Guest's Blog
On March 22, 2021, The Del Mar Garden Club of Southern California held an informational session called “Fighting Climate Change with Plants”. As a person who is extremely concerned about the looming apocalyptic events due to climate chaos, but not extremely well informed about what we can do to prevent them, I signed up.
I quickly realized that the presentation was not going in the direction that I had hoped, meaning extolling the innate virtues of plants that have the ability to sequester carbon if we just let Mother Nature do her job. No. Featured speaker Joanne Chory, a plant geneticist from the Salk Institute, based in San Diego, CA shared how she and her team were genetically engineering plants to have bigger roots, longer roots, and roots that sequester more carbon by manipulating the gene that makes suberin to make more suberin and therefore hold more carbon, and then put those genes into crop plants. They were going to start with Sorghum. (I will talk about why that is interesting later.) She showed slides depicting what would be manipulated and how the roots were in fact growing longer in preliminary trials. I actually considered that it might be a good idea. For about a second.
We are entering the Post-COVID world. And the role of liberals and progressives (as well as libertarians and champions of constitutional rights) is far more significant now than we realize.
COVID-19 has brought on many changes in society. As COVID numbers diminish, there is a renewed euphoria in progressive circles in the wake of the pandemic concomitant with a Democrat presidential victory and an unprecedented awareness of gender and racial inequalities. While there is much to be excited about for progressives, warning flags have appeared that raise questions about whether our future direction is genuinely one of greater equality.
The COVID pandemic has shown all of us the power of government public health institutions in mobilizing and transforming society to deal with a pandemic threat. Yet, at the same time, public health policy, supported by the overwhelming majority of progressives, has become a paternalist force that has used its authority to control, manipulate, and divide the body politic, marginalizing or censoring public voices—investigative, scientific, and medical—that deviate from the “official story” of COVID-19.
Regenerative agriculture is a global farming revolution with rapid uptake and interest around the world. Five years ago hardly anyone had heard about it. It is in the news nearly every day now. This agricultural revolution has been led by innovative farmers rather than scientists, researchers and governments. It is being applied to all agricultural sectors including cropping, grazing and perennial horticulture.
In previous articles we have described how regenerative agriculture maximizes the photosynthesis of plants to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to increase soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is a good proxy for soil health, as it is important for improving fertility and water capture in soils, thus improving productivity and profitability in farming.
Many regenerative farmers sow their fields with mixtures of plants just to capture carbon dioxide to improve the levels of soil organic matter. These are called cover crops and are distinct from the cash crop. The cover crop builds soil fertility. The cash crop earns an income.
Dozens of U.S. law firms have formed a coalition to fight a new $2 billion settlement proposal by Monsanto owner Bayer AG that aims to contain the company’s ongoing liability related to claims that Roundup herbicides cause a type of cancer known as non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL).
The settlement is designed to compensate people who have been exposed to Roundup products and either already have NHL or may develop NHL in the future, but who have not yet taken steps to file a lawsuit.
Forced vaccination is becoming one of the most significant civil rights issue of the 21st century. Can we freely refuse a vaccine if we have concerns regarding safety, toxic ingredients, and potential harms? Do we own our bodies, or does the state? Do we have rights in the face of a giant government-techno-medical industrial complex that acts as a branch of government?
Ronnie Cummins is founder and director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), a non-profit network of consumers promoting a healthy, just, and regenerative system of food, farming, and trade. His recent book Grassroots Rising, is a call for action to build a strong global Regeneration Movement around education and awareness, consumer activism and farmer innovation that can also inspire to political change.
There is a long-term disaster far worse than the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic will end in a few years; however, the world will lose many millions more to sickness, hunger, poverty and catastrophic weather events because of the unprecedented climate emergency.
The world reached a record of 417.2 parts per million of carbon dioxide (ppm CO2) in the atmosphere in May 2020 – the most in over 3 million years.
A study published in May 2019 shows that if we don’t succeed in radically reducing emissions, civilization could collapse by 2050. As reported by the New York Post, the authors of the report say:
“This scenario provides a glimpse into a world of ‘outright chaos’ on a path to the end of human civilization and modern society as we have known it, in which the challenges to global security are simply overwhelming and political panic becomes the norm.”
The good news is that we can turn this around by scaling up regenerative agriculture.
No grievance regarding vaccines is more serious than vaccine-injury. A mere possibility of vaccine-injury is insidious: what is meant to be a prophylactic life-saving procedure performed on a healthy recipient may end in his or her serious injury or death.
As pediatrician Dr. Robert Sears discussed in a public talk, the very idea of vaccine-injury is a hard one for doctors and public health specialists to accept, therefore, out of a need to protect their collective ego identity, the default position of the medical profession is denial of vaccine-injury.
It’s easy for medicine and public health to remain silent about or minimize the perception of vaccine injury. War metaphors in public health lead to the implicit acceptance of vaccine-injury as acceptable collateral in dealing in the war against infectious disease.
The metaphor of war has long been a part of public health. In responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world’s public health agencies mobilized and shut down entire parts of society under the utilitarian goal of stopping the spread of COVID-19.
In America, entire states were locked-down, public schools were dismissed, government public services halted and businesses closed while grim pictures of death were painted, pictures of sick and dying on ventilators were broadcast and vivid dialogue of apparently overwhelmed hospital capacity were plastered on mainstream media. Journals and media outlets played along, streaming out content about the dangers of COVID-19 and the need for continued lock-down. Dissenting views on social media were censored by social media tech companies.
New research is adding worrisome evidence to concerns that the widely used weedkilling chemical glyphosate may have the potential to interfere with human hormones.
In a paper published in the journal Chemosphere titled Glyphosate and the key characteristics of an endocrine disruptor: A review, a trio of scientists concluded that glyphosate appears to have eight out of ten key characteristics associated with endocrine disrupting chemicals . The authors cautioned, however, that prospective cohort studies are still needed to more clearly understand the impacts of glyphosate on the human endocrine system.
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