carbon storage rights from their forests", and I must reply now and here, loudly, talking you: do you really think so? Are you able to digest this nonsense? Can you imagine for a moment, telling yourself a community of 2,000 people, in the jungle, they must defend their rights of carbon sequestration? I wonder: we will not stop manipulating life to ridiculous extremes? It will not be that stupid things that we have done to ourselves, we do it out of spite and with total impudence these tribes? This is mi while to say: please, please, please!
I know someone will say immediately that I misunderstood what it means to sequester carbon, or encourage the care of the forest, and so on: I hope you understand me, I am calling for common sense before applying reason, not after.
The official reports from the UN do not offer information about issues also important: final state of logging areas, not-wood products extracted, losses in biodiversity … that nor local governments offer. These data are always known time after, when another organization must go there to initiate the restoration programs, the following business in the chain. Please, instead of knowing the latest skirt or stupidity of an artist at the peak, take a while to read closely any of the reports officially issued - here are more than the bees that remain in the countryside buzzing-, and try to figure out how the information could have been obtained and drawn.
In those places, nobody watches what you do, what you make or what you deal. On the contrary, some foundations are free for make up the maps of soils, crops, properties, water resources, and are supporting “innovative tools”, which “could help” to those better crops in… where really? They do this in the new free lands where rights and newspapers never arrive! That is what comes. And the need of biofuels has three great customers: North America, Europe and the tandem China-India, being the crops the sugar beet, oil seed crops, jatropha, cassava, and sorghum. This is your world, our world.
Letting aside other issues that will be mentioned later, I go focus the attention over the basis for every chemical compound that we could know today, and the aim which all of them accomplish in the Nature. Why it? Because I think, you will be able to have a comprehensive vision of what is happening with many issues noticed here, mentioned in the news, hidden on drugs, and more. The most important proof today for us of communication tools that we have the beings (specially important for the matter), which are using plants and animals as us, and we exchange in many ways, is the huge troop of substances "naturally produced".
The best advantage that has been done with this has been learning to interrupt it, the communication into living beings, chemically or by introduced genes. Could you imagine that your fantastic computer or tablet losing your communication? That is what has been done. The weedkillers, the insecticides or fungicides make that, interrupt the growth, the respiration, unbalancing processes or the behavior in animals, for example: but not ever it occurs when was liked, but in many more targets there around and even far, as easily as happens. For years, people have believed confident that kill these little critters affected only to those we wanted to eliminate: that easy!
(Plant diversity in the Mediterranean area, photographs by the author)
Are known approximately 10,000-12,000 compounds produced by bacteria (this is what is officially accepted and visible like the icebergs but the databases from industries contain more), fungi and plants, which are used for different purposes. Plants have revealed be armed species to deal with others, what does not prevent its end on someone stomach, however. Let’s go see some of them.
The first chemical company in the world: the Nature.
Exactly, yes, this is the first largest chemical company in the world, the Nature: from this one has born the human chemical industry. All that you go read now is actually the World of Communication between living beings through messengers: is only a quick and compressed version.
A set of substances comprises the group of main players in the natural interaction between living beings. We go now see the main of them.
Surely you know the alkaloids (a pair of very smart websites which explain the way drugs operate when are introduced in our body and the effects caused, are the funny Mouse, and Jellynek). The most noticeable stimulant and anesthetic effects are shown on the nervous system, can you explain what they can also have effects on other organs, since they are controlled by the nervous system, are enervated. Include compounds like nicotine and anabasine (from Solanaceae as tobacco); cocaine (from the coca); caffeine (from the coffee); berberine (from the barberry); psilocin (from mushrooms), which operates over the serotonin neurotransmitter; morphine (from the opium); ephedrine (from the Ephedra family); vincristine (from the Madagascar periwinkle), a mitotic inhibitor, used in stopping of cell division in strong leukemia and other cancer; reserpine (from the snakeroot); galantamine (from the snowdrop) used in some phase of Alzheimer’s disease; theobromine (from the cacao); theophylline (from the tea); codeine (from the opium poppy); quinine and quinidine (from the Cinchona); coniine (from the yellow pitcher plant and poison hemlock); atropine (from the Deadly Nightshade or the mandrake); vincamine (from the periwinkle); cyclopamine (from the corn lily), which produces the cyclopia of lambs by its teratogenecity; bufotenin (from the Vilca, Breadnut, Velvet beans and also toads); scopolamine (from the Jimson weed, Black henbane, Corkwood tree); aporphine, psylocibin (from many mushrooms); sanguinarine (a strong destroyer of cells and tissues, obtained from the bloodroot); and yohimbine (from the Yohimbe and Niando) used in diabetes 2, and a large list of other derivatives and compounds. Some of the ways, pathways and targets that can be “partners” with theses substances (like the next ones), will be exposed later.
The Glycosides are carbohydrates linked to another compound of different chemical nature, usually stored by the organism, activated when should be used. A metabolite usual from its decomposition is the prussic acid or hydrogen cyanide. One way that the body has to excrete some poisons is the linkage of poisons with the glucuronic acid, creating a glucuronide, more soluble in water (then in blood, and filterable in kidneys). Sure you know some of these compounds: the salicin, which becomes into salicylic acid (obtained originally from willows or osiers); the coumarin, which has demonstrated have toxicity in animal livers, used as enhancer for aroma and foods, and medicine (warfarine is a derivate used as anticoagulant, which easily crosses the placenta), rodenticide, obtained from the kumaru, vanilla grass, sweet woodruff, the velvet plant (American natives have used it as paralyzing because of its content of rotenone), the Chinese cinnamon (which also contains the hazardous styrene, and cinnamaldehyde used as flavorant, antimicrobial, fungicide, and corrosion inhibitor), the sweet grass, being converted by fungi in the poisonous dicoumarol (that causes the hemorrhagic disease of cattle recognized in 1920), or the sweet clover; the derivatives from anthraquinone, from the tropical senna, rhubarb (that also contains oxalic acid), or Aloe (with aloin), and also found in luminescent bacteria that are harmless and lethal pathogens symbionts for insects, and kill them living in nematodes that parasite the insects; the amygdalin, a compound present in trees of the Prunus family, as apricots, peaches, apples, raspberries, crabapples, black cherries, almonds, yuca, and roots of sorghum (was used with B17 vitamin as cancer cure treatment, fully ineffective, a strong case of quackery); also are known other as prunasin (from the oriental bush cherry, the hard Pear, the Miyama cherry, and Catclaw Acacia), or the lotaustralin (from the Golden root, austral Trefoil, and white clover), the dhurrin (from the sea arrow grass), or the linamarin contained in lima beans, flax (linseed).
Among these compounds, the bioflavonoids are secondary metabolites, not directly implied in growth or development, but strongly involved in the defense of plants. As attracting signals for insects are widely present in plants as pigments, and help on the infection of Rhizobia into roots. Most interesting is its suspected capability to modify and response to allergens, viruses, bacteria, diarrhea or carcinogenic compounds. Today flavonoids are intensely studied for their antioxidant activity (in vitro but not in v
ivo), inhibitors of cancer and use in treatment of cardiovascular diseases. It is not clear the action into the body, perhaps effects are not directly related to flavonoids, and even the body response is this of get away from them. Examples are the quercetin (from onions, citrus, buckwheat), cyanidin (from grapes, apples, blueberry, loganberry, elderberry, red onions, bilberry, blackberry, cherry, cranberry, red cabbage and hawthorn), genistein (from the dyer's broom), hesperidin (from citrus), quercetin (from citrus, into the whine), anthocyanin (into the whine), rutin (from citrus), Luteolin (from ragweed pollen, barks, clover blossom, and the Asian yellow Myrobalan, and into the navel oranges, oregano, peppermint, rosemary, olive oil, chamomile, celery thyme), delphinidin (from larkspur and violas), theaflavins (from the tea), tannin (from the tea, into the whine), taxifolin (from the açai palm, Himalayan cedar, Chinese yew, chir pine, or Siberian larch), catechins (from tea, cutchtree, into the whine, cacao which contains also theobromine, and chocolate), epicatechin (from the cocoa, tea), and dihydrokaempferol (from the Siberian pine). Also
An Invisible Chain of our Time Page 9