Canopy Roads of South Georgia

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:

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

Why Monsanto Thought Weeds Would Never Defeat Roundup

Wishful thinking. That's why Monsanto unleashed crops and pesticides that are both poisonous to humans. Wishful thinking. Also known as greed.

Daniel Charles wrote for The Salt 11 March 2012, Why Monsanto Thought Weeds Would Never Defeat Roundup,

First, the company had been selling Roundup for years without any problems. Second, and perhaps most important, the company's scientists had just spent more than a decade, and many millions of dollars, trying to create the Roundup-resistant plants that they desperately wanted — soybeans and cotton and corn. It had been incredibly difficult. When I interviewed former Monsanto scientists for my book on biotech crops, one of them called it the company's "Manhattan Project."

Considering how hard it had been to create those crops, "the thinking was, it would be really difficult for weeds to become tolerant" to Roundup, says Rick Cole, who is now responsible for Monsanto's efforts to deal with the problem of resistant weeds.

So they thought small scale would be the same as saturating 90+% of every corn, soybean, peanut, and cotton field in the U.S. and numerous other countries with virulent poisons. Because they wanted the money.

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Both Roundup-Ready corn and Roundup are toxic to humans: scientific evidence

Professor Gilles-Eric Séralini put out a press release yesterday, NEW STUDY: Genetically Modified Corn Toxic to Humans,

“We were very much surprised by our findings. Until now, it has been thought almost impossible for Bt proteins to be toxic to human cells. Now further investigations have to be conducted to find out how these toxins impact the cells and if combinatorial effects with other compounds in the food and feed chain have to be taken into account,” says Gilles-Eric Séralini from the University of Caen, who supervised the experiments. “In conclusion, these experiments show that the risks of Bt toxins and of Roundup have been underestimated.”

The toxicity of the corn itself may have been a surprise, but not that of Roundup:

These findings are in accordance with several other investigations highlighting unexpected health risks associated with glyphosate preparations.

Previous studies, including ones by Dr. Séralini, already showed exposure to glysophate (the active ingredient in Roundup) to be "a risk factor for developing Non-Hodgkin lymphoma", and to be toxic to human umbilical, placental, and placental cells with a that "is far below agricultural recommendations and corresponds to low levels of residues in food or feed." In Argentina, Prof. Andrés Carrasco has demonstrated birth defects in amphibians and there is increasing evidence of human birth defects.

Regarding Monsanto's GM corn itself, we already knew it causes liver and kidney damage in rats (later reverified using Monsanto's own data), and chickens fed feed including Monsanto corn show abnormal gene expression.

Now we have even more hard evidence of the toxicity of Monsanto's GM corn and of Monsanto's Roundup. The journal article is available through Wiley online.

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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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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:

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.

• Fewer pesticides for higher yields: if they can do it in west Africa...

• More profit and higher yields through organic farming in India

• Organic Farming Yields often Better Than with Agrochemicals

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11 year old is onto Monsanto and how to fix the food system

The "dark side of the industrialized food system." as related (accurately) by Birke Baehr at TED^xNextGeneration Asheville.

Conventional farmers use chemical fertilizers made from fossil fuels. Then they mess with the dirt to make the plants grow. They do this because they've stripped the soil from all nutrients from growing the same crop over and over again. Next more harmful chemicals are sprayed on fruits and vegetables. Like pesticides and herbicides to kill weeds and bugs. When it rains, these chemicals seep into the ground, or rise into our waterways, poisoning our water, too.

His personal goal:

A while back, I wanted to be an NFL footall player.
I decided I'd rather be an organic farmer instead.
[applause]
That way I can have a greater impact on the world.

He's got a turn of phrase:

We can either pay the farmer, or we can pay the hospital.

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Press mum on new glysophate evidence

I quoted Jill Richardson back in March about about Professor Col. Don Huber's letter to USDA Secretary Vilsack about new evidence found of diseases caused by Roundup. She writes 27 April 2011, Why Is Damning New Evidence About Monsanto's Most Widely Used Herbicide Being Silenced? It turns out that Monsanto's Roundup herbicide might not be nearly as safe as people have thought, but the media is staying mum on the revelation.

Huber was unavailable to respond to media inquiries in the weeks following the leak, and thus unable to defend himself when several colleagues from Purdue publicly claiming to refute his accusations about Monsanto's widely used herbicide Roundup (glyphosate) and Roundup Ready crops. When his letter was finally acknowledged by the mainstream media, it was with titles like "Scientists Question Claims in Biotech Letter," noting that the letter's popularity on the internet "has raised concern among scientists that the public will believe his unsupported claim is true."

Now, Huber has finally spoken out, both in a second letter, sent to "a wide number of individuals worldwide" to explain and back up his claims from his first letter, and in interviews. While his first letter described research that was not yet complete or published, his second letter cited much more evidence about glyphosate and genetically engineered crops based on studies that have already been published in peer-reviewed journals.

And that's plus all sorts of evidence about other ill effects of glysophate, including lower IQ in children, and Roundup-Ready crops themselves causing organ disruptions. All that plus the very real risk of the genetically modified crops having unpredicted effects. There's much more.

Could this silence of the press be because only five companies own more than half of all the media in the U.S.? Let's not forget the legal system is also complicit, given the Fox-can-lie case.

So what can you do? vote at the checkout counter. Buy local and organic. And of course bug your elected officials about doing something about it.

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At 100, Elsie Quarterman attends her Cedar Glade Wildflower Festival

Dr. Elsie Quarterman pioneered the ecology of cedar glades. Yesterday she attended the annual festival named in her honor, the Elsie Quarterman Cedar Glade Wildflower Festival at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, Lebanon, Tennessee. Aunt Elsie is 100 years and five months old, and isn't getting around as fast as she once did, so she met with her students and grand-students at a local restaurant. Only a few of them are pictured here:

Kim Cleary Sadler, Assistant Professor of Biology at Middle Tennessee State University and co-Director of the Center for Cedar Glade Studies. (Student of Thomas ``Tom'' Ellsworth Hemmerly, who was teaching and couldn't come.)
Dr. Elsie Quarterman, Professor Emerita of Plant Ecology, Vanderbilt University
Carol C. Baskin, Professor of Biology, University of Kentucky

There were classes, botany walks, owl hoots, and musicians. Here's the schedule. It was sunny this year, unlike last year's great flood. Next year, you should come! Get out of town, take a walk in the glades.

Elsie got a guided tour, with Tennessee State Naturalist Emeritus Mack Pritchard and his successor Randy Hedgepath. Here they are with Elsie's nephew Patrick Quarterman, while Gretchen Quarterman photographs a glade.

Here State Naturalist Randy Hedgepath consults with Dr. Quarterman about identification of a cedar glade plant.

Elsie got out of the car to look at this one with Randy and Ann Quarterman: