Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health

FEATURING EMILY MONOSSON – For far too long human societies have developed artificial technology to combat disease both in humans and in our food sources. We have used chemical warfare on plants and overused antibiotics in ourselves to treat mundane diseases. But today we are seeing the growth of antibiotic resistant bacteria and as our understanding of bacteria grows, scientists are realizing that an overreliance on chemicals to protect ourselves may be coming back to haunt us.

A new book by an environmental toxicologist suggests that with our greater understanding of the natural world we can develop methods to work with nature instead of against nature in order to stave off disease.

Read Emily’s articles at www.ToxicEvolution.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter at
@emonosson11.

Emily Monosson, environmental toxicologist and writer, independent scholar at the Ronin Institute and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of Unnatural Selection: How We Are Changing Life, Gene By Gene; Evolution in a Toxic World: How Life Responds to Chemical Threats; and the editor of Motherhood, The Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out. Her new book is called Natural Defense: Enlisting Bugs and Germs to Protect Our Food and Health.

**This interview was originally broadcast on March 15, 2018.