Super Bugged

            What could super bugs, bees, and trees have in common?  That the human, plant, and animal world are suffering hugely and exacting losses is a good place to begin.  Not only are these living families of life dying in unprecedented numbers, in each case a super bug of one sort or another has been identified as the causal agent.

            Among humans MRSA has been in the news.  In the plant world the mighty oaks are not so mighty anymore, and in the animal world our favorite insect, the honeybee, is rapidly declining.

            Bacterial Leaf Scorch (BLS), the disease that is killing members of the red oak family in unprecedented numbers, is caused by a bacterium run amok, as is MRSA in humans.  Colony Collapse Disorder, a syndrome resulting in the demise of countless honeybees, is believed to be caused by a super bug of a viral nature.

            There are many corollaries underlying these losses.  The super bug causing MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, appears to be a new strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium.  The one causing BLS, Xylella fastidiosa, has always been present in the environment and only recently developed into a devastating and killing force.  The red oak family, which includes the beloved pin oak and other landscape favorites, is fully involved in this pernicious taking of life; and it is the belief of arborists worldwide that that the white oaks, sycamores, and maples are not far behind.  As for the honeybees, how could a microscopic virus so quickly gain an upper hand over such a common and giving bee?  To date this remains a mystery entomologists are working hard to unravel.  While it is true that honeybees have struggled for some time with various environmental challenges, this pathogen is causing catastrophic losses far exceeding anyone’s expectations.   

            In a relatively short period of time MRSA has surpassed the AIDS virus (another super bug) as an American life-taker.  This past year AIDS claimed approximately twelve and a half thousand American lives, while MRSA is estimated to have claimed upwards of nineteen thousand.  How could such a recently passive bacterium become one of the most invasive pathogens out there?

            A few short years ago BLS was thought to be a slow moving disease with little chance of contagion.  Now it is clearly a tree reaper with untold future consequences.

            MRSA has been shown to be resistant to treatment with many common antibiotics and is only responsive to the most exotic and powerful in our medicinal arsenal.  BLS similarly needs a specialized antibiotic treatment (oxytetracycline), but in the case of our trees this is only a disease management tool, not a cure. 

            These challenging treatment scenarios have left health professionals, plant pathologists, and entomologists to suggest that we are at a tipping point with respect to resistance, both in America and globally.  Someone commenting on MRSA called world reaction an inappropriate alarm, but is it?  There have been too much suffering and too many lives lost not to be alarmed.  Similar thoughts were expressed by plant pathologists regarding BLS just a few short years ago, but not anymore.  With Colony Collapse among the bees, crossbreeding was thought to be the answer, but clearly something more is necessary.   What truly could have been done to avoid this tipping point of resistance?  What would make a difference?  The big picture is confusing and overwhelming. 

            Over many years of practicing my profession as an arborist I have been challenged by the rapid decline and loss of tree species.  Despite the many tools available to us and the support of skilled plant pathologists, we have not been able to effectively care for and protect some of the world’s greatest trees such as the mighty chestnuts and the grand elms.  In these cases we could gain some measure of understanding and find some degree of relief from feelings of professional and personal inadequacy in knowing that they were caused by pathogens or insects (killer bugs) that were introduced to America from afar.  We have learned that there may be unexpected environmental consequences to bringing foreign plants, insects, animals, and even cargo to our soil; and we’ve seen the solution as slapping our own hands and promising not to pull at the threads of life’s fabric so wantonly. 

            In the case of the BLS assault on the oaks, however, the identified causal agent (bacterium) has always been here.  So what has weakened the oaks and/or strengthened the bacterium enough to allow the unthinkable to happen?  Ultimately we will undoubtedly identify a combination of conditions that has allowed this once passive organism to morph into a more vigorous and tenacious super bug.  What we may never really understand is how the conditions favoring life have been replaced by conditions that allow this final decline to occur.  Alas, we will often be left with knowing that that which we see is being caused by something we don’t see. 

The word itself, resistance, may be the key.  Instead of fighting all of these super bugs on their terms, we may be better served by understanding how life’s resistance has been broken down.  Is it not the life in one and all that is threatened?  Regardless of our particular genesis and our eventual destination while sharing this planet, we also all draw from and need to give back to the river of life, which vitalizes, moves, and sustains life while in existence.  It is something so very precious, don’t you agree?  It is something that is often taken for granted until it is subdued, leaving us or being taken from someone or something that is important to us.

The reservoir of life itself may be failing, and our first concern should be to replenish it.  Might it soon occur to us, as humans, that what we know to be essential for our health and happiness is also necessary for the rest of the world around us?  Such basic things as fresh air, clean water, and wholesome food can only come to us if they are conceived and supported by the acts and structures of a living and vital world.

            One thing we can be sure of is that every breath drawn and every spring bud unfolding is an act of the dynamism of life holding back the pernicious forces adept at taking life away.  These huge and belief-defying losses cannot be tolerated in a healthy and sustaining world.  Out among my leafy friends I am dismayed.  Who is stronger than the mighty oak?  Super bugs!

            The mechanisms of decline may be gaining an upper hand, and we must be concerned.  In the language of pathology and entomology, super bugs are often noted as life giving or life taking.  Terms like ‘beneficial fungi’ and ‘life-supporting bacteria’ versus designations like ‘decline organisms’ separate the good guys from the bad.  Implied in this nomenclature is that some microorganisms support health or life, while others foster decline.  Where have all the good guys gone? 

            Certain conditions favor the forces of life, while others accelerate the loss of life.  In humans, the key for a vigorous life is a safe and healthy environment, not toxic green lawns, excessively polluted water and air, and the stress pollutants of noise and light. Trees are much more vigorous and disease resistant when they are part of unmolested and intact forests, not surrounded by compacted soils, water diverted by grade changes, etc.  Honeybees are much more protected when surrounded by pesticide-free diverse food sources, not mono-cultured flowers saturated with EPA allotments of chemicals.  Individual losses or specific species’ decline typically point to a troubling imbalance in the bigger living system in which these losses occur. 

Perhaps, in general, humanity has lived in contradiction to the needs of many of the living Earth’s systems while pursuing our goals of growth and development.  As such, we may not have given enough consideration to the important life-giving forms around us.  Seeking our ‘advantages’ may be coming at a loss of important and life-sustaining aspects of our world.

            Invariably growth for growth’s sake threatens the health of our world.  In human terms this may be likened to the development of a cancer in the body.  In that case cellular overgrowth occurs in one part of the body with great detriment to our health and well-being.  When possible we choose to contain or restrict this out of control growth, for if left unchecked there comes a tipping point where life is leaving us and death is taking us.  Is this an appropriate metaphor for the life sustaining vs. life eroding conditions confronting our disappearing oaks, honeybees, and people?  The arrival of these super bugs may help us to understand what is happening on a much larger scale.  The river of life is drying up, leaving less than enough to sustain a healthy world!  The imbalance is evidenced in much of our world.  Decline and dying is overwhelming life and living in so many ways.  Clearly, the suffering and dying oaks are a tree canary of sorts.  In fact, there are canaries and red flags almost everywhere if we are willing to look: coral, ice caps, honeybees, and rising seas.  The aspen are dying, not quaking, and our oaks are leaving us.  It is hard to believe.  How many of life’s precious functions and forms are at the edge and frightfully close to sliding into darkness?  It’s hard to know.  Trees are dying while weeds are thriving.  Honeybees can’t be found, but yellow jackets are stinging their way across America.  Inner city youth see contenders, not playmates, and the slaughter is on.  Living is not such a good thing for over two thousand American children a year who commit suicide instead.  Does anyone really feel good anymore?  Or has the imbalance and decline that is so obvious in our world also begun to creep into our homes and our bodies, leaving us aching and looking for pharmaceutical relief?  How many living Earth systems can fail before it all goes over the edge?

            Understanding that the living Earth systems are breaking down compels us to ask, “What can be done?”  The biggest challenge for us today is seeing, rather than turning a blind eye.  Seeing will allow us to come down on the beneficial side of life.  Continuing to not see will only add to the hand of the reaper with further decay and decline.  Seeing compels us to view the world from wherever we are.  For instance, as an arborist I can choose to see trees as sticks in the ground from which I make a living, or I can see these woody beings as leafy friends.  “Friends?” you say, “A tree is just a tree.  How can it be a friend?  This term is reserved for more special and warm-blooded relationships!”

            The difference in how we see the world that looks back at us can make all the difference.  As sticks in the ground, we just remove the trees to build a house.  As ‘leafy friends’ we find a way to build our house among the trees.  

            Trees, along with the woodlands and forests to which they belong, are one of the most significant carbon busters in this alarming time of global warming.  They provide us with precious oxygen and wood with which to build and heat, and they provide a general cloak of comfort over the land.  In return they ask only for a place to be.  Do you have friends like this?  Yes, they are friends indeed!  And might we not also benefit by considering all significant life systems as friends and kin to the human family?  If we begin to see them in this way it will be much more difficult to disregard their legitimate place in our world.

            Regardless of what we do or where we are now, there is a living world that needs our participation.  If we listen to the world around us the cues will be obvious: the ‘needing meaningful time’ child, the finch upon an empty feeder, the dogwood tree with wilted leaves in the back yard, the lonely senior citizen right next door.  Clearly we can’t take the living world for granted.  Perhaps the vigor that underlies the multitude of life forms on this Earth is being suppressed.  Dynamic and healthy life is not so available now.  The tipping point may have been reached.  Life’s fragility equals our loss.

            Not seeing has allowed humankind to separate ourselves from the world to which we belong.  Admittedly, we see the Earth as important, but we don’t feel intimately involved in it.  The consequences have been huge and can be noted in different ways.

So many of our behaviors and the attitudes that support them illustrate that not seeing this intimate and interdependent connection has allowed our technologies to out-distance our conscience.  The consequence has been that if we think we need something from this world we feel justified in taking it.  The implications are clear to this arborist:  if we continue on this way we have a very short horizon before us.

            To lengthen our horizons we may need to re-look at some common beliefs that may not be to our benefit regarding the challenges before us; for instance, the belief that science will reveal the causes and set forth a solution.  Maybe, and maybe not.  Focusing on the small underlying organisms involved in this myriad of losses may keep us in catch-up mode, while the living world collapses around us.  Much of the credit for MRSA is given to the misuse of anti-bacterials, particularly antibiotics.  But this doesn’t explain why a life supporting bacteria or organism has not consumed or fended off this bad guy.  We certainly can’t explain away the invading reaper of our oaks as a bacterium strengthened by overuse of antibiotics.  Very few anti-bacterial agents have ever been used in the plant kingdom. 

            Intellectualizing and explaining away the obvious as being cyclical and normal serves to give ‘normal’ a very wide range.  This view may cloak our eyes and subdue our concern, further delaying our response to these alarming signs.  Again, we are practicing not seeing.  Some might suggest that we shouldn’t be overly concerned about the oaks.  It’s part of the cyclical ebb and flow of life.  I disagree.  There has been no historic corollary or fossil evidence anywhere of a loss of this magnitude in such a short period of time.

            Regarding the recent rapid rise in childhood autism, there are those who credit the increasing numbers to better diagnostic tests and more accurate record keeping. Twenty or thirty years ago this breakdown of communicative and emotional structure occurred only once in every hundred thousand births.  Today it appears in one out of two hundred fifty births.  To accept these numbers as being within the ‘normal range’ may be foolhardy.  Is it possible that the quantity and quality of life is just not able to support the developmental and structural integrity of so many of our children’s growth?

            What is our best hope in all of this?  Caring will be the verification of our willingness to see the value of protecting life’s needs.  Identifying with life’s needs connects us to the special something that underlies all life forms in our world of existence.  We can’t be here and alive without it.  All life draws from it moment to moment, and without it we are no longer involved in the living experience. 

            Our hope lies in the often-asleep goodness within us.  If we can translate this into personal and collective acts of caring for life, then that which began us will find a way to keep us.  It is within us to be caring.  We are capable of being good stewards of our Earth and the life upon her.  Clearly we are special beings on this world.  But perhaps we must foster a new attitude that suggests that we are not more special.  Much of human behavior suggests that we are separating our thread from the fabric of life in the pursuit of being special, which may be diminishing our lives while threatening the well-being of the world to which we belong.  Thus, we may be better served by giving standing to all of life, regardless of how we interact with it.  The health and vigor of life belongs to all of life simultaneously.  If certain forms or expressions of life are lost, then all of us have lost something as well.  And if caring is what it will take, what could possibly stand in our way?  Old habits and outworn beliefs, perhaps; a belief like ‘this world is only a place that we are passing through, and what really matters is that there is an eternal resting place, Heaven,’ for example.  Of course if we are just passing through on our way to Heaven we must be more special, and we can take from this world whatever we see as deserving of our special status.          

            Is there a ‘better’ belief system for this world’s needs?  All theologies can find a place in life’s needs; if not a mantra then a cloak of comfort against the powerful and ruinous winds blowing about us.  We have seen the human hand of taking in some of our losses, and we have noted the human hand of giving in some acts of recovery.  Our American eagle and California condor still fly, and they fly over cleaner water flowing in our rivers.

           As for the tipping point of resistance; where is ours in all of this?  Is there a colony collapse of our own just up the road?  With specie failure so evident in the world around us, can we be long immune?  Are the super bugs of decline lining us up in their sights?  Will MRSA soon have the company of even more aggressive super bugs?  Are the AIDS virus, cancers, autoimmune diseases, and the many debilitating children’s afflictions (genetic abnormalities, autism, etc.) the beginning of an assault on the human family?  Are these losses already holding a mirror up to us to which we are drawing frightfully close?  Is the future something we can assume we will enter?  What are we willing to do to lengthen our horizons? 

            Nothing could be more assuring than if what we do and are willing to consider centers around life for life’s sake.  We must let life be the sun we revolve around.  Any thing, thought, or action that takes away part of this sun may only continue to cloud our future. 

            Admittedly, many of the assumptions and implications herein are speculative and subjective.  Drawing from observation in the natural world yields parallels and corollaries regarding the state of our world.  These parallels I have attempted to draw between plant, animal, and human domains may not be completely appropriate, but that something is going on with our natural and living world I am quite certain. 

            There are more troubling observations from where I interact with the world.  Many of the grand expressions of life are being depressed and thus being substituted with more marginal (less beneficial and less valued) expressions.  In the landscape and woods edge poison ivy is thriving and growing at accelerated rates, while cultured grapes are struggling with one pest after another.  Ageless species of trees are dying, but the common weeds are thriving.  Beneficial insects like lacewings and honeybees are struggling while consuming, decline-inducing insects such as Japanese beetles, bagworms, and tent caterpillars are ever increasing their populations.  In the soils that support the plant kingdom the beneficial and necessary fungi of the micro-rhizae families are less and less evident, while infectious soil-born fungi like those causing verticillium wilt are ever more present.  

            At some point sooner rather than later, society must respond to the deficits and losses that confront us.  Many are saying it is already too late and are questioning whether their own actions can even make a difference.  Recent history suggests that the majority of humanity has not seen or appreciated our intimate connection to the living Earth.  Throwing our hands up is another way of practicing not seeing – not seeing the value of getting started toward caring for and celebrating life around us as inseparable from the life within us.  Ultimately our efforts will need to be big.  Small may not be good enough at this late hour.  Then again, if enough of us truly make a small step, it may be enough to equal a big one!

            Human history has often illustrated that we have wanted to reach beyond life’s integrated fabric and do something grander and more special of our own.  Perhaps these insatiable yearnings to become more are to prove our worth.  Now the greatest challenge of recent history is set before us.  The taking fires are burning all around us.  Will we be able to cool them down and put them out?

            Identifying life as the ‘pearl of great price’ will, for many of us, become a new way to see.  Perhaps humankind’s material extravaganza of taking and controlling would not seem so necessary if only we could believe that life, and more of it, is what we seek.  We can only be as alive as the living world around us is allowed to be. 

Author's Bio: At a time in history when there are unparalleled numbers of negative messages assaulting the human mind and heart, Stephen Redding radiates unmistakable optimism, faith, and promise. A survivor of many death-defying experiences, he believes that he was brought back to life to spread his optimistic and unique regard for this world and the others he has visited. His message is for all people, in all stages of life, who yearn to find deeper meaning in their lives and greater hope for their tomorrows. Stephen believes and hopes that millions of people are ready for a new consciousness. Stephen, one of fifteen children of a Pennsylvania farm family, lives with his wife and four children on their thirty-five acre homestead and tree farm in rural Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. In the 1980's he garnered much publicity for a hunger strike he conducted on behalf of some ancient trees threatened with destruction by an electric utility company. Stephen is the author of Something More and More or Less, two books in which he weaves events of the past, truths of the present, and promises for the future into a revealing tapestry of lessons learned, comfort, compassion, and hope. Through a series of his life's events, punctuated by a cast of friends, family members, and uniquely original characters, Mr. Redding escorts the reader on a pathway of discovery that leads to the poignant recognition that this earthly life, this reality is a highly valued world among others in creation's fabric of the existence experience. Among the many discoveries made possible for us is the compelling perspective that life as we know it represents a long journey through time and space. We, as living beings, have always been present in one way or another. Yes our face and properties of self may have changed as conditions and circumstances of the journey have demanded. To our credit life has always found a way to continue to respond to creation's grand design.

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