Science and Nature

There was a programme on the Discovery channel on 28th November, Saturday, called, "Raw Nature."

In that programme, a doctor was making rounds of the jungles of Africa to look for animals who were badly being hurt by all the 'scientific instruments' that the 'wild-life scientists' have installed on the bodies of various animals, but which are harming the animals immensely, are causing them a lot of pain making their life hell, and also endangering their very lives.

In fact, even as a child I used to wonder, if these instruments, like those stiff collars and transmitters that the Western scientists put on those poor creatures did not make their life hell by causing them immense pain. My concerns were established today. And Western science, once again stood convicted.

One of these poor creatures was an endangered kind of lion, the white lion. They'd operated him to fit a transmitter inside, which had started to leak, and was introducing poisionous acid into his system. He was very sick and was dying. They hoped, by taking it out he would recover. The other was an Elephant whose ear was badly cut by the transmitter that was fitted by a belt around her head. It had created a sore wound there.

These were only two of the creatures that we know have suffered. There would be thousands of them, who are living a hellful life because of all the scientific experiments that we're doing on them, in order to 'understand' them better.

The truth is, our understanding of these animals will always remain poor, no matter how much scientific data we can gather about them. And however proud we may be of our brains, and the 'science' that this brain has created, it will never be perfect, there will always be loopholes, like this, which will in the long run, defeat their own purpose.

I still remember, a Discovery channel programme where this scientist was trying to understand elephants, and she commented, the elephants may have emotions, but unless there is 'scientific' proof of this, we can not accept this as a fact. And, I thought, you don't need science to know that animals have emotions. Indians, e.g. already know this and practise this in their day-to-day life.

We don't really need science to understand other creatures. In nature, we were born with this understanding of other life forms on earth. We could instantly relate with them and see them just as being like us. Our instincts gave us a perfect understanding of nature and all the other life forms. Modern human society has robbed humans of this instinct.

In fact, here we have humans, as we have today been made by Western religion and science, who have lost complete touch with their own nature, and need science to tell us things about ourselves. That is how unfortunate the whole things has become. And when you think that its a science which, in any case is so incomplete to really understand much about anything, especially, when its about non-tangible, invisible things like human emotions or sexuality or gender -- you can well understand, what a blunder it can create.

No wonder, that science has become a perfect tool in the hands of the anti-man forces to misrepresent male gender and sexuality in any which way they deem fit.

And, let's come back to the animal issue. Why do we need to know about animals than what is required in order to live with them peacefully on this earth. We need to know about them, because, we have left no room for nature and its beings in the life we have created for ourselves, driving them to such small pockets and endangering their very existence. Now, when out of goodwill, we want to save them, we have to depend upon the science that destroyed nature in the first place to do something about it.

Come to think about it, why do you need to know about humans more that what is necessary? E.g. why would you want to know the 'causes' of so-called 'homosexuality?' Why not just accept nature as it is, and revolve our lives around it. Rather than rejecting what is obviously in the nature, and then trying to reinvent nature and wanting to make it fit into how we would like things to be.

For that matter, why would an entire culture want to reject the existence of differently gendered individuals (the third or more genders) or refuse to acknowledge the existence of gender as a distinct and valid human trait from our outer sex?

Unfortunately, its the West, its culture, its religion and its science -- all heavily influenced by Christianity which has given rise to a widespread cultural mentality that wants to fix nature, rather than accepting it and living it. The ancient humans -- those that they calld 'pagans' did just this. Accepted nature as it is, and just built their life around it. Can we ever get rid of Christianity and other such religions, and all their far reaching ramifications, and go back to a state, where we are reasonably in touch with nature -- both outside and within us.

Experience Nature To Feel That Oneness

Times of India, Dated: September 9, 2008

THE SPEAKING TREE
Surendra Pal

Human beings have been drawing spiritual inspiration from nature. This has been going on for ages. According to Buddhist philosopher and photographer Daisaku Ikeda, the respon~e to nature's beauty is not merely aesthetic but reflects also the ability to discern a deeper meaning and interconnectedness in things. The photographer of nature's beauty serves as a bridge connecting the hearts of people everywhere with a language that is universal.
Osho in his discourse on
'Intuition' quotes the haiku of Basho the Zen mystic and master: "When I look carefully/ I see nazunia blooming! by the hedge!" Osho says that the deep meaning of it cannot be understood intellectually but only intuitively. The idea is that one can draw deep
spiritual inspiration even from a simple message. By observing an ordinary flower and pondering over its beauty, one could feel inspired to try and unravel the mystery of creation. For hasn't Keats said that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to knOw."
To feel love and compassion for all, observe nature with totality of mind without getting affected by previously constructed images, opinions or past knowledge. Look around to observe things as if you are seeing them for the first time. Become one with the object of observation. The sun provides light and warmth irrespective of who benefits from it. Clouds, rivers, mountains and jungles follow the same example
of universal love. .
Trees provide the shade, fruits and flowers with the same unattached benevolence for all. They do not demand favours in return. The earth matures seeds into plants irrespective of who planted the seeds or who will benefit from them. This truly is
like a mother's love for her children. A mother loves all her children and is forgiving even when some are the cause of hurt.
If one learns to appreciate nature, the world will be a much better place to live in. Because through such appreciation, destructive tendencies like jealousy, envy, hatred and selfishness will be overcome. A new era of mutual love and trust will descend on earth. All differences will melt away. Most of our problems have arisen because we have stopped learnIng from nature.
Imagine the blissful feeling
one gets when listening to the chirping of birds at dawn, observing the river flowing placidly in its course, looking at the snow-clad peaks of mountains, taking a stroll in a forest with majestically standing tall trees and looking at the moon on a full-moon night or a star-studded
sky on amavasya (new moon) night.
Divine feelings generated by experiences close to nature compel one to ponder over the meaning of life and our place in the universe. This creates in us the urge to become one with the Divine to experience eternal bliss. Live with nature, love nature, protect nature, learn from nature and you will soon rise above all your narrow parochial tendencies. You will become a votary of universal love.
The main cause of discontent is because we spend too much time indoors and away from the nurturing restorative powers of nature. So, try to get back to nature in some way. Give yourself some time in the woods, mountains, open meadows or walk barefoot on the beach. Drink in the beauty of nature as much as you can. Even if you live in the city, go and walk along the grass in a park. You will feel more complete, rejuvenated and blissful. So delight in the beauty you see around you.
http://spirttuality.indiatimes.com

Sceintists blast Darwinism and Sexual Selection

click here to read the article

Revolutionary Facts Destroy Zoological Dogma

A Landmark Scientific Work Uncovers Nature
Revolutionary Facts Destroy Zoological Dogma

"Reclaiming Natural Masculinity site does not agree of the use of the misleading western word s'homosexual', 'gay' etc. to describe animal behaviour. We advise our readers to study the article by ignoring the usage of these words.

By Jack Nichols

A social revolution is at hand involving homosexual, bisexual and transgendered behaviors. A major zoological study Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity by Bruce Bagemihl (St. Martin's Press, 1999) has destroyed old and laughable zoological interpretations and has put same-sex love and affection onto a trajectory that leads to a revised way of seeing the world.

Bagemihl's book provides "an affirmation of life's vitality and infinite possibilities: a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable."

Such a multi-sexual worldview is no longer theoretical. Bagemihl says the material he's gathered about animals' varied same-sex mating habits points to exactly the same world that's inhabited by we humans.

Thus, courtship allowed only in an "approved manner", sinks in doom, because, while science watches and makes reports upon Bonobos, for example, the "human see human do" effect simultaneously emerges. Personal and public consciousness expands as a result. The awareness celebrated in Biological Exuberance of such widespread animalistic preference for same-sex love could suggest, some believe, that those human groups forever resisting the fact of their natural diversities face the probability of group extinctions.

Why? The orthodox cast those who refuse their "proper" sex-cult rules into a pit of contentions. But both the ideological fanatics and ordinary humans may perish because of the authoritarian group's unwillingness—even to the point of sanctioning deadly violence-- to admit to or to permit variety and elasticity in it's midst.

Because the anti-homosexual taboo discourages "too much" natural bonding among men, a heavily confrontational culture usually develops to ward off unfettered affection with macho-boastful, theatrical enthusiasms like those that are appreciated by WFW fans. A well-known heterosexual Buddhist scholar and author, the late Alan Watts, puts it this way:

Bonobo males make love ... not war

"If they (young and unrealized homosexuals who affect machismo, ultramasculinity, and who constitute the hard core of our military-industrial-police-mafia-combine) would go fuck each other (and I use that word in its most positive and appreciative sense) the world would be vastly improved. They make it with women only to brag about it, but are actually far happier in the barracks than in boudiors. This is, perhaps, the real meaning of "Make Love, Not War." We may be destroying ourselves through the repression of homosexuality."

With the publishing of Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, the age-old charges, most often touted by "religious" cults, quickly become frontline Religious Reich ideological casualties, namely that same-sex love is "unseemly', 'unnatural' or 'against nature'.

His book, a major revolutionary study published in our times, serves front line lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists, providing a stunning and fascinating investigation into the variant love lives of creatures great and small. It deserves the rapt attention, some believe, that is given to other great revolutionary works published over the centuries.

Bagemihl triumphantly investigates herds and hosts of living beings—including insects, reptiles, birds and mammals, until, one feels tempted to say, as a legendary Quaker gentleman once did in a different context: "All the world's a little queer but me and thee. And sometimes I wonder about thee."

Four-hundred and fifty species are examined in Biological Exuberance, proving that heterosexual behaviors in animals are simply part of a much more expressive continuum, just as Alfred Kinsey had written to be so about humans. It is significant that the Religious Reich has sought to destroy Kinsey's reputation because they know his findings give the lie to their "religious" dogmas.

If mean-spirited fundamentalist attempts to ruin Kinsey's personal reputation had actually been successful, and even if his famed 1940/50's studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female had been unfairly discredited and expunged by these same religious fanatics, the truths these books contained would still have been resurrected in other forms. Thus, the publication of Biological Exuberance points publicly today to a similar sexual diversity in animals that Kinsey, Pomeroy and Martin first discovered in their studies of humans.

What are some of the questions that Biological Exuberance posits? Do animals same-sex kiss with passion? Yes, the walrus does, certainly, as do African elephants and mountain zebras (males). Among the most homosexually-joyous animals, ones whose makeup is closer to human beings is a highly intelligent ape known as the Bonobo. Bonobo society, in contrast to that which afflicts scrappier chimp cousins, is both passionate and peaceful.

Peter Gorner, a science writer for the Chicago Tribune, calls Bagemihl's work "monumental" and "a landmark in the literature of science," while Susan McCarthy, in Salon magazine, tells how Bagemihl spent ten years of his life writing 768 pages of research about exactly what goes on at South Park's "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Animal Sanctuary."

Female Bonobo chimps getting to know one another

Highly significant, says Ms. McCarthy, is how Bagemihl "ridicules the ingenious explanations researchers have given for why animals might appear not to be straight arrows."

"They're showing dominance," is one oft- used excuse, or "it's appeasement," or "they're just confused."

Ms. McCarthy points out that "some homosexual animals have one night stands and some have long marriages. Gay and lesbian geese stay together year after year." Bottlenose dolphins, she explains on behalf of Bagemihl, shy away from heterosexual pairing, but males can many times be inseparable mates.

Previously, pure gay animalism had been best covered over 30 years ago in Wainwright Churchill's pioneering work Homosexual Behavior Among Homosexual Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (Prentice-Hall, 1967). Churchill's study, which covered males only, was a comprehensive look at same-sex love-making as a fact of life rather than as a sin, crime, or disease. Today Biological Exuberance has an added advantage in that it studies the females of our varied species.

Like Churchill's book, Bagemihl's much-expanded work of today is grounded in scientific principles and argues effectively for a humanistic approach to sex, accepting that there's no single pattern of sex that can be universalized for all people (or animals.) Wainwright Churchill quotes Kinsey in a way that now highlights Bagemihl's new, more comprehensive research.

Alfred Kinsey says:

"It is unwarranted to believe that particular types of sexual behavior are always expressions of psychoses or neuroses. In actuality they are more often expressions of what is biologically basic in mammalian and anthropoid behavior."

---

(Source: Gay Today)

ELEPHANTS IN "MUSTH"

What does the word "musth" mean?

An essential part of the problems of the keeping of elephant bulls is the so-called musth. Musth is a word of Persian origin and is translated in the languages of Northern India by "condition of poisoning". The word musth is used to describe an abnormal behaviour or the behaviour of a drunk, whether human being or elephant.

What is musth?

The musth can be defined as a periodical change of the behaviour of elephant bulls, which can last from some weeks up to some months. This change has got hormonal reasons. In the musth period a bull produces 40 to 60 times more of testosterone (male sex hormone) than in the non-musth time. As far as I know, this phenomenon occurs with elephant bulls only - particularly with Asian elephant bulls.

How do elephant bulls change in musth?

The musth changes the character of an elephant bull in various ways.

Physical symptoms of the musth are: swollen temple or temporal glands swollen trunk base an oily liquid comes out of the temple glands, leaving a black trace across the cheeks to the corners of the mouth penetrating smell of sweat and urine permanent dripping of urine and hind legs, which are wet on the inside by urine drops no erection of the penis the foreskin of the penis becomes white-greenish Mental symptoms of the musth are: autistic behaviour aggressive outbursts when the bull feels disturbed does not tolerate any noise and sudden movements does in everyday contact hardly react to familiar commands of the keeper tries to attack even familiar elephants and humans

Of what significance is musth when looking after elephants? These symptoms complicate the contact with the bull considerably. It is also very discouraging for the elephant keeper to work with a withdrawn, extremely aggressive elephant, which disapproves everything and actually is out to kill him. Why is musth dangerous? The danger of the musth for the elephant keeper is that the bull usually at first doesn't have any outer physical musth symptoms. This is one of the main reasons, why the elephant bull has to be kept in a special bull stable, where there is no direct physical contact to the keeper. If the bull would be kept like a female elephant, sooner or later a bad accident would certainly happen.

Can the beginning of musth be predicted? With Maxie, the elephant bull in the Zurich zoo, it is conspicuous that, about two months before it is obviously in the musth, the floor of its stable begins to foam when it is washed out. Is musth a bulls' rutting time? The opinion of many zoo visitors that a musth bull would be in his rutting season, is absolutely wrong. Musth has nothing in common with rut. The elephant bulls don't know a rutting season like deers or antelopes, because the oestrous cycle of the female elephants is not seasonally timed. Does a bull in musth spend time with the elephant group? For this reason it is also right not to bring the bull into contact with the female elephant during its musth. The risk that the musth bull could attack the cows because they annoy it for any reason is too big. The fact that the musth bull cannot be controlled by the elephant keepers and the very cramped conditions in a zoo would give the cows and the elephant calves no chance to get out of danger. Why do elephant bulls go into musth? Actually there is nothing known about the purpose of the musth. Every elephant researcher and every elephant keeper has got his own opinion. Usually the ideas are about the marking of territories, the expelling of other bulls from an area and about the possibility that also a physically weaker bull can reproduce itself this way. The musth seems to be a remnant from the elephants' prehistoric time, which has endured up to the modern age.

Can musth be prevented? As the musth is no disease or other pain, it cannot be prevented or treated. The musth is part of the natural behaviour of the elephant. I don't know if the bull feels well in the musth or if it doesn't; if it has a headache when it presses its head against the iron bars or if it is simply furious and angry and wants to be left alone. Above all, it can't stand sudden movements and noise. Moreover it is very likely that the skin of the hind legs causes pain to the elephant because it is irritated by the constant dripping of urine. The musth period of the Zurich breeding bull "Maxie" is always in winter. This let the idea arise that the musth could be connected with light and thus with the exposure of the pituitary gland.

What significance does musth have for a working elephant? As for working elephants, the musth means of course also a loss of earnings for the mahout. To minimize the musth period of the working bull and the loss of earnings, the musth bulls are treated drastically. Musth bulls are tied to two strong trees and set free again only when the must is over. During this time the bulls get very few food and drinking water. The idea that the musth is shorter when the bull has a hard time seems to be true. So the musth of working bulls lasts several days and not 5 to 7 months like for some zoo elephants. Our ethics and morals forbid us to treat zoo bulls in our world like working bulls in Asia.

What significance does musth have for the breeding of elephants? The musth also impairs the breeding of elephants. Because a cow elephant has only 3 to 4 times a year an oestrous cycle and because it is conceptive only 3 to 4 days then, it will - together with the long musth periods - continue to be difficult to breed elephants successfully.

A historical musth drama

The fate of the Murten elephant in 1866 shows a historic aspect of the musth.

Marching through the small market town of Murten in the Swiss canton of Fribourg as part of the American travelling circus Bell & Myers on the morning of 27th June 1866, elephant handler Moffat would never in a million years have imagined that, before the break of dawn the following day, he would be thrown into the air, kicked and manhandled, before dying a painful death in the dust in front of the stables of the Hotel Weisses Kreuz........more

translated by Martin Kaiser

(Source:Elephant encyclopedia)

Evolution�s Rainbow

Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People

Joan Roughgarden

University of California Press

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 2004

Reviewed by Jamie Faye Fenton

Joan Roughgarden

Joan Roughgarden is a professor of evolutionary ecology and geophysics at Stanford University. Her research activities involve developing mathematical models of ecosystems as well as field studies. She has written numerous books and papers and is an expert on Caribbean anolis lizards. Roughly at the time of her son�s graduation, she became active in the San Francisco gender community.

Participation in the 1997 San Francisco Pride Parade opened Joan�s eyes and made her curious about the role of diversity in biology. She started a research project.

There was little to go on. It seems Western science itself was blind to diversity, sweeping aside natural exceptions to the hetero-centric metaphor. Not even Charles Darwin was immune. Science had missed something big, the vital role of cooperation and diversity in evolution.

Joan responded by writing Evolution�s Rainbow. The result is a wide-ranging book covering natural science, evolutionary theory, anthropology, bio-ethics, and GLBT identity. It is also, like many personal projects of transgender authors, a defense brief for her soul.

I generally like to summarize an author�s line of argument first, and then give my reactions. Joan covers many topics and my summary is quite long. I will switch back to my own perspective in the section titled �Reactions�.

Sex and Gender

�Male� means making small gametes and female means making large gametes. The smaller gametes are called sperm and the larger gametes are eggs. This is the only universal difference. This is because a scheme in which one sex favors gamete size over quantity and the other quantity over size will always win-out in competition with schemes with equal sizes.

Sexual reproduction is less efficient than asexual reproduction. Despite this, sex can be a better strategy, because it allows a species to �rebalance the genetic portfolio� to hedge against fluctuations in the environment. A sexual population can maintain a much larger genetic reservoir, squirreling away adaptations currently out of favor for the day when the climate and ecosystem change.

Gender is the appearance, behavior, and life history of a sexed body. This definition is different than the typical division between �physical sex� and �mental gender� used in the TG community. Or, as Kate Bornstein put it: �Sex is fucking, everything else is gender�.

Beyond these two simple definitions, everything else is up in the air. Joan gives numerous examples of why this is so.

A Wide Range of Diversity

Hermaphrodites are common in the ocean and in plants. Some organisms change sex during their lives, others can change from asexual to sexual, depending on conditions. There are species where the females are larger than the males, others in which the males give birth and/or bear the burden of child-rearing. Female birds have XY chromosomes and males XX. Female hyenas and some female primates have penises. Male fruit-bats have mammary glands. Certain deer and kangaroos are intersexed. So are kangaroo rats, pigs, and bears.

Some fish change sex in order to balance the sex ratio. Other fish have two genders, one female and the other part-male part-female. The anglerfish male is tiny and attaches itself to the female, ultimately becoming one of her organs.

In both the birds and the bees, sex and gender is quite different than it is for us.

There are many instances in which the parental investment of males in raising the young exceeds that of the females. This is called sex role reversal and can extend to having females competing for males, forming dominance hierarchies, keeping harems, and an apparent double standard.

Sex role reversal is not seen in mammals. Mammalian females make an enormous investment by supplying the egg, carrying the embryo, and providing milk, which males can�t match. Mammalian reproduction may have evolved in response to climatic change and as a way for females to assume control of their offspring. Males then acquire an incentive to control the females.

The �normal family� is considered to be a male and female parent living with their offspring, with the male dominant. Other possibilities are �unnatural�. This is wrong. Many human families have only one parent, or have two same-sex parents, or are lead by grandparents.

�

The stereotypical male-female dominance relation is not universal. Power relationships are both diverse and subtle. In primates, we see coercion among the chimpanzees and orangutans, and a peaceful sexuality among the bonobos and monkeys.

Monogamy is rare, even among mammals. Many birds are monogamous because the parental investment is localized in the nest rather than the female body. Others form cooperative extended families with more than one male or female parent.

Vampire bats have a buddy system for sharing meals and form extended families. Social relations are formed and expressed by grooming. More generally, animals can acquire reputations for cooperating or cheating. Much of this has escaped notice in field study.

The distribution of reproductive activity across members of a group is called reproductive skew. High skew occurs when the distribution is uneven, and skew is a primary factor in how individuals structure their lives.

Animal behavior is often described using human metaphors. In birds, extra-pair copulators are called �perpetrators� and the nesting non-parental males �cuckolds�. Animals �steal� and �deceive�. Such words suggest a biased attitude.

Sandra Vehrencamp developed an alternate model in which reproductive skew is connected to a labor market for cooperative effort. Animal societies are a political economy of reproductive opportunity. The structure of this economy depends on distribution inequities in the availability of resources or exposure to danger combined with genetic relationships. Its an ongoing negotiation between breeders and helpers.

There are families with more than two genders. Each variation is called a morph.

Morphs within a sex can differ in many ways: size, color, relationships, mating behaviors, environments, parenting behaviors, life-spans, and typically, social roles. Within-sex polymorphisms are easy to spot in fish and lizards.

Sometimes a morph will change as an individual matures. Male bullfrogs mature from silent to singing.� The plainfin midshipman fish also has two male morphs, one is large, can sing, and guards the nest. The smaller, silent morph darts in the larger morph�s territory to fertilize eggs.

The sunfish has 3 male genders and 1 female and demonstrate a third male role. The large males guard, the smallest are end-runners, and the medium size cooperates with the larger. This pattern is common. The larger male offers access to mating opportunity to the medium male in return for help in guarding. In some cases, this same-sex relationship is established by courting.

Tree lizard males have controllers and two end-runner morphs. A lizard end-runner can switch back and forth between the role of nomadic and sedentary. For lizards, the hormone progesterone determines which morph an individual becomes.

White throated sparrows have two morphs of each sex. One morph is more aggressive than the other. They tend to pair off into opposites � a butch female with a femme male and vice-versa.� Territorial defense trades off against the better parental care provided the passive partner.

The most complex case is the side-blotched lizard, which has 3 male and 2 female genders. The two female morphs vary by their egg production and tolerance for territorial crowding. The relative populations of each morph cycle over time.

In some species, males �cross-dress� as females. This is usually explained as a form of deceit called female mimicry, which seems overly complex. Other explanations are less tortured and more explanatory. For example, a masculine male might recruit a feminine male to live nearby as a non-threatening neighbor or to cooperate in some other way. A common characteristic is the lessening of hostilities. Viewing cross-gender behavior as deceitful is transphobia extended beyond humanity.

Sexual Selection

Darwin, in The Origin of Species, describes sexual selection:

This form of selection depends, not on a struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring�

� I believe, that when the males and females of any animal have the same general habits of life, but differ in structure, colour, or ornament, such differences have been mainly caused by sexual selection: that is, by individual male had had, in successive generations, some slight advantage over other males, in their weapons, means of defense, or charms, which they transmitted to their male offspring alone.

Joan claims Darwin is wrong. Female choice, where it exists, is concerned with all aspects of the life cycle, not just mating. Commitment matters more than strength and good looks.

Nor are females necessarily coy. In some species, they initiate sex. In others, such as Bocage�s wall lizard, females change to male coloration to signal unavailability. There are butch and femme female damselfly morphs. The butches benefit from less distracting male attention when population density is high, while the femmes benefit when it is low. Other female insects synthesize male perfumes as an anti-aphrodisiac.

Females can choose the size of their families, although coercion is seen in mammals. Extra pair copulations and paternity are a natural strategy for females to balance the dangers of male power with the benefits of male parental investment.

Dominate males do not have better genes than subordinates by objective standards of measurement. Females select males whom they believe will deliver on the promised parental care. Females can mate with multiple partners to distribute paternal responsibility. Females can change their presentation to regulate mating frequency. Females can choose their family size. Courtship is not a beauty contest; rather it is a negotiation of parental commitment.

All of these contrary facts prove that Darwin�s simple model of sexual selection is too simple.

Same-sex Sexuality

Darwin is also wrong about same-sex sexuality. He would regard such behaviors as impossible, because same-sex mating produces no offspring.

Appearing in 1999, the book Biological Exuberance presents documented evidence of same-sex mating in over 300 vertebrate species. There appears to have been a cover-up.

There are lesbian lizard pairs where each partner cycles from butch to femme in opposite phase. They copulate, as do some asexual lizards, perhaps to form pair-bonds.

The pukeko bird is bisexual, with both male-male and female-female matings occurring 10% of the time. This activity is seen as reducing hostility and regulating brood size. The oystercatcher has two types of threesomes. One is cooperative and the other aggressive. Both have one male and two females.

Both geese and swans have male-to-male pair-bonding. These relationships are stable and gay swan couples raise their young together.

Sheep are notoriously gay, engaging in frequent anal sex. There are �effeminate male� sheep that prefer to be with the ewes and dislike gay sex. Scientists have tried to breed gayness out of sheep, which may cause more harm then good.

Deer, reindeer, moose, giraffes, pronghorns, American bison, mountain zebras, warthogs, African elephants, Asian elephants, llamas, and many more animals engage in same-sex mating. Some are more gay, others more lesbian, and in some species both sexes have at it. The list extends to include numerous predatory mammals, small mammals, vampire bats, marine mammals, and the primates.

Same-sex mating is so blatantly obvious among primates that it has been studied since the 1970s. Japanese macaques are old world monkeys that live in mixed groups of 50-200, with 4 times as many females as males. (The males migrate from group to group every few years). There is a female dominance hierarchy. Short term lesbian relationships form between more distantly related individuals, with the lesser monkey enjoying a temporary elevation of status. Why?

Neutralists claim that homosexuality in Japanese macaques is a harmless distraction; while adaptationalists believe that it is a �socially inclusive trait� that has value on its own. The debate is not settled.

Bonobos are our close relatives and are notorious sluts. Bonobos enjoy oral sex, hand jobs, French kissing, and both same and cross-gender mating many times a day. Each encounter lasts 15 seconds. Sex is used to facilitate sharing, for reconciliation, to welcome, for bonding, and for reproduction. Female bonobos will exchange sex for sweets, suggesting that the oldest profession is even older.

These other uses beyond reproduction suggest that mating can be used to gain entry and participate in a social group that controls resources.� Lemurs, baboons, langurs, white-handed gibbons and gorillas all have same-sex matings. The evidence suggests that homosexuality in primates evolved about 50 million years ago.

Despite the views of the homophobes, who either didn�t look or don�t see, homosexuality is both natural and surprising common.

Cooperation in Evolution

Joan returns to her discussion of the three major claims of Darwin�s Theory of Evolution. The first claim, that all of life evolved from a common ancestor, has stood up well. The second claim, that the force of natural selection causes species to change, also stands, although the nature of the force has been clarified by mathematical models that define Darwinian fitness as a measure of net reproductive productivity, or fecundity times the probably of survival.

This struggle for survival was usually described using the metaphors of conflict. This shading underplays the role in cooperation in optimizing fecundity and increasing the probability of survival.

All multi-cellular organisms are cooperatives that live or die together. Likewise, cooperation exists within the cell; many cellular subunits once existed independently. The nucleus is not the center of control. Humans are self-contained alliances of bacteria.

Darwin�s third point, sexual selection, is undermined by the many counter-examples from earlier in the book. These show that the binary model is not universal, as there can be more than two genders, sex roles can be reversed, females choose mates for diverse reasons, same-sex sexuality is common, and sex is not just for reproduction.

Darwin conceptualized nature through patriarchic metaphor.

Evolutionary psychologists have built a shaky tower of dubious claims on top of this discredited sexual selection theory. A particularly inflammatory example is the notion that human males have an evolved capacity to rape.

Joan�s view, again, is that of the political economy of reproductive opportunity. Items of social trade can include food, real-estate, work, etc., as well as mating. This wider view accounts for the natural diversity of gender expression and the value of social-inclusionary traits.

Human Diversity

Joan turns her attention to diversity in humans, first by describing her own development as an organism. Her egg-part formed while her own mother was an embryo, and follows a complex sequence of events leading to the oviduct. Her sperm part also began while her father was 4 weeks old and follows an equally complex pathway to that oviduct. Born with a male phenotype, Joan�s zygote, the genes recombine, and then the cell repeatedly divides and then implants itself in the uterus and embryonic development proceeds.

Eight weeks after fertilization, Joan�s Y chromosomes express the SRY gene and give her testes. Differentiation continues, often controlled by hormones until the fetus is ready and Joan emerges as a boy.

Human males and human females are only moderately different. This difference first appears in the ribosomes a few divisions after fertilization. Development involves a complex pattern of negotiation. A key player is the SRY gene from the Y chromosome and activates masculine characteristics. Because of the negotiation protocols, it does not have absolute power. Much of the structure of the body is determined by the complex interaction of gene combinations.

Richard Dawkin�s concept of the selfish gene overlooks the necessity for cooperation within an organism as well as between them. Perhaps a better model is �the genial gene�.

A given person differs from another of the same sex by approximately 60 genes out of their 30,000. (Which 60 varies). Accounting for sex chromosomes, the difference is only 250 genes. The effects of these small differences are magnified by the fact the some genes control others. The SRY gene that influences masculinity is known to evolve rapidly. Variations on the sex chromosomes can control the magnitude of the differences between males and females and the extent of transgender expression.

In other words, evolution influences how much males and females differ, and to what extent transgender gene expression takes place.

Genetic expression affects hormones, which in turn affects cells with receptors. A developing fetus is affected by hormones from the mother, the child, and the placenta. After birth, the child�s hormones continue to choreograph maturation. Both sexes produce both types of hormones, just at different times and amounts.

In addition to physical sex characteristics, hormones affect the brain and cause dimorphisms to develop that are noted in birds, rats, and in humans. There are only a few small human brain dimorphisms known at present, and a small Dutch study suggests that MtF transsexuals show the same characteristics as genetic women in one of these areas. Men score better on some mental task categories than women and vice-versa, and live (fMRI) imaging studies show differences in activation patterns.

Despite discernable differences, male and female humans have strong overlapping abilities. This creates plenty of room for transgender expression.

The human brain has grown 3 times larger over the last 2.5 million years. This can not be explained by technological progress or by accounts involving sexual selection advanced by evolutionary psychologists. Perhaps the human brain is the consequence of a social inclusionary trait pulling itself up by its bootstraps.

The disparity in male and female life-span may result from each sex selecting different �life history� strategies, optimized for the risk profile each sex faces

The three different identified brain dimorphisms plus the two physical morphs gives rise to 16 possible gender variations. There are undoubtedly more, particularly if intersexuality is also considered.

Gender identity develops some time between the third trimester of pregnancy and 3 to 12 months after birth.

There are some brain differences associated with homosexuality, and there is evidence of sexual orientation running in families. Some researchers claim that a �gay gene� exists, but this has not been confirmed. If such a gene exists, homosexuality is far too common to be a genetic defect. Sexual orientation is fixed at some time between ages 1 and 10.

Why would homosexuality evolve if it works against reproduction? Homosexuals are indeed less fertile. An early idea was that gays were �helpers at the nest�. Perhaps homosexuality is a social-inclusionary trait that was adaptive at some time. Straights and gays can be compared to the male �controller� and �cooperator� morphs seen in fish and birds.

Psychology

Joan dislikes psychology and regards psychologists as dangerous. She reluctantly describes how this discipline views and interacts with transgender people. Most information is anecdotal, coming from therapist�s reports and autobiographic writings. Most MtF autobiographies have de-emphasized transgender sexuality in a bid to gain public acceptance.

The therapist�s perspective is distorted by the disease metaphor, gate keeping responsibilities, and the narrow window of interaction with clients. The best available book on the subject is True Selves, by Millie Brown and Chloe Rounsley. True Selves describes the typical TG life trajectory as beginning with an early awareness of difference, experiencing disapproval and violence, and an attempt to conform that eventually fails. There is then a breakthrough leading to emergence, transition, and perhaps surgery.

Not everyone follows the script exactly. Some eschew surgery; others find they can be both men and women.

For some, sexuality is most important. They participate in BDSM activity, usually in the submissive role. Others derive sexual pleasure from cross-dressing. Some transsexuals feel that their transition process is driven by autoerotic sexual desire. Joan, like many transsexuals, is appalled by this idea, although she believes that self-identified autoerotic transsexuals must be included in the TG community. �A female persona in a male body must survive testosterone�.

FtMs typically start as lesbians and are not squeamish about sex.

Threats to Diversity

Medical science poses a danger to human diversity. While the concept of disease is fuzzy, it has been applied to the detriment of GLBT people. GLBT expression is far too common to qualify as a genetic defect. Other conditions, such as ADHD and sickle-cell anemia, don�t either, because they are adaptive in certain situations.

Lynn Conway claims that the prevalence of transsexuality is under-reported by two orders of magnitude. Transsexuality and several varieties of intersexuality are too frequent to be genetic defects.

Gays and lesbians were once stigmatized as mentally ill and were subjected to abusive treatments. Homosexuality was dropped from the Diagnostic Manual in 1973. Transgender expression remains under the classifications of gender identity disorder (GID) and transvestic fetishism. This must change.

There is some acquiescence, as the medical classification allows for cost reimbursement in some areas. Still, pathologizing transgender expression is stigmatizing and fosters dependency. Transsexuality is a natural condition like pregnancy.

Early medical interventions to �correct� intersexuality often get it wrong.

Genetic engineering also threatens diversity. Monocultures create vulnerability. Cloning barely works for only a few species. Partial cloning raises ethical dilemmas, as do many other bio-engineering possibilities. Genetic engineers possess a dangerous arrogance. The most promising early application area is bio-warfare. Practitioners have a responsibility to preserve diversity at all levels and to �do no harm�.

Diversity in Culture

Several Native American cultures are strong positive examples, with �two-spirited� people held in high regard. The two-spirit category is broad and encompasses gays, lesbians, and transgenders.

Two spirits are important in Zuni legend and ceremony. Osh-Tisch was a famous two-spirited Crow woman who was also a war heroine. Hastin Klah was a gay Navajo medicine man that played a pivotal role in preserving his tribe�s heritage.

Some tribes had transition ceremonies. The Papago would place a boy in a brush enclosure with both a basket and bow and arrow. This was set on fire. If the youth grabbed the basket on the way out he was accepted as two-spirited.

The two spirit heritage is gradually re-emerging from the holocaust of the European conquest.

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Polynesian cultures also include a transgender category called the Mahu. Mahu means �half-man half-woman� and can be MtF or FtM. They are identified early and MtF Mahu tend to be attracted to men and are accepted in women�s spaces. Like two-spirits, they are viewed being a combination of the sexes and are generally accepted as part of the natural order. Western transgender culture is making inroads via a more sexual style called raerae or travesti.

India has about one million MtF hijras. Hijras are a religious sect devoted to the Mother Goddess Bachuchara Mata as well as a low-ranking caste. A candidate chela is apprenticed to a guru and lives with her in a small commune. When ready, the chela has her penis and testicles removed in a private ceremony called the nirvan. Hijras perform blessings at weddings and birth celebrations.

Despite their sacred role, hijras are looked down on, considered to neither man nor woman. They can marry and some have done well. Others do not.

Ancient Transgender Categories

The primary transgender category in historical Western culture is the eunuch. Eunuchs were often slaves in serving roles. Some eunuchs were masculine and some were feminine.

In Rome, eunuchs served in high imperial ministries. Another common role was priestess to the goddess Cybele. This priestess group conducted public genital removal ceremonies and were considered by some to be sacred prostitutes.

The Bible mentions eunuchs in both Testaments and explicitly welcomes them into the community of God. They had a ceremonial role in the early Church, eventually displaced by the concept of celibacy. Early Islam also had a transgender culture called Mukhannathun.

Jehanne D�Arc is perhaps the best known medieval transvestite saint. She led the French in battle against the English, was captured and burned at the stake for refusing to renounce her identity.

Sex in Biblical Times

The ancient Greeks are well-known for intergenerational male sex. The proper practice employed the intercrucial position in which both partners stand face to face and the active partner thrusts his penis between the thighs of the passive one. Greek lesbians used an ancient dildo called an olisbo. Some forms of homoerotic activity were acceptable in Greece, others were not.

Contrary to the theology of the Religious Right, the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. In fact, it contains several descriptions of loving same-sex relationships: Ruth and Naomi; Jonathan and David. The story of Sodom and Gibeah condemns homosexual rape, Leviticus only condemns anal sex. Paul�s letter to the Romans is about homosexual acts, not relationships, and can be interpreted as a warning about sexual excess

Modern Transgender Identities

The tomboi of Indonesia are female-to-males who cross-live as men in a butch/femme paraculture.

The vestidas of Mexico exemplify the fate of transgender people in most cultures. Often rejected by their families, they come to the city and support themselves through sex work.

The guevedoche of Dominican Republic were a third-sex social category for intersexed children who were raised as girls and allowed to choose their sexual identity at puberty. This category was destroyed after medical doctors told villagers to raise these children as boys.

The transgender movement in the United States is now accepted as part of the mainstream sexual minority coalition of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. Still, there is the shameful reality of violence against gender-variant people, examples include the murder of Private Barry Winchell on a military base and the murder of Gwen Araujo near San Francisco.

It may be impossible to determine why and how GLBT expression evolved. Perhaps it was adaptive in some contexts and not others. By its very nature, biological variation will always defy social categories.

The story of Noah�s Ark illustrates why diversity must be preserved.

Policy Recommendations

The transgender agenda: to be cherished, enjoy freedom and dignity, an end to violence, equal participation, and a right to health care. Joan lauds our hometown hero Mark Leno for his pioneering work in government.

Diversity must be protected by changing the way medicine and psychology is taught. The FDA should maintain a list of diseases and regulate surgical and behavioral therapies. Biotechnologists need to be licensed and should pledge to protect the human gene pool and work for peace. Epidemiological impact needs to be evaluated before authorizing utilization.

We should unveil a Statue of Diversity on the West Coast of the United States.

Reactions

Whew. That�s a lot of stuff; Time to switch back to being Jamie Faye.

I know Joan Roughgarden. We were friends during her transition period and I enjoyed discussing the science of transgenderism with her. Later our paths diverged, she went for surgery and I went dancing.

I enjoyed her book. Joan comes up with terrific explanatory metaphors. She marshals a mountain of well-documented evidence for sexual and gender diversity in nature. While it sometimes seems too much, it is the only way to defeat the tendency to dismiss counterexamples as flukes. An argument for diversity has to be diverse.

Joan is a notable critic of evolutionary psychology and of the autogynephilia theory. Distressed by the angry tone of the debate, I wrote several articles criticizing the critics. That, plus my wild reputation, put a distance between us. I feel Joan handles this issue well in Evolutions Rainbow. She has grounded her ethical position with scientific facts.

In her section on the genetics of homosexuality, she cites 5 papers written by J. Michael Bailey (as lead investigator) as evidence for points she makes. This is in contrast to her recent writings in other venues excoriating him for writing The Man Who Would Be Queen.

Her description of human reproduction is both scientifically precise and poetic.

In some places, it seems that Joan uses the term transgender to mean �full time transsexual likely to pursue reassignment surgery�. Do cross-dressers belong?

There is a political charge to some of Joan�s writing. Medicine, psychology, male-oriented science, and the church have done us wrong. Having pegged her as conservative, it is a little jarring to see Joan use phrases like �policing the gender binary�.

Joan has changed. Life as a woman will do that to you.

Interpretations

Perceiving the Rainbow

I like the rainbow metaphor for diversity. Each wavelength of light corresponds to a different attribute of the extended phenotype. Since each band can have its own intensity, there are an enormous variety of possible combinations. Not all of them are viable, as only certain colors will light the stage well.

Taking the metaphor a little farther is instructive. When a ray of light finds its way into a human eye, it causes photo-chemical reactions to take place on the rod and cone cells of the retina. The rods sense black and white, while the cones sense relative amounts of red, green and blue. Each of these three �cone� zones cover a third of the rainbow. These 4 signals flow through a neural net which classifies them, and eventually the color is associated with a name by the linguistic capacity.

Two points can be made. First, this system discards information by only sampling the visual spectrum in three broad bands. Multiple wavelengths can produce the same perception. This is why we see bands of color in the rainbow.

Second, different cultures have different systems for describing color, but they all follow a consistent pattern. Some languages have only two words, which invariably translate to black and white. Some have three, black, white, and red. Others have four, five, and so on.

Within any culture, the terms for color can evolve over time. Cultures always begin with only two categories at stage I, and can progress forward adding new terms through the sequence shown in the diagram. The first color split off is always White from Red/Yellow. Then Black splits off from �Grue� in III, Red from Yellow in IV, and then Green from Blue in V. (Some languages do the stage III, IV, & V splits in a different order, but this main sequence holds true for 83% of the languages studied).

Adapted from Color Appearance and the Emergence and Evolution of Basic Color Lexicons. Paul Kay and Luisa Maffi. American Anthropologist. (1999)101:743-760.

The insight here is that the human nervous system, by its very nature, categorizes. Not only is information lost, the ability to describe what remains is limited by culture.

When I was maturing, my culture did not have a word for transgender, much less a heritage of legend to describe who I was and what I was to do. We were colorblind.

Science has extended the range of color perception by 16 orders of magnitude beyond the visible range. It has also introduced numerous new ways to classify perceptions. It remains limited by the power of culture to direct the eye and give names to the colors.

Metaphoric Blindness

Much of the previous account is a paraphrase from early chapters of George Lakoff�s book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Lakoff has also written extensively about the role of metaphor in human cognition.

Metaphors are pervasive in human thought. Based on the primitive attributes of human experience, they structure chains of abstraction. Time flows like water. One�s mood can be high or low. Life is a journey. A particle of light is like a wave. Mathematics consists of metaphors bleached clean into consistent abstract patterns.

The process of science is about carefully extending metaphors from one domain to another and conducting tests to verify the validity and extent of the analogy. Like the scaffold on a building, a set of metaphors both extend the range of tools and obscure perception. Darwin analyzed nature through the metaphoric matrix of a 19^th century man, leading to the errors in the sexual selection theory.

Perhaps metaphoric blindness caused medicine to classify gender variance as a disease. While that idea is clearly dated, when it emerged it was forward-progress from immoral perversion. A hospital seemed better than a jail.

The rainbow metaphor illustrates both the variety of diversity and the limitations we face in perceiving it. It will help us move from the hospital into the light.

Science in Suspension

Why do medicine and psychology continue to view transgender people as having a mental disorder? I think it has more to do with history than malice.

A wealthy FtM endowed the Ericksen Foundation which gave many grants for research into transsexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. This spawned an academic interest in gender issues, with several universities opening gender clinics. The staff of these clinics conducted research on their subjects and published their results. The party ended in the 1980s, when one study claimed that SRS was of dubious value. Many of the clinics closed and research and publication slowed to a trickle. Insurance funding was also withdrawn, so gender treatment became a �cash in advance� business with little incentive to do long range research or publish results. Transgender science went into hibernation.

The end of the gender clinic era froze scientific understanding in the mindset of the 1970s, which then regarded gender variance as a psychiatric condition treatable by medical intervention. The GLBT freedom movement charged ahead, leaving the caregivers behind.

Evolution�s Rainbow is a new beginning for transgender science. Joan thoroughly demolishes the obsolete concepts of GLBT diversity being sinful, being a disease, being unnatural, or as arising from poor up-bringing. She also catalogs a broad variety of examples from natural history and anthropology to build upon. This sets the stage for further progress; however Joan has relatively little to say about which lines of inquiry to pursue.

Joan is clearly uncomfortable with transgender sexuality. It is the only area in the book where I found errors. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of writings concerning the transgender experience are about sex. There is a vast network of unexplored caverns here, and Joan only peers into the entrance.

Transgender Social Categories

Joan�s examples of transgender categories in culture sort into three broad groups:

I. Cultures that revere transgender people. The Native American and Polynesian examples.

II. Those which tolerate but still look down on transgender people. The hijra, eunuchs, and the Western medical model.

III. Cultures that despise transgender people, relegating them to sex work, like the vestidas. This fate is, regrettably, the most common one.

Some of these cultures combine gay and transgender, others, like ours, split gay and transgender, as well as transvestite and transsexual. This is like color category splitting as explained by Paul Kay. (In San Francisco, we have many more shades, like �butch-bear leather men� and �femme tweaker twink�. It is why our Pride Parade is so long!).

Physical conversion rituals such as castration, penis amputation, and GRS are most often seen in the type II para-cultures.

At this point in history, we are at level II, reaching for level I. The ugly memories of level III, and the very real possibility of being cast back make sex a touchy subject. Perhaps this is why post-ops lead the autogynephilia war.

It will be interesting to see if GRS goes out of fashion as we attain level I.

Diversity and Bioethics

Diversity is not only necessary for adaptation; the evolutionary process has invented mechanisms for explicitly generating and preserving this property. The human brain is an evolution engine; a massively parallel generator and selector of ideas, as is culture. This brings us today:� Evolved intelligence can now understand and manipulate the process by which it came into being.

Like all other ethical problems, the issues with bio-diversity boil down to hard choices.

Is it better to let a transgender child be born into a cruel group III para-culture or is it more humane to abort the pregnancy? Where are the boundaries between diversity and disease; or diversity and crime? Is it right to destroy cultural diversity; say the inferior role of women in Saudi Arabia, in the interest of justice? How much time and treasure should the health care & legal systems devote to fighting evolution to a standstill?

Joan recommends that the government regulate biotechnology and medicine. This has its costs. More regulation means delays and more suffering while we wait for treatments to pass through the pipeline. There is also the risk of the government falling under the control of conservatives who might outlaw transgender medicine entirely.

Our community is in a race against biotechnology. We must bring our culture up to Group I before biotechnology enables a Group IV � a culture entirely purged of transgender expression.

Being diversity-positive is better than being diversity-negative. It does not make the hard problems go away.

What is Next?

We must catalog the GLBT manifestations of humanity before they are lost.

What is the right model for evolutionary psychology? Human cognitive capacity must have been structured by evolution in some way.

Is gender identity dysphoria culture-bound? By what mechanisms does it arise?

Are the complexities of transgender sexuality artifacts of its repression, or is there more going on than that?

How should transgender health care be provided in the future? In the current climate, many transgenders need therapy for the same reasons torture survivors do.

Why does cooperation arise in some contexts, and competition in others? What are the principles governing bio-negotiation? Show me the math.

Conclusion

Evolutions Rainbow is a superb introduction to the biology of gender diversity and a call to action. Like its subject, it is a diverse collection of fascinating facts, presenting a compelling case for restructuring scientific attitudes and for a more tolerant and careful society. It is required reading for any transgender studies curriculum.

Transgender science is at last reawakening, so this book is destined for revision. Joan would be happy for that. It is heartening to see the grand expedition resume.

Why we can’t do sans pesticides

Hindustan Times September 6, 2006
Mike Pandey

Traveling on one of my filming expeditions to Bhavnagar, I came across a beautiful sight — a turquoise blue estuarine river emptying itself out into the sea. I stopped to soak in the sight and approached the river bank for a closer look. A strong acrid and stinging vapour made me pull back. It was a smell that was familiar from school days: the smell of copper sulphate!

That explained the intense blue colour. Small clusters of blue crystals had formed on some of the dead twigs and stones in the water.

Nothing moved in that sterile river. It was bereft of life, poisoned.

The river was loaded with chemical effluent from a factory a kilometer upstream. The story is the same everywhere. Factories pump out untreated effluents and chemicals directly into the rivers. According to government surveys, the pesticides in most of the rivers, including the Yamuna, is a few lakh times over the permitted levels.

This is the water India drinks.

Instead of being preoccupied with frivolous issues such as pesticide in cola we should get to the bottom of the problem.

The pesticide in the cola is not being imported from somewhere. It is in our own drinking water — not only in rivers but in the groundwater. In fact pesticide is in everything, in all the food we eat. It is even present in the safest food in the world: Mother's milk.

Our farmers are misusing pesticides — some out of ignorance and some by design to get that extra profit. Many of the pesticides used, are banned all over the world. So how are they still available off the counter here? Is it ignorance or some corrupt officials greed that is poisoning the nation?

The damage caused to thousands by Endosulfan is an example of what havoc pesticides can cause. Diseases like cancer, kidneys stones, tumors, allergies, brain damage and skin diseases like leucoderma have been traced back to pesticides.

Thousands of young farmers have gone prematurely grey in Bhatinda Punjab. It can trigger off Alzheimers, Parkinsons and cause a drop in sperm count. In relation to their body weigh, infants and children eat and drink more than adults and are more vulnerable.

But can we do without pesticides?

Not so long back, I was in Austria in a friend's garden. She was complaining bitterly that her prize flower pots did not bloom any more because of the aphids that were attacking and killing off the buds.

All the pesticides she used had not managed to get rid of them. Next morning, I took a walk in the nearby wild undergrowth and found what I was looking for quite easily: Ladybirds. I released about six ladybirds on the Aphid infested flower pots. A week later the Aphids had diminished considerably and10 days later all were gone. The Ladybirds had done their job.

Their larvae were feeding off them and multiplying happily. Natural predators of Aphids— I explained to my overwhelmed host. Pesticides kill off the good insects along with the pests creating an imbalance. Biological pest management is the best way to go.

Meanwhile, soak vegetables in salt water for a couple of hours after peeling and wash thoroughly. Spinach absorbs a lot of pesticide and heavy metals. It must be soaked in salt water and then washed under running water. Trim fat and skin from poultry. The fat stores pesticide.

Another intrusion on your table is the copper sulphate which makes lady fingers (bhindi) choliya and shelled peas look crisp and green.

Bleaching chemicals are used to make gur (jaggery) whiter .Our preoccupation with good looking food will get us into trouble. The shining brinjals, red tomatoes, plump chicken are all laced with chemicals and hormones. It is the callousness and greed of a few and the lack of education which is poisoning the food we eat and the water we drink.

Enforcement and education are the key if we are to build a strong healthy and dynamic India.

(Mike Pandey is a wildlife conservationist and winner of three Green Oscars)