Ronnie's Blog
Over the course of next year, six children will stare down Monsanto in U.S. courtrooms.
Six children, whose childhoods have been interrupted by excruciatingly painful cancer treatments.
Six children, whose once bright futures are now uncertain.
Six children who have cancer because they were innocently exposed to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.
Beyond the cesspool of the Trump administration and his fascist allies across the globe, powerful winds of rebellion and regeneration are gathering momentum.
This year will likely be remembered as the time when the U.S. and global grassroots finally began to acknowledge the terminal crisis posed by global warming. With the global scientific community finally dropping their customary caution and pointing out that the “end is near” in terms of irreversible climate change, the mass media, a significant number of global policymakers and hundreds of millions of ordinary people simultaneously began to wake up across the world.
Activist youth in America, led by the Sunrise Movement, supported by a group of radical insurgents in the U.S. Congress, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are leading the new resistance and calling for an end to business as usual—and a Green New Deal.
You’re probably more familiar with the work we do in the U.S. But the Organic Consumers Association is also a co-founder of two other organizations: Vía Orgánica, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Regeneration International, which has staff and close allies working in the U.S., Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Belize, the Philippines, London and elsewhere.
Reporter Tracy L. Barnett recently was assigned to cover the work of these two organizations, for an article in Permaculture Magazine.
Calling it the “one of my most inspiring assignments so far this year,” Barnett produced a version of the story that appeared in several online publications, including the Esperanza Project.
The Climate Emergency is finally getting the attention of the media and the U.S. (and world) body politic, as well as a growing number of politicians, activists and even U.S. farmers.
Alongside the massive political and economic campaign to move to 100% (or nearly 100%) renewable energy as soon as possible, we must put an end to the massive emissions of our corporate-dominated food and farming system and start drawing down and sequestering in our soils and forests billions of tons of “legacy” CO2 from the atmosphere, utilizing the enhanced photosynthesis of regenerative farming, reforestation and land restoration.
I’ll get right to the point.
The fundraising campaign we launched earlier this month is lagging.
Like other nonprofits, our team would much rather be out there educating, organizing, mobilizing, lobbying and having a real impact, than in here expending our time and energy on fundraising.
But it’s the reality we’re faced with: We’re powered by you—nearly 80 percent of our funding comes from individual donors like you, who contribute anywhere from $5 to $50 to $500.
Every single one of those donations counts.
Long before “fake news” was a household word, playwright and political activist George Bernard Shaw warned:
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
For decades, Monsanto has manufactured and disseminated “false knowledge” about its top-selling weedkiller.
And our U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been right there by Monsanto’s side. Ignoring the truth. Protecting Monsanto’s profits.
There’s no reassuring way to say this: You’re being poisoned against your will.
Sure, you can take steps to minimize your exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller.
But given its widespread and reckless use in this country, you’d have to live in a bubble to protect yourself from a chemical so toxic it’s been banned or severely restricted in 17 other countries.
Every 15 years, the EPA is supposed to review the latest science on glyphosate, then issue a determination on whether this toxic chemical should be re-approved for another 15 years.
The last deadline for a new review of glyphosate was December 2015. But that deadline came and went with no word—probably because in March 2015, the World Health Organization inconveniently announced that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen.”
Three-and-a-half years past the 2015 deadline, the agency that’s supposed to protect your health came out with its bold “no risk to public health” claim.
Now the public has until July 5 to comment on the EPA's so-called scientific review of this deadly herbicide.
We think “comments” aren’t enough.
Amidst all the bad news, scandals and neo-fascist machinations in Washington, there is some good news on the political front: A number of leading Democratic Party candidates for president, including U.S. Senators Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), emboldened by a wave of grassroots action on the part of the youth-powered Sunrise Movement and Student Strike for the Climate, and bolstered by a group of recently elected members of Congress led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), are putting forth bold proposals that could actually solve the climate crisis.
Five years ago, at the massive People’s Climate March in New York City, a small but determined band of food, farm, natural health and climate activists held a press conference at the Rodale Institute in Manhattan, where we announced the formation of a new global network: Regeneration International (RI).
Vandana Shiva, Andre Leu, Richard Teague, Ryan Zinn, Kris Nichols and myself, among others, put forth the bold, but then little-known proposition that regenerative food, farming and land-use practices, scaled up internationally, and in conjunction with a global transition to renewable energy, could not only substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow down global warming, but could actually draw down enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to reverse climate change.
We pointed out that a Regeneration Revolution could also dramatically improve the environment, soil fertility, food quality, public health, biodiversity and rural economies, while revitalizing the body politic.
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