fungicide
Trump’s global resorts put profit first, environment last, critics say.
Mongabay looked into Trump’s claims that he is an environmentalist, winning “many, many environmental awards.” We were able to locate just two — one a local New York award, and another granted by a golf business association.
Donald Trump’s negative environmental record in Scotland and elsewhere has conservationists concerned in Bali, where Trump firms are developing a major resort and golf facility known as Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali.
Another resort under development, the Trump International Hotel & Tower Lido, a 700-hectare facility including a six-star luxury resort, theme park, country club, spa, villas, condos and 18-hole golf course threatens the nearby Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, one of Java’s last virgin tropical forests.
Mongabay looked into Trump’s claims that he is an environmentalist, winning “many, many environmental awards.” We were able to locate just two — one a local New York award, and another granted by a golf business association. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests to list Mr. Trump’s awards.
Trump’s environmental record as president, and as a businessman, is abysmal, say critics. His attempt to defund the U.S. Energy Star program, they say, is typical of a compulsion to protect his self interest: Energy Star has given poor ratings to nearly all Trump’s hotels, which experts note has possibly impacted his bottom line.
Who doesn’t like a luxury resort and 18-hole golf course set atop a sheer cliff with breathtaking views of the Indian Ocean? Revered Hindu Gods that inhabit the temple nearby, according to the local Balinese concerned over plans to open the Trump International Hotel & Tower Bali. Local environmentalists aren’t keen on the resort either.
The Balinese worry that the Trump development will loom over the centuries-old Tanah Lot, a temple that sits upon a rock off the west coast of the wildly Instagrammed and oft visited Indonesian island.
This particular holy site is one of the most venerated temples of the “Island of Gods.” And while the Balinese are ever welcoming to tourists — important to the island’s economy —their religion, and laws, stipulate that all non-religious buildings not exceed 15 meters, or the height of temples, and more or less the height of a coconut tree.
The Trump tower, resort and golf course, now still in the planning stage, also pose environmental concerns. Suriadi Darmoko — Executive Director of the Indonesian environmental NGO, Wahana Lingkungan Hidup Indonesia (WHALI) Eksekutif Daerah Bali — believes the island does not need more hotel suites and jacuzzis.
A 2010 study by Indonesia’s Culture and Tourism Ministry, he notes, found Bali had a surplus of 9,800 hotel rooms. And according to a report by the HVS consulting firm, the average occupancy of upper luxury hotels in 2013 in Bali achieved only 60 percent.
Darmoko is especially worried about the Trump project’s plans to expand the property around the existing Pan Pacific Nirwana Bali Resort. The amount of “farmland in Bali drops” when land is transferred to “becoming tourist accommodations and supporting facilities” he told Mongabay. “What Bali needs is a tourism accommodation moratorium,” during which the government could “conduct a study to calculate the supporting capacity and supporting ability of the environment in Bali.”
The Trump tower project will be developed by MNC Group, Indonesia’s leading investment firm, and will be managed by the Trump Hotel Collection. As reported by Reuters last February, Herman Bunjamin — the vice president director at PT MNC Land Tbk (MNC Group’s property unit) — has assured the Balinese that the company would follow local government environmental regulations, and respect the Hindu religion.
However, this is not the first time a Trump construction project has experienced a swirl of controversy around its potential environmental impacts. And that worries local Balinese communities and conservationists, even though Trump himself has claimed many times that he is an award-winning environmentalist — a claim we’ll explore in some detail later in this article.
Ever since the 70-year-old billionaire was sworn in as the 45th President of the United States in January 2017, watchdog organizations have paid extra close attention to the past, and ongoing, international environmental record of Trump’s companies, especially considering that Trump has largely retained his ownership interest in his businesses.
Trump: mixing politics, golf and the environment
According to Investopedia, before becoming president, Donald Trump had amassed a net worth of an estimated $3.5 billion. The Trump Organization LLC acts as the primary holding for Trump’s firms, and serves as an umbrella company for his investments in real estate, brands and other businesses, ranging from golf courses to hotels.
Among its key executives are two of his sons: Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, who last March told Forbes he will not talk business with his father in order to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest, but will only pass financial reports to him. Ivanka Trump, the President’s elder daughter, resigned from her father’s company in January and today works as an unpaid adviser to him in the White House.
Golf is one of the many businesses that made Trump rich. According to the financial disclosure form published last June by the Office of Government Ethics, Trump’s golf courses alone reported $288 million in income from January 2016 through April 15, 2017.
In recent years the sport has increased wildly in popularity, and today golf is a multi-billion dollar industry: as of year-end 2016 there were golf facilities in 208 of the 245 countries in the world. However, the perfect manicured green color of the globe’s 33,161 courses comes at a high price to the environment.
A study by Kit Wheeler and John Nauright of Georgia Southern University found that golf course construction often consists in “clearing of natural vegetation, deforestation, destruction of natural landscapes and habitats and changes in local topography and hydrology” in order to roughly replicate the barren Scottish Highlands in which the game originated. That unnatural landscaping often leads to erosion and habitat loss, not to mention the fact that the maintenance of a standard 9-hole needs a great deal of synthetic chemicals — many deemed hazardous to wildlife — to keep it lush and green, including fertilizers, insecticides, pesticides and fungicides.
The environmental problems associated with golf, the authors note, are particularly acute in Southeast Asia due to the sudden boom of the sport there and due the fact that golf course maintenance in the tropics is far more difficult than in other parts of the world because of the higher levels of rainfall, greater numbers of pests, diseases and weeds.
According to UNEP, golf course maintenance can also deplete freshwater resources — an average course in a tropical country needs 1,500 kilograms (3,307 pounds) of chemicals annually, and uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers. This astronomical use of resources is hard to justify in the developing world where competition for water and cropland, amid soaring populations, is intense. The problem is further complicated by weak environmental regulation and enforcement plus corruption, all too typically seen in developing countries.
Today, Trump Golf boasts a portfolio of 17 courses across the globe stretching from the jagged California cliffs to the (previously) barren desert of Dubai. This empire is expanding, and 2018 will see the opening of Trump International Hotel & Tower Lido, a 700-hectare (1,730 acre) development including a six-star luxury resort, theme park, country club, spa, luxury villas, condominiums, and, of course, an 18-hole signature championship golf course.
This new Trump-branded property will be set in the mountains of West Java, around 65 kilometers (40 miles) south of Jakarta and beside the Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, one of the island’s last virgin tropical forests.
The project has become a major concern to RMI, the Indonesian Institute for Forest and Environment, an NGO whose goal is the promotion of community-based natural resource management and biodiversity conservation in the region.
“[T]here are major concerns from the local villagers on [how much of the] water supply that will still be available to them because the project is estimated to demand [lots] of water for their luxury facilities,” RMI’s Executive Director Mardha Tillah told Mongabay, pointing out that the Trump facility will be built in an important water catchment area.
After “a public discussion that was organized by local youth, the local sub-regency government officials stated that the environmental impact assessment was not complete yet, although some construction had been undergone — e.g. a reservoir,” she said.
The Associated Press reports, that the development is causing concern among Indonesian environmentalists, who fear for the nearby national park and its threatened animals, including the Critically Endangered Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus), the Endangered Javan leaf monkey (Presbytis comata), the Vulnerable Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), and Endangered Javan silvery gibbon (Hylobates moloch).
Tillah shares these fears. “I am very much keen on looking at the EIA [Environmental Impact Assessment] document that shows how this resort does not affect any wildlife in this area,” she said.
Considering the President’s abysmal environmental record and his anti-environmental pro-business views, it is hard not to imagine that this anti-regulatory philosophy permeates Trump’s companies. During the election, Donald Trump stated that, “[W]e’ll be fine with the environment. We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.”
Both Trump’s Balinese and Javan projects will be developed in partnership with MNC Group, who is also building the new Bogor-Sukabumi toll road, scheduled for completion at the end of 2017 which will provide direct access to Lido Lakes, reducing the drive time from Jakarta.
The highway, like tropical pavement around the world, is transforming the pastoral region. “The toll road has changed the landscape of rural areas of Bogor — paddy fields are replaced by the toll road projects,” said RMI’s Tillah. “If only it was not for this resort project, [the] toll road might not be constructed, because it was neglected due to lack of investors for more than a decade.”
“On the other hand,” she added, “improvement in [regional] train service and an increase of [operating] frequency [could] already [have served as an alternative] solution for [moving] people.”
ABC revealed that Donald Trump personally lobbied for the road with senior Indonesian politicians in September 2015 at Trump Tower in New York, when he was both in negotiations over the Lido development and running for the presidency. According to ABC, the meeting was not authorized by the Indonesian Government, and was held with the direct assistance of Trump business partner Hary Tanoesoedibjo, President Commissioner and Founder of the MNC Group.
Tanoesoedibjo, a media mogul who created his own Indonesian political party in 2015, attended Trump’s inauguration last January. As the Nikkei Asian Review pointed out, he is the subject of a police investigation for allegations of intimidation and corruption, which he claims are politically motivated.
The Scottish saga
One of the best places to view the ongoing relationship between Trump’s businesses and the environment is in Scotland; the fact that golf originated there has done little to make that association run more smoothly.
For more than a decade, Trump’s golf course on the coast of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, has been at the center of a heated dispute between those who support and oppose it. Trump International Golf Course Scotland won planning permission in 2008, but conservationists objected to the project because it would radically transform large parts of one of the country’s rarest coastal dune habitats.
“The construction of Trump International Links has had an irreversible and unjustified impact on a fragile dune system, in particular a large area of the internationally important Foveran Links Site of Special Scientific Interest [SSSI],” Bruce Wilson, Senior Policy Officer of the Scottish Wildlife Trust, told Mongabay.
“Unfortunately this planning application was approved by the Scottish Government despite evidence that it was easily possible to build two world class courses on the Menie Estate without destroying the SSSI,” he added.
Trump has also been involved in a long-running row with the Scottish government over the impact of windfarms on his golf course.
Before his White House campaign, he sent letters to the then first minister of Scotland Alex Salmond to urge him to withdraw his support for windfarm development. In this series of messages, obtained by the Huffington Post thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, Trump labeled windfarms as “monsters,” suggested without evidence that “wind power doesn’t work,” and told Salmond “your economy will become a third world wasteland that investors will avoid,” if the green energy alternative was embraced by Scotland.
Trump’s resistance didn’t end there. The U.S. president-elect exhorted the leader of UK Independence party (UKIP) Nigel Farage and key associates to lobby against the Scottish windfarms. However, none of this aided Trump’s crusade against the turbines, and in December 2015 he lost a Scottish Supreme Court battle against the installation of an windfarm located several miles offshore of his course.
Last July the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, the country’s principal environmental regulator, also raised formal objections to the Trump company’s proposals for a second 18-hole course in Aberdeenshire. Now the organization will have to revise its plans to make sure its project does not violate sewage pollution, environmental protection and groundwater conservation rules.
A statement by Trump International Golf Links published by the BBC reads in part:
The recent correspondence between Trump International, the local authority and statutory consultants is a normal part of the planning process and the regular ongoing dialogue conducted during the application process. SNH and Sepa always reference a range of policy considerations and factors which is standard practice and nothing out of the ordinary. Our application is making its way through the planning system and this dialogue will continue until it goes before committee for consideration. The Dr Martin Hawtree designed second golf course is located to the south of the Trump estate and does not occupy a Site of Special Scientific Interest therefore is not covered by any environmental designations.
We are extremely confident in our proposal and that this process will reach a satisfactory conclusion acceptable to all parties on our world class development.
What’s good for Trump is good for the U.S. and world…
During his campaign Donald Trump said he wanted to get rid of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “in almost every form.” Now that he is President, Trump appears to be moving toward that goal, and some of his businesses are among the institutions that could benefit from a dramatic roll back in environmental regulations. A look at Trump’s attacks on the U.S. EPA, and the business rationale for those assaults, is enlightening when studying the actions of Trump businesses around the world.
For instance, Trump issued an executive order commanding the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers to review the Obama-era Clean Water Rule, also known as the Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS) — a rule that greatly irks golf course developers.
Last March, Bob Helland, director of congressional and federal affairs of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America (GCSAA), issued a statement that makes clear why his association opposes the Clean Water Rule as written: “Under the rule, golf courses could likely be required to obtain costly federal permits for any land management activities or land use decisions in, over or near these waters, such as pesticide and fertilizer applications and stream bank restorations and the moving of dirt. The impact on golf course management could be dramatic.”
In 2016, the GSCAA praised Trump as “a president who understands the value of the game of golf, both as a golfer and golf course owner,” who “is also familiar with the H-2B Visa program that a number of golf facilities utilize, including one of his own in Florida.” This visa program allows U.S. employers, or agents who meet specific regulatory requirements, to bring foreign nationals to the U.S. to fill temporary nonagricultural jobs. “This could lead to a breakthrough in the red tape that makes using the program so frustrating,” said GSCAA. These statements shine a bright light on the imbalance between the administration’s business, environmental and immigration policies.
World-class hotels form another cornerstone of the Trump financial empire. So when the president proposed cutting all funding to EPA’s very successful 25-year-old Energy Star Program, a program meant to save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, CNN launched an investigation to see how Trump businesses might benefit from its elimination.
It turns out that the government’s Energy Star for Hotels ranking process provides an assessment of the energy performance of a property relative to its peers, taking into account local climate, weather and business activities at the property. Energy Star claims these ratings can affect the value of a property — the media investigation discovered that Trump’s properties tend to receive low ratings.
According to CNN, “[t]he most recent scores from 2015 reveal that 11 of his 15 skyscrapers in New York, Chicago and San Francisco are less energy efficient than most comparable buildings. On a scale of 1 to 100 for energy efficiency, Manhattan’s old Mayfair Hotel, which Trump converted into condos, rated a 1,” the lowest rating possible.
The House Appropriations Committee rejected the Trump’s administration proposal to eliminate Energy Star, but its spending bill for 2018, which came out in early July, proposed reducing funding by roughly 40 percent, a cut to $31 million.
Critics say that such a deep reduction will be significantly harmful to the environment. “We appreciate that the committee has rejected the administration’s proposal… but a 40 percent cut would be crippling as well,” said the President of the Alliance to Save Energy Kateri Callahan in a press statement.
In 2014, EPA estimated that Energy Star has reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 2.5 billion metric tons since 1992, while also providing energy cost savings to consumers, hotels and other industries.
“I have to wonder where this is coming from,” Callahan said, stressing the fact that Energy Star is one of the most popular government programs in U.S. history and has enjoyed broad bipartisan support since it was created under President George H.W. Bush.
Donald Trump, award-winning environmentalist?
Donald Trump has been claiming he is an environmentalist at least since 2011, when he told Fox & Friends that “I’ve received many, many environmental awards”.
“I am a big believer in clean air and clean water. I’m a big believer. I have gotten so many awards for the environment,” Trump said during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa. “I won many environmental awards, I have actually been called an environmentalist, if you believe it,” he repeated at a rally in Atkinson, New Hampshire.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross echoed that assessment on NBC’s Today show. Trump, he said, “is an environmentalist. I’ve known him for a very long time. He’s very pro-environment.”
Politifact found a grain of truth in Trump’s statements. A decade ago two local groups did award Trump for specific projects. In 2007, he received the Friends of Westchester County Parks’ inaugural Green Space Award for donating 436 acres to the New York state park system, and in the same year his Bedminster New Jersey Trump National Golf Course received the first annual environmental award of the The Metropolitan Golf Association (MGA).
MGA’s press statement reads: “Through the leadership of Donald J. Trump, [director of grounds] Nicoll has implemented an environmental strategy that has resulted in the preservation of a dedicated 45 acre grassland bird habitat on the property, as well as intensive erosion control and stream stabilization management plan. The impacts of golf construction and operations on this land have resulted in a significant environmental net gain from the previous land use. Trump National has made itself readily available to Bedminster Township officials by way of monthly meetings to keep them up to date on the club’s environmental monitoring activities.”
MGA also said that, while planning the construction of an additional course, the club integrated environmental awareness into their golf course maintenance and construction plans by maintaining more stringent standards than those required by state and local regulations.
However, critics note, if Donald Trump is an environmentalist, he is not an orthodox one. In his tweets, he has referred to global warming as “a canard,” something “mythical,” “based on faulty science and manipulated data,” “nonexistent” or “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” and also as “a total, and very expensive, hoax,” not to mention “bullshit.”
Nor does he show his environmentalism in the associates with which he surrounds himself. When choosing someone to lead his transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency, Trump picked climate science denier Myron Ebell, who believes the environmental movement is “the greatest threat to freedom and prosperity in the modern world.” His EPA head is the former Oklahoma attorney Scott Pruitt, a climate change skeptic whose LinkedIn profile says he is “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.” Pruitt in the past sued EPA 14 times to block clean air and water safeguards, and recently denied that carbon dioxide causes global warming.
However, big business can save big bucks by being environmentally friendly, and that is something that did not go unnoticed at Trump’s environmental award-winning New Jersey golf courses. The Wall Street Journal reported that both of them qualify as a farmland because they are not only sports fields, but also home to activities associated to farming such as hay production and woodcutting. The Bedminster golf course is even home to a small goat herd that grazes overgrown grass. It is not clear exactly how much the tax breaks save Trump, but the Journal estimates the courses pay less than $1,000 in annual taxes instead of the $80,000 that would be standard for such properties.
Still, experts note, anyone saying that Donald Trump always puts profit and his assets ahead of the environment would be wrong. In truth, Trump’s policies could do serious harm to his businesses. As Buzz Feed News notes, Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement likely means continuing rising sea levels and more extreme storms, which both threaten his low-lying properties, including the Trump National Doral in the Miami suburbs, a luxury golf resort that could end up submerged. Indeed, had Hurricane Irma tracked east of Florida instead of west, as originally expected, it’s likely the storm, supercharged by some of the warmest Caribbean waters on record, would have made a direct hit on Mar-A-Lago, the so-called Winter White House.
Conflict of interest?
The U.S. Congress has exempted the president and vice president from conflict-of-interest laws Title 18 Section 208 of the U.S. code. This decision was based on the premise that the presidency wields so much power that virtually any possible executive action might pose a potential conflict of interest (COI).
Last November, during his first news conference since his election, Trump declared: “I have a no-conflict situation because I’m president, which is — I didn’t know about that until about three months ago, but it’s a nice thing to have, but I don’t want to take advantage of something.”
Many watchdog organizations have been less complacent than Congress and the President concerning COIs — including those involving presidential power, the Trump companies, and the environment. These NGOs are watching to see if Trump international and domestic business deals have political implications, or if any policies promoted by his administration seem designed to benefit Trump businesses.
The President’s just proposed tax reforms are a case in point — watchdog groups, the media and financial experts began looking for COIs and policy points benefiting Trump’s tax bracket and his businesses within hours of the announcement of the merest sketch of a tax reform plan.
“Presidents have historically understood that there can be a conflict of interest even if the law doesn’t technically apply, and they have followed the same standards that apply to other federal employees,” Clark Pettig, American Oversight’s Communications Director, told Mongabay.
American Oversight (AO) is a watchdog organization that is investigating numerous COIs across the Trump administration. For instance, it sued EPA to force the release of communications between regulators and industry groups, and to uncover the role investor Carl Icahn has played in setting policy. AO has also launched a broad investigation of the administration’s payments to Trump-owned businesses, and has submitted FOIA requests for documents related to the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement.
Pettig believes Trump clearly has a conflict of interest as he serves as President while also owning and profiting from a global business empire.
“Rather than “draining the swamp,” the Trump administration has brought unprecedented conflicts of interests to Washington,” he said. “From rolling back environmental regulations that could impact his golf courses, to using diplomatic events to promote his own resorts, President Trump seems determined to use his power to enrich himself and his business empire,” Pettig said.
Laura Friedenbach, Deputy Communications Director of Every Voice, a Washington-based watchdog organization whose aim is to reduce the influence of money in politics, is concerned as well. “When a public official is making decisions on behalf of the American people and also has a large personal stake in the outcome, it presents a conflict of interest,” she told Mongabay.
“The conflicts of interest facing President Trump and his cabinet raise real questions about where the Trump administration’s priorities lie,” Friedenbach said. “Are they doing what’s best for the American people, or are they letting their own interests and the interests of their business partners get in the way?”
“If President Trump and his cabinet are more concerned with boosting profits for companies they have a stake in, and personal ties with, including fossil fuel companies, then the result will be slowing down progress on combatting the effects of climate change,” she declared.
The Trump Organization, Trump Hotels, Trump Golf, and MNC Land did not reply to Mongabay’s multiple requests to comment for this article; nor did they answer questions sent to them concerning their projects’ environmental impacts, Energy Star ratings, Trump’s environmental awards, and steps to reduce project carbon footprint.
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Debunking climate change deniers' claims about plants.
Some climate deniers claim carbon dioxide is good for plants, and plants are good for people, so we should aim to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere than we already are.
Bigger isn’t always better. Too much of a good thing can be bad.
Many anti-environmentalists throw these simple truths to the wind, along with caution.
You can see it in the deceitful realm of climate change denial. It’s difficult to keep up with the constantly shifting — and debunked — denier arguments, but one common thread promoted by the likes of the U.S.-based Heartland Institute and its Canadian affiliate, the misnamed International Climate Science Coalition, illustrates the point. They claim carbon dioxide is good for plants, and plants are good for people, so we should aim to pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere than we already are.
We’ve examined the logical failings of this argument before — noting that studies have found not all plants benefit from increased CO2 and that most plants don’t fare well under climate change-exacerbated drought or flooding, among other facts. Emerging research should put the false notion to rest for good.
Several studies have found that, even when increased CO2 makes plants grow bigger and faster, it reduces proteins and other nutrients and increases carbohydrates in about 95 per cent of plant species, including important food crops such as barley, rice, wheat and potatoes. A 2014 Harvard School of Public Health study, published in Nature, looked at 130 species of food plants and found that increased CO2 reduced the amount of valuable minerals such as zinc and iron in all of them.
Another study, by Irakli Loladze at the Catholic University of Daegu in South Korea, found increased CO2 caused calcium, magnesium, potassium, zinc and iron concentrations in plants to decline by an average of eight per cent, while sugar and starch content increased.
As a Scientific American article points out, billions of people depend on crops like wheat and rice for iron and zinc. Zinc deficiency is linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly children, and exacerbates health issues such as pneumonia and malaria. Iron deficiency, which causes anemia, is responsible for one-fifth of maternal deaths worldwide.
Part of the problem with the industrial agricultural mindset and the denier argument that CO2 is plant food or “aerial fertilizer” is the idea that bigger and faster are better. These studies illustrate the problem with the climate change–denial argument but, in its pursuit of profit, industrial agriculture has often made the same mistake. Plants — and now even animals like salmon — have mainly been bred, through conventional breeding and genetic engineering, to grow faster and bigger, with little regard for nutrient value (leaving aside anomalies like the not-entirely-successful “golden rice”). But higher yields have often resulted in less nutritious fruits and vegetables.
Genetic engineering’s promise was increased yields and reduced need for pesticides, but studies show it has fallen far short of that ambition. A 2016 National Academy of Sciences study, as well as a New York Times investigation, found no evidence that genetically engineered crops increased yields over conventional crops. Although insecticide and fungicide use on GE crops in the U.S. and Canada has decreased, herbicide use has gone up to the point that overall pesticide use has increased. France, which doesn’t rely on genetically modified crops, has reduced use of all pesticides — 65 per cent for insecticides and fungicides and 36 per cent for herbicides — without any decrease in yields.
The “golden rice” experiment shows that plants can be engineered for higher nutrient value, but that hasn’t been the priority for large agrochemical companies.
As for carbon dioxide, we know that fossil fuel use, industrial agriculture, cement production and destruction of carbon sinks like wetlands and forests are driving recent global warming, to the detriment of humanity. The one flimsy argument climate change deniers have been holding onto — that it will make plants grow faster and bigger — has proven to be a poor one.
Like life itself, science is complex. Reductive strategies that look at phenomena and reactions in isolation miss the big picture. Our species faces an existential crisis. Overcoming it will require greater wisdom and knowledge and a better understanding of nature’s interconnectedness.
Tackling climate disruption and feeding humanity are connected. It’s past time to ignore the deniers, reassess our priorities and take the necessary measures to slow global warming.
— written with contributions from David Suzuki Foundation senior editor Ian Hanington.
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After the flood, the monster that grows like ‘the Blob’ — and doesn’t die.
All mold needs is moisture, oxygen, a surface to grow on and a food source.
The Texas towns and cities inundated by Hurricane Harvey's torrential downpours are finally drying out, but the storm left a menace behind: mold.
Just 24 hours after a heavy rain, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now many Texans can attest, the fungi can begin to grow and invade a home.
“Mold appeared almost instantly,” said Alan Tillotson of Cypress, a community about 25 miles northwest of downtown Houston. He and his wife, Vicki, returned to their neighborhood after having fled Harvey for most of last week. They started pulling off drywall and found big black circles of fuzz behind it. “We had it growing visibly on the materials we were removing. The goal is to get all the wet stuff out before it becomes a science experiment.”
Blossoming on walls, on furniture, on clothes and potentially in every crevice and corner of every soaked property, mold not only damages homes and businesses but affects human health. Exposure can trigger a stuffy nose, irritated eyes, cough or respiratory problems.
Mold is so ubiquitous because it reproduces and spreads via pollen-like spores that are lightweight and travel easily through the air, thus exposing people through inhalation and skin contact. Complicating the situation: Those spores can last a long time.
Indeed, all mold needs to survive and thrive is moisture, oxygen, a surface to grow on and a food source. Molds feed on dead, moist organic matter, including leaves, wood, cloth, paper, even dust. Smaller than the head of a pin, spores can hang in the air for hours — where they can be breathed or ingested.
Dead spores still contain allergens and so can affect health, which is why it's not enough to kill mold. It must be removed.
Tillotson said he and his wife have suffered no ill effects so far. They quickly ventilated rooms, opened windows and turned on fans. They have already had the drywall stripped down to the studs and their hardwood floors removed.
“The water came in so fast,” he recounted Tuesday. “We had no idea how high it would go. If I had to do it all over again, I’d have already moved away.”
Methods to remove mold run the gamut. There's simple, as in scrubbing with a fungicide mixed with bleach and water. There's also complicated, which can involve wet vacuuming or vacuuming with a high-efficiency air purifier.
Yet mold expert Nick Gromicko, founder of the National Association of Certified Home Inspectors, thinks some victims of Hurricane Harvey may not ever be able to remove all the mold.
“Mold can be hidden behind walls where spores are not detected, and mold can grow very rapidly within days,” he said. “Mold is literally a monster that grows like that vintage movie 'The Blob.' … It doesn’t die. If it has food and water, it will live forever.”
With thousands of homes and businesses along the Texas Gulf Coast unreachable for days — and perhaps uninhabitable for weeks or months — Gromicko said many structures likely can't be rescued.
“Where homes have been in standing water for so long, the cure for most of these mold problems is going to be a bulldozer,” he warned. “The homes are going to have to be razed.”
Among the steps the CDC recommends for getting rid of mold after flooding are:
Throw out items that cannot be washed and disinfected, such as mattresses, rugs and carpets, upholstered furniture and books.
Remove and discard wet or contaminated drywall and insulation.
Thoroughly clean all hard surfaces, including floors, wood and metal furniture, counters, appliances and plumbing fixtures, with hot water and laundry or dish detergent.
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Industrial meat production is killing our seas. It's time to change our diets.
America’s addiction to cheap meat, fed on corn and soy in vast indoor factories, comes at a high cost to our own health and that of the planet.
Every spring, as the snows thaw, water rushes down the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, spreading life, then death into the Gulf of Mexico. The floodwaters are laden with fertilisers washed from fields and factory farms. As spring turns to summer, excessive nutrients first drive a huge bloom of living plankton, then cause death on a gargantuan scale as a dead zone blossoms across the seabed. Most years it grows swiftly to over 5,000 square miles of seabed, killing everything that cannot outrun it.
This year’s dead zone has engulfed 8,700 square miles, the biggest ever recorded.
A new report lands much of the blame for the dead zone at the door of modern industrial agriculture. America’s addiction to cheap meat, fed on corn and soy in vast indoor factories, comes at a high cost in human health problems and environmental destruction. None of these costs are paid for by the companies that produce the meat and feed, such as Tyson, Cargill and ADM.
Agriculture was very different before the second world war, when animals were mostly kept outdoors. Cows grazed on pasture and rangeland, while chickens and hogs rooted over fields, supplemented with food and crop waste. Chemicals were little used.
In the last few decades, meat production has intensified and become big business for the agrochemical industry. Animals have been moved indoors into crowded feedlots where they are fattened on corn and soybeans grown, ironically, on the rangeland the animals vacated. Cropland is eating into the remaining prairie, making this wildflower rich habitat one of the most endangered in the US.
Crops grown to supply meat production consume vast quantities of fertilisers, herbicides, fungicides and pesticides, much of which wash into streams and rivers, and then downstream to the sea. Indoor animals are pumped full of veterinary drugs to counter the disease risks of high-density living. The drugs find their way into watercourses from urine, manure and abattoir waste.
Plankton, the microscopic plants and animals that drift in the open sea, fuel ocean food webs. Normally, they are limited by lack of nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, the key ingredients of farm fertiliser. But in certain parts of the sea, nutrients, light and warmth come together in just the right quantities.
One such area was the “fertile crescent”, an area west of the Mississippi Delta, once famed for its abundant marine life and prolific fisheries for fish and shrimp. But agricultural pollution has destroyed it.
The Mississippi drains 40% of the lower 48 states, including much of the midwest agricultural belt. Corn and soybeans for industrial meat production produce half the nitrogen and a quarter of the phosphorus pollution reaching the Gulf of Mexico. So much fertiliser washes into the Gulf today that the planktonic explosion of life is excessive. Come summer, the short-lived plankton die and sink and their rotting bodies suck up all the oxygen dissolved in the water. The deathly shroud kills indiscriminately.
There are more than 550 dead zones across the world today, the great majority due to agricultural and industrial pollution. Meat consumption is growing fast, encouraged by low prices that do not reflect the true costs.
As Philip Lymbery argues in his compelling book, Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were, if the costs of pollution, habitat destruction, losses to fisheries and tourism, climate change and impacts on human health were fully accounted for, meat would be a luxury food.
Industrial agriculture and our diets must change if the world is to prosper. By eating more vegetables and less meat, reared outdoors in humane and sustainable ways, we would all be better off.
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Bye bye banana? Hopefully not in Vietnam.
In late 2015, scientific publications and mainstream media sources reported alarming news for the 400 million people in the world who depend on bananas for their basic sustenance, as well as the hundreds of millions of others who love the mushy texture and sweet taste of this tropical fruit.
Bye bye banana? Hopefully not in Vietnam
VietNamNet Bridge – In late 2015, scientific publications and mainstream media sources reported alarming news for the 400 million people in the world who depend on bananas for their basic sustenance, as well as the hundreds of millions of others who love the mushy texture and sweet taste of this tropical fruit.
Tropic Biosciences team, global coffee, banana industries, Vietnam economy, Vietnamnet bridge, English news about Vietnam, Vietnam news, news about Vietnam, English news, Vietnamnet news, latest news on Vietnam, Vietnam
New frontier for fruit: Tropic Biosciences meeting with the 3T Banana Company, one of the largest banana exporters of Viet Nam, in Hung Yen Province. Pictured from right to left: The Managing Director of 3T, Pham Nang Thanh; CEO of Tropic Biosciences Gilad Gershon, CTO Dr Ofir Meir, Trang Nghiem of the Israel Trade and Economic Mission in Ha Noi. — VNS Photo Ruth Sinai
The news was best captured in the alliterative headline of a Washington Post report that read “Bye Bye Banana”.
It was the latest episode in an agricultural saga that began with the extinction of the world’s most popular banana some 60 years ago, and the looming threat currently faced by the world’s banana crop from a more resilient version of the same disease.
The fungus, known as Panama Disease, is believed to originate from Australia in the 1800s, and it virtually wiped out the Gros Michel banana in the mid-1950s and 60s. Some 99 per cent of today’s market – dominated by brands like Chiquita and Monsanto – consists of its successor, the Cavendish banana, which is exactly why it is vulnerable to the same kind of deadly fate that befell the Gros Michel.
“You basically have only one kind of banana on the market, what is known as a monoculture. There was no genetic variety with the Gros Michel, and that’s why it disappeared. We’re afraid the same could happen to the Cavendish. We have to develop a species that is resistant,” explains Dr Ofir Meir, chief technology officer at Tropic Biosciences, a UK-based start-up founded last year to develop high-yielding and disease-tolerant commercial varieties of crops, specifically in the US$50 billion global coffee and banana industries.
Meir, with experience in R&D; at seed giant Monsanto, and his colleagues, including the former head of plant R&D; at Nestlé, are hoping to pioneer the application of their innovative genomic project in Viet Nam, a major grower of both coffee and bananas.
“We started thinking where would be a good target market to spearhead our technology,” says the company’s CEO Gilad Gershon, a biotech entrepreneur and retired major in the Israeli navy. “In a way, it was a no-brainer. Viet Nam is the second largest producer of Robusta coffee in the world (after Brazil), and the Cavendish bananas actually originated in Viet Nam.”
Splicing and dicing
What Tropic Biosciences is doing is known as genetic editing, the latest frontier in the world of genomic science, which holds tremendous promise for treating human and plant-based disease.
While still in its infancy, this latest chapter in science-nonfiction is a technique used to modify DNA with extreme precision. Unlike the process of genetically modified organisms (GMO), which involves introducing foreign genetic matter into organisms to modify their DNA, genetic editing makes cuts to specific DNA sequences in a plant or human cell, using enzymes called “engineered nucleases”.
Genome editing can be used to add, remove, or alter DNA in the genome and thus change the characteristics of a cell.
“To my understanding, genetic editing is a modern technology for new varieties promising high yields, high quality and tolerance or resistance to drought, particularly for coffee which is the main cash crop in Viet Nam,” says Truong Hong who heads the Western Highlands Agro-forestry Scientific and Technical Institute (WASI).
Hong, who met with the Tropic Biosciences team at the institute in Dak Lak Province earlier this month, said it was his first introduction to the world of genetic editing. “I would be very happy to work with them on problems faced by coffee growers, such as nematode causing root rot disease and the effects of drought in the dry season. I think growers will also like this new approach.”
The company is currently developing several prototypes of products at its labs in Norwich, which were presented to Hong and his team, most notably high-yield and low-caffeine varieties of Robusta coffee.
“We want to involve the growers in the research and development stage because we want to be sure of obtaining the best results,” says Gershon.
The R&D; team also met in Ha Noi with the Agriculture Genetics Institute to introduce the technology and their plans.
“We are happy to explore the different alternatives for collaboration with local research institutions,” says Gershon. “One interesting candidate is AGI which has shown real interest in such collaboration.”
Shining eyes
The growers with whom they met appear enthusiastic about testing the proposed coffee products.
“We aim to come back in a few months and choose one or two leading growers to run the pilots with,” says Gershon.
“We’re hoping to introduce these species here in cooperation with the institute and others,” he adds. “Everyone we met seems to want to try, to do. You talk to people and you see their eyes shining. They’re go-getters.”
The Government, scientists and growers are indeed thirsty for this kind of innovation in both coffee and banana growing, to enhance sustainable exports – 94 per cent of the coffee grown is exported — and to build up expertise in this highly competitive, burgeoning field of genetic editing.
According to Nguyen Manh Dung of the Department of Processing and Trade for Agro-Forestry-Fisheries Products and Salt Production, although Viet Nam produces about 1.4 million tonnes of bananas annually, it cannot satisfy all its export demand.
Viet Nam’s preservation technologies have yet to meet international requirements, making it impossible to always keep the fruit looking good. Thus, relatively few Vietnamese products have been licensed to penetrate high-end markets.
"In the long term, studies and research on banana cultivation have to focus on generating banana varieties that are high-yield, high quality, are of better appearance and are also resistant to several dangerous diseases," Dung tells Viet Nam News.
Banana growers with whom the team met along with Pham Nang Thanh, the head of 3T, one of the country’s largest banana exporters, appeared excited, the visitors say.
The enticing horizon being offered by the genetic editing technique would also extend the green phase of the bananas, so that the fruit could be transported and stored for longer periods before ripening for sale.
The developers promise that the hot-out-the-lab prototype would not only protect bananas from the dreaded Panama Disease, it would also make them resistant to Black Sigatoka, a disease that damages the plant leaves and requires extensive use of fungicide to control. The resistant species would thus reduce losses and costs to growers and protect their health. Tropic Biosciences argues that this could result in a saving of $4-10 per tree annually on fungicides, translating to savings of as much as 25 per cent, not to mention a cleaner environment.
Growers could then use some of the savings to buy the disease-resistant, genetically edited plants, with the proprietary traits developed by the company.
The same business model would apply to the coffee crops, with the company promising that the new species would increase coffee extraction yields by between 5 and 15 per cent, reduce disease that results in annual losses of as much as 15 per cent of the coffee crop – and improve taste.
“We started trying to develop a higher-performing plant. If you reduce the need for chemicals and enable more delicate cultivation, the taste also improves,” says plant scientist Meir.
The gene editing community, which conducts much of its work under a tight shield of secrecy for fear its methods will leak, is careful to stress that its output is not the highly controversial engineering known as GMO.
“Although there was no proof of any health threat from that, people felt uncomfortable about GMO because it introduced foreign DNA and cross-cropped species, so that regulators in different countries greatly limited its use,” Gershon explains.
Gene editing appears more palatable, although the Food and Drug Administration is still conducting a review of its possible impacts. While bio-ethicists warn of slippery slopes of interfering with DNA, for example to “edit” embryo genes, scientists are forging ahead in the labs and plantations.
Ruth Sinai
VNS
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Fungal disease is on the rise. Is environmental change to blame?
Scientists and physicians are looking for clues to a worrying increase in fungal infections and exploring ways to reduce the threat.
Scientists and physicians are looking for clues to a worrying increase in fungal infections and exploring ways to reduce the threat.
Image © iStockphoto.com/iLexx
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Lindsey Konkel
@lindseykonkel
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April 26, 2017 — Fungi are everywhere — from the mushrooms that decompose fallen logs in the forest, to the mold that grows in your bathtub, to the microscopic fungal cells that reside naturally on your skin. Scientists estimate there are 1.5 million species of fungi on the planet. They’re a diverse group, bunched together by their ability to use digestive enzymes to break down and absorb nutrients from their surroundings — a characteristic that makes some of them great decomposers. Fungi are, in essence, nature’s first compost bin. Many of them also help plants grow or carry out other important ecosystem functions.
And some fungi are pathogens, causing disease in plants and animals, including humans. Throughout human history, fungal diseases have been pretty rare. Those that do arise tend to be only skin deep (think athlete’s foot or ringworm). Our complex immune systems and our hot bodies — most fungi can’t survive our internal temperatures — have largely protected us from major life-threatening fungal outbreaks.
“We live in a sea of fungi, but probably less than 20 to 30 species are common pathogens in humans,” says John Perfect, an infectious disease specialist at Duke University.
Invasive fungal infections — the really bad kind that infect the heart, blood, brain, bones and other internal organs — kill about 1.5 million people worldwide every year. According to some estimates, at least as many people die from the top 10 invasive fungal diseases as from tuberculosis or malaria. Perfect and other experts say these deadly diseases are on the rise. Some fungal pathogens that infect humans are emerging in parts of the world where they’ve never been found. In hospital patients, these life-threatening fungal infections are becoming more difficult to treat. Scientists and doctors are beginning to trace these worrying trends to human activity and changes in the environment, and working to figure out what we can do differently to reduce the threat.
Emergent Strain
The rise of human fungal infections coincided largely with the onset of the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s, says Robin May, a microbiologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Fungal diseases flourished in the severely immune-compromised population of people with AIDS. One fungal disease in particular — cryptococcosis — became an AIDs-defining illness in the 1980s. While the advent of antiretroviral therapy substantially reduced the number of people getting — and dying — from cryptococcosis, the disease remains a big problem in some parts of the world.
The main cause of the disease is a common fungus found in soils all over the world called Cryptococcus neoformans. In some people with cryptococcosis, the fungus invades the lungs, causing pneumonia and other breathing problems. In some cases it spreads to the nervous system and causes swelling around the brain. More than 1 million people with HIV/AIDS worldwide are affected with cryptococcal meningitis each year. The infection often is fatal in those with weakened immune systems, though it’s rare in people who are not immunocompromised.
The emergence of Cryptococcus gattii in the Pacific Northwest in 1999 raised concerns that a changing climate can increase the range of fungal pathogens. Map Courtesy of American Society for Microbiology
Then in 1999, doctors on Vancouver Island in Canada diagnosed six people with what appeared to be a more virulent strain of cryptoccosis. None of the infected individuals had medical conditions, such as HIV, that would weaken their immune systems. They were otherwise healthy.
Researchers tracked the new infections to a different species of fungus — Cryptococcus gattii — a fungus that is more commonly found in the tropics. How the fungus made its way to Canada’s west coast is anybody’s guess. But it colonized its new, northern environment causing infections over the next decade in healthy individuals across the Pacific Northwest before starting to wane.
The emergence of C. gattii in the Pacific Northwest raised the notion that changes in climate could potentially increase the range of some fungal pathogens, according to May, who studies why some fungi are more harmful to humans than others. Researchers are now trying to understand how long-term changes in weather patterns — temperature or moisture, for instance — might impact human exposures to C. gattii and other fungal pathogens in the environment.
Links to Climate Change
Very few fungi can survive extreme heat or freezing temperatures. Instead, most thrive in moist, temperate climates. As the world warms, that temperate range is increasing, says May. And the fungi are keeping pace.
Fungal diseases cause more than two-thirds of all crop losses worldwide. Photo Courtesy of DuPont Pioneer
Some of the clearest reports come from agriculture, where fungal diseases cause more than two-thirds of all crop losses worldwide. “Major fungal diseases such as rice blast, wheat stem rust and corn smut challenge the global food supply,” says Sarah Gurr, chair in food security at the University of Exeter in the UK.
She and colleagues have shown in the northern hemisphere that fungal pests are shifting poleward at a rate of 7.6 kilometers (4.7 miles) per year. This means new fungal threats for some of the world’s most important grain producers, including the northern prairies of Europe and North America, says Gurr.
Fungal diseases are having their moment in wildlife too. Over the past 30 years, a chytrid fungus has led to the extinction of more than 200 species of frogs, leading to the greatest disease-caused loss of biodiversity in recorded history. Deadly white nose syndrome — named for the white fungal growth that characterizes it — has been spreading through bat populations in the eastern half of North America since 2007.
The proportion of plant and animal disease alerts recorded by the Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases attributable to fungi has risen in recent years. Diagram courtesy of Nature Publishing Group
Fungal species can only cause disease if they can survive at host temperatures, explains Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist and immunologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. Casadevall and others worry that global warming could drive the evolution of more heat-tolerant fungi — a change that could have big implications for human health.
“A major factor protecting us from fungal disease is the difference in temperature between the human body and the outside environment. As fungi adapt to living at higher temperatures, we may begin to lose some of that natural protection,” says Casadevall. For a heat-tolerant fungus, the human body might start to look less like a sweltering furnace and more like a balmy retreat.
Casadevall and colleagues have demonstrated that some fungi may already be adapting to warmer temperatures. When they analyzed thermal susceptibility data for several strains of yeast (a type of fungus) gathered since 1985, they found an increase in the past 20 years in the maximum temperature that some strains could withstand. The findings, say the researchers, are a “clear warning that global warming may cause fungi to become significantly more thermally resistant,” though it’s not possible yet to predict which species may become new human disease threats.
Non-Environmental Factors
The rise in invasive fungal diseases may be due to a number of non-environmental factors too, including increased susceptibility due to medical procedures.
“Advances in medicine have come with a few trade-offs, one of those being a rise in human fungal infections,” says Jack Edwards, a medical mycologist at Harbor/UCLA Medical Center in California. Edwards studies life-threatening infections due to yeast in hospitalized patients.
The CDC estimates there are roughly 46,000 cases of hospital-associated invasive candidiasis each year, a number that’s increased over the past two decades. It’s one of the most common bloodstream infections in hospitalized patients, and is caused by Candida yeasts that normally live in the gut and on the skin with few problems. But in patients with weakened immune systems — people on cancer chemotherapy or who have undergone an organ transplant, for instance — Candida can be a big problem, causing deaths in about 30 percent of patients with bloodstream infections.
“Every time you take an antibiotic, you’re killing off some of the good bacteria in your gut that keep the growth of harmful organisms such as pathogenic yeast in check.” – John Perfect
Overuse of antibiotics may be another factor leading to more life-threatening fungal infections. The human gut microbiome — the living things within our intestinal tract — consists of a few trillion organisms, including bacteria, viruses and even fungi. It’s a whole community of microscopic bugs — some of them helpful, some of them harmful. Our health depends on just the right balance.
Most antibiotics don’t discriminate between good and bad bacteria, explains Perfect. “Every time you take an antibiotic, you’re killing off some of the good bacteria in your gut that keep the growth of harmful organisms such as pathogenic yeast in check,” he says.
Drug Resistance
Invasive fungal infections can be some of the trickiest medical problems to treat. A dearth of antifungal medications is one reason, says Edwards. There just aren’t a lot of drug options for preventing or treating fungal disease.
“We have vaccines for parasites, viruses, bacteria. But no fungal vaccines,” says Edwards. He’s working with collaborators to develop a vaccine against candidiasis that could be given to transplant recipients, intensive care patients and others at high risk to prevent the life-threatening yeast infection.
Drug-resistant fungal infections complicate the picture.
Some experts fear that rampant use of single-target-site fungicides — chemicals with one very specific means of killing fungi — in agriculture could translate into more drug-resistant fungal infections in humans.
Aspergillus fumigatis, a fungus that causes lung infections, is showing signs of drug resistance in the environment. Photo courtesy of Yale Rosen
In Europe, the Americas and Asia, researchers have found drug-resistant strains of Aspergillus fumigatus in garden soil, plant seeds, rice fields and compost. The fungus causes a disease called aspergillosis, which can cause breathing problems in both immune-suppressed and healthy people.
The discovery of drug-resistant aspergillosis in patients who have never before taken antifungal medications suggests that drug resistance in some cases could be coming from the environment and not from previous use of antifungals, says Gurr.
She says we should limit use of agricultural fungicides that are structurally similar to medically important antifungal medications. More research is needed too, she says, on the basic life cycle of fungal plant pathogens. Such knowledge, says Gurr, could lead to more judicious use by helping farmers to better plan when in the growth cycle to apply fungicides to their crops.
Perfect says fungal diseases have become a “silent” epidemic among certain groups — cancer patients, people with AIDS and the severely ill in hospitals. And the problem seems to only be exacerbating with time: Over the past year, reports have emerged of yet another — frequently drug resistant — hospital-associated fungal threat, Candida auris, in at least 16 countries around the world. As the environment around us changes and our natural defenses become more tenuous, Perfect warns, we need to take steps to protect ourselves, especially the most vulnerable among us.
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Earthworm numbers dwindle, threatening soil health.
Earthworms help recuperate soil and enrich it with much needed minerals. But environmentalists are concerned as earthworms have come under threat from intensive use of manure and acidic soil.
Earthworms, it seems, are the unsung heroes of our world. Labeled slimy and disgusting by many, these lowly invertebrates work unseen and underground where they till, fertilize and improve soil.
But environmentalists are concerned that industrial agricultural practices are making life difficult for this surprisingly important animal.
Intensive use of manure and acidic soil with a pH value below five harm the worm, although it remains unclear whether herbicides affect earthworm's ability to reproduce.
Still, one thing is for sure: the destruction of its habitat every few months with heavy machinery stresses the animal.
Fewer than 30 earthworms are found per square meter on intensively farmed fields. But on organic farms, where the fields are rarely ploughed, up to 450 worms live in the same area, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
That's bad news according to agronomists and gardeners. A thriving earthworm population is an indication of healthy soil. And the retreat of the species is so evident the WWF has published an "Earthworm Manifesto" to publicize the faith of these dirt-dwellers.
"If earthworms suffer, so too does our soil and thereby the basis for agriculture and food supply," said Birgit Wilhelm, a WWF expert in the farming sector. For Wilhelm, these worms are the least appreciated creatures on the planet.
Diligent workers
Earthworms are industrious and irreplaceable in that they tirelessly work to fertilize and aerate soil, and in the process help prevent soil erosion.
"Strictly speaking, there are 45 species and four categories [of worm] that carry out a range of tasks," explained Professor Heinz-Christian Fründ, an environmental scientist with expertise in soil at the University of Osnabrück.
Some eat fallen leaves and wood on the soil's surface. Others gather en masse in compost heaps. A third category lives in mineral soil, which is derived from minerals or rocks and contains little humus or organic matter.
The worms replenish the soil with their excrement, which contains all the nutrients plants needs to thrive, including nitrogen, phosphorous, and calcium.
"The most well-known species of worm, the common earthworm, plays a major role for the farming sector," said Fründ. The animal builds a system of tunnels in which it lives. It digs a vertical main entrance from the top layers of the soil until it gets to a damp, reliable depth. In an enormous show of strength, the worm burrows through the earth, aerating it, so oxygen and plant roots can reach further down. This act contributes to soil formation and regeneration and improves its ability to absorb water.
The common earthworm feasts on rotting, bacteria-rich plant matter that it finds on the soil's surface. "Therefore, it's essential that farmers don't harvest right down to soil level, but instead leave some remnants," Fründ said.
Effects of climate change
Droughts are particularly devastating for worm populations. If there are too few worms, the soil will become dense, poorly aerated and won't absorb enough water.
"Soil that contains many earthworms will absorb up to 150 liters of water per hour and square meter," said WWF's Wilhelm. "If the soil has too few worms, it will act like a blocked drain. Very little will get through. That can lead to floods."
Heavy metals, such as copper, are one of the factors that can reduce earthworm numbers. However, copper compounds are used mainly by organic farmers - particularly in vineyards. Wine producers have been using the substance as a fungicide for about 100 years, although the European Union has designated it a "candidate for substitution," compelling member states to seek more favorable alternatives.
"Large amounts of copper can negatively impact an earthworm's enzymes. It inhibits their growth or they can no longer reproduce properly," according to Bernd Hommel, an expert in analysis and organic chemistry at the Julius-Kühn-Institute, a federal research center for cultivated plants. Although the researcher also established that some earthworm species can excrete the absorbed metal.
Even the agricultural sector has long known that earthworms need to be protected, says Hommel. "Only synthetic pesticides that have been tested in the lab and out in the field for compatibility with earthworms are coming to market," he added.
Future food
Still, the WWF warns of a "dangerous chain reaction for humanity," and has called for politics and society to encourage an agricultural sector more focused on soil and humus-friendly farming. The goal of the EU's farming policy should be the promotion and maintenance of natural soil fertility, said WWF's Wilhelm.
At a time when development is swallowing up more and more countryside, good soil is becoming increasingly important to ensure a secure food supply for the world's growing population. Long-term soil fertility and the ability of farmland to recuperate are under threat and protecting earthworms with their ability to improve soil should be an agricultural goal.
Research has shown there are solutions. "Using a soil cover with a catch crop such as grass during winter led to a sharp rise in earthworms," Fründ said. It's a glimmer of hope for these underground dwellers.
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