NETFUTURE

                    Technology and Human Responsibility

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Issue #123                                                 October 9, 2001
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                 A Publication of The Nature Institute
            Editor:  Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)

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CONTENTS
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Sowing Technology (Craig Holdrege and Stephen L. Talbott)
   Do we really want to pit agriculture against nature?

DEPARTMENTS

Announcements and Resources
   Workshop on Perception

About this newsletter


==========================================================================

                            SOWING TECHNOLOGY
           Do We Really Want To Pit Agriculture Against Nature?

                   Craig Holdrege and Stephen L. Talbott

(The following is a somewhat expanded version of an article that appeared
in Sierra, July/August, 2001.)

Drive the Nebraskan backroads in July and you will encounter one of the
great technological wonders of the modern world:  thousands of acres of
corn extending to the vanishing point in all directions across the table-
flat landscape.  It appears as lush and perfect a stand of vegetation as
you will find anywhere on earth — almost every plant, millions of
them, the same, uniform height, the same deep shade of green, free of
blemish, emerging straight and strong from clean, weed-free soil, with
every cell of every plant bearing genetically engineered doom for the
over- adventurous worm.

If you reflect on the sophisticated tools and techniques lying behind this
achievement, you will likely feel some of the same awe that seizes so many
people when they see a jet airliner taking off.  There can be no doubt
about the magnitude of the technical accomplishment on those prairie
expanses.  And yet, the question we face with increasing urgency today is
whether this remarkable cornucopia presents a picture of health and lawful
bounty, or instead the hellish image of nature betrayed.

Actually, it is difficult to find much of nature in those corn fields.
While nature manifests itself ecologically — contextually —
today's advanced crop production uproots the plant from anything like a
natural, ecological setting.  This, in fact, is the whole intention.
Agricultural technology delivers, along with the seed, an entire
artificial production environment designed to render the crop independent
of local conditions.  Commercial fertilizer substitutes for the natural
fertility of the soil.  Irrigation makes the plants relatively independent
of the local climate.  Insecticides prevent undesirable contact with local
insects.  Herbicides discourage social mixing with unsavory elements in
the local plant population.  And the crop itself is bred to be less
sensitive to the local light rhythm.

Where, on the farm shaped by such technologies, do we find any recognition
of the fundamental principle of ecology — namely, that every habitat
is an intricately woven whole resisting overly ambitious efforts to carve
it into separately disposable pieces?

But all this represents only one aspect of agriculture's abandonment of
supporting environments.  The modern, agribusiness operation in its
entirety has wrenched itself free from the rural economic and social
milieu that once sustained it.  The farm itself is run more and more like
a self-contained factory operation.  And the trend toward vast
monocultures — where entire ecologies of interrelated organisms are
stripped down to a few, discrete elements — has become more radical
step by step:  first a single crop replacing a diversity of crops; then a
single variety replacing a diversity of varieties; and now, monocultures
erected upon single, genetically engineered traits.

As the whole process drives relentlessly forward, the organism itself
becomes the denatured field in which genes are moved to and fro without
regard to their jarring effect upon the living things that must endure
them.  Want to make a tobacco plant glow in the dark?  Easy — inject
a firefly gene!  Want a frost-resistant strawberry?  Try a gene or two
from a cold-water flounder.

Yet, despite such freakish prodigies, the overriding question about
biotechnology is not whether we are for or against this or that technical
achievement, but whether the debate will be carried out in just such
fragmented terms.  In focusing on technological wonders to improve
agriculture, are we losing sight of the things that matter most — the
diverse, healthy, and complex communities and habitats we would like to
live in?  The question to ask of every technology is how it serves, or
disrupts, the environment into which we import it.


Is Genetic Engineering New?
---------------------------

The natural setting whose integrity we need to consider first of all is
that of the individual organism.  The challenge we're up against here
emerges in the frequently heard argument that genetic engineers are only
doing what we've always done, but more efficiently.  Writing in the New
York Times, Carl B. Feldbaum, president of the Biotechnology Industry
Organization, objected to the claim by critics that "what [traditional
breeders] do is `natural' while modern biology is not":

   Archaeologists have documented twelve thousand years of agriculture
   throughout which farmers have genetically altered crops by selecting
   certain seeds from one harvest and using them to plant the next, a
   process that has led to enormous changes in the crops we grow and the
   food we eat.  It is only in the past thirty years that we have become
   able to do it through biotechnology at high levels of predictability,
   precision and safety.

But the concern about genetic engineering today isn't that it enables us
to commit altogether new mistakes.  Rather, it's that it perfects our
ability to commit old ones.  No one is suggesting that the abuse of our
technical powers began with the discovery of the double helix.  Using
conventional techniques, breeders have, for example, produced Belgian
cattle with such overgrown muscles that they cannot be delivered
naturally; birth requires Caesarian section.  Likewise, there are hobbyist
chicken breeders who — to judge from the pictures in their magazines
— are more interested in bizarre effects that tickle human fancies
than in the welfare of the chickens themselves.

The difference is that with genetic engineering we can now manipulate
living organisms much more efficiently and more casually than ever before.
The technician need scarcely be distracted by the animal itself.  There's
none of the Frankenstein drama and messiness.  We can construct our
monsters in a clean and well-lit place.

Moreover, Feldbaum's claim completely glosses over what is
unprecedented about genetic engineering:  that it selects isolated genes,
not entire healthy organisms.  Writing in Science (March 26, 1999),
geneticist Jon W. Gordon assesses the failed attempts to create heavier
farm animals by inserting appropriate genes.  In pigs, the addition of
growth hormone-producing genes did not result in greater growth, but
unexpectedly lowered body-fat levels.  In cattle, a gene introduced to
increase muscle mass "succeeded," but the growth was quickly followed by
muscle degeneration and wasting.  Unable to stand up, the experimental
animal had to be killed.

Such results are hardly surprising when you consider the isolated and
arbitrary intrusion represented by single-gene changes.  By contrast
— and this is what Feldbaum ignores — traditional breeding
allows everything within the organism to change together in a coordinated
way.  As Gordon writes,

   Swine selected [by traditional methods] for rapid growth may consume
   more food, produce more growth hormone, respond more briskly to
   endogenous growth hormone, divert proteins toward somatic growth, and
   possess skeletal anatomy that allows the animal to tolerate increased
   weight.  Dozens or perhaps hundreds of genes may influence these
   traits.

If there's a logic to ecological relationships that says, "Change one
thing and you change everything," the same applies to the interior ecology
of the organism.  Responsible traditional breeding is a way of letting
everything change without violating the whole — because it is the
organism as a coherent and healthy whole that manages the change.


Do Organisms Need Preserving?
-----------------------------

This points to another consideration as well.  In traditional breeding the
integrity of the organisms themselves places limits upon what can be done
— limits you could reasonably call "natural."  For example, you could
not cross a strawberry with a cold-water fish in order to obtain
strawberries with "anti-freeze" genes.

The problem now is that we can break through these limits, but we have not
replaced the safeguard they represented.  Today, such a safeguard can come
only from our own, intimate, respectful understanding of the organism as a
whole and of the ecological setting in which it exists.

This is the decisive question:  does the organism possess a wholeness, an
integrity, that demands our respect?  And can we gain a deep enough
understanding of it to say, "This change is a further expression of
the organism's governing unity, and that change is a violation of
it"?

A difficult challenge, and not one we have trained ourselves to meet.  You
have to see a plant or animal in its own right and in its natural
environment in order to begin grasping who or what it is.  But given what
ecologists David S. Wilcove at Environmental Defense and Thomas Eisner at
Cornell University have called the "demise of natural history" in our
time, there is not much hope of greater familiarity with the organisms
whose natures we manipulate — certainly not by those laboratory- and
test tube-bound researchers who are doing the manipulating.

Nevertheless, some things are fairly obvious.  It's hard to understand how
the Mad Cow debacle could have occurred if anyone had bothered to notice
the cow.  How could we possibly have fed animal parts to ruminants?
Everything about the cow, from its teeth to its ruminating habits
to its four-chambered stomach, fairly shouts at us, herbivore!  Can
we violate an organism's integrity in such a wholesale manner without
producing disasters — for the organism, if not also for ourselves?

What the Mad Cow episode illustrates is that our notions of safety are
relative to our understanding of the organism.  And nothing has tended to
fragment our view of the organism as powerfully as genetic engineering.
Instead of a coherent whole expressing an organic unity through every
aspect of its being, the engineers hand us a bag of separate traits and
molecular instrumentation.


Are Bioengineered Products Adequately Tested?
---------------------------------------------

Only such a fragmenting mentality could suggest (in the words of former
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, Dan Glickman) that "test after rigorous
scientific test has proven these [genetically engineered] products to be
safe."  This suggestion is simply false on its face.  The application to
cows of bovine growth hormone (rBGH) produced by genetically engineered
bacteria was approved primarily on the basis of tests with rats — not
cows, and not people who consume cow products.  Genetically altered Bt
corn was approved without being tested for its effects on beneficial
species such as green lacewings or on "incidental" species such as the
Monarch butterfly.  (Subsequent research has suggested the possibility of
harm to both Monarchs and lacewings.)

But the more fundamental problem is that, because the organism is an
organic unity, its assimilation of foreign DNA potentially changes
everything.  Gene expression and protein levels are altered in ways
that have proven consistently unpredictable.  About one percent of genetic
transfers yield the looked-for result; the other ninety-nine percent are
all over the map.  For example, when scientists engineered tomatoes for
increased carotene production, they indeed got some plants with more
carotene — but those plants were unexpectedly dwarfed.  No one
expected this experiment to yield dwarfed plants.

So even the one percent statistic paints too optimistic a picture.  This
"success" rate reflects a focus on the particular trait that was looked
for; but even when this trait is obtained and the resulting organism is
used as the founding ancestor of a new, genetically altered line, it
remains to ask:  what about the subtle changes throughout the rest of the
organism — changes not directly related to the researcher's intent?
If there can be immediately obvious changes such as dwarfing, there can be
many more unobvious ones.  It's hard to test for changes when anything can
happen and you don't know what you're looking for.  In actual practice,
almost no such testing is done.


Is Biotechnology Good for the Environment?
------------------------------------------

Against this backdrop, the biotech companies' promotion of genetically
altered crops as the Great Green Hope of the environment due to the
promise of reduced pesticide applications is puzzling at best.  After all,
the entire thrust of the factory-farmed monocultures encouraged by these
companies is to eliminate across huge acreages all traces of any
environmental richness that might have been worth preserving in the first
place.  And now the corporate research laboratories are poised to release
into this devastated landscape a continuing stream of alien genes that, in
their own right, promise to become the ultimate, uncontrollable
pollutants.  Chemical spills can eventually be cleaned up, but there is no
recalling the replicating genes we have loosed upon the natural world.

If there's any claim that must be evaluated ecologically, it's the claim
of environmental benefit.  Yet, as Michael Pollan remarks in a New York
Times Magazine piece on genetically engineered potatoes:  those who
simply take vast monocultures for granted will always think they have,
say, a Colorado potato beetle problem — rather than the total
environmental problem of potato monoculture.

Certainly there are silver bullets to be had, even if their unfortunate
tendency is to rip crudely through the delicate, ecological fabric they
are aimed at.  Perhaps the most obvious silver bullet is Bt cotton.  The
relatively mild Bt toxin engineered into the crop is highly effective
against the bollworm and substitutes for an extraordinarily nasty series
of sprayings in conventional cotton fields.  Yet, to leave the matter
there is to accept the conventional approach as the only alternative.  And
it is also, as Charles Benbrook points out, extremely irresponsible.

Benbrook is former executive director of the National Academy of Sciences
Board on Agriculture and now an agricultural consultant in Sandpoint,
Idaho.  He sees Bt, in its normal, externally applied form, as perhaps the
most valuable pesticide ever developed.  It is approved for organic as
well as conventional use, and controls many serious pests not otherwise
easily controlled.  He calls it a "public good," and suggests that
engineering it into crops on a massive scale is the moral equivalent of
loading everyone's toothpaste with antibiotics.  Yes, the antibiotics
would yield an immediate "benefit" in terms of reduced incidence of
certain diseases.  But the consequences for both immediate and long-term
health would be ugly indeed, since disease microbes would develop
resistance much more rapidly than otherwise.  In the case of Bt, the
inevitable development of resistance by pests will reduce the useful
lifetime of this invaluable pesticide to a small fraction of what it would
otherwise be.  Then we'll be off to search for the next silver bullet.

It's a measure of the narrow vision of the biotech industry's
environmental assessment that the Bt toxin in the crop itself is never
added into the calculations of pesticide use.  Yet, speaking of corn,
Benbrook estimates that (depending on how you frame the question) there is
10 to 10,000 times as much Bt toxin produced in the crop as would have
been applied in the usual external applications — and that's assuming
a year in which the corn borer needed to be controlled at all.  It
can hardly be doubted that the amount of Bt toxin in Bt corn intended for
human consumption exceeds any residue on conventional, Bt-sprayed corn.

Moreover, researchers have recently discovered that the Bt toxin released
by the crop into the soil binds to soil particles and is then highly
resistant to biodegradation.  The implications for beneficial soil
organisms are almost completely unknown — although the researchers
found that a high percentage (90 - 95%) of insect larvae exposed to the
toxin died.

Crops genetically modified for resistance to herbicides pose similar
problems.  Knowing that their crops will more or less tolerate an
herbicide, farmers are not likely to reduce their applications.
Monsanto has requested and received from the Environmental Protection
Agency a threefold increase in allowance for glyphosate residue on Roundup
Ready soybeans.  (Glyphosate is the active ingredient in the company's
Roundup herbicide.)  The increased residues are hardly an environmental
improvement, especially in light of the fact that glyphosate has been
linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (a cancer of white blood cells) in a
study reported in the journal, Cancer (March 15, 1999).

The vast expansion of acreage in herbicide-resistant crops has led to huge
increases in the use of glyphosate — a 72% increase in 1997 alone,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  This large-scale
adoption of single-pronged weed-control strategies is deeply troubling
because it encourages herbicide-resistance in weeds (already observed with
glyphosate) and wholesale shifts in weed populations.  These shifts
require additional herbicides, and the resulting treadmill, as Benbrook
puts it, "is on hyperdrive today.  We'll burn up the current generation of
herbicides in five, ten, or fifteen years instead of three to five
decades."

The alternative to the treadmill is to turn our attention away from silver
bullets and look at ecological integrity.  Mary-Howell Martens, who was
formerly a genetic engineer and conventional farmer, now farms 1100 acres
organically in New York state.  Like many other organic growers, she and
her husband, Klaas, grow soybeans without using any herbicides.  They work
instead with nature, relying on soil fertility (the calcium-magnesium
ratio in particular affects weed vigor); long, diverse rotations,
including corn, soybeans, clover, and grains, to disrupt weed cycles;
clean seeds; well-timed tillage early on, so that the crop gets ahead of
the weeds and tends to smother them; and avoidance of high-salt
fertilizers, since salt compounds stimulate weed growth.  Later weed
control can be done mechanically, on a spot basis, as needed.


Orchestrating Nature's Complexity
---------------------------------

Most people regard genetic engineering as the future of agriculture, if
only because it is sophisticated, cutting-edge science.  But impressive
procedures in the laboratory do not automatically equate to precise
effects upon nature.  Even if it were true that DNA presents us with a
kind of master computer program controlling the living organism, every
software engineer knows about the unpredictable and sometimes disastrous
consequences for massively intricate programs when someone goes in and
"twiddles the bits."  Already in 1976, when computer programs were vastly
simpler than today, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum could write a
now-classic chapter entitled "Incomprehensible Programs" where he pointed
out that any substantial modification of a large, complex program "is very
likely to render the whole system inoperative."

In its application to agriculture, genetic engineering is crude,
blindfolded, trial-and-error science — and not only because the
consequences of particular genetic alterations are largely unknown.  The
farmer is often prevented from exercising skilled judgment based on the
ecological realities of the local environment.

Take, for example, the farmer who plants Bt corn as protection against the
European corn borer.  (Bt corn has been engineered so that the Bt toxin
— a pesticide naturally produced by the bacterium, Bacillus
thuringiensis — is manufactured in each cell of the plant.)  Such a
farmer commits to round-the-clock, season-long application of a pesticide
in his fields before he knows whether the corn borer will even be a
problem.  In major parts of the corn belt, the answer is that, during most
seasons, it will not.

If you really want technical sophistication, don't look at the latest
biotech application, but at the many successes of Integrated Pest
Management.  IPM is founded on decades of painstaking investigation into
the incredibly complex and subtle weave of natural ecologies.  Where the
main trend of today's biotech agriculture is to isolate the farm from its
environment, reducing the operation to the simplistic terms of a few
manageable variables, IPM at its best tries to work with the
environment, penetrating the boundless complexity with an understanding
that can turn intricate equilibria to good use.

It's one thing to take the heavy-handed biotech approach and engineer a
pesticide into every cell of a crop; it's quite another to manage the
ecological interrelationships of the farm so that the offending insect is
controlled by the natural balances of the larger context.  Tragically, the
more simple-minded, heavy-fisted approach tends to destroy the
possibilities inherent in the more subtle practice.  Among other problems,
converting an entire crop into a pesticide virtually guarantees the rapid
emergence of pest resistance, which IPM has taken such pains to avoid.

Working with natural complexity rather than against it is the aim of a
remarkable research organization in Kenya, the International Centre of
Insect Physiology and Ecology (ICIPE).  The Centre brings together
molecular biologists, entomologists, behavioral scientists, and farmers in
an interdisciplinary effort to control the various threats to African
crops.

The most important pests of corn and sorghum on that continent are the
stemborer and striga (witchweed), which, together, can easily destroy an
entire crop.  ICIPE researchers developed a "push-pull" system:  a grass
planted outside the cornfield attracts the stemborer; a legume planted
within the cornfield repels the insect and also suppresses witchweed by a
factor of forty compared to a corn monocrop — all while adding
nitrogen to the soil and preventing erosion; and, finally, an introduced
parasite radically reduces the stemborer population.

ICIPE director Hans Herren won the World Food Prize in 1995 after the
Centre gained control over the mealy bug that threatened the cassava crop,
a staple for 300 million people.  (A small, parasitic wasp was
instrumental in the success.)  No chemical applications and no costs to
the farmers were involved.  Yet Herren doubts he could obtain funding for
such a project now.  "Today," he says, "all funds go into biotechnology
and genetic engineering."  Biological pest control "is not as spectacular,
not as sexy."


The Real Future of Agriculture
------------------------------

Fortunately, some work on Integrated Pest Management continues, and the
results are often so dramatic that one wonders why the genetic engineering
labs have secured all the glamour for themselves.  Even the simplest step
toward balance sometimes yields striking results.  In what the New York
Times called "a stunning new result" from a vast Chinese agricultural
experiment, tens of thousands of rice farmers in Yunnan province "have
doubled the yields of their most valuable crop and nearly eliminated its
most devastating disease — without using chemical treatments or
spending a single extra penny."

The farmers, guided by an international team of scientists, merely
interplanted two varieties of rice in their paddies, instead of relying on
a single variety.  This minimal step toward biodiversity led to a drastic
reduction of rice blast, considered the most important disease of the
world's most important staple.  The fungicides previously used to fight
rice blast were no longer needed after just two years.

The experiment, covering 100,000 acres, "is a calculated reversal of the
extreme monoculture that is spreading throughout agriculture, pushed by
new developments in plant genetics," observed Martin S. Wolfe in an August
17, 2000 commentary in Nature.  The problem, Wolfe suggests, is
that monocultures provide a field of dreams for the development of super
pests.  The conventional solution — to breed resistant varieties and
develop new fungicides — leads to rapid pest resistance.  "Continual
replacement of crops and fungicides is possible, but only at considerable
cost to farmer, consumer, and environment."

These costs make the virtues of the new rice system all the more dramatic.
How was rice blast overcome?  Researchers, Wolfe says, have identified
several factors in play.  To begin with, a more disease-resistant crop,
interplanted with a less resistant crop, can act as a physical barrier to
the spread of disease spores.  Second, when you have more than one crop
variety, you also have a more balanced array of beneficial and potentially
harmful pests that hold each other in check.  A single pathogen, such as
the one involved in rice blast, is therefore less likely to gain the upper
hand.

Also, of the two varieties of rice used in the Chinese experiment, the
taller variety was the one more susceptible to blast.  But, when planted
in alternating rows with the shorter variety, the taller rice enjoyed
sunnier, warmer, and drier conditions, which appeared to inhibit the
fungus.

And, finally, a kind of immunization occurs when crops are exposed to a
diversity of pathogens.  Upon being attacked by a less virulent pathogen,
a plant's immune system is stimulated, so that it can then resist even a
pathogen that it would "normally" (that is, in a monoculture) succumb to.

This last point reminds us that disease susceptibility is not a fixed
trait of a crop variety, but relative to the conditions under which the
crop is grown.  Many existing susceptibilities reflect the crop's extreme
isolation from anything like a natural or supportive environment, with its
checks and balances.  This environment includes not only other plants, but
also the complex, teeming life of the soil — life that is badly
compromised by "efficient" applications of fertilizers, herbicides, and
pesticides.  And, as these new findings indicate, even a "healthy" variety
of disease organisms is important.  What biotech company, focused on the
latest, profit-promising lethal gene, would encourage such a balanced
awareness among farmers?


Should the Students Re-engineer the Teacher?
--------------------------------------------

When biotech proponents say, as they often do, "Prove to us that anyone
has died or been made seriously sick by genetically engineered foods," the
pathology is in the question itself.  The underlying stance is, "If you
can't show us the corpses, where the hell's the problem?"  This suggests a
complete unawareness of the ecological, social, economic, and ethical
questions posed by the whole trend of technological agriculture.

If the right questions were being asked by those pushing biotech on
farmers, they would be saying, "Look, here's why we think this kind of
crop — and farm, and business structure, and community — is
better for society than a highly diversified, local, small farm-based,
organic agriculture."

But they do not address this larger picture, continually drawing our
attention instead to particular technological achievements.  They offer
the farmer specific "solutions," but, as Amory Lovins, co-founder of the
Rocky Mountain Institute, has remarked, "If you don't know how things are
connected, then often the cause of problems is solutions."  Nor are they
quick to mention the one way their systems do surpass all
alternatives:  they offer more patent opportunities for biotechnology
concerns.  It's hard to package all the local variations and contingencies
of an environmentally healthy agriculture into a proprietary, uniform,
for-all-purposes commercial system.

The question is why we would want such a package.  The assembly-
line uniformity and near-sterility of those endless Nebraskan corn fields
certainly do appeal to some of our current inclinations, but they are not
the inclinations of nature.  It's true that we must work creatively upon
nature.  But eliciting the yet-unrealized potentials of an ecosystem is
one thing; firing silver bullets at it is quite another.  We have scarcely
begun to understand all that nature can teach us about the bounty of the
earth, and it would be a shame for the students, having gained a little
knowledge, to attempt an ambitious re-engineering of the teacher.



                          ---------------------


Biologist Craig Holdrege is author of Genetics and the Manipulation of
Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context, and director of The Nature
Institute in Ghent, New York (www.natureinstitute.org).  Stephen L. Talbott
is a senior researcher at The Nature Institute and editor of its hardcopy
newsletter, In Context.

Related articles:

** "Golden Genes and World Hunger: Let Them Eat Transgenic Rice?" in NF #108.

** "Pharming the Cow" by Craig Holdrege in NF #43.


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==========================================================================

                       ANNOUNCEMENTS AND RESOURCES


Workshop on Perception
----------------------

A two-day workshop, "Seeing the World Afresh: The Deep Ecology of
Perception", will be held at Columbia Teachers College October 20 (9 am to
5 pm) and 21 (9 am to 11 am).  The course, which is available for academic
credit, will offer training in meditative perception.  Its aim is to help
heal the split between humanity and the natural environment by providing
an objective foundation for the ecological movement, rather than a
foundation in self-interest.

Instructors are Douglas Sloan, Michael Lipson, and Georg Kuehlewind.
Sloan is a professor emeritus of history and education at Teachers
College, and also director of the sponsoring organization, the Center for
the Study of the Spiritual Foundations of Education.  Lipson, a Soros
Faculty Scholar and clinical psychologist, was for many years the Chief
Psychologist in Pediatric AIDS at Harlem Hospital, and has written and
taught extensively on themes of medical ethics and meditation practice.
Kuehlewind is the author of over 20 books on themes of linguistics,
psychology, and epistemology.  For many years a professor of chemistry in
Budapest, Hungary, he is the founder of the Logos Foundation, an
international institute for the promotion of developmentally appropriate
child rearing and education.

For further information, contact Hope Miller at 212-678-3802 (email:
hmiller@exchange.tc.columbia.edu).  Columbia Teachers College is located
on 120th Street in Manhatten.

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==========================================================================

                          ABOUT THIS NEWSLETTER

Copyright 2001 by The Nature Institute.  You may redistribute this
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #123 :: October 9, 2001

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