REGENERATIVE AGRICULTURE

Regeneration 2022: Requiem or Revival?

“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.

Learn more: Regeneration 2022: Requiem or Revival?

COVID CULTURE

Breaking Up with Fear and Conformity

Tessa Lena, one of OCA’s favorite commentators, author of the blog “Tessa Fights Robots,” like so many of us, is sick and tired of the COVID fear-mongering. She introduces a recent essay with a poem:

Data’s rotten,
Tests are toast.
News is sullen,
Coast to coast.

Feudal darkness
Here and now!
To the masters
Peasants bow.

Facts are fiction,
Love is screen.
Gossip’s trending,
Trends are mean.

Hear, hear,
Where’s the joy?
Ask Alexa.
She’ll annoy.

CLIMATE AND POLITICS

Don’t Look Up: A Political Parable on the Climate and Other Crises

The most-watched new movie on Netflix is called Don’t Look Up, a comical but disturbing parable on contemporary politics and culture.

As Common Dreams reports, Don’t Look Up is: “about an existential threat to the planet and the inability of political leaders to deal with the looming crisis except through a prism of self-interest—both personal and corporate—that ultimately endangers all of humanity.” Sound familiar?

Watch the trailer for the movie: DON'T LOOK UP | Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence | Official Trailer | Netflix

GLOBALIZATION

How Black Rock and Vanguard Shape the News and Your Future

Black Rock and Vanguard, controlling over 15 trillion dollars in assets, have arguably become the two most powerful corporations in the world. As Jeannette Cooperman writes: “Who controls the corporations who control our news? A helpful index was just compiled—not by mainstream media, but by Harvard researchers exploring media’s future. Skimming the list, I see two names again and again: BlackRock Fund Advisors and Vanguard Group.” Together, BlackRock and Vanguard own:

• Eighteen percent of Fox.

• Sixteen percent of CBS, and therefore also of Sixty Minutes.

• Thirteen percent of Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, and the Sky media group.

• Twelve percent of CNN.

• Twelve percent of Disney, which owns ABC and FiveThirtyEight.

• Between ten and fourteen percent of Gannett, which owns more than 250 Gannett daily newspapers plus USA Today.

• Ten percent of the Sinclair local television news, which controls seventy-two percent of U.S. households’ local TV.

• A large unspecified chunk of Graham Media Group, which owns Slate and Foreign Policy.”

And keep in mind that most of the ad revenues of the mass media come from Big Pharma as well as political candidates running for office.

Learn more: How a Company Called BlackRock Shapes Your News, Your Life, Our Future

MILLIONS AGAINST MONSANTO

What Was Monsanto?

Tom Philpott of Mother Jones reports:

“In his new book Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future, Bartow J. Elmore has delivered the definitive historical account of a firm with a momentous history and an afterlife that makes it as relevant as ever. An environmental and business historian at Ohio State University, Elmore wrote Seed Money for a non-academic audience—in clear, brisk prose, with an eye for the telling anecdote…”

Seed Money documents in detail Monsanto’s unbridled power and nefarious deeds: “the highly predictable (but denied for years by Monsanto) rise of weeds that evolved to resist Roundup; credible suspicions that Roundup is more toxic than the company originally let on; the deluge of older, even more toxic herbicides deployed in a futile attempt to control those superweeds; and a festering legal dispute over the company’s phosphate mines in Idaho, which have “contaminated soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals and radioactive constituents,” as the US Environmental Protection Agency has found.”

Read Philpott’s review: What Was Monsanto?

RECONNECT TO TRUTH

Not an Essay, A Letter by Charles Eisenstein

Although the entire COVID pandemic has been disturbing and indeed frightening, with manipulated news and medical disinformation, panic-mongering, media censorship, and government mandates and lockdowns that shred the Constitution and threaten to tear the nation apart, Charles Eisenstein reminds us that:

“the current situation is not like it was in the antebellum South or the Communist bloc. Those pushing a techno-medical-totalitarian program are nowhere near to consolidating power to the extent of the Soviet Communists, the slave-owning class, the Nazi Party, or the medieval Catholic Church. Similar forces are at work—dehumanization, scapegoating, ideologies of control—but there is still time to turn the tide. Vocal dissent does not mean certain death.”

Read more: Not an Essay, A Letter

SUPPORT OCA & CRL

Highlighting the Good

The last few years have generated a relentless stream of bad news so discouraging, you’ve no doubt been tempted to give up. So thank you for your continued participation and support.

In the face of slander and censorship, we have survived as a Movement for organic food and farming, natural health, peace, and justice. We have built up and maintained a counter-culture of truth-telling. OCA and RI and our allies have not only survived, but we have significantly expanded our reach and our influence.

We are relieved that the highly transmissible, but far less virulent Omicron variant, as we explained in last week’s newsletter, will likely mark the beginning of the end of the pandemic over the next few months, even though the powers that be seem hell-bent on fear-mongering and increasing their already authoritarian control.

Now is the time for resisting illegitimate authority, and picking up the pieces of our shattered Democracy. Now is the time to bring people back together under the banner of regenerative food, farming, and land use, natural health, and Constitutionally-based participatory democracy. Our obligations are clear: shut down the “dual-use” bioweapons labs. Stop the weaponizing of pathogens that caused the COVID-19 pandemic. And make organic food-as-medicine, and natural health practices and remedies, the norm, not just the alternative.

We at OCA want to thank you for your loyalty, support, and engagement over the past tumultuous year, surely the nation and the planet’s darkest hour since the Second World War. I don’t need to remind you that you and I, our children and grandchildren, are standing at the crossroads, living under the fearful shroud of what can only be described as a 21st Century political, economic, environmental, public health, and climate Emergency.

Over the next year we will continue our decades-long campaign to educate and mobilize the public. As always we will expose the bad—how our deteriorating public health and chronic disease epidemic is directly related to our degenerative food, farming, and land use practices—while highlighting the good—how organic and local food and natural health practices can resolve our health, environmental, and climate crisis.

But we need your help to step up our truth-telling as we campaign to regenerate our politics, food, farming, and health.

If you’ve already donated recently, thank you so much for your support.

If not please consider giving us a donation now.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Support Citizens Regeneration Lobby, OCA’s 501(c)(4) lobbying arm (not tax-deductible)

Donate $100 or more and we’ll send you a copy of Ronnie’s 2020 book, Grassroots Rising, or a copy of Ronnie's new book, co-authored with Dr. Mercola, The Truth About COVID-19

Click here for more ways to support our work