Tag Archives: Science

The whistleblowers show sued Fox (and lost)

Fox News hired Jane Akre and a couple of other reporters as an investigative unit and did a snazzy promo about that. The first case they investigated was Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone, RBGH. This is the whistleblower story behind the Fox Can Lie lawsuit.

ITN in the U.K. reporting about Health Canada’s report on bovine growth hormone:

Monsanto’s engineered growth hormone did not comply with safety requirements. It could be absorbed by the body, and therefore did have implications for human health. Mysteriously, that conclusion was deleted from the final, published version of their report.

That was for a product that U.S. EPA had approved with little or no testing. Fox’s investigative unit had the story, but Monsanto threatened to sue Fox. Watch the video for the details.

Eventually, Akre sued Fox. She won, but Fox won on appeal. An appeal that established that Fox can lie.

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PS: Owed to Paul Hollands.

Troubled youth heal by healing troubled watersheds

We already knew nature makes healthy. Here’s a group helping nature help troubled youth make nature healthy.

From the website of Youth and Ecological Restoration Program:

Planting native trees and shrubs in local watersheds provides habitat and protection for fish, birds and many other species.

Stephen Hume wrote for the Vancouver Sun yesterday, Healing power of troubled waters: An ecological program that links at-risk teens with damaged watersheds has breathed new life into both,

After Carnation Creek, Wendy applied and was accepted at university as a mature student, successfully studying ecology and land reclamation, presenting her own scientific papers. Then, eight years ago, she began putting her wisdom to work teaching the next generation to pay attention to the consequences of heedlessness, greed and ignorance about our dependence on the natural world.

Her innovative Youth and Ecological Restoration Program helps teenagers at risk. Some struggle with

Continue reading →

Advanced sheets-Field operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1917

What was your county like a hundred years ago, roads, houses, streams, ponds, and soils? Digital Library of Georgia in association with the University of Georgia Map Library has made available old soil maps from around 1910-1920 online in a viewer that can pan and zoom. Detail of Cat Creek Road, Lowndes County, Georgia in 1917:

Detail of Cat Creek Road

Detail of Cat Creek Road
John S. Quarterman, Gretchen Quarterman, Brown Dog, Yellow Dog,
Screenshot by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Lowndes County, Georgia, 13 July 2012.

The soils haven't changed much (Tf is Tifton A soil, for example), but the roads and houses have, and many streams have been dammed for ponds.

They seem to have all Georgia counties. Here's Tift County in 1910 and Cook County in 1931.

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Owed to Don Davis of the Lowndes County Museum at the 11 July 2012 WWALS Watershed Coalition meeting.

 

Dr. Elsie Quarterman, Prof Emerita of Plant Ecology, Vanderbilt, 101 years and 7 months

Patrick, Gretchen, Elsie, Ann:

Patrick, Gretchen, Elsie, Ann

Patrick, Gretchen, Elsie, Ann
Pictures by John S. Quarterman for Okra Paradise Farms, Nashville, Tennessee, 2 July 2012.

Elsie, Patrick, Ann:

Continue reading →

Groundwater levels: red

In case anybody thinks the recent rains have done away with the drought in Georgia, take a look at this USGS map of groundwater levels today:

USGS Active Groundwater Network map 18 April 2012
Legend for USGS Active Groundwater Network map 18 April 2012

South Georgia, all red and orange. Here’s more detail.

It’s also worth remembering that while our Floridan Aquifer does recharge somewhat, that much of its water has been there since the last ice age. So if we keep mining water at a rapid rate, the aquifer will keep falling.

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Greed is Good for Poisoning the Food Supply?

For many years big agro has treated the world’s health as an economic externality, a problem for somebody else that did not affect its own bottom line. That is starting to change, most recently in Argentina.

Anthony Gucciardi wrote for NaturalSociety 11 April 2012, Explosive: Monsanto ‘Knowingly Poisoned Workers’ Causing Devastating Birth Defects,

In a developing news piece just unleashed by a courthouse news wire, Monsanto is being brought to court by dozens of Argentinean tobacco farmers who say that the biotech giant knowingly poisoned them with herbicides and pesticides and subsequently caused ”devastating birth defects” in their children. The farmers are now suing not only Monsanto on behalf of their children, but many big tobacco giants as well. The birth defects that the farmers say occurred as a result are many, and include cerebral palsy, down syndrome, psychomotor retardation, missing fingers, and blindness.

This would be the same Monsanto that was convicted of chemical poisoning in France.

But this is once again far away in a small country of which we know nothing, right? Wrong:

The farmers come from small family-owned farms in Misiones Province and sell their tobacco to many United States distributors. The family farmers say that major tobacco companies like the Philip Morris company asked them to use Monsanto’s herbicides and pesticides, assuring them that the products were safe. Through asserting that the toxic chemicals were safe, the farmers state in their claim that the tobacco companies ”wrongfully caused the parental and infant plaintiffs to be exposed to those chemicals and substances which they both knew, or should have known, would cause the infant offspring of the parental plaintiffs to be born with devastating birth defects.”

Still, it must be some obscure poison only sold in the third world, right?

Wrong:

The majority of the farmers in the area used Monsanto’s Roundup, an herbicide with the active ingredient glyphosate that has shown to be killing human kidney cells. What’s more, the farmers say that the tobacco companies pushed Monsanto’s Roundup on the farmers despite a lack of protective equipment. In other words, these farmers — many in dire economic conditions — were being directly exposed to Roundup in large concentrations without any protective gear (or even experience or skills in handling the substance). Still, the farmers say the tobacco giants required the struggling farmers to ‘purchase excessive quantities of Roundup and other pesticides’.

That would be the same Roundup that farmers use around here all the time, without protective equipment. The Roundup we already knew was Continue reading →

Glyphosate found in all samples of urine, many times drinking water limit

Mike Barrett wrote for NaturalSociety 26 January 2012, Monsanto’s Infertility-Linked Roundup Found in All Urine Samples Tested,
A recent study conducted by a German university found very high concentrations of Glyphosate, a carcinogenic chemical found in herbicides like Monsanto’s Roundup, in all urine samples tested. The amount of glyphosate found in the urine was staggering, with each sample containing concentrations at 5 to 20-fold the limit established for drinking water.
So, we now know what pesticides are doing to bees. What are they doing to humans? Well, we know that, too: lower IQ in children, organ disruption, miscarriages, birth defects, and infertility.

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Insecticides are killing the honeybees

Is corporate profit worth wiping out honeybees?

Brian Wallheimer wrote in ScienceDaily 12 Jan 2012, Honeybee Deaths Linked to Seed Insecticide Exposure,

Analyses of bees found dead in and around hives from several apiaries over two years in Indiana showed the presence of neonicotinoid insecticides, which are commonly used to coat corn and soybean seeds before planting. The research showed that those insecticides were present at high concentrations in waste talc that is exhausted from farm machinery during planting.

The insecticides clothianidin and thiamethoxam were also consistently found at low levels in soil — up to two years after treated seed was planted — on nearby dandelion flowers and in corn pollen gathered by the bees, according to the findings released in the journal PLoS One this month.

“We know that these insecticides are highly toxic to bees; we found them in each sample of dead and dying bees,” said Christian Krupke, associate professor of entomology and a co-author of the findings.

The authors are careful to say they don’t claim to have found the only cause of honeybee deaths, because they can’t prove that. They do seem to have proved specific insecticides are one cause.

Is wiping out honebees worth the profits of a very few large agrobusinesses that sell these poisons?

Who sells this stuff, anyway? Bayer, Arysta, and Valent sell clothianidin, and Syngenta (SYT) sells thiamethoxam. What’s Syngenta’s excuse?

How do we feed a growing world population?
By poisoning honeybees, apparently.

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Organic farming as productive as pesticiding (proven yet again)

Rodale Institute has been running a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture since 1981. They report:
After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.
Year after year, Rodale found:
Organic yields match conventional yields.

As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,

And now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University’s Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.

At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:

Norman Borlaug, instigator of the “green revolution” of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said: Continue reading →

Organic yields higher than pesticided, all around the world

To feed the world, we need to get rid of Monsanto’s pesticided patented seeds and get on with diversified sustainable organic agriculture.

A friend commented about Organic farming better for bottom line:

Devil’s advocacy: yields from organic agriculture are lower than from artificially fertilised + pesticide’d crops; therefore, the practice tends to increase food prices; therefore, organic food means starvation for people who would otherwise eat. Discuss!
Nope, that’s simply not true. Organic farming yields more, in addition to being more profitable, healthier, and tastier.

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