Ronnie's Blog
Unfortunately, both Democratic and Republican politicians in the U.S. appear to have lost touch with reality and the needs of everyday working class, middle class, low-income, and rural communities. America’s political duopoly appears hell-bent on demonizing “the other party” for partisan gain meanwhile working full-time for their respective donors in the billionaire class, with their primary paymasters coming from corporate agribusiness, Big Pharma, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the fossil fuels industry, and the military-industrial complex.
With Establishment Democrats and Republicans continuing to discredit themselves, Trumpers and Progressives alike, it’s time for a new grassroots rising. It’s time for a game-changing grassroots-powered politics based upon Regeneration, rather than “business as usual” and “politics as usual.”
OCA and our allies believe that a global awakening and Grassroots Rising, based upon the principles and practices of regenerative food, farming, and land-use, has the awesome potential to inspire and provoke a multi-partisan, multinational, populist Movement—Democrat, Independent, and Republican; liberal, radical, conservative, and libertarian; rancher, farmer, and indigenous; urban and rural; consumer and farmer; North and South.
Over the past decade, Mexican government officials, heeding the concerns of civil society and responding to the evermore obvious crises of the environment, climate, food, farming, forced migration, public health, and rural poverty, have issued a number of official proclamations with potentially major positive impact.
These official proclamations have included:
The signing of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement and the complementary 4 for 1000 “Soils for Climate” pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly and to offset the nation’s carbon footprint by scaling up agroecological and regenerative practices in agriculture, forest management, and soil health so as to drawdown and store excess atmospheric CO2 in the nation’s soil, trees, and biota, preserving biodiversity and improving rural and indigenous economic livelihoods at the same time. On December 31, 2020, Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador issued a decree announcing the phase -out by 2024 of Monsanto/Bayer’s toxic herbicide glyphosate, and a corresponding phase-out of the importation of genetically engineered corn from the U.S., used mainly in livestock feed, despite strong protests by Monsanto, the U.S. government, and the industrial agribusiness lobby.An announcement made by the Mexican Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources in 2021 that the central dynamic for Mexico’s agriculture should be based upon agroecological principles and practices, instead of conventional chemical-intensive, fossil-fuel intensive, export-oriented, GMO farming practices.
Like most of you, we at OCA and Regeneration International are sick and tired of gloom and doom, false promises, and authoritarian/technocratic schemes. We’ve had enough of the mad science, genetic engineering, war-mongering, fear-mongering, political corruption, corporate greed, cancel culture, and media censorship. We’re tired of political posturing and sectarianism (“my issue or my constituency is more important than your issue or your constituency”). We’re done with name-calling and yelling at one another instead of sitting down and figuring out how we, the 99%, can move forward on real solutions for the U.S. and the world’s most pressing and dangerous crises—while agreeing to disagree on many of the secondary issues that will likely still divide us for the foreseeable future.
We’re not putting out a regular issue of Organic Bytes this week, because we want to remind you that we the people united, the global grassroots, have the power to overcome the life-or-death threats pressing down on all of us. But in order to move forward, we need to ask you once again in these calamitous times for your support, which we need now, more than ever.
I’ve always considered myself basically a radical populist and a political independent. In the 1960s I was part of the Yippies, as my mentor in the New Left, Abbie Hoffman, called us, rejecting authoritarian socialism and communism as well as corporate “profit-at-any cost” capitalism and imperialism. We listened to John Lennon, rather than Vladimir Lenin. I was born and raised in Texas, where I was heavily influenced by my beloved Louisiana-born Cajun grandparents, traditional family farmers and populists in the tradition of Huey Long.
Ever since my early days in the 1960s anti-war, Civil Rights, counter-culture, back-to-the-land organic and coop movements, and my many years of doing solidarity and organic farming work in Central America and Mexico, I usually agreed with many on the left when it came to issues such as war and peace, imperialism, disarmament, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, economic justice, labor organizing, environmental protection, and climate issues. But I also always felt a kinship with what I call “grassroots libertarians,” those distrustful of Establishment politicians (whether Democrat or Republican), proponents of natural food, natural health, common sense, Constitutional rights--those believing that we need a radical decentralization of power from national and international elites and corporate board rooms to local participatory democracy.
As we have repeatedly emphasized over the past decade, we cannot hope to solve the climate, human health, environmental, immigration, financial, and rural economic crisis without organic and regenerative food, farming, and land use becoming the norm (along with alternative energy, conservation, and natural health practices), rather than just the alternative.
According to numerous polls and focus groups, the majority of Americans already understand that organic farming and (nutrient-dense, fresh, home-cooked, organic) food is better for your health. A growing number also understand that organic and regenerative farming, animal husbandry, and land use are healthier and more humane for farm animals and better for the climate (reducing emissions, naturally sequestering excess atmospheric carbon) and the planet (reducing pollution, preserving and regenerating biodiversity).
The unavoidable problem is that the majority of people are economically stressed and time-constrained, and/or lacking in cooking skills. Consumers routinely “cut corners” by purchasing cheaper, highly-processed, non-organic food or by eating out (or ordering home delivery) in fast food chains, or conventional restaurants. Sixty percent of the diet of Americans is composed of highly-processed food, laced with excess sugar, bad fats (high in Omega-6, low in Omega-3), pesticides, synthetic ingredients, preservatives, GMOs, and toxic vegetable oils.
For almost 30 years, OCA and our predecessor organization, the Pure Food Campaign, have been educating consumers and farmers about the hazards of genetically engineered (GE) foods and crops, calling special attention to the fact that these “Frankenfoods” and crops are always accompanied by and contaminated with toxic pesticides and chemicals (such as Bayer/Monsanto’s Roundup/Glyphosate, and Syngenta/ChemChina’s neonicotinoids).
GMO foods and their companion pesticides and chemicals destroy the environment, pollute the water and air, kill bees and other pollinators, and poison our bodies, metastasizing the diet- and environmentally-related chronic diseases and damaged immune systems that now plague the majority of the population, including our children. The nation’s chronic disease epidemic, which afflicted 12% of Americans in 1984, before GMOs and highly processed foods dominated our diets, has now risen sharply to degrade the health of approximately 60% of the population. This chronic disease epidemic sets up 145 million Americans to become victims of cancer, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and, as witnessed recently, genetically engineered viruses such as SARS-CoV-2.
“Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy.” - Vandana Shiva, Regeneration International Co-Founder.
In September 2014, at the massive Climate March in New York City, a small but determined band of organic food, farm, natural health, and climate activists marched in the streets and held a press conference at the Rodale Institute in Manhattan, where we announced the formation of a new global network: Regeneration International (RI).
The ambitious goal of Regeneration International is to “change the global conversation” on food, farming, and climate. Our strategy is to inspire and mobilize the global grassroots with the revolutionary message that the climate crisis can be solved, in fact, that global warming and its collateral damage to public health, the environment, biodiversity, and economic livelihoods, can actually be reversed through a global scaling up of organic and regenerative best practices in combination with a transition to renewable energy.
The three words that perhaps best describe 2020-2021 are diabolical, insane, and tragic. The good news, however, is that there are unmistakable signs of awakening, resistance, natural immunity, and Regeneration emerging as we move into 2022 and beyond.
According to Yahoo News, a new poll indicates that Americans now overwhelmingly believe “that the coronavirus pandemic stemmed from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, and that the Chinese government subsequently lied about it.”
The comprehensive survey, carried out by pollsters who routinely work for both the Democratic and Republican parties, has been basically ignored by the corporate mass media, medical journals, and the political Establishment. The poll indicates that more than 2/3 of the U.S. public, across all levels of education—including Republicans (86%), Democrats (61%), and independents (67%) now believe that COVID-19 “most likely” came from a lab release in Wuhan, China. Furthermore, given the fact that scientific hubris and greed, an illegal biological arms race, and criminal negligence precipitated this global disaster, 76% of Americans believe there need to be sanctions or punishments imposed on the Chinese government and scientists for causing and covering up COVID-19.
