Obama Appoints Monsanto the devil VP to Senior Advisor to FDA Commissioner

Tuesday, August 16, 2011
It just keeps getting more insane.

Michael Taylor was just appointed senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. This is the same man that was in charge of FDA policy when GMO's were allowed into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to determine their safety. He "had been Monsanto the devil's attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA [and then] he became Monsanto the devil's Vice President and chief lobbyist. This month [he] became the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. He is now America's food safety czar. This is no joke."

You're Appointing Who? Please Obama, Say It's Not So!

The person who may be responsible for more food-related illness and death than anyone in history has just been made the US food safety czar. This is no joke.

Here's the back story.

When FDA scientists were asked to weigh in on what was to become the most radical and potentially dangerous change in our food supply -- the introduction of genetically modified (GM) foods -- recently uncovered documents have revealed that the experts were very concerned. Memo after memo described toxins, new diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and hard-to-detect allergens. They were adamant that the technology carried "serious health hazards," and required careful, long-term research, including human studies, before any genetically modified organisms (GMOs) could be safely released into the food supply.

But the biotech industry had rigged the game so that neither science nor scientists would stand in their way. They had placed their own man in charge of FDA policy and he wasn't going to be swayed by feeble arguments related to food safety. No, he was going to do what corporations had done for decades to get past these types of pesky concerns. He was going to lie.

Dangerous Food Safety Lies

When the FDA was constructing their GMO policy in 1991-2, their scientists were clear that gene-sliced foods were significantly different and could lead to "different risks" than conventional foods. But official policy declared the opposite, claiming that the FDA knew nothing of significant differences, and declared GMOs substantially equivalent.

This fiction became the rationale for allowing GM foods on the market without any required safety studies whatsoever! The determination of whether GM foods were safe to eat was placed entirely in the hands of the companies that made them -- companies like Monsanto the devil, which told us that the PCBs, DDT, and Agent Orange were safe.

GMOs were rushed onto our plates in 1996. Over the next nine years, multiple chronic illnesses in the US nearly doubled -- from 7% to 13%. Allergy-related emergency room visits doubled between 1997 and 2002 while food allergies, especially among children, skyrocketed. We also witnessed a dramatic rise in asthma, autism, obesity, diabetes, digestive disorders, and certain cancers.

In January of this year, Dr. P. M. Bhargava, one of the world's top biologists, said that after reviewing 600 scientific journals, he concluded that the GM foods in the US are largely responsible for the increase in many serious diseases.

In May, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine concluded that animal studies have demonstrated a causal relationship between GM foods and infertility, accelerated aging, dysfunctional insulin regulation, changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system, and immune problems such as asthma, allergies, and inflammation

In July, a report by eight international experts determined that the flimsy and superficial evaluations of GMOs by both regulators and GM companies "systematically overlook the side effects" and significantly underestimate "the initial signs of diseases like cancer and diseases of the hormonal, immune, nervous and reproductive systems, among others."

The Fox Guarding the Chickens

If GMOs are indeed responsible for massive sickness and death, then the individual who oversaw the FDA policy that facilitated their introduction holds a uniquely infamous role in human history. That person is Michael Taylor. He had been Monsanto the devil's attorney before becoming policy chief at the FDA. Soon after, he became Monsanto the devil's vice president and chief lobbyist.

This month Michael Taylor became the senior advisor to the commissioner of the FDA. He is now America's food safety czar. What has Obama done?

The Milk Man Cometh

While Taylor was at the FDA in the early 90's, he also oversaw the policy regarding Monsanto the devil's genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (rbGH/rbST) -- injected into cows to increase milk supply.

The milk from injected cows has more pus, more antibiotics, more bovine growth hormone, and most importantly, more insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). IGF-1 is a huge risk factor for common cancers and its high levels in this drugged milk is why so many medical organizations and hospitals have taken stands against rbGH. A former Monsanto the devil scientist told me that when three of his Monsanto the devil colleagues evaluated rbGH safety and discovered the elevated IGF-1 levels, even they refused to drink any more milk -- unless it was organic and therefore untreated.

Government scientists from Canada evaluated the FDA's approval of rbGH and concluded that it was a dangerous facade. The drug was banned in Canada, as well as Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. But it was approved in the US while Michael Taylor was in charge. His drugged milk might have caused a significant rise in US cancer rates. Additional published evidence also implicates rbGH in the high rate of fraternal twins in the US.

Taylor also determined that milk from injected cows did not require any special labeling. And as a gift to his future employer Monsanto the devil, he wrote a white paper suggesting that if companies ever had the audacity to label their products as not using rbGH, they should also include a disclaimer stating that according to the FDA, there is no difference between milk from treated and untreated cows.

Taylor's disclaimer was also a lie. Monsanto the devil's own studies and FDA scientists officially acknowledged differences in the drugged milk. No matter. Monsanto the devil used Taylor's white paper as the basis to successfully sue dairies that labeled their products as rbGH-free.

Will Monsanto the devil's Wolff Also Guard the Chickens?

As consumers learned that rbGH was dangerous, they refused to buy the milk. To keep their customers, a tidal wave of companies has publicly committed to not use the drug and to label their products as such. Monsanto the devil tried unsuccessfully to convince the FDA and FTC to make it illegal for dairies to make rbGH-free claims, so they went to their special friend in Pennsylvania -- Dennis Wolff. As state secretary of agriculture, Wolff unilaterally declared that labeling products rbGH-free was illegal, and that all such labels must be removed from shelves statewide. This would, of course, eliminate the label from all national brands, as they couldn't afford to create separate packaging for just one state.

Fortunately, consumer demand forced Pennsylvania's Governor Ed Rendell to step in and stop Wolff's madness. But Rendell allowed Wolff to take a compromised position that now requires rbGH-free claims to also be accompanied by Taylor's FDA disclaimer on the package.

President Obama is considering Dennis Wolff for the top food safety post at the USDA. Yikes!

Rumor has it that the reason why Pennsylvania's governor is supporting Wolff's appointment is to get him out of the state -- after he "screwed up so badly" with the rbGH decision. Oh great, governor. Thanks.

Ohio Governor Gets Taylor-itus

Ohio not only followed Pennsylvania's lead by requiring Taylor's FDA disclaimer on packaging, they went a step further. They declared that dairies must place that disclaimer on the same panel where rbGH-free claims are made, and even dictated the font size. This would force national brands to re-design their labels and may ultimately dissuade them from making rbGH-free claims at all. The Organic Trade Association and the International Dairy Foods Association filed a lawsuit against Ohio. Although they lost the first court battle, upon appeal, the judge ordered a mediation session that takes place today. Thousands of Ohio citizens have flooded Governor Strickland's office with urgent requests to withdraw the states anti-consumer labeling requirements.

Perhaps the governor has an ulterior motive for pushing his new rules. If he goes ahead with his labeling plans, he might end up with a top appointment in the Obama administration.

Hemp, The Great Green Hope

by Rand Clifford
June 10, 2011

“It has something to do with something called marijuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind.”
So said congressman Rayburn to congressman Snell’s question: “What is this bill about?”

That was way back in the summer of 1937, when congress was being asked to essentially outlaw a drug they knew nothing about, marijuana. But realistically, marijuana had little to do with it. The real issue was non-drug industrial hemp.

Industrialists were like scarab beetles, rolling around this giant ball of profit protection, and they ran right over the domestic hemp industry. Hemp presented way too much competition, too much threat to entrenched and entrenching profits. Took a pretty big ball of dung, but the scarabs rolled it expertly, professionals. Except for several years of heavy production during WWII, under the feds’ “Hemp for Victory” campaign—which told the truth about hemp and helped us win the war...not a single acre of hemp has been legally grown in America since 1937. Seventy-four years and counting. That was one enormous ball of dung. The entire hemp-prohibition infamy could be called a dung deal, especially as related to the common good.

What could have possessed grown men, congressmen even, into making it a crime to grow one of the oldest, and the most valuable crop in history? Essentially the same thing that keeps the common good in government crosshairs today, the hideous mechanics of humanity’s ultimate modern plague: obsession with corporate profits—virtually the opposite of government Of, By and For the people.

Also in 1937, in its annual report to stockholders, the DuPont company gloated over “radical changes” regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of “sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization”. They went so far as proclaiming that, after massive farm foreclosures of the depression, farmers were inhibiting America’s industrial progress. They should move to industrial cities so farmland could be consolidated into huge agribusinesses controlled by corporations—along with all other means of industrial production. Farming should be primarily for food.

DuPont’s president, Lammont DuPont, even ordained: “Synthetic plastics find application in fabricating a wide variety of articles, many of which in the past were made from natural products. The chemist has aided in conserving natural resources by developing synthetic products to supplement or wholly replace natural products.”

Yes, a world of synthetics...mother lode patents, petroleum alchemy, pollution, extinction, poverty and disease, deforestation, global warming; fascism, globalization, perpetual wars for dwindling resources; corporate centralization of all means of production—even global food supply. Concentration of money, of power, of control—power to the corporations, slavery to the people. Conversion of largely rural, agricultural America into an urban, industrial nation. Landfills brimming with immortal waste leaching death into our living systems...until death do us part.

The reason scarabs were in such a frenzy over hemp in 1937 was clearly revealed by Popular Mechanics magazine—a full six months after! the American hemp industry was effectively dead and buried via trademark corporate chicanery. The February cover story for Popular Mechanics in 1938 was titled, “The New Billion-Dollar Crop”. Imagine how much money a billion dollars was in 1938. The article told the truth, praising the advent of new machinery that would drastically reduce hemp’s labor demands; and praising a crop so valuable that in the early days of America, for farmers with a certain threshold of acreage in production, it was illegal not to grow hemp.

Imagine the chagrin of people involved in our burgeoning hemp industry upon learning that hemp had been banned in America because of “The Killer Weed from Mexico”, by the illegal Marijuana Tax Act. By law, taxes are for raising revenue, not for molding behavior. But obviously—even more so today than ever before...upper echelons of power are above the law. Laws are for “small people”—unless they facilitate, as George Bush the elder said, speaking of certain clandestine federal operations, “The continuous consolidation of money and power into higher, tighter and righter hands.”

And remember DuPont’s “...radical changes regarding the federal government’s conversion of taxation authority into a tool for forcing acceptance of sudden new ideas of industrial and social reorganization”? What about the Constitution...or as George Bush the younger calls it, that “...goddamned piece of paper”?

As for the news, the New York Times reported on August 3, 1937, that “President Roosevelt signed today a bill to curb traffic in the narcotic, marihuana, through heavy taxes on transactions”. A dung deal. Industrial hemp strains of cannabis have zero drug potential, and are NOT “marijuana”, but...never mind. Competition slammed. Profits protected. Hemp threat eliminated.

The negative impact to the common good of America from seventy-four years of hemp prohibition is difficult to fathom. America is largely about service jobs and finance, not manufacturing or production—despite consumer spending being 70% of our Gross Domestic Product. We offshore as much production as possible to take advantage of slave labor markets, lax environmental protections, tax incentives.... And we sink ever deeper into debt as former middle-class citizens, their jobs off-shored, become street people, and millionaires become billionaires, and billionaires shed their skins.
 
Spokane’s congressional representative is a republican named Cathy McMorris Rodgers. Somehow two of my email addresses got on her mailing list. I fatigued over all the trumpeting of GOP efforts to take from the poor to give to the rich, and repeatedly tried to get off Cathy’s list without success. So I replied to one of her emails by simply asking her to define her position regarding the common good of America. Bingo, I’m off Cathy’s list. Haven’t heard from her in months.

Hemp has taught us many things about how power works in America, and our education continues. Hemp’s usefulness is truly remarkable; food, fuel, fiber, paper, plastics—using modern technology, hemp offers an estimated 25,000 natural products. Hemp needs no petrochemical fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, or fungicides, and is actually beneficial to the soil. Hemp is nature’s premier powerhouse for converting sunshine and water (and carbon dioxide while breathing out oxygen) into an astonishing range of superior, eco-friendly products. Perhaps one of the worst things about hemp is that, for the bulk of our perception-managed population, it sounds too good to be true. Well, for about the last 12,000 years hemp has proved true—yet for the last seventy-four years in America, growing hemp has been a crime. That’s the real crime.

The U.S. hemp industry is currently ringing up $400 million in annual retail sales—all of it on imported raw materials! The number of good, non-transferable (cannot be “off-shored”) jobs hemp prohibition costs us is shameful. We need solid jobs. We need to create value. Other economic benefits of hemp, along with the environmental benefits, are all but incalculable.

The idea of a “jobless recovery” is ludicrous, the term itself an oxymoron. Parasitic Wall Street casino killing off the middle class is also killing off America. Globalization is shoving us back toward feudalism. Dark-ages redux. Privatization is poisonous...and the way things are going, how long do you think it will be until some corporation privatizes the atmosphere, and we have to pay to breathe? Hemp is a powerful antidote to globalization and privatization. No other plant can actually empower entire regional economies...the antithesis of globalization. Farmers could regain the status they deserve, growing the world’s most useful crop and selling it to local markets that sell it to local processors that sell their products to locally-owned businesses that sell to local citizens that work in the hemp industry—all with the aid of public banking. All the wealth stays where it belongs—with the people that create it. This could all be happening across America right now, putting hundreds of thousands of people to work creating wealth. But...the same movers and shakers standing most in the way of America returning to hemp slither in the same den as other parasitic snakes that ripped off the whole world with complex toxic debt bombs rated as AAA investment-grade securities while at the same time profiting on bets that the toxins would foul the entire global economy—THEN when their toxic bombs burst, slithered to Congress dripping crocodile tears and begging for (and getting) $23.7 trillion! (1) of taxpayer blood via threats of global financial meltdown, and threats of martial law in America. The whole sordid nightmare represents the greatest upward transfer of wealth in history. Troubled Asset Relief Program...doesn’t paying federal taxes make you proud to be American?

So much for the “shining city upon the hill”. Too bad we commoners lack the spirit to fight for hemp and get back some shine....

Of course democrats and republicans are simply two sides of the same corporate-toady coin, despite apparent differences especially regarding the common good. In 2005, republican representative from Texas Ron Paul was chief sponsor of the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2005”. The bill would have allowed farmers to grow industrial hemp—non-drug varieties of cannabis, differentiating between cannabis strains and setting limits on the amount of psychoactive THC allowed. Now, for the environment, the economy, the common good—for everything that deserves a future, that sounded too good to be true.

The bill died in committee.

Ron Paul tried again in 2007, 2009, and on May 12, introduced the “Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011”. This time Ron Paul has twenty-two co-sponsors—and that’s where differences appear in the way democrats and republicans regard the common good; twenty of the co-sponsors are democrat, two of them republican. It’s the most co-sponsors Ron Paul has attracted so far. Sounds like hope? At this rate, perhaps in a few more decades such bills might even make it out of committee.

Chances even seem good for a democratic senator to introduce for the first time a companion bill in the Senate. But odds are overwhelming that the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011 will die in the usual place: The Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

You might wonder why in hell an agricultural bill is going first to a committee on crime, terrorism, and homeland security. Well...sorry folks, this is America, and the bill is actually an entrenched-profits issue, common good against the ruling elite. We should all know by now what function hope has in America, but collective amnesia is epidemic. So....

Never mind.

And the ultimate clincher that scarabs might never be able to obliterate with their mighty balls, stark revealment of marijuana interdiction being an attack on hemp...it’s getting closer. Hemp was prohibited by prohibiting marijuana...but it is conceivable—even almost certain that eventually, marijuana will be legalized, but not hemp. The purported reason for banning hemp will disappear, but not the ban on hemp. Such is how power works in America. And amnesia.

The environmental benefits, the economic benefits, the major surge of job creation, the luxury of superior natural products—forget them and the countless other benefits to the common good of America; the impact to entrenched profits would be too great for the elite to ever allow hemp to be grown in America again. As long as the status quo is maintained, hemp will never have a chance.

We obviously need drastic changes to the status quo, but us commoners have a profound problem called apathy. Relentless perception management of corporate mainstream media feeds the apathy, and amnesia. How are mainstream Americans ever supposed to learn the truth? How is the fact that we outnumber our primary oppressors nearly a million to one ever supposed to be seen clearly, and focused on as a platform for doing something...anything to correct problems such as hemp prohibition, and American imperialism being so vastly more important than us common Americans?

Hope is an elusive thing, unpredictable—just like us...we hope?

(1)  http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aY0tX8UysIaM

The Future of Agriculture

Garden as If Your Life Depends On It--Because It Will
By ELLEN LaCONTE

Spring has sprung—at least south of the northern tier of states where snow still has a ban on it—and the grass has 'riz. And so has the price of most foods, which is particularly devastating just now when so many Americans are unemployed, underemployed, retired or retiring, on declining or fixed incomes and are having to choose between paying their mortgages, credit card bills, car payments, and medical and utility bills and eating enough and healthily. Many are eating more fast food, prepared foods, junk food—all of which are also becoming more expensive—or less food.

In some American towns, and not just impoverished backwaters, as many as 30 percent of residents can't afford to feed themselves and their families sufficiently, let alone nutritiously. Here in the Piedmont Triad of North Carolina where I live it's 25 percent. Across the country one out of six of the elderly suffers from malnutrition and hunger. And the number of children served one or two of their heartiest, healthiest meals by their schools grows annually as the number of them living at poverty levels tops twenty percent. Thirty-seven million Americans rely on food banks that now routinely sport half-empty shelves and report near-empty bank accounts. And this is a prosperous nation!

In some cases this round of price hikes on everything from cereal and steak to fresh veggies and bread—and even the flour that can usually be bought cheaply to make it— will be temporary. But over the long term the systems that have provided most Americans with a diversity, quantity and quality of foods envied by the rest of the world are not going to be as reliable as they were.

What's for Supper Down the Road?

As they move through the next few decades Americans can expect

* the price of conventionally produced food to rise and not come down again,

* prices to rollercoaster so that budgeting is unpredictable,

* some foods to become very expensive compared to what we're used to

* and others, beginning with some of the multiple versions of the same thing made by the same company to garner a bigger market share and more shelf space, to gradually become unavailable.

Tremors in food supply chains and pricing will make gardening look like a lot more than a hobby, a seasonal workout, a practical way to fill your pantry with your summer favorites, or a physically, spiritually and mentally healing activity, or all four. Gardening and small-scale and collective farming, especially of staple crops and the ones that could stave off malnutrition, could become as important as bringing home the bacon, both the piggy and the dollar kind. Why?

Why's Gardening So Important Now?

There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up spade, rake and hoe, make compost and raise good soil and garden beds with a vengeance, starting this spring and with an eye toward forever.

1) Peak oil. Most petroleum experts agree that we shot past peak oil in the US around 1971. Lest you've missed the raging (http://www.postcarbon.org), that's the point at which more than half the readily, affordably retrievable oil in reserves has been used up, what remains is more expensive to retrieve, and the dregs are irretrievable. We've shot or are about to shoot past peak worldwide, estimates of when ranging from 2007 to 2013, with many oil company execs agreeing to at least the latter. There are no new cheap-easy oil fields coming on line. Any new fields you hear about or new methods, like tar sands drilling are expensive, water guzzling, dangerous, environmentally disastrous and unlikely to produce more than a few years worth of oil, and that a decade or more down the line. That means abundant, cheap oil is about to be history. What difference does that make?

For one thing, there is no replacement for oil that can do all that oil has done as cheaply and universally as oil has done it. I offer an exercise in Life Rules, "The ABC's of Peak Oil" which helps readers imaginatively subtract from their lives everything that depends in one way or another on cheap easy oil. It doesn't leave much. (See Beth Terry's website, for example, for what subtracting plastics may entail.)

The global economy that presently supplies us with our food, runs on cheap oil and lots of it. It runs slower and less predictably on expensive oil that's hard to get because it's located in hard-to-reach or high-risk conflict-ridden zones. Cheap, abundant food on the shelves of grocery and big box stores and food banks, on our tables and in our bellies depends on cheap abundant oil for fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, and to power farm machinery and transport food from fields to processors and packagers and then to purveyors and consumers, around the world. Past peak, that system's going to have the half-life of the strontium 90 that's escaping the Fukushimi Dai-ichi reactor: 29 years, or there abouts. One good global crisis, and not that long.

2) Peak soil & space: A couple of links between peak oil and peak soil: First, it matters that one of the proposed alternatives to oil is biofuels. Acreage around the world is being converted from production of corn, wheat and soy for human and animal consumption—i.e., food—to production of ethanol and biofuels to put in trucks and cars and . . . Which makes remaining corn, et al, more expensive. Some energeconomy geniuses are proposing that Afghanis, for example, convert the fields of opium poppies that are their primary agricultural export, not to growing grains or legumes or other staple foods, but to biofuel, which would, not coincidentally, make the gasoline that goes in American military equipment much cheaper and provide Afghanis with a profitable market item rather than food.

According to a 2009 National Geographic staff report, "The corn used to make a 25-gallon tank of ethanol would feed one person for a year." Tell that to Archer-Daniels-Midland, Al Gore's deep-pockets friend and mega-ethanol and corn products producer.

Second, the huge oil-gluttonous machinery that has made factory farming possible has compacted soils, literally crushing the life out of them.

Arable land in the developing or so-called Third World has been at a premium since time immemorial, thanks to geographic location and/or persistent plundering by empires old and new. Revolutions in north Africa and the Middle East are occurring not just to obtain more democratic governments but also to obtain more food and more affordable food. Revolutionaries are barking up a tree that's seen better days.

In the United States and elsewhere in the developed, read "First" world, arable land has reached peak production. All those petroleum-based products that fueled the Green Revolution of the last century, also produce so many crops, constantly, with support from toxic chemicals and without concern for the microbes that make soil a live, self-regenerating system, that most American farmland—if its farmers didn't go organic a while back—is comprised of dead soils. Peak oil makes a repeat of the petroleum-driven 20th century Green Revolution impossible, which is good for soil and other living things, not so much for food prices and supplies.

After peak, in soil like in oil, comes descent. Adding insult to injury, every year farmers lose thousands of acres of arable land to urban and suburban sprawl and more tons of topsoil than they produce of grain and other field crops to attrition. Half the Earth's original trove of topsoil, like that which once permitted the American Midwest to feed the world, has been lost to wind and erosion. Millions of years in the making, it has been depleted and degraded by industrialized agriculture in only a couple of centuries. China's soils ride easterly winds across the Pacific to settle out on cars and rooftops in California while the American Bread Basket's soils are building deltas and dead zones at the mouth of the Mississippi. Like oil, that soil isn't coming back. We can only build it, help it to build itself and wait.

3) Monoculture: We can cut to the chase on this one. The food we eat is produced on industrial-strength, fossil-fuel-driven super farms. Those farms practice monoculture: the planting one crop, often of one genetic strain of that crop, at a time and sometimes year after year over vast landscapes of plowed field. When thousands of acres of farmland are sown with the same genetic strain of grain, uncongenial bout of weather, disease or pest to which that strain is susceptible can wipe out the whole crop. At present the Ug99 fungus, called stem rust, which emerged a decade ago in Africa, could wipe out more than 80% of the world's wheat crops as it spreads, according to a 2009 article in the L. A. Times. Recent studies follow its appearance in other countries downwind of eastern Africa where it originated, including Yemen and Iran (where revolutionaries are already protesting rising prices and shortages), which opens the possibility of its emergence further downwind in Central and Eastern Asia. The race is on to breed resistant plants before it reaches Canada or the U.S. But it can take a decade or more to create a universally adaptable new genetic line that is resistant to a new disease like stem rust that can travel much faster than that. The current spike in the price of wheat is due in part to Ug99 which might properly be renamed "Ugh."

4) Climate instability. Bad -- uncongenial -- weather has lately devastated crops in the upper Midwest, Florida, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia, parts of Africa and elsewhere. Many climate scientists believe we've passed the equivalent of peak friendly and familiar weather, too. And while increasing heat will bedevil harvests, intense cold, downpours and flooding, drought and destructive storm systems will make farming an increasingly hellish occupation if profit is what's being farmed for. The transitional climate will be unpredictable from season and will produce more extremes of weather and weather-related disasters which means farmers will not be able to assume much about growing seasons, rainfall patterns and getting crops through to harvest. If the past is precedent, the transition from the climate we've been used to for 10,000 years to whatever stable climate emerges out of climate chaos next, could take decades, centuries or even millennia. Especially if we keep messing with it. When a whole nation's or region's staple crops, especially grains, are lost or on-again-off-again, everything down the line from the crops themselves become more expensive, from meat, poultry and dairy to every kind of processed food. I.e., the food we shop for as if supermarkets were actually where food comes from.

5) The roller-coaster economy. This isn't the place for me to offer my explanation for the probability of global economic collapse. (See (www.ellenlaconte.com/excerpts-from-life-rules/#chpfour) for that.) No pundits, talking-heads or economic analysts (well, very few) deny there are rough economic times ahead. Even many of the cautious among them acknowledge that we may be looking at five or six years of high unemployment and many of the lost jobs won't be coming back. The less cautious, like me, predict the collapse of the whole fossil-fueled, funny-money, inequitable, overly-complicated global economic system in the lifetimes of anyone under 50. Well, at the rate we're going in all the wrong directions politically and economically, I hazard the guess, anyone under 80.

Clearly, depending on the present system to provide us with most or all of our food reliably or long-term, is unwise in the extreme. Which is how we get back to why we need to garden as if our lives depended on it. Bringing food production processes and systems closer to home is going to prove vital to our survival. We need to take producing our own and each other's food as seriously as we've taken producing a money income because growing numbers of us won't have enough money to buy food in the conventional ways and there will be less of it to buy. So what's our recourse?

Gardening Like Everybody's Business

Under the influence and auspices of the prevailing economy, most Americans have forgotten how to provide for themselves. We've become accustomed to earning money with which we buy provisions. That process is about the have the legs kicked out from under it. Instead of earning money (or its funny-money kin like credit cards) to buy the things we need, we'll need to start providing more of those things for ourselves and each other locally and (bio)regionally. Gardening -- and small-scale farming -- while they will need to be undertaken in a businesslike fashion will be less about doing business than about everyone's having something to eat and more people being busy providing it. And while not everyone will be able to garden or farm, we are all able to get up close and personal with those who do.

Agent Orange is Baaack...The Escalating Chemical War on Weeds

The Return of Agent Orange
By FIRMIN DeBRABANDER

A few weeks back, the New York Times made mention of an astounding development, which has, for whatever reason, received little fanfare or recognition. Despite its Vietnam War notoriety, Agent Orange is in vogue again, this time down on the farm. Its reemergence, and in this particular setting, raises a host of troubling questions that are not being well considered.

Over the past year, there have been increasing reports of emerging superweeds resistant to Roundup, the preferred weedkiller of America’s farmers. Roundup is sold in tandem with Roundup-ready seeds, both marquee products of the Monsanto (the devil) Corporation. In the 1990s, when the latter product hit the market, it was momentous, revolutionary – a godsend: Roundup-ready seeds are genetically designed to resist application of the potent herbicide. By sowing Roundup-ready seeds and dousing their fields with the trademark weedkiller, farmers could forego the expense and toil of tilling the land, and losing valuable topsoil in the process. Production was enhanced, time and money saved. It was quite an economic boon to farmers, at least in the short run. Environmentalists were also pleased in light of the topsoil angle. Needless to say, Monsanto was thrilled that farmers were even more dependent on its products.

But for years critics ominously warned that, as is the nature of ‘nature,’ weeds would eventually evolve to withstand Roundup. Monsanto brushed aside such concerns, saying it would be ages before anyone had to worry about something like that. The glory days lasted about a decade. The superweeds evolved faster than anyone imagined-- and with a vengeance. Farmers accustomed to drenching their fields with Roundup are now battling a monster breed of pigweed that, the New York Times reports, “can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more…so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment.”

Nature has issued quite a challenge to our ‘weed solution.’ The chemical industry has decided to respond in turn with Agent Orange. To be precise, Dow Chemical is working on seeds that are resistant to 24-D, a component of Agent Orange… presumably because it intends on spraying farmland with wartime defoliant.

This is alarming on a number of fronts. But let’s be clear on one thing at the outset: we don’t necessarily need Agent Orange to deal with weeds. The Amish don’t. Never have. Superweeds-- like superbugs (or superbacteria) emerging in concentrated chicken farms-- are the product of industrial agriculture, which aims to squeeze as much as possible from the land, and has selected monoculture as the optimal means of doing so. Grow one crop, in great density, on huge tracts of land, demanding tremendous output. Hence the Iowa corn fields, which stretch as far as the eye can see. There’s only one problem with this: nature does not ‘farm’ this way. Monoculture is highly vulnerable to pests, disease and weeds. In monocultivated fields, predators find a vast pool of identical, fat, helpless victims. In contrast, nature ‘farms’ a diversity of crops amidst one another, which do not succumb en masse to any given plague.

We have insisted on monoculture in order to produce as much as possible. Today, we’re able to extract 6 times more corn from an acre of land than 100 years ago. Industrial agriculture is to be commended for that impressive efficiency. And I know how its apologists – Dow and Monsanto included-- would defend the institution and its manic drive for production. Industrial agriculture is necessary, they would say, to feed the world: you can’t feed upwards of six billion people by farming like the Amish.

Though I am not qualified to contest this claim fully, I can think of one important fact that casts doubt upon it. In this country, industrial agriculture’s immense bounty has wrought skyrocketing rates of obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Agribusiness has not exactly harnessed its awesome technological advances to feed the world, but rather, to cram as many excess calories as possible into citizens of the industrial world. In particular, its bounty has subsidized a profusion of cheap fast and processed foods. Indeed, two of Monsanto’s most popular Round-up ready products are corn and soy, the building blocks of our processed foods.

So, it seems clear, at least in the US, industrial agriculture can step off the gas pedal. We could use an Amish revolution across the farm belt. If we adopted Amish style polyculture, our farms might well produce less. But would that be such a bad thing? Polyculture would certainly produce less of the staple commodities, corn and soy, and less processed food in turn. It would make for a healthier—lighter-- nation.

But we cannot settle for less. We must have more.

We’re so hell-bent on maintaining our voracious consumption habits, that we’ll engage the services of the defense industry. We’ll use Agent Orange to fight off weeds and ensure the delivery of cheap corn to Frito-Lay, Coke and Kelloggs; and when megaweeds evolve to withstand Agent Orange—eighteen-foot-tall weeds, stems like tree trunks—we’ll reach for the napalm. ‘Napalm-ready’ soy; that’s our future.

All in the name of productivity, efficiency, convenience-- profit. For you see, farming as nature ordains it fails on all fronts. Nature does not cut it in the USA.

We think nothing of wantonly poisoning the land on which we depend for sustenance. We have gravely degraded the rich topsoil of the Prairies, much of which has flowed down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico (and is now covered in a slick of oil, I presume). Our herbicides, pesticides and fungicides have stripped the land of natural nutrients, which we aim to supply in chemical doses. And when agricultural problems arise-- problems that are the product of our industrial, chemical practices-- we administer more of the same. Actually, I’m wrong: in the case of Agent Orange, we administer stronger poisons, as if we aim to twist Nature’s arm—as if we could. As if we could subdue her, and force her to do our bidding: ‘You WILL give us Cheetoes at 20 cents to the pound-- or else!’

It is of course hubris. Not to mention tremendously short-sighted. What do we think, soaking the fields in Agent Orange? Surely, Dow must know that the very application of this chemical in strong, widespread and longterm doses is precisely the doom of this product: these are the very conditions that encourage—dare!-- superweeds to evolve. So what are the chemical companies playing at? What’s the game plan? Do they intend to graduate to ever more potent and dangerous herbicides? Surely that can’t be sustainable. Or do they hope to mix and match chemical herbicides, to keep the weeds off balance? That seems marginally safer, at best. And does anyone know how these chemicals fare in the environment, once combined, over the course of years? Or is Dow simply aiming for Monsanto’s promised land, an herbicide-seed combination that will corner the market, and inflate company stock in the short run?

Besides the fact that we would use these chilling chemicals in the production of our food, no less. Agent Orange is accused of having caused birth defects in Vietnam, and increased rates of cancer among American veterans of the war there. Dow has disputed these claims. And yet, in light of Agent Orange’s reputation, it is surprising that Dow would press on with its use in food production nonetheless. This shows tremendous gall. Or shocking disrespect for the consumer.

Even if, as Dow argues, the harmful effects of Agent Orange are uncertain, why risk it? Why mess with this wartime defoliant when proven, though less obscenely prolific, farming methods beckon? In the end, it all comes back to us: what do we want? What do we demand of our food and farms? Do we demand piles of cheap, throwaway calories in toxic doses, which require us to squeeze nature mercilessly? Nature will not put up with this for long; as the superweeds attest, she’s already rebelling.