Do you, or your kids, or someone you know suffer from asthma? 

Then you’d better hope you don’t live in an area where you’re exposed to a lot of fracking.

That’s the gist of a new report published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine, a publication of the American Medical Association. The report’s authors studied asthma patients who live in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale region, one of the nation’s largest and most active fracking regions. What they found is this: the greater the exposure to fracking, the higher the risk of asthma attacks.

Reporting on the study, reporters at Inside Climate News wrote:

Natural gas development releases various air pollutants including particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and sulfur dioxide. The equipment also produces loud noises and bright lights, which can increase anxiety and sleeplessness. Years of research show that all these factors can exacerbate asthma.

The paper adds to the growing research linking the natural gas industry to various health impacts including birth defects, respiratory problems and skin rashes.

More here 

Read the abstract 

There was a time when the words “secret ingredients’ meant something good. But now when we hear those words we think: What are food corporations hiding from us now?”

We know one type of ingredient they’re hiding, thanks to lobbyists with deep pockets and corrupt politicians: GMOs.

“Secret Ingredients,” a film in the making by Jeffrey Smith and Amy Hart, chronicles the stories of people like Kathleen DiChiara. Dichiara and her family suffered from a long list of chronic health disorders, including allergies, asthma, auto-immune disease, autism. They sought medical treatments, but nothing helped—until they eliminated GMOs (and the pesticides used to grow them) from their diets.

The film highlights many other families with similar stories, and the physicians who witnessed their dramatic recoveries. It also reminds us that even though our politicians and regulatory agencies refuse to protect us from—or even require labeling of—these secret ingredients, we can protect ourselves by learning which foods are likely to contain GMOs, and by choosing to never buy them.

Watch the trailer 

“Someday we shall look back on this dark era of agriculture and shake our heads. How could we have ever believed that it was a good idea to grow our food with poisons?” – Jane Goodall

Barring a miracle, the DARK Act will become law by the end of this week—with or without President Obama’s signature. (A bill automatically becomes law 10 days after Congress passes it, whether or not it’s signed by the President). 

For those of you who worked so hard to win the basic right to know what’s in your food, this may feel like the end. 

But this is really just the beginning. 

Monsanto (and Dow and DuPont and Bayer) haven’t just been poisoning our food. They’ve been relentlessly poisoning our soil—on a global scale. Millions and millions of acres of GMO monoculture commodity crops are causing once-fertile soils to erode at an unprecedented rate, stripping the Earth of its ability to grow nutrient-dense food for a burgeoning population.

It’s time to remember that only about 20 percent of those GMO crops go into food for humans. The other 80 percent go into animal feed, gobbled up by a polluting, inhumane factory farm system, or into ethanol to fuel cars.

Our mission has always been bigger than winning labels on GMO foods. We must not lose sight of that mission. We can’t let this one setback cause us to lose hope—or momentum.

Now, more than ever, it’s time to take on the entire “dark era of agriculture.” And the corrupt political system that’s keeping it propped up. With a vengeance. Are you with us?

Donate to the Organic Consumers Association (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic standards, fair trade and public education)

Donate to the Organic Consumers Fund (non-tax-deductible, but necessary for our GMO labeling legislative efforts)

Support OCA’s Regeneration International Project (tax-deductible, helps support our work on behalf of organic, regenerative agriculture and climate change)

It’s official. Monsanto has been invited to participate in the International Monsanto Tribunal, a citizens’ tribunal which will take place October 15-16 in The Hague.

Unfortunately, the invitation, sent in the form of a registered letter from the Tribunal judges to Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant, went back to the post office boomerang-style. Because no one would sign for it.

That won’t keep us from trying. This week, we announced to the international media that Monsanto has been invited to submit written testimony at the citizens’ tribunal and also to send legal representation.

Will Monsanto show up to defend itself? Or hide out?

We don’t know yet. But this much we do know. The evidence against Monsanto is mounting.

Earlier this month, a federal judge ruled against Monsanto’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by a coffee farmer who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma seven years after she started using Monsanto’s Roundup on her farm.

Also this month, the city of Portland, Ore., became the eighth American city to file a lawsuit against Monsanto for favoring “profits over ecological and human health” when they contaminated (and refused to clean up) the city’s environment with carcinogenic PCBs.

And just this week, about 20 people who believe Monsanto’s Roundup is responsible for their cancer filed a motion to combine their cases against the agribusiness giant in order to streamline the discovery process. They’re asking that the case be heard in Illinois, which happens to be the largest producer of soybeans, that are “sprayed with glyphosate containing herbicides more than any other crop with 122,473,987 pounds applied to soybeans in 2014.”

Monsanto has finagled its way out of lawsuits in the past. But the Biotech Bully’s luck may be running out.

Either way, with or without written or oral testimony from Monsanto, the citizens of the world will hold Monsanto accountable in October.

Read the press release 

More on the Monsanto Tribunal here and here.

Download the MonsantoTribunal leaflet

Download the Monsanto Tribunal poster

Like Monsanto Tribunal on Facebook

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Sign on as a supporter of the Monsanto Tribunal (no donation required)

Make a donation to the Monsanto Tribunal

Unless President Obama vetoes the DARK Act by the end of the work day tomorrow (Friday, July 29), this President’s consumer rights legacy will be that he denied the vast majority of consumers in this country the right to know if their food contains GMOs—by allowing a discriminatory, deeply flawed, and quite possibly unconstitutional law go into effect.

Obama still has time to do the right thing. But time is fast running out. 

Thanks to consumers and activist groups around the country, over 106,000 people signed a White House petition asking Obama to veto the DARK Act, and over 120,000 signed our MoveOn petition asking the same.

So far, those petitions, and similar ones submitted by other groups, have been met with radio silence.

We have less than 48 hours to convince Obama that this bill serves no one except greedy, deceptive corporations, their lobbyists and their minions in Congress.

Otherwise, it will be lights out for GMO labeling in this country. And hell to pay for those corporations that hide GMOs behind “SmartLabels”—or as we prefer to call them, the “Mark of Monsanto.”

TAKE ACTION: Sign the White House petition asking President Obama to veto the DARK Act! 

Call the White House 202-456-1111 or 202-456-1414 to leave your comment! The comment line is open from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. ET Monday through Friday.

Join TODAY’s Twitter Storm—click this link and your tweet will automatically go out at 11 a.m. EDT

We all love to hate Monsanto. We also know that Monsanto isn’t the only poison-maker trying to pass itself off as a “farmer-friendly producer of food to feed the world.”

Monsanto belongs to an exclusive club of dominant pesticide makers. That club, which includes Dow, Dupont, Bayer, Syngenta and BASF, is about to get a lot smaller. And a lot more dangerous.

Bayer has been trying for months to buy Monsanto. Dow and Dupont are in talks to merge. And Switzerland-based Syngenta may soon be owned by ChemChina.

It’s bad enough that less than a dozen multinational corporations (including Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta) control nearly 70 percent of the global seed market. If these mergers and buyouts go through, that number will shrink even further.

The recent merger and acquisition in the seed and chemical (why are the words “seeds” and “chemicals” even uttered in the same breath?) signals trouble in the industry. That’s probably a good sign. But giving more control to even fewer corporations will definitely have a downside.

In our essay of the week, Martha Rosenberg and Ronnie Cummins take a look at the proposed buyout of Syngenta by ChemChina.

Read the essay