us and monitors hurricanes, keep in mind that every day, without fail, the Sun rises in the East, and lies in the West. We rather believe in things than making the effort to think and analyze what someone is telling us. You can open the saltshaker, and pour it over fire, and invoke forces, and many more: you are wasting the time, and the salt. And that day the food will be flavorless. We can be experts in some degree, we can be experienced, we can be able to teach to someone something, but how many of us are able to tell clearly what we do not know? How many times we acknowledge the limits of our knowledge? Unfortunately, we do not do, despite is good and necessary.

What follows could be a clear example of how so many people can believe or need believe something, which is completely impossible.

One day, a friend called me asking by a tree called Yakaratiá (the Papayón), as a new kind of food possible, that her seen in a video. She believed possible to reach a food from the wood processed. And despite the habits that are in some areas in the World, that include some kind of mix of wood with fruits and millet or wheat but in little amounts (for example), it has been very hard explain to her (and three people more after her) that cellulose and lignin are not edible nor digestible for humans, in no case, as they have never been either fungi or mushrooms, despite we like its taste. The video, only was a marketing presentation as such portfolio of a company, but is not real. But it shows as many more examples (the most of them actually applied as real things) that with a well-established script, an idea and commercial advertising, the right equipment and appropriate stakeholders, absolutely any story are built. I have had in my youth an advertising study, and I remember very well how is found what people need.

I am suspecting the true value of work still is unknown. The ancient contract offered to millions of workers since the Industrial Revolution has become in a different way, but the roots are the same: "If you want, here you have a good life, but do not mind you, do not worry, do not think about nothing, we have all things controlled". We do not notice, but our acceptance of this way of life is also our tomb. Do not compare yourself with ants, ants are wild, not machines as you are.

Where is your ability, your knowledge, your skills, your freedom to decide if, from the first day until the last only choose between one of the things that are on the market?

## 15. The Food and Organics.

### Organics: are going backward or actually move forward?

It is pointless to go against a food safer, clean, assorted, allowable, that need a handling. In fact, the ecological food already is being handled as needs. It is reasonable, is rightful, when is thus and no another thing. Where is the right point? Have we balanced the fulcrum, what we want and how we do? That might be one of a list of questions raised about need and benefits of ecological food.

Delve into the ground of this discussion, is finally reduced to mention the possible interest you might have one or the other method. The intensive cultivation has a definite goal, above all the other possible: achieve a big production, with only one crop, applying a standard method, with the lesser manpower and lesser expenses, in the lesser time, fulfilling the measures required by distributors, and trying increase the share on the market. This let behind some features if the required standards are right.

The ecological farming has a fully different aim. Including also the production for own consumption, may have the same goal (the profit) but fulfilling other functions as the following: restore the health of soils where performed; provide doubly sure food (pass stricter rules than industrial food, and are proximate to original species); diversify production; decrease dependence on a crop and its price; recover the security in feeding obviously; facilitate the supply nearby; allow operating different sizes with different applications; recover depressed areas that have not found another outlet acceptable; maintain seed diversity and wildlife; facilitate and integrate the opening of special crops; allow recovery of fruit trees, secondary species and protectors; allow the production suited to towns; combine work with cattle feed; integrating waste by harnessing in the cycle; allowing use of non-fruit crops; creating a market more directly, linked to local economies; and linking together secondary products and cultivations, which alone could hardly be developed successfully.

The food-handling industrial companies, which approaches us to our feeding distributors, offering us millions of tons of perfect tomatoes colored in Pantone 485, within the same range of width and hardness, indelible (it never dies!), without life, with prices that allow workers just live, in the range of the harder workers (on the bottom, plowing soils) till upper workers (those trading with high-added-value-quality-services, what means enrichment), can it continue being interesting? You decide. There is no other way to do this? There is a way. Always it was there. One way allows make much money to few, the other allows feed and live for more, more people. What were you thinking?

For a while, let's go again to mall, enter with no money or purse, to walk slowly, and observe what you are watching. The most products there, after months have not been paid to suppliers yet. Half of them were kept for months, one, two or three (barring some fresh vegetables), waiting a buyer like mummies. All foods are there in the shelves defying nature, are kept without decomposing. Naturally, it is good for us, whenever we go there the food is waiting us, but not always: many foods are valid if proteins are not lost. These proteins are not screws, nuts, springs, plastics, or soap: are biological molecules, as biological molecules change and must change and react to environ conditions, as the ripening, light, wet, pathogens, time passing, its chemical inside and more. Let's go try to put a bit of sense into. I hope now suspected in the skin of the fruit itself, for example, where the plant is defending the fruit, should have a few important substances for it, like the inside should oxidize rapidly in contact with air. A skin bathed in chemicals may not have many defenses, and also if you cut the fruit, not rust!

One reason given for the storage and preservation treatments is the need to get products to consumers in good condition: this can also be achieved without such treatment, producing near and what it takes, really adapting the field, production and work demand. Otherwise, would remain only the interests to a business that does not protect these values, which are also important.

The organic foods have been present with us since our onset as well as with other animals, with all its invisible guests, and after a generalized change that has taken place in the XX century as consequence of the change of techniques (I guess on this time you already have been reflecting a bit about this bet) and only roughly fifty-thirty years ago, it was when some people began to regain consciously organic farming. Some regions in the World yet have never seen these changes, and others were aware where the knowledge has been higher, as can have been Canada, Germany, Sweden, Finland and others. You cannot argue that it has reached the market; you can discuss the handling to do the same.

Plants, with its guests and visitors, their various environments, the soils where live, and all the interactions included, are systems created along millions years, being necessarily related the pieces of the system the ones to each other. Even today, barely we have learned from a few cases of interesting relationships among plants and its guests, behavior, abilities, always with implications into the chemical level: hormonal molecules are factors used sometimes as drugs or active principles, sometimes as controllers of growth, or even for the further management of fruits. The industrial interest has its roots in the production, and not more away. It would be a good idea if applied to feed Martians, but not the best to feed us.

### The leeway or the room for maneuver, is lost?

The changes around food are not only "to have or not to have the supposed food safety, or the happiness of eat something clean": it implies rather all in our lives, our activities, our economy, and most important so I think, the leeway we have for correct the wrongs. The important changes operated externally by the human hand, can be organized in five groups (I am sorry, sure there are more groups, or can be otherwise organized, or being lacking some issues):

(1) On the lands: the reduction of the number of species cultivated and associated around them; the destroying of soils containing the organic matter and structure, which supports the vegetable coverage; the exhaustion of soils, and for many regions of the underground waters; the rising of sulfate and nitrate levels into soils to values that will not be lowered unless have passed many years, and its slow trespassing to waters and its cycle, the water communities and the nearby farms downstream; the loss of soils in tropical region by overexploitation; the degradation of lands wrongly changed, by the countering the local natural ecosystem. None of these "changes" might turn out to be harmless; I hope you already know.

(2) On the genes: the essential linkage of plants to chemical treatments producing a couple or triad product (seed-treatment-fertilizer); the induced resistance to some pathogenic specie with wide effects over others; the extensive change of genes from different specie that share the site and now "can talk to each other"; the overflowing introduction of molecules that may be mistakenly recognized at the genetic level, which can act as never should act.

(3) As consequence of practices: the decoupling of livestock from the grasses and soils unbalancing the consumption of meal, becoming his breeding in a world filthy for animals and for us; the absorption of chemicals by plants, arthropods, and upper animals in different degree, becoming every being in a carrier of pollutants; the negative impact over soils communities of microorganisms and the related animals, including effects over the breeding, behavior, feeding, and survival; the abandonment and desertion of cropping from natural species, its management conquered along centuries, currently avowed worldwide by biologists or some agronomists.

(4) Related to treatment of food: the inclusion into the food of compounds absorbed on the soils and from the spreading, in a mix of tested and untested effects, accumulative and no accumulative substances, and byproducts; the appearing of a large list of relationships between chemicals used and alterations of metabolic functions, effects over other diseases or linkages yet under investigation, additionally to the already unveiled or described today; the extension of food with less variety of nutrients, high content in fats, greases and substituted carbohydrates.

(5) On the market: the fill of the market with improved modified organisms resistant to poor conditions of soils, or highly productive for biofuels (as consumer of nutrients), always coming exclusively from the genetic engineering; the displacement of natural food by the treated, the processed or elaborate food; the omnipresence of feed fed beef, the dependence from global prices marked in the rich countries; the oversizing of farms accounts and machinery; the loss of estates by poorest peasants in the undeveloped countries; the sale of lands to low prices in those countries; the linkage to an extensive range of packages for carry, deliver, keep and offer the foods; the over production of an uncontrolled amount of waste and debris from the alimentary industry, adding homes, malls, factories and farms.

This scenery comes from the modern and "revolutionary" agriculture, and other fields as chemistry manufacturing, machinery, and the markets of distribution and sale. Then the organic agriculture, can be seen like a back step, or a smart move forward?

### Between food safety and the boot that treads organic farming.

Changes operated are related to the concept of quality of food and its different issues, the most of them have had as goal transform the food in a handling product, safe, but always and mainly marketable: (1) organoleptic features, as the taste, the smell, its touch, how it sounds when you eat, it appearance; (2) assimilative features, what provokes after eating, easily to assimilate; (3) marketing features, as the handling, the size; (4) nutritional features, its contents, importance in nutrition, modifications, compounds included and excluded, presence of pre and probiotics, flavonoids; (5) hygiene features, absence of contaminants or pathogens (bugs are not welcome), thermic treatment, conditions for storage; (6) service features: stability to decomposition or alteration through treatments (freezing, drying, salting, smoking, canning, UHT ultra-pasteurization) use or purpose, keys for selling.

Is there some rule that could define a behavior for the handling of food? It is there, could have been the Codex Alimentarius. Anyway, as many other rules this could end being a new way to control the market and its characteristics, what is common and appreciated in high offices. It is a join of norms generalized about the features of food, revised mainly by the FAO and WHO, including approved food additives, many methods of analysis, lists of contaminants, inspection and certification systems, and residues from medicines and pesticides. Are established the maximum levels for substances, conditions for frozen food, fresh vegetables, juices, cereals, legumes, derivative, proteins, greases, fish, meats, and more. An agreement called TBT (Technical Barriers to Trade) regulates trade restrictions by legitimate goals according to the health protection of people, animals, the environment and national interests. Another agreement called SPS (sanitary and phytosanitary safety), establishes the individual rights of states to regulate levels of safety applied locally, and has a more specified scientific basis. States must demonstrate the scientific reasoning that could base the running off a new regulation, what is intimately linked to commercial interests from food companies.

Examples of why we need treat the food (when this is reasonable completely) and how are we doing this are of many kinds. A common example of treatment in the food is the milk and its pasteurization (Pasteur, 1864): this thermic process has the goal of reduce the number of natural pathogens that contains the milk which are thermolabile, but it does not kill all spores or microorganisms; these little colonies remaining cannot intoxicate humans. Anyway, the treatment also alters the state of vitamins and proteins, with a strong loss of nutritional value. When one liter of milk is treated by the fifth time, barely has any value, but yet keeps some like taste. Two treatments are used currently, mainly with bulk liquids: the HTST (high temperature, short time) and the UHT (ultra high temperature) that eliminate coliform bacteria common in soil, water and plants (E. coli, cholera). The shelf life is between two weeks and three months, but the milk can be reconditioned again until five or six times, and by this way returns to the market. The treatment prevents anyway tuberculosis, salmonella, polio, diphtheria, brucellosis, typhoid and scarlet fever. But, for reasons that really we still do not know, some variants of Mycobacterium avium (which causes the Crohn's disease in humans and Johne's disease (PTBC) in animals, resist the process: that is why UK changed the standards for the process. Two byproducts of degradation on milk are the hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF), a potential carcinogenic, and furosine.

As ever, main and natural diseases are likable to treat, and when it is applied to huge populations makes sense completely. Well, there is a lot of changes to do, a lot of improvements to reach, but now recovering the value of food, our food: that is an opportunity for research, invent and design new ways of organizing this matter.

By contrast, the blanching of vegetables or fruits for preservation, aims deactivate the enzymes that break off naturally proteins, lipids and carbohydrates: the reduction by a hot steam atmosphere of the peroxidase and catalase activity ensures inactivation of other enzymes and maintaining nutrients. The scalding of vegetables is a smart practice during cooking, keeping as many proteins with a simmer. Whilst some processes have been completely established, and could be modified but ever following the same goals of safety, some other processes or interventions can be more likely object of discussion.

A very old debate and argument shows how it works, the wide intervention on food with unclear purposes: it is the use of the growth hormones (GH, or somatotropin), banned in the EU. The European Union banned the use of five hormones in 1988, after some outrage, but it caused the replying of the US and Canada: both countries claimed sufficient evidence, and as a countermeasure increased trade tariffs until the rectification of the EU. What is GH? A study leaded by Choh Hao Li (director of the HRI of the University of California, San Francisco) found the genes that regulate into the cells the production of growth hormones: the GH is secreted only by somatotropic cells within the lateral wings of the anterior pituitary gland. The side-effects never have been completely studied, some of them never were. And are known some common effects already (carpal tunnel, increasing in the risk of diabetes, influence over the Hodgkin's lymphoma, or immune response to GH). In 1985, were reported the cases of Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, in humans treated previously with a byproduct HGH (growth hormone obtained by recombinant DNA technology) extracted from cadavers 15 years before: the use of the HGH was linked to the transmission of prions. The companies that produced and sold the GH are various: Lilly, Pfizer, Genentech, Sandoz, Novo and Merck. Were widely used (today all are legally accepted in the US) for growth of livestock, athletic improvement, and even was related on the advertising of supplementary nutrients by the producer companies, providing an ambiguous idea about the combined effects of the hormone and dietary supplements. The UCSF has partnerships with industry as Pfizer, Genentech, GE Healthcare, Nikon, Abbott Diagnostics, and other research institutions as the HHMI. You can discover a very interesting map about the extension of interests from the UCSF over the world in this map. Genentech is considered the first biotechnological industry in genetic engineering: only the solution of only one dispute among the UCSF and Genentech over the patent of Protropin, patented in 1982, reached the amount of $200 millions, and it was anyway a success. As in many cases, Genentech is a company founded by a biologist (Herbert Boyer, who performed the recombinant DNA technique in 1978, and the synthesis of insulin) and a businessman (Robert Swanson, a financial investor who found the money to make possible the onset of the company, currently the first in funds).

The fact that a significant number of hazardous molecules "seek shelter" within us abundantly, does not mean that anything has changed suddenly after millions of years, unless our food habits: this habit increases fat mass in the body, providing a perfect refuge (a kind of communal living) for molecules that love fat, lipid constitution. It is unbridled consumption of fats that attracts unfriendly agents to place less appropriate. Furthermore, concentrations with toxicity to certain compounds are related to its density / kg of body mass. Again the food deceives you. No matter the mass of the molecule acting, what matters is how many molecules there are.

Many pathogens are naturally presents when conditions allow it: a fungi called Aspergillus can contaminate with aflatoxins the maize, soya, rice, wheat, olives, sunflower, cotton, millet, along drought periods, with high temperatures, and even once harvested the crops, in warehouses with moisture. Humans have resistance to aflatoxins, unlike animals, but children are particularly sensible to it. By one side, is visible the need of control, and by other side the advances offered temporarily but worldwide by processes as this one. However, we should add other solutions in substitution of the pioneer techniques already elders: this ones could be a very real green attitude, investing more in less aggressive treatments (by microwaves, mix of light and heat), and maintaining what has been a primary, worldwide, continued along the life, strong basis of our feed.

As show the studies geared in developing or undeveloped countries, and the data verified from historical diseases in the European and Mediterranean region, in many of these natural diseases the rate of appearance could be diminished by the control of the practices that we make with waters and lands, but those that have not pathogenic origin may be supposed directly related to other issues: the use of chemicals in many ways (the more usual of chemicals in our society turns on in an average of 1,000 compounds ubiquitous, till the number of 10,000 of wide use) and the interaction between our genes, our body, and the environment (chemicals included), what has been called today epigenetic.

### The why of food additives in our lifestyle.

Is not this control and prevention of pathogens what concerns people, logically, is the use of compounds as substitutes of the features: these can substitute the smell, the taste, reach a consistency and feel desired, a selected color that supplies the missing color in the food, or even hide some undesired flavor. The ability to shape food thus is directly related to the sale and harvest conditions, collection or treatment. If you have ever made a jam natural at home, of course in hygienic conditions, you will understand what I am saying, since its appearance, odor and consistency have little to do with the industrial jam. You have in the mall (not in all the countries) food without additives: eggs, natural yoghourts, nuts... and sure, whatever the type of food, the organics. The rest... you cannot avoid what they carry into.

What that more concerns us usually is what is going into our stomach or gut. Is it not so? Of course, how is being treated currently the food is an issue that interest us. Let's go see a bit about it. By one side, the current industry says: "all this must be guaranteed, clean, tested, safe... and beautiful," and finally is a remembrance of how knows the food and fed you. By other side, we might get bored listing all the changes that have taken food. Its related feature for consumers is the price. I will add another more for a clever consumer with common sense, like the way of growth, feeding in animals, fertilizers in vegetables; the health status, pollutants absorbed, and nutrient levels; the package carrier; and the environmental behavior of the processing. And it is quite difficult for the consumer on the street really know what they have purchased or eaten, at least by this way. People have neither time nor knowledge for it. It is not a problem with organics.

Our lifestyle has assumed into our habits and culture some invisible and little dangers that we do not worry because we do not seem it can be important, even we like some of them. We cannot avoid our pleasure to fried and roasted with crispy skin and almost burned: these have inside nitrites, which react in the acid environment of the stomach with beer, fish, or meat, especially when roasted, resulting nitrosamines, the same of the smoke.

Nitrosamines are carcinogenic, one inducing factor of colon cancer. And as it was revealed in a farm from Norway, the reaction of the methylamine of fish treated with sodium nitrite, had as result the liver cancer in livestock, so may be continued with the bigger consumer, the man. Also the acrylamide, another carcinogenic (as ever we only can assume that is possible), appears when meals with high content in starch are cooked at high temperatures: although is difficult assess the dose for its effects, is known the relation with some cancer processes in women and the pancreatic cancer. One example more of toxic pollutant in the food is the benzopyrene, a carcinogenic pollutant (Group 1 in the IARC list) generated at high temperatures, generally originated by wood burning, automobile exhaust fumes (where diesel engines are more dangerous), but related to our lifestyle, in the combustion of organic material or grilled and charbroiled food, and cooked meat products. I am sorry, that is not new; all the cases posed already are known and old. Nowadays we are struggling with new cases as these ones.

The energetic drinks are other case of stupidity. The sales of energetic drinks around the world, that do not have any relation with any real bodily need: in any case are a business of trillion. The possible profits that we could hope, as we usually do, are the profits of drink water ... and sugar! Actually are accustoming our body to nothing but the drink, to the belief of his power. We are paying for nothing, and therefore fatter.

The packaging of food also has passed out through a close watching by some consumer associations, and it reasonably. The package is important for the big selling and delivery, but not in the small markets: by this reason have been performed many designs, with chemical plastics derived from oil. The package must control the entering light, water, temperature, entering gasses as O2, N2 o CO2, or pollutants included the metals, and microorganisms. Two matters can worry us: the huge amount of debris that we are generating uselessly (wood, paper, paperboards, inks, metal, glass and pane of glass, and plastics) while there are possible uses of basic materials (glass, ceramics and pottery) even more economic and cheaper than the used currently, also addressing issues such as weight for its transport; and the transference of toxics to food and its real environmental prices for plastics. The classic plastics of that war are polyethylene terephthalate (PET, with a mild toxicity by release of antimony), polyvinyl chloride (PVC, with some effects over liver, nervous system and immune system), nylon, polypropylene polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC), polyethylene (high or low density, HDPE, LDPE), oriented polypropylene (OPP), or the high nitrile resins (HNR). Compositions of these ones are the Tetra Brik, metal packaging.

First we do and afterwards we study, when we study. A new frontier of concern comes from the nano-particles (based on metals as copper, iron, cerium oxide, magnetite, zinc oxide, gold, silver, titanium dioxide, cerium oxide, or fullerols C60 or fullerenes C70), are clearly transferred from foo to the body, and when observed in plants affect to germination, flowering, or growth.

When we talk about food and organics, we usually forget what this can mean: a new problem in other kind of feed, the animal feed. Plastics such as container or building material goods have now become a problem to redesign, as our way of proceeding is to send them passively away after use. This results in a large-scale burst of garbage in any part of the world: from landfills, urban slums, rivers, and also over the large-scale meeting areas in the sea's currents. The plastics degrade by acids, sun light, salt, but slowly, fragmenting into smaller pieces, which massively entering the digestive system of birds and fish eventually killing them. The plastic soup discovered by a captain (Charles Moore) is not an illusion or film: it causes yearly (at least estimated by down) the dead of 1,000,000 birds and 100,000 sea mammals, is unknown how much of floor in deep zones is covered with this fragmented garbage, and extends for a variable length between 1 and 14 million square kilometers. Here I can only name a photographer who exposed the way he sees it, with whom I agree quite simply: Midway Journey.

What can you find there into? Absolutely all you can find out. Some things are so extremely easy to spread so are the most dangerous, as nurdles. All this debris is also dumped from ships that lose their containers, garbage carried by wings, and from the drainage of bigger towns. And ships sail more the more we consume, do not forget.

The change in the inertia that have the manufacturing, facilities, resources and trade in these materials, is an example as any of what to expect from the new green chemistry, or the change in the handling of products can be made from down: and like so many changes, will be more successful and secure the more local the origin of new emerging applications be, though, with consumer attitudes and commitment; doing it one to one.

Surprisingly, the hemp is a candidate to be used as material for synthesis of plastics, as well as being considered a complete food with a 34% of essential fatty acids omega 3 and omega 9, highly recyclable for several times, having a simpler treatment, and to be a profitable source of biofuel: but the value as drug and competition with other materials and the oil industry make it difficult to start any activities in this regard. Once again, things are not evil or the devil, just do not use them correctly, by greed.

Some pictures belong to PETA.

## 16. Health and research.

### First of all...

Before talking about science, is fair to point a fact so remarkable as significant in understanding of why things happen as they happen. And the matter is: women. Women have been for ages set aside, hidden, ignored, neglected or even expelled from the realm of science, as they were in every field of life barring home and maternity. The best place that many times may have expected is like a sort of assistant or supply for men. It has been a huge loss.

Even if they have made a very impressive feat, it is not enough to notice they are there: as we always go to famous names, we must know that Irene Sendler did not make enough to be awarded with the Nobel prize after saving more than 2,500 children in the WWII; Lisa Meitner did not got any recognition by her work about nuclear fission, backwards that her mate Otto Hahn; nobody could have been able to suffer today the huge work that performed M. S. S. Curie with the radius for years, being barely recognized; Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell suffered the same fate; Rosalind E. Franklin reached to observe DNA by X rays, but the award was leaded to the couple of scientists Watson and Crick. This lack of balance is many deeper than the mentioned. Somehow, women do not need be mentioned with only a little list, they are achieving their place by themselves, by their own means, as are capable.

Today, a recall comes to me, while I am writing: a girlfriend of mine, who is still working with a research grant after his doctorate, was talking me a lot about a few issues around materials sought for the improving of the retention of humidity in cultures, and also implied in other uses less likable. After show off her concerns and explaining to me how she should follow rightly the aims implying the supplier funds, she broke to cry. I was shocked, cold and paralyzed. Suddenly, I understood why was she worried about, but more enough I realized another matter: a very clever person, strong worker and liable researcher, a woman touching essential issues, was wanting go out her work by ethical reasons, wondering what could do out once will be discovered her attitude. Now I wonder myself: is this really what we want, chaining researchers, and mute their own knowledge? Obviously, this is not science, nor research, nor support.

### With less means, but more ideas and nearer to reality.

Although the Charles Darwin before scientists had already occasionally relationship with the state and followed its objectives, it was not the tone until the nineteenth century, when it emerged strongly the use of science, especially in chemical industry. Charles Darwin was focused on implementation and monitoring issues that were general, with not many means (but traveling), although with a great opportunity as it was the voyage of the Beagle. The focus of the development was based on field observation of priority in establishing causal relationships in the systematic study, and above all this, in a search for a general explanation really made that could affect any living, having then Darwin any genetics laboratory. The approach was probably correct although not be based on laboratory research (rather than exhaustive subsequently over the years that followed until today) but in reflecting on events that inevitably must and can be explained with numbers, which will not have the mathematical to do not harm: on the contrary, the quantification of the facts can delve into the truth and correct explanation, and of course correct it. And yet, imagine and find out the why of facts.

The same could be or look today, but it is not. Scientists junior, and senior, are focusing research that being general theory (this goal is highlighted and given continuously in all papers) are far from being actually. The research can address diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, or viral diseases, always looking on the genes the possibility of a sort of control over the process. But the method fails statistically when the scientific study sample sizes are hardly defensible, while there is a notable lack of consistency in the clinical data obtained, while the actual disease risk populations reach the 400 million inhabitants, from 7.000 million. And not only is meant to be scientific, but it is believed to be scientific, while forget the high margin of error involved, and just accepting the genetic variability. And of course, in an extended form, the goal is always to learn to intervene in nature, never learn to adapt to nature. You can agree to a remarkable and several number of research and applications of the same, but the number of disagreements that I feel profoundly with others is high, due to the intervention in nature with an exclusively profit, taking advantage of situations that could be diminished dramatically by acting with head.

Today is being sold with all the effrontery of the world the idea that one or two controlled genes can be considered the simple solution of one independent and lonely disease. If you are a humble scientist by training, think this two or three times before accepting. You are witnessing the manipulation of science, the science that you liked and called you for going to classrooms.

The genetic code is not the responsible nor the solution for each process we pay attention: not, is a golden opportunity to concentrate in the laboratory and in the factory that finances the production of new invoice solutions, without rectifying the bulk of the conditions that cause the problems really.

Moreover, when patents end their life, suddenly are discovered saviors studies about inadvertent effects of compound X, and miraculously jump everywhere, then the compound can be replaced by a new patent, and the business continues. Try here with some you could know. No matters if the elder DDT or a recent antibiotic. The important is that we keep winning with it. Student: when you finish your school, try to acquire and have a good criterion, although that have a real cost and effort: to filter many supposedly scientific writings that supposedly are "reviewed" between friends. Unfortunately, we are not looking at the behavior of nature as a whole, because it does not matter, as it could have interested to Darwin.

In regard to the research and its application and science, it is obvious the qualitative and quantitative leap between countries, but not the human: and this is important to people. The talent and ability to work is not located in a country, nor into sex, but are likely to be some possibilities for this; but are scattered, waiting for a catalyst to put them to work on something appropriate for every talent. And it is very difficult to see then the relationship between talent and passion for a subject, the skill, and discipline.

An extreme example (though not exclusive at the time) the inability to stop the passion and talent of an area can be found at Spartan patience of Marie Curie, which I mentioned at the beginning: she developed the work in prison conditions, conditions that could not admit a single current student of a faculty or research center in the world. Though all, she did her work.

### What is being scrutinized in the body?

The complex lot of biological functions that has the human body is controlled in various ways: some processes are conducted and influenced by environmental phenomena: some of them are known as the circadian clocks; their rhythms seems as clockworks, controlled by different agents. Other functions are controlled or conducted with the stored information of genes.

We are being forced to follow those cycles or patterns that Nature has, as in the case of mammals is the turning of the Earth, provoking the appearing and disappearing of light daily. As we need know what interesting things for us are happening outside and inside, our cells have inherited from our ancestor the ability to detect signals that tell us where, what, how much and when are there things we could use somehow: light, temperature, water, smells, surfaces, colors, nutrients, mates ... all those things which means something for our needs. Also we have our cycles: for example, our growth stages include cycles, our memory, our links with others; all follow cycles and sudden events.

We, living beings, are communication beings, and despite we apparently only talk externally, by signs, visually, listening and touching ... it is because our nature does not bother us with the essentials, those which are rolling down, permanently, in every cell, in every organ, at the chemical level. You must know and assume it. Your life has a hidden chemical essential language. You do not notice all the time, but is there working.

Your heart has a rhythm, variable, allows you go faster, and sleep quiet. Your arteries and veins respond to heat and cold. Your stomach responds to hunger, to that strong roast, to poisons, and the sweetness of the cake, more than your taste buds. Your body will tell you sometimes that you are tense, or you are tired (maybe of your boss!), or will depress you, or you will feel cowed, or will throw you in bed with fever, if someone sneaks into your blood, as a virus, as a bacterium. These are all responses, what runs continuously. Some information never is visible, but is there: the instructions to repair the swelling of your spleen, the instructions to recover from diarrhea, how to fight against cells that turn crazy. The body not always knows how to answer, but has thousands of mechanisms. And all of them are important, very important.

Changes in the activity come from many causes: a very hot day, a lack of water, a drink dirty water, too much noise for eight hours daily, to breath powder all the day and more: many years eating little amounts of preservatives, salts and sugar substitutes, months or years adding small amounts of pesticide residues, small and "dumb" slowly accepted quantities of metals. Furthermore, you help this with your own habits: you do not walk like any animal in its natural condition, always used the same foods unable to do without them, and your body makes very little "work" day: driving long, long time. So things happen, invisibly, imperceptibly, every day, on the recommendation of not know how many stupid advice on TV.

By other side, the set of genes that we have, may contain a right set, may have a lack or absence of material, may have changed, be duplicated some of them, modified, mutated, harmed, and even being forced to the expression or be silenced by other genes or molecules acting into the cells, all this naturally. These questions are matter for work in bioengineering, genetics, or pharmacy. The intervention along the chain of events between genes and genes or molecules and genes, is a path widely opened in research, as makes sense, but also implies to do many questions about the how, the when, the where, and very important, why and what.

### Faces of the research.

The scientific method is based on the hypothetical-deductive reasoning. First we observe (1), we formulate the questions (2), we propose the hypothesis (3), make predictions about the assumptions that provide the answers to questions (4), and experience the congruency and infallibility thereof, must be this measurable and quantifiable (5). Thus, we can give way to a theory. Wonderful, so far so good, and it is right! But in light of the use made in some cases (many) of science, applied to technology, it is clear that something more than the scientific method is necessary. And who finally applied science through technology must necessarily be responsible for meeting targets previously defined by society. It is not reasonable to allow the opposite: it would mean continue with a free license to do anything.

A story about drugs can show the two faces that the science has: knowledge and the purpose of its use. We have a list of different chemicals that operate as venoms, and the kind of related effects that may appear. It was discovered some years ago that the basis of the electrical transmission (under a chemical basis) into the nerves is identically found in simple animals as well in humans or mammals, but the patterns may be different according the specialization of the animal, their body and structures or systems.

One between many uses that have drugs, e.g., are the mitigating or relieving of pain, specially when morphine is unable to do it (this one is the case of the Prialt drug). And it is perfect. Yes, that is science applied; all can recognize that it is an application and desired use of science. When one source of chemical compounds like the natural compounds from these cute cone snails, a huge source of venoms that can reach the number of 200,000-500,000 is discovered, even a 1% of these substances can be applied for purposes which are far from be therapeutic goals. The same applies to oil derivatives, or traditional chemicals. These chemical compounds interact with biologic systems "hassling to another," by altering any of its functions, organs or systems.

No one can say that the seeking to build research drugs is being made deliberately to annoy people, no, of course not. But must be understood how the scientific world actually is doing research. When a chemical company has a research or sales budget as large as a medium-developed country, when is participating with shares in other companies in related fields, when becomes the only support research that is done, when defines the only business that can be done, when defines what to investigate, when recommends and sets "scientifically" with its scientists what is smart and what not, it becomes easier to understand how thrive the only existing research projects, which are of real importance and significance. Somehow, to free the researchers from this slavery is a needing, and this would allow to asking them for other goals closest to earth.

The ultimate success of projects is an issue that is negotiated in the aisles, also in the same corridors leading to the Nobel Prize, or in laboratories, as well as in the halls of address or research universities: here there is not scientific knowledge, there is not a single sentence of those attributed to Einstein, just negotiation, the possibility of action, contract, create businesses, open markets, making more profitable those existing, because there is another side to all this more than the economic. Any assay, trials, study, research, statistics, are part, and expensive part of ... finally a business. Today, although despite the little publicity that has this fact, the peer review is suspected to be too perfect, too fast, always including the same direction, which in science is truly something so difficult to achieve, given that scientific facts cannot be prepared in advance. And some thesis proposals seem to be visionary.

A second story that shows how things happen in the real world of research might be the following. Less than one year ago, I managed to contact a reduced group of chemists and biologists who have begun privately a hard work: building a map of industries, researchers, products and related treatments, clearly referencing when and why the studies are promulgated by land or throw any compound benefits searches in medicine. They have focused their task (as they say) in only 250 compounds, the most widely used, but the map requires a long work estimated at more than three years, because as they said, everyone is related. From the brief exchange of views, and before starting to mistrust me (as I expected to happen) left me an example of their work, which does not always lead to discover anything good or anything bad, but always the economic dynamics.

They wrote me (not literally): the sodium dichloroacetate (DCA Na) is a salt derived from the DCA or dichloroacetic acid, a strong acid, but used for the treatment of lactic acidosis in humans. A recent study published in Cancer Cell (2007) leaded by researchers at the University of Alberta, found the possible applying of DCA to restore, by recovering the mitochondrial function, the expected cell apoptosis (programmed cell death, a natural event for cells), allowing thus to cancer cells the self-destruction, and with this shrink the tumor. Well, It must be proved. Against this possible effect, other sites published other studies, as was this study from the McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida (BMI). They also reminded me that the BMI was initially founded by the manager of 3M, William L. McKnight (the company which poured the perfluorinated chemicals or PFCs, in the Mississippi River, and one of its facilities was named as Superfund site) and the Department of Defense of the US; and they let me know that BMI is related as other foundations (e.g. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) with chemical companies that support them (J&J, P&G...). I saw they were not extremists, they pointed me recently other opinions more cautious and never friendly of easy science or pseudoscience were considered. A later result from new trials shown the same effect, but the newspapers never said that trials were conducted with more treatments than DCA, as it was actually done with chemical treatment. By other side, the DCA is a non-patentable compound, but finally a treatment was patented by the University of Colorado, being today in Europe yet under examination. As other chlorine compounds, at some dose levels, start to show other side effects as carcinogenicity or neurotoxicity.

After all it, they said me: remember, "3M has been a company as other more, reached a strong position by making the programming of results, and that is what are using all companies. For a drug company, a treatment will be profitable according its period of applying and its cost, and if they need find treatments for six-month, they will do". You can see: "today, Roche has the approved drug Kadcyla (from Genentech, Inc.), which increases the life for six months "more," and think about, whilst the patent of former formulation of trastuzumab will be dead soon. The cost of treatment rose from the former $4,500 to now with $9,800 monthly". A line of work lasts as lasts their patent, and treatments must be as long as lasts the purse. Finally, they gifted me a little pearl hot: GlaxoSmithKline and Avandia: As drug industry's influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias. Therefore they said that "it is essential follow them from the beginning and silently, examining each step and deal".

You should remember that any extreme is that; an extreme is that makes you lose the right criterion. But you are who must achieve this criterion, and you have many tools: common sense, reasoning, logic, study; and go slowly, never fast.

## 17. These diffuse words: biodiversity and climate change

Currently, you will be forced to be hearing up and learn about all this things, always in the words climate change and biodiversity: you are already completely rounded by this stuff, actually you are filled. And the worse, people usually do not know and are not able to know exactly what to believe. This is simple.

Despite this, sometimes Nature is shocking us again, with unforeseen events that open your mouth... and your mind. We have reasons to care of all this are there waiting some mankind smart.

### Many professionals, each in a task, working altogether! That is biodiversity

A simplified idea of the word biodiversity could offer the image of a branched tree of species, colorful and beautiful, some of them rare, but like those in zoos. It does not correspond with reality; it does not mean anything for people in the daily life. There are one imaginary tree of species on the world, where the trunk, the primary and secondary branches, the medium and little branches, relate those leaves that can be seen at the end of every branch, and some leaves which are not at the end but the middle path. The number of branches is not known very well, but yes roughly; the number of leaves, species that live in the world, let alone.

What is quite very well known is that every species as "group" means that, in some point in time and place, and also in some point in these imaginary branches along the structure of this tree of life, between species, has taken place a change, a new adaptation between the specie concerned and ... perhaps other species, probably the environment, but more likely the whole, the sum of other species that surround it and the environment. And this change has its translation in a different use, an expected genetic change, a new communication between organism and the surrounding life or environ. New venom, a new receptor, an improved sense, and a released ability to digest other food... all this is important. All are keys to understand relationships between organisms, thereby those, which also are relations, diseases.

Biodiversity also means a strong and large chain of beings interrelated which allows create and maintain all the goods that are there, where you look. And of course, for me as for many others, the best of all, the marvelous burst of life. Why we need keep up the biodiversity? Because represents a complex mass of conjoined beings that is efficient, overlapping each other sites, after falling back moves forward, goes everywhere, is able to live for hundreds of thousands of ways that those we have managed. Hopefully, biology, medicine, chemistry or genetics follow the path that has followed other times the physics: learn and let go by the behavior of nature, and found electricity, magnetism or telephone.

Currently, the most accurate knowledge that we can have of biodiversity is... where it is? It is not in the field. That we call biodiversity (or accurate knowledge of real existing biodiversity) is at the shelves, boxes, books, papers, draws, pictures, notes, herbariums, botanical gardens and museums. Shockingly, all these sources could become the only stores of life and biodiversity, if we end up destroying everything that lives outdoors. Out of doors, we have still more than what we never will have: there always come times when someone must stop crack the toy, ever before later when there is no solution.

What really threatens biodiversity? An easy answer again: is the mankind. Neither the volcanoes, not the asteroids, not the tsunamis, not the Sun, nobody barring the mankind is. The biodiversity as model of life diversity has changed strongly under certain periods and conditions, as we learned (we know some periods of big extinctions). But within the scale of geological time, our life is an infinitesimal span, so short as is very, very unlikely that any natural catastrophe could deplete the biodiversity existing: on the contrary, is our behavior what allows produce a strong change, immediately, and we already have a large list of proofs.

The concept of biodiversity must be understood according to human time: we are a different agent of pressure, a quick agent: we cannot be worried for the possible biodiversity existing 300,000 years before or ahead; we must be worried by our biodiversity, our current biodiversity, in our future of 100 years at least, because we are able to deplete this in only 100 years.

All these natural threats are like a lonely word within the definition of what is Nature, which has survived to all of them along millions years. The present threats are other kind of menaces, our menaces. Europe already is a clear sample, despite its efforts to be a green region: what are there? There are some closed parks with some plants and some herds of deer? There are still a few lakes with geese and cranes? We are used to do not see anything, from far, few times, ever on TV. Surely, the next decades we will be aware that the most of the landscapes in developed countries will have nothing to do with real ecosystems, and almost absolutely all have been lost forever.

A spot on mind for everyone has been forever Africa. A site of jungles, savannas, forests, big carnivorous and more "specialties" on which to enjoy. This is no more than a consumerist viewpoint, the bigger extent of our sight that we seem to have. Underneath goes other vision: a site for do business without permission, pay a royalty to local chief, reach goods at low price, make business with no one restrictions, and make profitable business that in other places already cannot be profitable, or are not admissible for their aggressiveness or dirty \- for the softer case that can be mentioned. At least, some little organizations have tried maintaining some micro-worlds of life, isolated, and some natural parks hardly try to balance tourism with conservation. Other places are not suffering the same fate: Brazil, Borneo, Indonesia, and the Central America continue to experience losses year after year, and some sites become unrecognizable. When do we go understand the obvious?

### Climate Change and other matters.

A problem to change the attitude facing words as "climate change" is this, things are much and more complex than our own garden and fruit trees, but as ever, our ordinary sight does not notice easily.

Australia has suffered intensively the last year's strong fires and droughts... and dry, and salinization, and loss of plants and animals, and the arrival of invasive species. Then, I understood perfectly the words of a scientist who worked in an Antarctic station, Peter Cosier (he belongs to the Australian Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists): he says, referring to the South Georgia Islands, "... it carries the romantic history of the explorers like Ernest Shackleton, and it is a place of indescribable beauty. But is also a place of great tragedy where millions upon millions of penguins, seals and whales were slaughtered for their oil. Do we need whales, fur seals and penguins for our civilization to survive? Of course not... After all, only four species of plants -wheat, corn, rice and potato- provide over half of plant based calories in the human diet, and around a dozen animal species provide 90 per cent of the animal protein. Europe wiped out most of its biodiversity centuries ago..." He is probably tired of seeing what is going alone. And his country also is tired, and his mates and citizens.

For the common people who sits on a couch to listen to or watch (because reading almost already does not) what in good faith believes that is being reported, the idea that surreptitiously holds in his mind is: does every time "more warmth", so the polar ice "melts", goes to sea, the sea level "rises" the polar lands (where any) may get "in sight" therefore will not "so cold" and you can "work" the land and its 'resources', and other sites will have "better climate", and also "likely" that there will be some clever idea, and "all we will draw match" of it all. But things can be explained in other more suited way.

### With what we are playing really.

Energy circulates continuously through all physical media that finds, as are on a planetary scale the air, the land, the biomass, and the water, and each of them have no choice but to move at the speed that each of these compartments provides or allows, and stays the time that physically is possible.

These compartments have different capacity to house the energy which circulates: well, the air transports the energy faster between compartments, biomass energy is a state that "stays a while" (the weighted average lifespan for all beings), the earth transfers the energy more slowly into its superficial processes, and water (where the seas are the bigger part) makes it very, very slowly, being a sort of accumulator-battery. When we look to water, the ice is a minimal part of the whole, and nonetheless, we are seeing how the "bricks of ice" are decreasing (are melting taking up heat from its environ). What it means? If there is enough energy for melting a minimal part of water on the Earth (those ice cubes), there is much more energy flowing around, and sure into the whole liquid water, so this means that the water battery has more energy accumulated and flowing. Where go we see more intensively this energy flowing, on first sight? We will see it as more intensive cycles of climate events: more heat and evaporation in dried areas (droughts), extreme rainfall longer and more frequent, temperature falls harshest, and its derivative consequences over terrains and ecosystems. The cycles among compartments, are naturally adjusted or arranged, but somehow they come: these natural processes of adjustment comes under threat, because droughts, sudden storms, drylands, increasing of strength and energy of climate cycles, become more common: the adding of a slightly increase on the sea levels, is not a good new.

A line of targets and goals (all green) to achieve has been established in order to reach a balance in the raft of indicators for the climate change. But this is not matter of targets, is a matter of wants and use made. Despite the many years of willing signatures, the signed agreements over climate control have utterly failed decade after decade, and throughout this whole time, we seldom have seen a Government taking up the wrongs, only bother to say nice words. An effort to spread a bit of facts and knowledge about climate change is this one by Dave Reay; in his site GreenHouse Gas Online.

Few words more are needed. An individual attitude is needed.

# I am a little puzzled by all this: solutions.

Our mind is lazy by nature, likes to be eating popcorns on the movie. While we follow building a wall of blindness, will be hard to recover the emotional health. Is there some intelligence, or just quick people? A Martian would prefer do not become contacted, it would be very dangerous to have such very rude guests at home.

I cannot imagine another kind and humorous way of expressing what can cause watched from afar, rather than the opinion of Julius Caesar. What would have said Julius Caesar? Julius Caesar was advised by a kind of wizards as other Roman chieftains, but surely he took up decisions by himself. "Veni, vidi, vinci" currently would have been another statement as: "Came, Saw, and I did not believe what I saw".

## 18. Popcorn, either in Swahili or English.

### All our life eating popcorns.

Nowadays, we should not be like those citizens of the Middle Ages, bowed and subjected to events, waiting for the signal of a God who fixes things: we already know that besides having each one a God, we have knowledge and experience to bring organization that seems to have and there is not. Despite having this in our baggage, now ills are not pests, are the product of our lack of self-esteem, of our unwillingness and independence, lack of judgment, I would even cowardice, and much greed, really tons of greed. So we sit down to watch the movie that put us, eating popcorn, and protesting at low and only occasionally.

Where resides the real power of simple folks who can actually make the difference? It is a simple act, do not to be in the consumer lists, quite the opposite, create and be the decision makers list. This is to say not... to only one 10% of goods that are presents around you, to begin. Every company knows can make business arriving to this 10% percent of population. You could force them to decide exactly that kind of good you want purchase: for example, I want you (all of you) to do clean agriculture, I want you to do protecting forests, I want you to do trading registered and transparent. I do not want more animal suffering, I do not want more smart changes without our smart criterion and decision. I do not want more give money others to pay fur. I do not want more speedy and unnecessary cars; I want quiet and light cars.

First you want to stop being idiotic, as with cigarettes.

Well, my way to reach all this is by changing, for example, beginning with a 10% into my life. Then it will be easier to change another 10% in my life. Each time I save from my spending a 10% I redirect some of those costs to other objectives. I already decided before, I already have a personal judgment, I already decided put my sight onto local wants and needs, truly comprehensible things. And it will be more and more, and also my children, and my community. The more people conducts a behavior, the stronger is. It is not spiritualism, but may be if you want.

There are no one market which can force me to nothing in my life, I am only myself. You may be sure, only you can be your worse enemy. As ever, the results come on time, only one year after go to light, and this is not new, already has been done. More than joy, this causes stupor when becomes visible the change of life so simple that you get.

Well, it is true; it is not so easy. Nobody likes to change suddenly their route, their patterns, their assurances, their brands, their references, their dogmas, in the end all reliance. Always there are other ways to do, for example: after change some key points in the world, the way of work altogether, the way of connect and communicate, other changes come also, as may be a change in the way that a network of populations, villages, towns and economies exchange its products and services, valuing by agreement inversely the distance, the use of transport, both if the products go as when the products come. Once established, being well calculated the formula for prices, it will be a peace undesirable for global companies, but the better for the common population. It is completely desirable and reasonable to want retrieve the business, labor, and return it to your control.

That is what really are popcorns: those delightful candies, those little drugs, your quiet, your little dose of happiness filmed, that sounds to reality, but is not. The best way to desire things is not to have it. Are worth when are not there. By crawling the history of merges, shares, owners, relationships, among bigger companies in the world, you would understand how and by who is decided, privately, what the crowds will like and need on the next days, months and years. There are an interesting study made by three researchers (barely noticed, of course, press media are blind to this) that has highlighted some spots on the current economic world: how keeping a net of companies, is it possible control the overall profit, by letting that some of its companies go down, and endorsing the growth and expansion from others. The candies are offered by some companies sometimes, and by other companies in other time.

The state how your body ends everyday, says a lot from your ability to be aware. By working for hours dipped between machines, or perhaps projects, not seeing for years one tree, one bird, one cow pissing across one fence, one mate smiling, dashing along the streets and traffic jams, asking yourself from who is this child in your house (I remember you that is your child, of course), truly, do you think all this things do not affect to your being, your life, deeply and continuously? Please, take a big time off, you might spend a few moments watching around, and take note how much that is affecting all of us.

We are proud by not have guilt of that, be innocents: always is a politician as Julius Caesar who make the war far, he comes back with gold and silver, and makes us rich. But the things go bad for us sometimes, and that is the high price for keep being innocents: the foreman, the chairman, the boss, the president and his team are free to do the suitable, what they consider: do not worry all will be right! If it smells too far, then we will claim his trial and his punishment, horrified and sorrowing by such an indescribable act. The savvy says us how things must be done, and the greed says us what to do when we all end in a silent agree, in the dark.

### Things cannot work thus for longer... I guess, do not you?

A herd of twenty baboons in a square mile fighting among them may solve their problems without too wounds. A forty pigeons flock jailed in eight cubic meters will be halved sure: it is too little space for living, and rules do not work too well. With us things are not different.

Then, eight billion inhabitants quarreling for food and water, likely will not be able to avoid clashes in different degrees, since the less worrying till the more shocking fights, sometimes widely extended. And we are like 8 billion baboons, deceiving ourselves written, even among those who are closest companions. This is the common history of everyday, can be applied without fear to every matter: health, food, the heat we need, the shelter, or even a place to live. We are not working to protect either the environment or our organization, only our individual prosperity. We are completely refractory to the death of others (that economically forced by poverty), to the miserable life of others \- and not because they work but because they have no defense.

How can we believe that we are dedicated to solve complex problems if the underlying problems which cause them are rooted in the way what we live, and to live in? Does not escape from this attitude no religion, no politics, no society: all have a hand covering existing shame of what we are with our fellow, precisely what other species are not themselves.

I go back again and again to talk about land and food, which is common for every being in the Nature: that binds us to the same laws that explain the disappearance of many of them. There are things you never will see again, be sure, and other things will be seen for the first time: that is not a prediction, this is same as saying that the sun shines and the moon reflects, facts; these next forty years, you will see less forests, less wildlife, more lands naked, climate cycles stronger and more intensive with more energy on the atmosphere, less freshwater stored, more lands technified, goods more expensive. All this will have effects in our lives. Something scarce is golden. Whose has the scarcity has the control, they will be millionaire, and will put a high value for scarce resources, and go charge a big bill. Therein lies the interest and value of large extension of lands across the world. The more you need, more you will buy for it. Nobody will restore one meter of land unless having earning.

You decide. Do you think that is possible continue this way, and could have your children some chance of basic life? Do you like this film, a second version more? Each of your acts now, is each of the bricks that compound the further history, the history that you are promising your children. Truly I think you have motifs to be worried, when I suspect you are only tired. I guess you already noticed I am not giving any candy along the text, less sugary. I feel that to talk deeply and root is the life, and, if we lie we are making hurt others, precisely what I do not want.

The history doom us to recognize our wrongs, and after seeing the film I have seen, my avowal only could be to tell you loudly I am tired of so many sugary lies.

## 19. Criteria, the tools do not prevent the thorny issues.

### Voices nothing saying.

The last century had a bunch of philosophers, artists, scientists, writers, physicists, engineers, humanists, all them talking intensively about the matter of this text. Today, there is a lot of people making visible their product, their trending topics, their ways to "make differences", their kinds of new brainchild, a new bursting idea, but nowhere can be sound no one true feeling.

Barely I hear a thunder, someone kicking (pardon, yeah I listen someone and not infrequently) between those who monopolize the press and TV. Everybody is hurry to take advantage and be the first, to be visible, to be "five minutes of TV". They are your leaders, there are doing the world, the culture life. With all this, with this huge salad of Disney's tales and human needs grossly mixed, you decide what you will do, what you will have, what you will teach, what to drink, how to sleep. Nobody likes hear the word tightrope, that means choose either follow by an ascending way of lifestyle which is meaningless and already looks have a bad end, or either follow by a sensible way more balanced and realist.

The laws are only imposed naturally when are envied by that which provide. The closer they are to everyday and real life, the more can be easily met. A law that is missing among these is the ban for doing business with those who violate the most basic laws. And this violation moves to the citizens whose country is origin of those companies. If this is not met, the voice is lost, the vote, the chair in a common forum. Today, this is affecting all developed countries, no one exception, and therefore its citizens and comfortable passive witnesses.

The natural direction that conducts to law may or should be called criterion or judgement (be we wise). On the Nature, animals and also plants show a behavior that permit distinguish, observe, scrutinize, find that is hidden in the landscape, but also distinguish distances, hazards, find resources: always identifying environmental signals, recognizing them. From the cellular level to the systemic level, it is part of the properties acquired by living systems. Our body keeps an army of methods, tools and processes that establish a mobile equilibrium point around which we find an optimal situation: thus, sometimes push us up cheering us, sometimes push us down prudently, between the new adventure and the feared disaster. This move is wide, we are continuously doubting, back and forth. As result, we achieve finally a rate of success, said it in a mathematical way, and always assuming a rate of failures, as already happen.

Our brain is a store of information, a machine which uses it, the signals outside and inside, and that learns from facts: has learnt to manage a big bunch of signals, and be deaf to some of them sometimes ever in natural conditions: when it does not happens, when conditions are fully out of range, as speedy, as farthest, cannot be managed. This is usual today, and is the reason that makes so valuable has and make grow the criteria. A lot of information today is far from us, invisible, not understandable. Taking care of criteria for every field in the life may mean to make a good reading of environment, of development, be in tune with reality, not with "sustainable balance" but the "really possible".

### All this is nice, yes: and any solutions with criteria?

Some leaders from the later centuries could have told us: Less crying and put solutions for the stones on the road. And the radical, unsound or wrong ideas have not space, are profitable for nobody. Criterion is something that shows some wild animals in conditions or proximity to humans, when faced with situations where they must choose a path between two or more presented to them, and entails compliance or not with group cohesion, or the own survival when are solitary. These criteria are not always desirable from a human point of view, the animals decide not reasoning, but do so with a kind of criteria. The criteria can be a simple inherited or learned behavior, and the type of judgment and decision picking turn distinguishes the conditions found in this population, and the character of its cohesion. We have already examples between geese, ants, monkeys, penguins, orcas, dolphins, rodents, and also between humans! Social animals always have criteria.

(1) Woman. Why on the first place? Well, underneath other aims, whatever the target we could look for, should be there a base that support all, not only physical, but also live and affective. With less means they reach more, less noisy, in less time and for more time, listening always in different ways, being more adaptable, they solve more issues and more thorny. Whom has supported all life in worse conditions, struggling for a place, being responsible for the essential economy, the teaching, the growth of each of us, who has been the link and glue for bind the persons and things, has been the woman. She never has had the role that actually can have. Never was seen their role? I deeply think that a change from the manly management to the womanly will lead us to more fairly walking. The more that has been banned and hampered, the more clear and obvious becomes the need of a feminine management.

(2) Children. Suffice it to say one thing: surely will come a change in our understanding of fatherhood, as there came a change in other matters as the couple, sex or procreation. We will begin to care for children who are not ours, and this will be a true sign of a mental change, real: that will be a true sign of profound change, because of the implications involved, and among them, the feelings towards those who have no defense that we could provide them.

(3) Consumption. Talking about the recent enforcement that trade associations have made on the world, this global market: said rawly, just one market with the same prices for every meter there are in the world is not an idea for the Nobel prize: is both a subtle and a cheeky steal. Each place must have its own prices, each own effort, each own work; it could be really an equaled balance. The current rules are only the rules for manage the folks as sheep, without guns, only with hunger and needs. Perhaps we have here a first true law necessary: food is life, and must be defined by the local population. Foreign prices are as foreign invader species: why do not protect we from them the regions? The same reason that allow the far prices can be so lower -the underpricing when buying-, makes them a kind of colonization: this only favors to big buyers and big sellers, not to you.

One way to change it? Slowly, day to day, the markets respond to daily behavior of consumers, and its accumulated change along a year, by buying locally, and rejecting fake that were made far away, than only weak all the work at both sites, the nearby and the farthest. This change in behavior is being conducted in various sites already: Germans, Finnish, Arabians and more, always starting from small towns, where there is a high awareness of that market called global market. Prices should include distances and transport always when are carried far away.

(4) Environment. Touching closely the ecosystems, there are something to say: well, we need cultivate plants and breed animals, but it was time ago that we know the ecosystems are not built of pieces exchangeable: streams, soils, forests, atmosphere, complexity, sea floors, sea reefs... are all necessary, even when are not producing packets of goods directly, all those are maintaining the whole earth. I hope nobody will dry a piece of sea it thinks is not valuable, will do it? And exchange of some elements as could be the change of fluvial streams by channeled streams only for water transport, is not even an idea, is another folly more. Ecology is not a trending topic, is not in our lives, has not been learned, and actually has been forgotten completely. I could repeat this fold hundred, because is an obvious fact: we should go back to it and learn again, and first define rules unavoidable for anyone, rules which can adapt the man to the environment, and not vice versa; define the leeway within which we must acting, always and all of us. Of course this can be built and become law, but has never arisen on the international ambiance, into the blue offices; so is necessary talk about the blue offices. As in other matters, nothing prevents it locally and from small communities. And we would not start from zero; there is a lot of knowledge.

(5) Attitudes. Other matter barely mentioned is our attitude; anyone could reflect to have the same fear to change. Who is the first? Who will make steps? Easy: the first step is as easy as be aware that all what is happening affects your life, your children, your time on the life, your relations, your future, absolutely all. Even more, the effects of changes by our economic and industrial model (worn by the overshoot), the first time affected only some countries, today are affecting the most, barring some farthest which are isolated on the sea. You must be the best whistleblower; we could be each one of us when we have affordable criteria and common sense. And perhaps the common sense reappears easily if a criterion feasible and rational comes before to be part of law and social organization. Somehow, we need feel again.

(6) Knowledge and recovering. Another matter that causes mistrust and insecurity: could we repair and recover all that we have lost? Are we capable? Will be we capable? Do we know what and how to do? Of course, there are plenty of knowledge, but also plenty of ignorance as we have seen, and even more than enough goodwill, when it is to do the effort, and no one is going to take away it again. One example has been the direct and practical work and the results obtained with it, the recovery of degraded lands in scattered sites in the world, with the working philosophy of Swiss team WOCAT (note 5). And they follow a kind of simplified standard (like the ISO 14000), a checklist, a publicized knowledge, training, without thereby throw balloons flying to the sky. And other examples could be added to this. There is capacity, and there is sensible knowledge. It is always applied science, and recovered relations.

(7) The use of things. Returning unafraid to talk about ourselves another obvious question: we are unable to reconcile technology with the natural life? It seems difficult to understand that a laptop is technology (and well used can be useful), but the food and ecosystems cannot be simplified or act as devices, the way it has been done by the hands of technologists without shame whatsoever. It is not about left to them the blame, it is necessary and unavoidable that we own our own vision of life, we have a vision, judgment, self-esteem, desire to maintain wealth around us, and not let someone tell us to where we will be limited access to it.

(8) Communities. Make a contract with Nature, as other part more on the deal, is it possible? It is not possible: it is essential, is something never done! It never was brooded on mind, by anyone: the best thought we have had in this regard has been dominate the nature, and if now still do not recognize the mistake, with all those crowds that we are already on Earth, the error will be very fat (we will add a "t", terror). A first contract with Nature is a kind of deal that overcomes the false agreements held annually for various reasons, issuing hundreds of documents, thousands of falsifying data, and exchanging business cards and job offers. Keep it clear, when it comes, the progressive improvements will come from small communities like yours, slowly, posing decisions, so tangible, without lavish documents, not needing Convention on Climate Change, or Annual Meetings about Traffic Control of Children or Species: if you and yours do not want, nothing unwanted will happen. Your community may not be the first to do so: it began almost eight years in various places, and they wait for nobody: cherish life too much to expect joint decisions.

(9) Accounts and balance. What about this called environmental account? What is that? How is it done? Do not worry, it is a simple concept to understand how to apply: do not remove or interfere or pressure on your farm, in your place, in your mountains, in your water, in your seas, so as to decrease what you had. We are part of Nature, we are living, so we can return and establish an exchange, and a balance, as all balances in nature are unstable. But if it is an equilibrium in which both sides gain, a "win-win outcome," both sides not lose.

A biologist, an environmentalist, an ecologist, an engineer, an economist, a sociologist, they could not know: should know it. Is easier to control little accounts as your little local accounts, than bigger accounts: but bigger accounts are mainly the adding of little accounts. The less you depend on banks, the less you must pay.

(5) World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies

The more you control, the less you lose. The smaller the territory is, the easier the control is. The lesser the account is, the lesser the greed will be. Get away from big projects. You will not left behind.

(10) Technology and science. Science, technology or wildness? It is not the matter the use of knowledge is the crafty enemy. The naive and innocent questions in science may always be posed, but the aims are as different as its results. Being a powerful extension of our physical body, as well as arts and music are, the crucial point is this: what we go make, resolve, understand, produce, save, what kind of brainchild will see the light? Still more intelligent weapons? What do you think about? Let's go discuss about the use that we do for things. This magical word contains thousands of colors, thousands of opposite acts. Be careful with the use. Do not mind if we talk of atomic nucleus, hemp, telephony, global positioning system... do not matter, physical things, technology, knowledge, all are not usually dangerous, are their uses, and these last ones uses are increasing today.

(11) Development. Big projects, big factories, big products? The engineering has occupied a wide place in our lives along 200 years, and continues doing it. As in every profession, are not all the same, many less than other fields, because there are more needs, customers, kinds, sizes, materials, situations, places, troubles, and cash to do things on demand. They know firstly the aims they should achieve in their work, they also know what may be possible, how is it possible, how much costs the possible, and the profits and costs of every thing that we are manufacturing and building, using and enjoying. Not one action can be done not assuming its implied economy. If we want energy, we must settle accounts. Forever there are behind a customer, a State, a company, and a community, always behind other customer. And the word greed will should be measured somehow before project, before contract, reviewing if contract with Nature previously written allows it.

(12) Public affairs. What about rely from others? What about politicians? The transparency in the era of Internet is easy. Do not waste the time more. Transparency always, when we want it from others it is easy to understand: sowing confidence will come back reliance. If you want social networks, media, tools, all are there, and technicians are there also. Whoever has credit if he is credible like person. Courts, laws, already are not sufficient by themselves: the coming world needs a visual monitoring tool, reliable, prompt with one click, without which life in society will become unbearable.

(13) Duty and Right. Rights or liabilities? Just in the opposite order. Liabilities include inherently rights; unlike rights do not always contain the responsibilities. By protecting firstly the rights, hardly we could define the liabilities. It seems to be turning out easier let that people fight against the violation of rights than making true rules and commitments. There is a lack of some truly essential references in our rules for trade, business, diplomacy, rights and more, as a good definition of complicity applied to big companies and states. Strong rules, will become strong rights. There is some reason to be no hard, but accurate. There are too many countries with lot of rights, and fewer duties, with many experts in skipping the last. Today it is easier to sign the fulfillment of a right than a responsibility: to the first there is always an excuse, for the second is not.

(14) The agreements. Usually we accept that all the agreements must include necessarily an economic payment, some kind of deal that becomes cash. Just consider this like a strong foundation, a base as foundation, is a mistake. A financial arrangement, long it takes, it is easy. They are always below other deficiencies and other outstanding issues, and when they are resolved, alliances are born where there were disagreements, much stronger than economic agreements: the money is strong, but alliances transcend all fields of life. And the alliances must be focused in the maintaining of goods, but all the goods.

(15) The great transport. A new supply chain is not only possible, but also valuable and possible. At some point in time, an economist will start to scrutinize how affect the costs of large transport over the seas and sky to common people. You would answer that it is already known and studied. Is it really studied and known? I am suspecting that is not really true, rather has been studied the economic process for a kind of business and no more. Today, there is no rule that can stabilize the large-scale trade, the global trade, and that is still a basic lack, not an achievement.

(16) Banks. Other bank will be needed, based on the local results, in the local scope. The day that some bunch of folks start to see this possibility, will expand this way of local-based link, and will diminish the appetite that have the big sharks to embark the people on large projects far from real life. Every great project for big business does not make grow its influence area, on the contrary it engulfs many more business, but you just have believed the first possibility mercifully. Banks with local owners and limited size have opportunities to be makers of a clever stabilization: yet has not studied nor envisioned the chance of change the banking currency: share both cash and a percentage of organizational control, as kind of funds, and relationship of citizens with what is happening in their community.

(17) Chemistry. The chemistry is an example of what happens to other sciences that scurry around her, such as genomics, bioengineering, nanotechnology, medicine or pharmacy. Those words that compound those fields of science cannot be so near to military industry and the investment and venture capital business. That only leads to a path, and does not require a book to understand, does it?

### To jump.

In the own real life, we can counteract the loss of so many odds, by returning to common sense only. It would be a clever idea scrap our old plans and habits and dismiss an old time with hardly a few criteria in our personal pocket, and too many decisions in distant offices. Think about, the Earth diameter has not changed, and so the surface is the same, thereby you may be sure that healthy and proper grounds will endow our children from opportunities. Make it possible in your home.

If something must disappear, are those pictures so many times used of starved children, are not shocking for longer, we are undaunted. That layer of refractory bricks that we have should disappear. The same is for mega-factories of meat, is overfeeding, the loss of harmless species of every kind and origin worldwide. Many limits that could state easily the common sense have been overshot widely, and ever is there a reply for every excess: a response that I heard many times in mouth of clever people is this one, not more peanuts!

According to the current conditions, what we need more is get rid of the ignorance, learn and teach. The jump will be found over a healthy selfishness, the selfishness of owning their own decisions, the selfishness to regain self-esteem, the selfishness of knowing that do not steal from those who are far, or others far cannot steal your time and life.

## 20. Stories on back.

Here are three little stories. Are not spectacular, are not the last: but somehow, affect all actors mentioned: plants, animals, people, food, diseases, ways of life or attitudes.

### The large road of yew, and the short road of taxol.

All trees do not live the same time, some of them have a long life: is the case of the yew family, some of whose species live over 1,000 years. The western yew is a conifer (without flowers) native to the Pacific northwest of North America, as the most of conifers an evergreen tree (larches are deciduous trees), with middle size, and a very slow grow: as they get older, may be twisted and hollow out the trunk. The seed becomes a red brilliant berry,

From this species (Taxus brevifolia), it was discovered in 1963 the effect that has a compound against the behavior of some cancer tissue-cells, when researchers from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) extracted this from the bark, isolated three years later. The molecule is a complex diterpene with an ester side chain and a unique oxetane ring (remember the terpenes in the Section 2, Chapter 1), being needed 60,000 kg of bark to extract only two kilogram of taxol (30kg/g taxol obtained).

A company which leaded the harvesting of yew bark was the biopharmaceutical Bristol-Myers Squibb, with an amount of 350,000 kg. As this one, many other species have a publicly known economic profit. You must know that the NCI today has tested the possible use of over roughly 180,000 compounds from plants. For all this, were felled many trees, but the numbers differs between sources of information: and even over the years, some sources about these numbers provided by some specialist have disappeared from Internet. The amount varies on the range since the 3,500,000 to 7,000,000 feet of yew, recognized officially only about 130,000. Many more were burned when was applied a clear cut. One case with only one species! This is the dark fat (document) that is following a huge amount of plants.

### The microbiologist crazy and the permaculture.

A focusing understanding of agriculture that influenced the approach of many people was the proposal and way of work of the Japanese Masanobu Fukuoka settled in the Shikoku Island, an island connected with the main territory of Honshu by the longest bridge in the world. Is very known by its pilgrimage of the 88 temples. M. Fukuoka studied in two centers of agriculture teaching, before the WWII, in a Japan where rice farms have had an important role. He worked in two centers once proposed by Makoto Hiura, finally working in the Yokohama Customs Office, inspecting plants, in a job closely related with plants pathologies and microbiology. As in many other cases, the abrupt change operated one day in the thinking of Masanobu, sometimes clashed with colleagues, with the opinions and attitudes of their surroundings, and with the same reality: over several years should have learned a few key lessons. The war forced him to keep working in the Kochi Prefecture Agricultural Experiment Station, where he had to monitoring with his colleagues the achievement of the best possible performance from crops.

In these years, conducted a comparative study between cultures treated with fertilizers and pesticides, and untreated \- as then and until today have been conducted thousands of studies by other scientists, focusing on all possible factors \- finding that, including operating costs, untreated agriculture was more profitable and safe, in addition to providing other relationship between the crop and the human environment and labor. The search for crop development to Fukuoka was never an issue or an ideal baseless, but an adjustment from the same economic base that you can never neglect.

After the war, he began to learn and apply his short experience in the remaining lands that his family kept. These years, although it has not been said so, was a period of learning in the field of ecology: remember that, a lot of concepts were born in the XX century, as may be the ecosystem (Tansley), descriptions of ecosystems (Lidenman, Odum), systems (Bertalanffy), and later concepts and evolving of this branch of the biology (Odum, Margalef).

The importance or weight of the Fukuoka work, reflected in his book "A One-Straw Revolution" (1978), has a twofold meaning: on the one hand, the proposal of a crop mode he called "doing nothing", mimicking the natural mode with which they operate plants; on the other hand, the implicit recognition of the opportunity to adapt to what the nature, and not vice versa; and this also getting a benefit. The Fukuoka-way is not a strange or spectacular path to grow crops, but is a completely natural way, full known, currently taught in ecological agriculture, applied worldwide already in very different places with success, when applied following the local conditions that marks the Nature in each place en ecosystem, soil, climate and orography.

Of course, this way of farming is not applicable in certain places, and they almost always meet the same conditions inexorably: vast expanses, one owner, high investment capacity or subsidies, the maximum removing of workforce, and total replacement crops by a "closed culture system".

### Live with salts.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the WWII, in 1942 a Japanese crowd gone to the US relocation camp for internment of Japanese people, in the Owens desert of California: this was the Manzanar camp (link). There born Gordon Hisashi Sato, son of a Japanese-born immigrant who was gardener and fisherman. G. H. Sato learnt there the cultivation of plants in desert and deprived conditions. He obtained a Ph.D. In biophysics at the C.I.T, leaded some institutions, projects of funding for basic research, and resigned to his position as director of the Upstate Biotechnology, Inc.

Then he began to focus its efforts in the Manzanar Project. This was an attempt to make productive areas with salts and desert features: he tried restore a natural chain of beings which allow take advantage of sewage, and continue on the direction of upper beings, as trees and livestock, always based in low cost techniques, and following the natural chains. The basis starts from algae salt-resistant and heat-resistant: this ones grow in salts waters, as tidal ponds, and become the feed of shrimps, and this ones be feed for fish. After try these kinds of projects in many places in agreement with Governments (Chile, China, Sudan) he noticed the poor access that communities could reach to some kind of profit from this. Then, Sato began the Manzanar Project in the Eritrea region, in 1992.

Here starts a simple story: along the coastline of the desert in Eritrea (Red Sea), there is a system of mangrove forests, plenty adapted to salty waters, and as in all the riverbanks, have the function of treating waste and water, species home, food and life support. For humans, mangroves provide many goods: firewood, food for livestock (goats, ships and camels), and seafood: indirectly, the restoration with roughly 1,000,000 trees has increased the improvement of local climate, the beginning of orchards, and management of incomes in order to reach a healthy livestock.

## Useful links.

Here is a little sample of resources online that can help introduce and learn something about the issues mentioned. Are not always the best sites but keep all of them a necessary strengthen on the information.

### AGRICULTURE

 Animal Feed Resources Information System (IRA - CIRAD - FAO).

 Biosafety Clearing-House (CBD): Search for LMOs, Genes or Organisms

 Crop Wild Relatives Global Portal (UNEP - GEF) and EURISCO.

 Crop Explorer of USGS (do not try find hemp).

 Global Spatial Database of Agricultural land-Use Statistics: simple and visual, but good when you want approximate yourself into.

 Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT - Main crops)

 International Information System for the Agricultural Sciences and Technology (AGRIS).

 International Plant Names Index (IPNI).

 Land Matrix. Online public database on land deals.

 Mesoamerican and Caribbean Geospatial Alliance (MACGA) / International Program USGS.

 Organic Consumers Association. & Organic ePrints.

 Plant Resources of Tropical Africa.

### CHEMISTRY

 Patents and Companies. The evolutive succession of patents.

Pesticides Database (EU) / Pesticide Action Network & Pan Pesticide Database.

 Reactome: Open-source peer-reviewed pathway database.

### FORESTS

 Agroforestry Database / Species. (World Agroforestry Centre).

 Global Forest Watch. A free site for look over the forest situation.

### FUNDS

 Funding Universe. Companies that offer funds for...

 Global Mechanism (GM) \- UN Convention to Combat Desertification

 Foundation Center. Bigger funds, bigger funders and main goals.

 Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office (MPTF Office - UNDP).

### GLOBAL

 Biodiversity Heritage Library.

 π Bloobook (13,000 species, by Paul Imboden).

 Environmental Treaties and Resources Indicators (ENTRI). (by countries)

 FAO Topics.

 GeoLand 2.

 GeoNetwork: a global database with maps and data, gathers many fields of study.

 Integrated Taxonomic Information System.

 International Court of Justice

 International Energy Agency.

 Maps.

 Online Biological Resources (USGS).

 Ozone Hole watch : About the famous Ozone Hole.

 UNCTAD Statistics.

### HEALTH

 Agency for Toxic Substances and Diseases Registry. Toxics Portal.

 Doctor Fungus.

 Ecotox (EPA).

 Engormix.

 Promed;) Map of Alerts.

 Risctox. & Busca-tox.

 Scorecard (pollutants & toxics).

### ORGANIZATIONS - CASES - PROJECTS

(A close sight over many organization shows all sort of aims, sometimes at all opposites)

 Forest Landscape Restoration.

 Grain.

 Great Apes Survival Partnership.

 Intermon Oxfam. Behind trademarks. The new exchange of image among companies.

 M S Swaminathan Research Foundation \- SEAS. India.

 PROFOR \- Program on Forests.

 Union of Concerned Scientists.

 Waters, global overview: International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC).

 Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists.

 Women changing the World (only in spanish).

### RESOURCES

 Glaciers (GlacierWorks).

 Infomine (Mine sites).

 International Energy Agency (Stats).

 Mineral Resources On-Line Spatial Data (USGS).

 Nuclear energy (by the Nuclear Association).

 Waters (EPA): An initial overview on the state of waters.

### SEAS

 Census of Marine life.

 One Stop Data Shop (OSDS): the coastal states submission for delineation of outer limits for the continental shelf.

### SOILS

 AfSIS Africa Soil Information Service

 European Sate of Soils. European Soil Data Center /Joint Research Centre.

 ISRIC - World Soil Information: an organization that collects mainly information about the soils globally. Anyway, is a key point controlled by the interest, but has useful information.

 LADA - Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands: an old work of assessment over the main areas affected by drought and desertification.

 World Reference Base \- Soils.

### TRADE

 Companies: the map of the market (online tool courtesy of The Street Wall Journal).

 Food Price Data Analysis Tool (GIEWS - FAO)

 SIPRI Arms Transfers Database (Stockholm International Peace Reasearch Institute.

 The Global 2000.

 USDA - Foreign Agricultural Service. International Agricultural Trade Reports.
