Organic Consumers Association and Food Rights Network Demand Retraction at April 12 BioCycle Conference

April 12, 2011 |

Food Rights Network and Organic Consumers Association

CONTACT:  John Stauber, Senior Adviser, Food Rights Network

PHONE: (608) 260-9713; (608) 279-4044

EMAIL: FoodRightsNetwork@gmail.com

SAN DIEGO€“Leading organic gardening and food safety advocates who
oppose  growing food in sewage sludge are attending the national BioCycle magazine conference Tuesday, April 12, 2011 in San Diego to demand an apology and retraction from Sally Brown, a columnist and editorial board member of
BioCycle magazine, and from Nora Goldstein, the executive editor of
BioCycle.

Sally Brown, who is also a research associate professor at the University of Washington, is delivering a keynote address at the
BioCycle conference; she promotes growing food in sewage sludge €œfertilizer.€ John Stauber, senior adviser to the Food Rights Network and co-author of the bestselling book
Toxic Sludge Is Good for You!, plans to personally deliver letters to Brown and Goldstein demanding an apology and retraction.

Last month, Brown wrote and Goldstein published
that €œsix ecoterrorists have the City of San Francisco quaking in its
boots, leading officials to stop a compost giveaway program that was
making hundreds happy.€

As John Stauber of the Food Rights Network and Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association note in their letter to the two:

€œDr. Brown€™s column in the March 2011 edition of
BioCycle
magazine makes a false and defamatory charge calling us
€˜ecoterrorists.€™  The Organic Consumers Association and the Food Rights
Network are proud to have led the coalition that successfully put this
sewage waste disposal scam on apparently permanent hold in San
Francisco. Indeed, we are expanding our efforts to warn the public at
large that so-called €œbiosolids€ and €œbiosolids compost€ are actually sewage sludge and thus contaminated with toxic and hazardous substances.€¨€¨€

Your smear
of us as €˜ecoterrorists€™ recklessly disregards the truth. We are the
proponents of genuine organic food and farming practices and federal law
forbids putting sewage sludge on organic farms and gardens. It is a
fraud upon the public to promote sewage sludge products containing
hazardous substances€”such as pathogens, pesticides, dioxins, PCBs, flame-retardants, endocrine disruptors, metals, and thousands of other contaminants€”as
€˜organic compost.€™ The success of our coalition in exposing and
stopping this fraudulent practice bears absolutely no resemblance to the
felony crime of €˜ecoterrorism.€™ €œ

€œSuch vilification is particularly pernicious in the post-9/11
environment, with the expanded powers of the federal government to
investigate charges of ecoterrorism. . . . That
BioCycle
magazine would call us €˜ecoterrorists€™ is also quite possibly malicious,
given your financial interests in promoting sewage sludge-derived
products.  We expect a written apology from both of you for your libel
against us . . . .  Additionally, we demand that . . .  this retraction
and apology be publicly announced from the podium at the national
BioCycle conference April 12th in San Diego.€

The
BioCycle conference begins April 12, and the keynote address at which Brown is slated to speak is scheduled for 9 AM PST.

The Food Rights Network is a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, based in Madison, Wisconsin:

www.FoodRightsNetwork.org

The Organic Consumers Association is based in Finland, Minnesota:

organicconsumers.org