Mother Nature has a way of controlling
every living thing. It's hard to say if each organism has a right to be here. I
guess it depends on your point of view. I can't believe cancer cells are equal
in importance to a giant tree. Be that as it may, the great psychic healer,
Edgar Cayce said that there is something in nature to cure every ill—referring
to the human body. For instance, he suggested eating a slice of pineapple every
day to control diabetes. I have no idea if it works, so don't try this at home.
Released from the technology
section of the BBC News this morning, I read about the use of wasps to control
crop pests. A number of farmers in Brazil have swapped chemicals for wasps, in
a country that has recently outgrown the US as the largest consumer of
pesticides. "Egg-spraying" from a plane is just a trial - at the
moment, the wasps' eggs are put on pieces of cardboard and distributed
throughout the fields of sugar cane.
In my youth spent in Australia, I
remember scientists released myxomatosis in mosquitoes to control the rabbit
plague. The poor creatures suffered a painful death. Recently, the boffins
looked into using radiation to sterilise fruit flies, a pest in many places. Researchers
at Oxitec, a spin-off from Oxford University, have done it recently to
mosquitoes, genetically modifying them to fight the insects destroying trees.
Also, in 1935 cane toads were
taken to Australia from South America to fight the cane beetle - an insect
harmful to sugarcane crops. But since the toads can consume almost anything,
their population exploded, quickly reaching more than 200 million and harming
local wildlife. "That was an act of insanity, really, against all of the
scientific knowledge at the time," says Dr Shaw.
Mankind can't help tampering with
nature. What do ordinary people do in their own environment? Maybe we shouldn't
use pesticides on our garden plants and chemicals to wash our hair. Could we
ever go back?
