CHRISTINA SARICH, - Natural Society/Nation of Change
Stephan: Here is a report on the direction we need to go, abandoning the chemical dominate nature approach to agriculture, and embracing working with nature's system.
Note the comment about how even a well-meaning billionaire like Bill Gates using his money can make a mistake that skews the entire world in the wrong direction. This, in itself, is an emerging trend. With 8 per cent of the population controlling 50 per cent of the world's wealth, the errors made by people like Gates can impose deeply flawed solutions on the world that the other 92 per cent have to live with.
If you’ve already been through an economic collapse, you might know a thing or two about how to feed your family with little money. More importantly, you might know how to do it without pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and GMO seed. On a total of about 20 million acres managed by over 35 million Russian families, Russians are carrying on an old-world technique, which we Americans might learn from. They are growing their own organic crops – and it’s working.
According to some statistics, they grow 92% of the entire countries’ potatoes, 77% of its vegetables, 87% of its fruit, and feed 71% of the entire population from privately owned, organic farms or house gardens all across the country. These aren’t huge Agro-farms run by pharmaceutical companies; these are small family farms and less-than-an-acre gardens.
A recent report from Agro-ecology and the Right to Food says that organic and sustainable small-scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue. Within five to 10 years we could see a big jump in crop cultivation. It could also take the teeth out of GMO business in the US.
According to World Watch, we can also farm fish […]
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TOM PHILPOTT, - Mother Jones
Stephan: I confess that when I read this story, I realized I had missed an important trend. This is a big deal, as it says, and it tells us that the days of industrial chemical based monoculture, depending on massive infusions of rock phosphates is doomed. The solution working with nature, not trying to dominate her.
Western Sahara, a sparsely populated slice of desert on Africa’s northwestern coast, doesn’t get much ink as a potential crisis point in the global food system. You’ve probably never heard of the long-standing independence movement in the Morocco-controlled territory-or that the area harbors vast stores of an element critical to contemporary agriculture.
Morocco, it is thought, holds up to 85 percent (PDF) of the globe’s known phosphate rock reserve-and a lot of it lies in Western Sahara. Morocco’s royal family thus controls what Jeremy Grantham, cofounder of the prominent Boston-based global investment firm Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., called the ‘most important quasi-monopoly in economic history.’
Our P use ‘must be drastically reduced in the next 20-40 years or we will begin to starve.’
Who cares about phosphorus? For starters, every living thing on Earth-including humans-since all the crops we eat depend on it to produce healthy cells. Until the mid-20th century, farmers maintained phosphorus levels in soil by composting plant waste or spreading phosphorus-rich manure. Then new mining and refining techniques gave rise to the modern phosphorus fertilizer industry-and farmers, particularly in the rich temperate zones of Europe and North America, quickly became hooked on quick, cheap, and easy phosphorus. […]
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CHARLENE LAINO, Senior Writer - Perelman School of Medicine
Stephan: This report dispels one myth, but fails to address the issue of the over-medication of children, which I think is actually the more important trend. Still, clearing this from the table is an improvement.
Psychostimulant medications for childhood attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are not gateway drugs for later substance use disorders, a meta-analysis of 15 longitudinal studies involving 2,565 participants suggested.
Children taking drugs such as methylphenidate (Ritalin), were neither at significantly increased nor significantly decreased risk of later dependence on alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, marijuana, or other illicit drugs, Kathryn L. Humphreys, MA, EdM, of the University of California Los Angeles, and colleagues reported online today in JAMA Psychiatry.
The current study failed to replicate a protective effect of the medication against alcohol and substance abuse disorders observed in the only other meta-analysis on the topic, Humphreys noted.
But that analysis included only six studies and since published 10 years ago, multiple studies have failed to confirm its findings, the researchers wrote.
Commenting on the findings, Joseph Biederman, MD, a specialist in the treatment of ADHD in children and teens at Massachusetts General Hospital, said, ‘This is a very important addition to the literature on ADHD by confirming through meta-analysis results from previously reported studies documenting that medications for ADHD do not increase the risk for substance use disorders.’
Biederman, a longtime advocate for the use of ADHD medications, has been a frequent target of anti-drug critics and was […]
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DAVID DOWNS, - San Francisco Chronicle
Stephan: As I have written before when my late wife, Hayden, was dying of colo-rectal cancer, every single physician or nurse with whom we interacted would at some point, ask me to step into the hall and say some variation of, 'I can't say this to you on the record, but find some way to get some marijuana. It will make all this much easier for your wife, and she will keep eating longer, which is important.' I did, and she did, and it made a tremendous difference. Now this unofficial truth has become official.
In a poll by the well-respected New England Journal of Medicine released today, more than three out of four doctors recommended medical cannabis for a hypothetical late-stage breast cancer patient.
‘We were surprised by the outcome of polling and comments, with 76% of all votes in favor of the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes - even though marijuana use is illegal in most countries,
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Stephan: The temptation is to see this as funny, or to say it is probably for the best. I don't see it that way. What it tells me is that the British economy is in such bad shape that men who normally turn to prostitutes for sex, no longer have the money to do so. Since this is an established habit, it suggests a powerful change. Note also that more and more women are being driven into prostitution, because they cannot find other work. In the United States you can see this same phenomenon amongst female and male college students, who are racked with debt. This is what austerity economics has produced.
Times are tough for Debbie, a prostitute in western England who runs a private flat with other ‘mature ladies
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