Sunday, January 29th, 2012
TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: Another example of profit trumping wellness. The consequences of this toxic marriage will haunt us for generations.
During the late December media lull, the USDA didn’t satisfy itself with green-lighting Monsanto’s useless, PR-centric ‘drought-tolerant’ corn. It also prepped the way for approving a product from Monsanto’s rival Dow Agrosciences-one that industrial-scale corn farmers will likely find all too useful.
Dow has engineered a corn strain that withstands lashings of its herbicide, 2,4-D. The company’s pitch to farmers is simple: Your fields are becoming choked with weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. As soon as the USDA okays our product, all your problems will be solved.
At risk of sounding overly dramatic, the product seems to me to bring mainstream US agriculture to a crossroads. If Dow’s new corn makes it past the USDA and into farm fields, it will mark the beginning of at least another decade of ramped-up chemical-intensive farming of a few chosen crops (corn, soy, cotton), beholden to a handful of large agrichemical firms working in cahoots to sell ever larger quantities of poisons, environment be damned. If it and other new herbicide-tolerant crops can somehow be stopped, farming in the US heartland can be pushed toward a model based on biodiversity over monocropping, farmer skill in place of brute chemicals, and healthy […]
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Sunday, January 29th, 2012
ABIGAIL PESTA, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: I learned about this because one of my Southern readers wrote to tell me about it when her just 18 year old son was arrested for having sex with his a just shy of 16 year old steady girlfriend of two years. It was the first I had heard to this trend. Commonsense just seems to have fled in our society.
Francie Baldino, a mother of two from Royal Oak, Mich., can tell you the day she became an activist against America’s sex-offender laws. It was the day her teenage son went to prison-for falling in love with a teenage girl.
‘The prison term was unthinkable,
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Sunday, January 29th, 2012
LESTER BROWN, - Truthout.org
Stephan: This is what happens when profit is the first priority and individual and social wellness is hardly a consideration at all.
Lester Brown has been called 'the guru of the environmental movement
Here are disturbing numbers from the International Energy Agency (IEA) and World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, by Lester R. Brown, and its excerpt ‘Governments Spend $1.4 Billion Per Day to Destabilize Climate’ released by Earth Policy Institute on Jan. 19, 2012. First, Culture Change provides critical comment:
It is a public service that Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, now with his Earth Policy Institute, has helped expose the huge, ongoing financial subsidies to fossil fuels industries. Governments’ and corporations’ persisting with this policy — legal corruption of the worst order at a time of out-of-control climate change — is nothing short of insane or criminal.
However, before presenting the IEA’s findings as reported by Lester Brown, a discussion of the underlying agenda or worldview of the orientation of the IEA and Earth Policy Institute ought to be considered. First, the IEA, representing the top 34 industrial economies through its sponsoring group Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, can be said to be waking up to peak oil and the dangers of climate change. So its work is more focused in recent years.
Second, an analyst and advocate such as Brown is so right on so many issues […]
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Saturday, January 28th, 2012
JEFFREY SMITH, - Institute for Responsible Technology
Stephan: I must have had 50 readers send me the viral report on identifying GMO foods that flashed across the internet a few days ago. It is bogus.
Let’s put a rumor to rest. No, the 5-digit PLU codes on produce do not tell you what is genetically modified or natural. This urban legend has circulated long enough, even on the best of websites. It’s time to take it down.
The 4-digit PLU codes on the sometimes-pain-in-the-neck labels glued to apples, for example, tell the checkout lady which is a small Fuji (4129) and which is a Honeycrisp (3283). She’ll know what to charge you and the inventory elves will know what’s what. If there’s a 5-digit code starting with 9, then it’s organic.
These numbers, organized by the Produce Marketing Association, have nothing to do with you. According to Kathy Means, Association Vice President of Public Relations and Government Affairs, this is an optional convention for retailers and their supplier and is not designed as a communication tool for customers. If you want to know which items are organic, look for the word Organic; and stop squinting at tiny codes.
GMO codes are hypothetical
Those that run PLU-universe figured that someday some retailer might want to distinguish between a GMO and a non-GMO for price or inventory purposes. So they created a convention of 5 digits starting with an 8, just […]
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Saturday, January 28th, 2012
, - Independent Media Center
Stephan: The evidence just keeps mounting. At this point I consider climate deniers to be criminally culpable.
Scientists meeting at the University of Copenhagen have warned that biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world, describing the loss of species as the 6th mass extinction event on the earth. The world is losing species at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the natural extinction rate, with the challenges of conserving the world’s species larger than mitigating the negative effects of global climate change.
Related: Climate change and habitat loss threaten biodiversity, extinction rate underestimated | Species biodiversity under threat from the velocity of climate change | UN study says biodiversity loss unstoppable with protected areas alone | Oceans at high risk of unprecedented Marine extinction scientists warn
Related Event: Call of Life: Facing the Mass Extinction – a film and discussion – San Fransisco on Sunday January 29, 2012.
The scientists and policymakers met last week in Copenhagen to discuss how to organise the future UN Intergovernmental Panel for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – an equivalent to the UN panel on climate change (IPCC). The conference was arranged and hosted in cooperation with the Danish Ministry of Environment and took place at the […]
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