Katherine's Blog
We’ve known since at least June that Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, compiled hit lists containing hundreds of names and other personal information about journalists, politicians and scientists, including their opinions about pesticides and genetic engineering.
But newly revealed court documents expose an even more calculated and sinister plan—a 130-page plan involving 11 staff members plus high-powered public relations firms—to "slime and slander" anyone who criticized their products or operations.
It may be true that you can take the boy out of the country, but it’s apparently not so easy to get the CEO out of Silicon Valley.
In mid-June, Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, publicly invited Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, to visit Harris’ ranch in Bluffton, Georgia. The invitation was prompted by a statement Harris got wind of, in the latest Impossible Foods Impact Report, which facetiously referred to regenerative grazing as the “clean coal” of meat.
The company has also claimed that grassfed beef “generates more GHGs than feedlot beef”—a claim that didn’t sit well with Harris, whose ranch in Bluffton, Georgia, stores “more carbon in the soil than our cows emit in a lifetime,” according the website.
Harris told a reporter for Civil Eats that he was “stunned” by the “clean coal” analogy. “I think there were many mistruths in that attack,” he said.
Should Vermont keep throwing money at cleaning up the state’s polluted waterways—without providing funding for preventing future pollution?
Vermont’s Clean Water Board is taking public comments through September 6, on the board’s priorities for funding the cleanup of Vermont’s waterways.
You can submit comments in writing here.
Better yet, deliver your comments in person at the board’s public hearing, 10 a.m. Thursday, August 22, at the National Life Building, Winooski Room, in Montpelier.
In a sit-down interview with Dr. Mark Hyman, food writer and guru Mark Bittman covers a wide range of issues—including this big question: If we had a food system in this country, what would it look like?
We think the Green New Deal is the best roadmap to come along since the original New Deal—and our best shot—for the kind of transformational change we need in order to have a real food system, based on what people really need and want, while at the same time addressing a host of other problems, including and especially, our current climate emergency.
TAKE ACTION: Sign the Green Consumers for a Green New Deal petition
The climate emergency is big. It touches on every aspect of human survival, from food security to what George Monbiot described this week as record temperatures that "test the thermal limits of the human body."
Let’s be honest. If we fail to throw the climate-change engine into reverse, and fast, it won’t much matter if we’re eating GMOs, or if our food is drenched in cancer-causing chemicals.
Sometime in the near future, a 12-year-old boy will take on Bayer-Monsanto in a U.S. courtroom. Jake Bellah has non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer linked to exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller. He and his parents allege that exposure to Roundup caused his cancer.
An article in the Guardian this week featured the story of Oliver Strong, who died from acute myeloid leukemia in June 2015 at the age of 12. Concerned that their otherwise healthy, athletic son’s cancer was caused by exposure to toxic chemicals, Oliver’s parents set up a foundation that is working with Texas Children’s Hospital and the Baylor College of Medicine to study the correlation between exposure to chemical toxicants and childhood cancer.
Citing statistics from the National Cancer Institute, the Guardian reported that cases of pediatric cancer in the U.S. surged by almost 50 percent from 1975 to 2015. The institute predicted that in 2018, up to 16,000 children, from birth to age 19, would receive a new cancer diagnosis.
Are all these cancers caused by exposure to chemicals? Probably not. But most are, says Dr. Zach Bush, a former cancer researcher. Bush, who said he was taught that cancer was a genetic disease, says his research now supports the theory that most cancers can be tied to exposure to chemicals.
You can’t make this stuff up.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) wants to let companies like Monsanto-Bayer, DowDupont and Syngenta (now owned by ChemChina) “regulate” their own genetically engineered products—under a proposed rule the USDA euphemistically calls the “Sustainable, Ecological, Consistent, Uniform, Responsible, Efficient,” or “SECURE” for short.
DEADLINE AUGUST 5: Tell the USDA to do its job: protect consumers, not the biotech industry!
Who cares about your child’s health? Not the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA this week confirmed what many Americans already know: When the Trump administration weighs the competing interests of corporate profits versus public health, the corporations win, hands down.
Wheeler announced Thursday that despite what independent scientists say is a wealth of evidence tying the popular insecticide known as chlorpyrifos to neurodevelopmental damage in children, the pesticide should continue to be applied by farmers to foods that children regularly consume, including apples, grapes, broccoli and cherries.
Over the past year or so, we’ve experienced some disturbing trends. Fewer and fewer of our emails are reaching our subscribers. Fewer of our articles are turning up in Google searches. At times, our web traffic is far slower than normal.
Are we doing something wrong? Or is something more sinister at work?
In 2016, the Environment America Research & Policy Center reported that Tyson Foods, one of the world’s largest meat and poultry producers, dumps more toxic pollution into the nation’s waters than any other agribusiness corporation, and produces the most animal manure of five major companies assessed nationwide.
Yet Tyson continues to falsely claim that the company cares about being “stewards of the land.” In its marketing and advertising materials, Tyson brags about its “commitment to conservation” and its “dedication to environmental leadership.”
We don’t think false claims like these are harmless. And we believe the courts won’t either.
- Page 1
- ››
Get Local
