Katherine's Blog
From the “Department of Here We Go Again,” the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) needs our help—again—to remind the Trump administration that all forms of genetic engineering must be excluded from organic production.
We have only until midnight EST October 3 to flood the NOSB with comments.
Last week, Organic Consumers Association (OCA), joined Regeneration International (an organization we helped co-found and continue to support) and the Sunrise Movement to officially launch the national coalition of U.S. Farmers & Ranchers for a Green New Deal.
Five members of Congress joined us in front of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to call for a Green New Deal for farmers and ranchers.
Earlier in the day, we delivered a letter to every member of Congress, signed by more than 500 individual farms, and 50 organizations representing more than 10,000 farmers and ranchers, asking Congress to support the Green New Deal Resolution.
Representatives of the Women, Food & Agriculture Network, Indiana Farmers Union and American Sustainable Business Council joined in the press conference, which was covered by multiple media outlets, including Politico, The Hill, Civil Eats and FERN AgInsider.
Why is a consumer and environmental advocacy group like OCA so invested in this new coalition of farmers and ranchers—?
Because we’re facing a food crisis. A soil crisis. A water crisis. And a climate crisis. And there’s just no way we solve these interconnected issues without “linking arms” and working together.
Just when you thought you’d heard the worst about Monsanto, comes this: Monsanto executives and paid shills for the company argued “to beat the shit” out of moms who criticized Roundup weedkiller.
They also declared “organic” to be the “enemy.”
As Monsanto’s new owner, Bayer, gears up to face another round of trials from plaintiffs alleging that exposure to Roundup caused them to get non-Hodgkin lymphoma, more revealing and disturbing internal emails and other documents are surfacing.
They’re ugly. They shed more light on Monsanto’s sinister tactics. And they target you.
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!
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