John Withee, the World’s Greatest Bean Collector

In the Pure Water Gazette’s article on seed patenting, My Secret Life as a Farmer by Gene Franks,   which appeared in our paper version in the spring of 1995,  John Withee was praised as one of the great heroes of our time because of his tireless efforts to save heirloom varieties of beans from extinction.  We were gratified to see that the Seed Savers Exchange, the oldest and most prestigious of the seed preservation societies,  has featured Withee and recognized his accomplishments in its 1999 Seeds of Change catalog. Much of the information in our article below comes from their article on Withee.

Seed patenting remains one of the most serious issues of our time, though few seem aware of the gravity of the war that multinational seed corporations are waging on heirloom seed varieties. John Withee recognized the seriousness of the seed dilemma early on and devoted his considerable energies to the preservation of heirloom varieties of beans.

Withee, who lived in Lynnfield, Massachusetts,  has been called “the world’s greatest bean collector.” He was born in Portland, Maine in 1910, son of a grocer who fed his family beans every day of the winter. John’s favorite bean from his youth was the Jacob’s Cattle, and it was his effort to locate that bean that got him started as a collector.  He is credited with the collection of about 1,200 separate strains of beans from the 1960s to the the 1980s.

He is best know for the founding of the very significant bean collectors society known as Wanigan Associates. Wanigan is an Indian name for boat-mounted  kitchens carried on river rafts that were floated down Maine’s rivers during the spring lumber drives. Huge quantities of beans were served to the Maine woodsmen from the floating cook shacks.

In 1981 Withee turned the extensive Wanigan Associates bean collection over to Kent Whealy’s Seed Savers Exchange for permanent maintenance. The photo below, from the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog, shows Withee displaying some 850 of his bean varieties in a case built by Kent Whealy. John’s bean case is now on display at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Several of John Withee’s bean varieties, including his favorite, Jacob’s Cattle, are offered in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogs.

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Home neutering kit.

Dog Yummies (cat excrement wrapped as candy.)

Mr. Ben T. Quisenberry (1887-1986)

The Gazette is honored to give its Hero Award posthumously to Mr. Ben T. Quisenberry, who died in 1986 at age 99. Mr. Quisenberry lived in and operated a tiny mail-order seed company called Big Tomato Gardens out of a small building that had been an old post office in Syracuse, Ohio. He printed his own seed packets, complete with mottoes, on an old printing press.

His passion was saving heirloom tomato varieties from extinction. Through his efforts, several tomato varieties, including Brandywine (his personal favorite), Golden Sunray, Czech’s Bush, Long Tom and Mortgage Lifter, survived the war on heirloom seeds waged by the large seed companies. (These can still be purchased from Seed Saver’s Exchange, whose current catalog contains a full page of Ben Quisenberry’s Tomatoes. Their address is below.)

In 1982, Mr. Quisenberry told an interviewer who asked the secret of his long, productive life:

Once a fellow from a television station asked me how I accounted for keeping active 95 years. I said to keep happy and to keep content, do something that’s worthwhile. If you have a hobby and you can make your hobby your business, you’re all the better off. Do something good…..l do marvel at myself sometimes, the way I keep going. Indeed I do. I marvel at myself. I’m surprised sometimes how I can keep going from 7 o’clock until dark. About dark, I’m like the chickens. I hunt for my roost. …..Aging in rural America, the elderly man is very fortunate if he is in a rural district. Out in Nature. Out where he can work. Out where he can fasten his hands onto the end of a hoe handle and make things grow. He’s with nature, and when he’s with nature, he’s close to God. God is nature and nature is God. So you’re in good company when you are out in a rural district.

For more information about Mr. Quisenberry’s heroic efforts in the cause of saving several varieties of seeds from extinction, and for an overview of the seed problem that has now grown critical, see the previous Gazette article “My Secret Life As A Farmer.”

To buy Mr. Quisenberry’s seeds, and to learn more about a truly outstanding organization, please contact:

Seed Savers Exchange
3076 North Winn Road
Decorah, IA 52101

(319) 382-5990

(Note: The photo Mr. Quisenberry is from the 1999 issue of The Seed Savers Exchange Catalog.)

Pat Roy Mooney

Pat Roy Mooney is one of a select group of heroes who devote their time and energy to the defense of plants. Plants are victims of a veritable holocaust being carried out by multi-national seed companies. This is a battle that affects us all, but few are even aware that plant biodiversity is a universal dilemma. (For background, see the  My Secret Life As a Farmer, which appeared in an earlier paper Gazette.)

The excellent article below appeared in the Dec. 16, 1998 Ottawa Citizen.

Biodiversity ‘crackpot’ wins Pearson medal: Activist wages war against ‘life patents’

By Andrew Duffy

The Pearson Peace Medal was awarded yesterday to Pat Roy Mooney, an expert on plant genetics who has led an international campaign against patents on living organisms.

Mr. Mooney, 51, a legally blind high school dropout, used to be called a crackpot as he battled large seed companies determined to promote the use of their genetically altered plant varieties around the world. But yesterday, Gov. Gen. Romeo LeBlanc lauded him as a visionary who recognized the dangers of agricultural technology long before most of the world. “He raised the alarm and he created a higher public consciousness of the threats to biodiversity,” Mr. LeBlanc said. “His achievements show us the impact that one person can have when he cares deeply about an issue: He has raised the chances of the world having a secure supply of food and he has raised the chance for peace.”

It’s estimated that 75 per cent of genetic diversity in the world’s 20 key food crops have been lost. Most of that diversity — important to ensuring that crops survive in changing conditions — has been lost in the past 50 years as genetically altered, high-yield crops have been introduced around the world…

Mr. Mooney is now executive director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, which has offices in Ottawa and Winnipeg…Mooney’s Rural Advancement Foundation has successfully fought against three patents taken out on human cell lines–copies of human cells reproduced in a lab–by the U.S. government.

The patents allowed the U.S. Department of Commerce to charge a $136 fee to anyone wanting to use the cells in an experiment. The cells came from the human tissue of indigenous people in Guaymi, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Mooney’s group has taken patent fights to the United Nations and to international courts. It’s his proudest achievement, he said, that the campaign has gone mainstream. “There are hundreds of groups out there doing this work now. And I can see a point down the road where we’re going to turn this stuff around: I think the momentum is building up so that the patenting of life will become a very hot topic around the world and we’re going to find companies back pedaling.”

Donald Rumsfeld: A Man of Constant Sorrow

by Hardly Waite

Written During the Dreary Early Days of the Bombing of Afghanistan

“Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about ‘vicotory.'” — Sidney Blumenthal, Dec. 2004.

At a Pentagon press briefing, speaking of the “collateral damage” resulting from the American assault on Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: “We mourn every civilian death.”

Now, if Professor Marc Herold,  who has with much labor counted the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, is anywhere near right, American bombs and soldiers have killed 3,000 to 4,000 or so civilians. I did some numbers and decided that if Mr. Rumsfeld,  who tells us frequently that he is a man of his word, does, as he says, mourn every civilian death, he must be a very busy mourner.

I’m not sure how long it takes to mourn an Afghan civilian, but if Mr. Rumsfeld devotes only five minutes of mourning to each and there are, say, 3000 dead, he has had to mourn for some 250 hours. In other words, if he is able to devote eight hours a day to mourning, he has had to mourn for an entire month, including weekends and holidays. It makes you wonder how he has time to keep the bombs flying.

I have several explanations for this.

First, he may not feel it necessary to devote a full five minutes to a citizen of Afghanistan. Clearly, American citizens require considerably more than 5 minutes of mourning, but in Afghanistan life is cheap. Could be that just a part of a minute each is enough.

Another explanation is that since so many of the dead are women and children, he may be able to mourn less for them than he would have to for a man. An Afghan baby, one would think, could perhaps be mourned for in just a few seconds.

Or, here’s another view. If, say, he mourns them in groups, like when whole villages or  several members of the same family are killed by the same bomb,   he could save much time. He did not, after all, say that he mourns for them individually, just that he mourns for them. The picture is of a scene in which several family members, including a newly married couple, were killed by a bomb that hit their home.   But it  presents yet another problem.  In this unfortunate blast,  a boy of seven was blinded.  Does Mr. Rumsfeld mourn only for the dead, or does he devote at least a minute or so to the boy who will go through life without  eyes?  Having to mourn for the wounded as well as the dead would, of course, add considerably to his grieving duties.

The most likely scenario to explain the prodigious amount of mourning accomplished by Mr. Rumsfeld, though,  is to be found in a closer reading of his statement. Note that he says “we mourn.” Perhaps it is not an editorial “we.”  Perhaps he literally means that he has help in mourning. Let’s say, for example, if he delegates some mourning to  Paul Wolfowitz, Mike Myers,  Tommy Franks,  et al,  they could probably,  all grieving together,  knock out the day’s mourning fairly early in the day and still have plenty of time to plan more assaults.

I don’t know how Mr. Rumsfeld manages it, but they say he is a remarkable man.

See also, “Palestinians and the Proper Way to Grieve Dead Children.”

Why the War Against Pot? 

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

Have you ever wondered why the United States spends vast piles of money and squanders immeasurable amounts of human talent and natural resources in the effort to combat a benign substance like marijuana?

Have you wondered why the US is now the only industrialized country to criminalize a substance that is obviously far less harmful than the majority of legally sold pharmaceuticals?

Kate Silver, writing in the Nov. 13, 2001 Las Vegas Weekly, has some answers.

In case you haven’t guessed, like everything else in the USA, it has to do with money. It has a lot to do with the end of the Cold War, Silver says.  When the Cold War ended, ” enormous needs for certain technology and personnel were eradicated. Once America declared its infamous War on Drugs, those needs were refilled.” It provided a new “enemy” and thus created a vast number of new government jobs and a major new source of technological endeavors to be managed by government bureaucrats. It turned the Cold War inward and allowed us to wage war on our own people at a tidy profit. Silver also points out that as a very nice side-effect,  “many powerful Political Action Committees donate money to campaigns to push their own agenda, keeping marijuana illegal.”

The toll of this war is, of course, enormous in terms of  “jobs, relationships, money and time lost for the crime of smoking a joint.”  Marijuana arrests take a lot of manpower and a lot of time. “In 2000, police arrested 734,498 people for marijuana violations–the highest ever recorded by the FBI. Of those, 88 percent were for possession. The remaining 88,456 were charged with sale/manufacture.”

You probably have noticed that government officials long ago gave up trying to justify the War on Dope with anything resembling logic.  Pot has just been added to the ever-growing list of “enemies” we’re expected to fight without asking why.

Silver concludes: “Las Vegas Weekly contacted a police source in hopes of getting an argument against legalization, and providing a semblance of balance. Sadly enough, the only reasoning the source could give for pot being illegal is, well, because it’s illegal.”

Pesticides and the Foods We Consume

by Hardly Waite

According to Dr. Laura Thompson of the Southern California Institute of Clinical Nutrition:

The EPA determines risk by estimating how much of various foods people eat in a year–since the more you eat the more pesticides you get. However, EPA believes that Americans eat less than 1/2 pound per year of the following foods: almonds, avocados, blackberries, boysenberries, eggplant, figs, honeydew melons, leeks, mushrooms, summer squash, Swiss chard, tangelos, tangerines, walnuts, winter squash.

Does this make you suspect there might be something slightly wrong with the government’s system of estimating the safety levels of pesticides in the environment?

Stop Terrorism Legalize Drugs

by James W. Harris

–The Drug War, in practice, is a massive government subsidy to terrorists.

The U.S. government is busily investigating numerous ways to cut off the funds of terrorist organizations around the world.

Here’s one method guaranteed to immediately gut the biggest single source for terrorist dollars end America’s War on Drugs.

The Drug War has created a massive illegal drug market that terrorist organizations — including bin Laden’s organization — have long used to fund their horrific activities. As Interpol’s chief drugs officer, Iqbal Hussain Rizvi, noted in 1994 “Drugs have taken over as the chief means of financing terrorism.”

Drug money helped fund the September 11 terrorist attacks. It has long been known that bin Laden was taking advantage of the opportunities created by the Drug War to fund his activities. CBS News observed on May 31, 2000 “For the first time, there is…evidence that Afghanistan’s heroin producing poppy fields are funding bin Laden’s organization, Al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban.”

Similarly, a few days after the September 11 attacks, House Speaker Dennis Hastert

 said “The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden.”

Indeed, an estimated 75% of the world’s heroin is currently produced in Afghanistan, according to the Wall Street Journal (October 2, 2001).

Remember, it is not drugs per se, but rather drug *prohibition* that makes it possible for terrorists to earn millions of dollars from producing and selling drugs — just as alcohol Prohibition made thugs like Al Capone rich in the 1920s.

The Drug War, in practice, is a massive government subsidy to terrorists. End it, and we will end the chief source of terrorism funding around the world — as well as curing a whole host of other prohibition-related evils.

The War on Common Sense Goes On

by Hardly Waite

During the 2002 Super Bowl game, the U. S government wasted $3.2 million of our tax money on a couple of lame commercials that put forth the silly notion that people who buy drugs are aiding the “terrorists.”  The idea seems doubly silly when you try to imagine how many hard-core heroin addicts went cold turkey when they learned from the ads that their self-destructive behavior might be hurting our national War on Terrorism. Or how many patriotic high school kids decided to give up dope smoking just to strike fear into Osama Bin Laden’s heart.

A San Francisco Chronicle reader named David Fiol wrote in a letter to the editor:

During the Super Bowl, the President’s Office of National Drug Control Policy ran ads suggesting that those who buy drugs help to fund terrorists. That may be true, but doesn’t the same reasoning apply to those addicted to the profligate use of oil? … When it comes to funding terrorists, are the selfish egotists guzzling gas in their SUVs and wasting energy to heat and cool their oversized homes any better than drug addicts?

Right, David.  And we could probably list a few dozen more common behaviors of good, patriotic Americans that feed the “terrorists” both financially and spiritually. But don’t expect anytime soon to see million-dollar Super Bowl ads denouncing excessive air travel or lavish spending on automobiles or the use of power lawn mowers. And don’t expect to see an ad showing an elegant woman being hustled off to Guantanamo for buying diamonds, although it is well known that “the Evil Ones”  have used tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars in diamond industry profits to fund their activities.

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