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RE: [RC] weed free - David LeBlancEd said: Over many generations, the potato produced more and more toxic chemicals, and the beetles became more tolerant of the chemicals etc. Unfortunately, the amount of toxic material in the leaves of a potato now far exceeds the tolerance of every modern insect except the potato beetle. There will most likely never, even in a million years, be an insect that will evolve to eat potato leaves. Good point - There's actually a really interesting exception to this. One of the treatment methods that's evolved over the last 15 years to treat toxic spills (especially gasoline) has been to use the natural bacteria in the soil to eat it. Previously, we'd dig up everything that was contaminated, take it off to an incinerator, and try to cook whatever it is out. When that's several dozen truckloads of dirt, this all gets expensive. What we've found is that for many of these cases, we can put pipes in the ground, and push air into them. Given oxygen, the bacteria will work on many types of hazardous waste. In the last 10 years, we've even been able to isolate bacteria that will metabolize dioxin, which is a pretty rough compound to deal with. So the single celled organisms can actually mutate fairly quickly - on the order of decades. For other types of waste, we can sometimes do well running it through staged systems, much like we treat sewage - an anaerobic reactor will pull off the chlorines, and then the aerobic reactor will consume what's left. Now before people start thinking along the lines of "better living through chemistry", which has got us in a lot of trouble, we still have some horrible problems and even if we know how to remediate a site, it's really expensive to do so. The Erin Brockovich movie is based on a real story where real people were getting ill. There's hundreds of less well publicized examples. Caring for the environment isn't just for "tree-hugging hippie freaks". =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
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