Considera

Potencies for Resurgence Magazine

Something remarkable has happened. Whilst our attention has
been on the floods along the Indus valley, political instability, and
allegations against cricketers, something I consider to be uplifting and
exciting has occurred in Pakistan. But, perhaps it would be better if
you were the judge …

Cotton seems to be thirsty for chemicals. Organic Consumers
says: ‘Cotton uses more than twenty-five percent of all the insecticides
in the world and 12% of all the pesticides.’1 So it was interesting to
find out that one of the main pests in cotton, the mealy bug, has been
shown to be deterred by an inexpensive, natural, non-toxic
preparation.

Since the creation of this preparation 10 years ago, it has been
tested by respected and independent agricultural authorities including
The Cotton Research Institute, the Nuclear Institute of Agricultural
Botany, the Entomological Research Institute and the pithily named
Directorate General of Pest Warning and Quality Control of Pesticides
Punjab, Lahore.

What did they find? The Entomological Research Institute of
Faisalabad ran tests on two different cotton varieties in 2008 and
2009. In both years the preparation was evaluated alongside the
standard chemical spray (a commercial brand of thiamethoxam, a
neonicotinoid insecticide) and a water control. The reduction in the
number of adult and nymph mealy bugs, expressed as a percentage
when compared to the control, was between 90% and 99.9% for the
thiamethoxam. For the non-toxic preparation the values were between
88% and 100%. That is statistically significant, and possibly even
more significant in other ways that I would like to suggest.

First though, I want to be clear why I say that this preparation -
now approved for commercial use in Pakistan under the name
‘Ventage’2 - is not toxic. How can something that is not toxic remove
mealy bugs from cotton? My assertion is due to the ingredients listed
on the official specification sheet. Ventage contains abies nigra (Black
Spruce), aethiops mineralis (mercury sulphide), cenchris contortix
(venom from the copperhead snake) and curare (a paralysing plantextract
used in medicine and on South American hunters’ arrows).
You may think that this would not only knock out mealy bugs but
everything else that came near the cotton fields. However, the crucial
thing is the concentration of these active ingredients. The highly
successful preparation is homeopathically potentised.
This means that the ingredients listed above have been diluted
and mixed time after time – using one part of the mother preparation
to 99 parts of dilute alcohol to make each daughter preparation. The
mercury sulphide has been through this process of potentisation 200
times, the spruce and snake venom 300 times, and the curare 500
times. Considering that molar concentrations of these ingredients
would have passed the seemingly inviolable threshold of Amadeo
Avagadro around the twelfth step of this process, we can safely
assume that there will be none of these ingredients left.

Many of you will be ahead of me, but let us just précis this
situation so we are all clear. A liquid has been tested on plants by
independent and respected agricultural experts and found to be highly
effective, but it has no trace of the ‘active ingredients’ in it.

I think this is truly remarkable both practically and in relation to
the conceptual basis upon which western scientists have been building
for years. Let us consider the practical first. If the above trials were
robust could they be repeated not just for cotton, but appropriately
adjusted for potatoes and elm trees, roses and lentils etc? Might it be
that we can deal with many of the issues facing agriculture with benign
solutions? Must we continue to rely upon the aggressive approach that
certainly has been effective in growing a lot of food and fibre for us,
but which has left enormous problems too? Perhaps we can secure
those gains but also reduce our carbon footprint and avoid polluting
crops, soils, water and air, to mention nothing of the cruel diseases of
agricultural workers themselves.

I have spent years collecting results from individuals and
organisations using potentised preparations on crops, and these are
available in the same form that homeopaths have forged for humans:
a materia medica and repertory. It is online, free, open source, and
can be added to as easily by hobby gardeners as agronomical whizzes
from well-funded institutes.3 Everyone is welcome; we will know who
has done robust and reliable research as our peers try out the
preparations over time.

The work from Pakistan has probably received the most
thorough, independent and authoritative evaluation on the site, but
others have also been tested by certifying bodies, academics, research
institutions and – possibly even more reassuring that this is worth our
consideration – by commercial growers who dig into their pockets year
after year. Some problems are being addressed by potentised
preparations for which there are no chemical alternatives.

What of the conceptual ramifications? I have assumed that
plants are not the ‘worried well’ that are so grateful for the attention of
the sprayers and bug-counting technicians that they are subject to the
placebo effect. Perhaps that is a misplaced assumption and I have
focussed upon the wrong remarkable result. The results from Pakistan
could also be faulty in some way: perhaps the technicians micromanaged
the trials to sway the statistics, however unconsciously: that
could be investigated explicitly. Perhaps more definitive would be to
see if Ventage has sustained success in the market.

In the meantime let us take some assurance from the calibre of
the testing authorities and look ahead as if the trials were robust and
reliable. Some years ago Dr Jonathan Miller said something along the
lines that if the homeopaths are right, everything we ever thought we
knew is wrong. I think we can reassure him somewhat because,
clearly, our culture has not got everything wrong.

My opinion is that if all the work with plants and potentised
preparations (which goes back to the 1920s) has something genuine to
tell us about reality, then the primary ramifications are in the life
sciences. Having tried on this heresy for a while, I have come to
consider that the material sciences - that I have understood Dr Miller
et al to champion - are pretty well served by current orthodox
scientific explanations. Our culture is superb with death! Where his
second conditional clause is to the point is when we consider living
things – plants, mealy bugs, Resurgence readers etc.

If I have understood my culture - and please correct me if I am
wrong here - we have all been encouraged by our education to
consider life as a special case of biochemistry, which is in turn a
special case of physics. Physics is the fundamental science of our
culture and we are only approved (and funded) scientists if we can
trace our assertions back to such objective foundations as can be
quantified by weighing and measuring. Life (and consciousness) is
treated as an emergent property or an epiphenomenon of the one true
actuality which is, in the last analysis, material. Life is not a ‘primary’
phenomenon so we pour all our energies into discovering the precise
chain of events which will show that organisms are indeed nothing
more than intricate mechanisms in all their – our - dimensions. If I
have understood my culture then I do not agree with it.

Science is still my guiding discipline, but the scientific
orthodoxy’s objectivity - ironically and sadly - has been impaired by
these materialistic blinkers. It has long ago forbidden itself the
conceptual tools to consider things otherwise.

I am now convinced that I have not totally wasted my time
collecting and collating these results. I began my research, in part, to
confront the debate about the placebo by working with plants and
potentised preparations. Now I think that if delusion it be, at least it is
shared by coworkers, animals, plants and even slurry lagoons.
So I now intend to channel my energies into two main streams.
One flows outwards with the intention of making this work more widely
known and used, and that means writing articles like this, and tackling
the legislature and certifying bodies. It also means crafting the
catalogue, the materia medica, and its index, the repertory, into more
transparent and useful tools for matching diagnosis to the relevant
preparation. Mainly it means more and more trials.

The second complementary endeavour is to clarify the
philosophical and conceptual basis that might encourage more people
to investigate this path. Richard Dawkins said he would want to know
about the new law of physics that homeopaths have uncovered before
he would really give homeopathy the time of day. (Mr Dawkins clearly
thinks the issue must come down to physics.). It is helpful to listen to
the clear thinking of seekers-for-truth even if areas of agreement
might initially seem elusive. I think we can now have that conversation
with growing confidence at both the conceptual and evidential levels.

My input to the conversation would not be about clathrate
microstructures in water or nanophase properties of materials, or
other mechanisms by which the ‘memory of water’ might be explained.
Good luck to those looking in this direction but it’s not a path that
tempts me. I am much more interested to mull over what and how
Goethe saw, and to appreciate the forces which sculpted the
archetypes into the awe-inspiring array of the natural world. I prefer to
observe life where it chooses to be and to use macroscope and mind to
discriminate between this plant that struggles and that one which is
thriving. If I had to start from scratch I wouldn’t get off the blocks, but
I hope to be up and running in the powerful slipstream behind Goethe,
Steiner, Suchantke, Hoffman, Schad, Adams, Whicher, Bockemuhl,
Bortoft, Colquhoun and others. I feel confident that potentized
preparations find their rationale within their beautiful conception of
what it means to be alive.