It's a beautiful morning and time for some praise, even though this is the  
most grim, most alienated summer I've ever known. (Humans seem to be intent 
on  throwing away everything that's good, oblivious to the losses, while 
they play  with their digital toys. I feel like the character John, in Brave 
New  World, not captivated like all the others by the easy fun and escape. I 
learned  in June that gigantic dams destroying hundreds of square miles of 
rain  forest in the Amazon basin are proposed, to provide electricity for 
growing  Brazilian cities. And that's just one assault on Nature among so  
many!)
 
Anyway, first, praise for the morning, to borrow Cat Steven's phrase. It's  
like being on vacation up at a Minnesota lake now, right here in the heart 
of  Des Moines. Despite massive human-caused damage, the planet is still  
capable of providing us with amazing beauty.
 
Praise for the tomatoes I picked this morning from my chemical-free,  
compost-fed, backyard garden. It's a great year for tomatoes. I fervently  wish I 
could plant on more than 0.013 of an acre of bountiful Iowa  land.
 
An excellent recent letter to the editor, Jim Redmond. I was not aware  of 
the effect on Native American tribes of the huge dams on the Missouri River. 
 Sorry for the delay in praise for your letter.
 
Apology accepted, Donna, but your comments were not a waste of  time. We 
should be constantly working on messaging. I thought my phrase,  "Genetic 
engineering is genetic damage, deliberately inflicted," would get  people's 
attention on the Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) issue but so  far it 
hasn't. (I haven't really done much to publicize that concept, I  admit.)
 
You wrote:
Maybe you'd like some help with better messaging of the hazards of GMO's as 
 well?
 
You may have been ironic in saying that, but I am taking it  seriously. 
Please do post here any suggestions you have. 
 
The failure to stop the spread of GMOs into the environment is beyond  
tragic--it's like a slow-moving nuclear war. It's leading to a world where  
Nature is gone, extirpated: replaced by engineered life forms. All of us  
working on the issue need all the help we can get.
 
Neila, this should be a discussion on the Iowa Topics list,  because if 
this is not an Iowa Topic, then what is? Iowa is probably the  most genetically 
engineered place in the world. As to giving our  enemies information they 
should not see, I'm not really worried about Monsanto  or DuPont infiltrating 
this list. After all, If we can't discuss matters of  substance on this 
list, we might as well shut it down.
 
I will try to post some writing I have done, from as far back as 1996, on  
the genetic engineering issue.
 
More praise; 
We as Iowans should all be happy that Donna is on the national  Sierra Club 
board. There are a number of projects involving the national Club  that she 
might be willing to help us with. Imagine if the 1.4 million members of  
Sierra Club could be motivated to save the irreplaceable, world-class  
resources that are right here in Iowa. To stop the cancer of urban  sprawl that's 
destroying our farmland, for example.  But there needs to be  a way to 
communicate to those 1.4 million what we volunteers on the ground  see as goals, 
as well as what staff see as goals. More about this soon, I  hope.
 
Tom

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