Essays
“I have cancer, and I don’t want these serious issues in HED [EPA’s Health Effects Division] to go unaddressed before I go to my grave. I have done my duty.”
It’s been four years since Marion Copley, a 30-year EPA toxicologist, wrote those words to her then-colleague, Jess Rowland, accusing him of conniving with Monsanto to bury the agency’s own hard scientific evidence that it is “essentially certain” that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, causes cancer.
Copley has since died. But her letter suggesting that EPA officials colluded with Monsanto to hide the truth about Monsanto’s flagship weedkiller has been given new life.
Thanks to the persistence of hundreds of plaintiffs in lawsuits alleging that they (or their deceased family members) were diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after being exposed to Roundup, newly discovered internal emails and other documents are being made public. And they paint an increasingly troubling and sinister picture of corruption.
Over the past three decades, organic food, farming, and products in the U.S. have grown into a $50-billion-a-year powerhouse, representing more than 5 percent of all retail grocery sales. This growth has been achieved with little or no help from the White House, Congress or the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and that’s been true no matter which party, Democrat or Republican, has been in power.
Although the majority of consumers—no matter whether they voted for Hillary (65 million), Trump (62 million), or stayed home and didn’t vote (92 million)—tell pollsters that they know that organic food is superior to chemical/GMO food, in terms of nutrition and environmental impact, and that they believe that pesticides, synthetic hormones, antibiotic residues and GMOs are dangerous, Congress keeps subsidizing industrial agriculture, factory farms, processed food and GMO corn-derived ethanol to the tune of billions of dollars a year. At the same time, lawmakers show little or no support for organic or transition-to-organic farmers or programs.
Millions of Americans have no health insurance. More than 50 million are woefully underinsured.
Meanwhile Big Pharma and profit-obsessed HMOs and hospitals are focused mainly on selling you overpriced (often hazardous) prescription drugs, on running expensive tests, and on keeping you on permanent health maintenance, rather than preventing the diseases that are so costly to treat.
We can't afford to provide universal healthcare for all as long as our medical model is focused on treating the evermore serious and widespread sicknesses of the body politic (for example obesity and diabetes) rather than the underlying causes. However, with the right preventive and holistic approach, we could easily afford Medicare for All–and it would cost much less for both consumers and employers than what we are spending now.
We have a national healthcare crisis. Can we overcome our partisan and sectarian divisions, and mobilize the grassroots power of the majority of Americans who are sick and tired of living in Degeneration Nation to solve the crisis?
Today, Donald Trump was sworn in as president of the United States.
Today, I'm announcing our #ConsumerRevolution and #PoliticalRevolution 2017-2020 platforms.
Today, we witnessed the swearing in of a president who has signaled loud and clear his intent to maximize the profits of giant corporations—like Exxon Mobil, BP, and Monsanto and Bayer (whose merger he's set to approve)—on a scale never before seen in our lifetimes. Public and environmental health be damned.
And yesterday we learned, not surprisingly, that the new USDA Secretary of Agriculture will be former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue, another millionaire climate-denier and cheerleader for the worst of the worst agribusiness corporations.
We have our work cut out for us in the coming months and years.
With that in mind, we have developed two platforms that will guide our work, beginning immediately.
Reporters and activists are, rightfully so, holding up the Standing Rock victory as a shining example of how, by breaking out of our single-issue and limited-constituency silos, and standing our common ground against corporations and politicians, we create a powerful synergy capable of protecting our common home.
Let’s replicate this model of solidarity and resistance over and over as we face what could well turn out to be the greatest threats in modern history to our health, our environment and our basic rights.
But let’s not stop there.
What if instead of declaring victory and moving on to the next battle, we could leave the Standing Rock community with the inspiration and tools and resources to restore their land to the fertile, biodiverse, productive resource that it once was?
What if, instead of limiting ourselves to staving off the next attack, we applied ourselves, with equal passion, to the task of collaborating with the water protectors to build the foundation for a cleaner, healthier environment, a healthier and stronger community, and improved economic and climate stability?
On November 9, members of the Organic Consumers Association and our Regeneration International team woke up in Marrakesh, Morocco, to the sobering news that Donald Trump would be the next president of the U.S.
News that an unabashed climate denier, with help from a Republican-controlled Congress, would soon control policies governing climate, food, agriculture and so much more reverberated throughout the COP22 Global Climate Summit where we, and thousands of people from around the world, were gathered.
We were briefly tempted to descend into despair. But once we caught our breath, and as we looked around us at all the inspiring work being done, all the collaboration taking place, the minds and hearts and hands working in unison to heal our planet, we bounced back.
The road ahead, the path toward abundant nutritious food for all, toward healthy economies and communities, toward healing a planet in crisis, may not be easy. But it’s a journey that has great potential to heal so much, and so many, on so many levels.
In his Letter from Marrakesh, Ronnie reflects on where we are, where we’re headed, and how we can all be part of the Regeneration Revolution.
". . . new chemicals come from our laboratories in an endless stream; almost 500 annually find their way into actual use in the United States alone…500 new chemicals to which the bodies of men and animals are required somehow to adapt each year, chemicals totally outside the limits of biologic experience.” - Rachel Carson, “Silent Spring” (1962)
Two years after Rachel Carson sounded the above warning, she died of breast cancer.
Now 50 years later, the pesticide and chemical assault on our health that Carson exposed in her book, “Silent Spring,” has intensified. Newer toxic chemicals like Monsanto’s Roundup and Syngenta’s atrazine have taken over where DDT and arsenic left off.
The European Union, utilizing the “precautionary principle,” has banned several dozen agricultural pesticides and practices that still pollute U.S. food, food packaging, water, bodycare, cosmetic, and cleaning products.
The President’s Cancer Panel, in 2010, warned that up to 80 percent of U.S. cancer cases—currently striking 48 percent of men, 38 percent of women, and increasing numbers of children—are directly caused by poisons in our environment and food, by Big Food, pharmaceutical, chemical and genetic engineering corporations, aided and abetted by federal government bureaucrats.
Still, U.S. regulatory agencies repeat the same old refrain: “Don’t worry.”
It was a long road that led to the Monsanto Tribunal and People’s Assembly in The Hague last week (October 14 – 16). So what's next?
In his recap of this historic international citizens’ initiative, OCA’s Ronnie Cummins reports that a critical mass of us are ready to embark on a “Long March” of resistance, movement-building and regeneration.
Ronnie writes:
Given the catastrophic consequences of “business as usual,” and continued domination by the global “1 percent,” we can no longer afford to operate as separate movements—the anti-GMO movement, the organic movement, the Fair Trade movement, the economic justice movement, the climate movement, the forest movement, the ocean movement, and the anti-war movement. Nor can we operate as regional or national movements of farmers, workers, students and consumers.
We must connect the dots between interrelated issues and we must work together, from the local to the international level, with fellow leaders of the global grassroots who see the “big picture.” Harnessing the enormous power of the global grassroots, we can build a new diverse Regenerative Movement strong enough and inspirational enough to overturn the dictatorship of Monsanto and the global elite. Coming out of Monsanto Tribunal and People’s Assembly at The Hague there is a new sense of urgency and determination. A critical mass of us are ready to embark on this Long March of resistance, movement-building and regeneration.
After a decade of exposing and demonizing Monsanto and genetically engineered foods, including an intense four-year battle to force mandatory labeling of GMOs (a battle rudely terminated in July when Congress rammed through the outrageous DARK Act), the U.S. food movement stands at the crossroads.
Should we keep badgering Monsanto’s minions in Washington for the right to know what’s in our food, a sentiment shared by the overwhelming majority of consumers? Or should we focus more on single-issue reforms, such as banning neonicotinoid bee-killing pesticides, better nutrition in schools, taxes on soda, and an end to the reckless use of antibiotics in animal feed?
A growing number of food activists believe it’s time to move beyond limited or single-issue campaigning and lobbying and take on the entire degenerative food and farming system, starting with the malevolent profit-driver and lynchpin of industrial agriculture, GMOs and fast food: factory farming.
We obviously can’t count on a corrupt Congress or a Clinton/Trump White House to enact significant policy change, no matter how popular or just our demands. So we need to shift our strategy and tactics. We need to aggressively mobilize a full-blown online and on-the-ground food fight, complete with marketplace pressure, popular education, boycotts, litigation, brand de-legitimization, and direct action.
The deed is done. On Friday, July 29, 2016, President Obama signed a bill that was written by corporations, paid for by corporations and that serves no one in this country—except corporations.
S.764, known by its opponents as the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know) Act, preempts Vermont’s mandatory GMO labeling law and substitutes in its place a federal bill that, no matter how Obama and his Congress try to spin it, is not mandatory and does not require labels—at least not labels that anyone can read.
I could, once again, list all the reasons this bill fails consumers. But I and others have already done that countless times, to no avail. The bill is a sham, a slap in the face to the 90 percent of Americans who support labeling. It’s an attack on states’ rights. It’s another “gift” to Monsanto and Big Food.
And, for anyone who still harbored any doubt, S.764 is proof that our Democracy is broken, that our lawmakers answer to Corporate America, not to us, the people who elect them.
It would be easy, after four-and-a-half years of non-stop fighting for labels, to cave in to despair. But let’s not give Monsanto the satisfaction. Instead, let’s take a page out of Gandhi’s playbook. Let’s launch a boycott that will go down in history.
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