By Richard Schiffman, Truthout | News Analysis

In a match that some would say was made in hell, the nation's two leading producers of agrochemicals have joined forces in a partnership to reintroduce the use of the herbicide 2,4-D, one half of the infamous defoliant Agent Orange, which was used by American forces to clear jungle during the Vietnam War. These two biotech giants have developed a weed management program that, if successful, would go a long way toward a predicted doubling of harmful herbicide use in America's corn belt during the next decade.

The problem for corn farmers is that "superweeds" have been developing resistance to America's best-selling herbicide Roundup, which is being sprayed on millions of acres in the Midwest and elsewhere. Dow Agrosciences has developed a strain of corn that it says will solve the problem. The new genetically modified variety can tolerate 2,4-D, which will kill off the Roundup-resistant weeds, but leave the corn standing. Farmers who opt into this system will be required to double-dose their fields with a deadly cocktail of Roundup plus 2,4-D, both of which are manufactured by Monsanto.

But this plan has alarmed environmentalists and also many farmers, who are reluctant to reintroduce a chemical whose toxicity has been well established. The use of 2,4-D is banned in several European countries and provinces of Canada. The substance is a suspected carcinogen, which has been shown to double the incidence of birth defects in the children of pesticide applicators in a study conducted by University of Minnesota pathologist Vincent Garry.

Researchers say that the effect of 2,4-D on human health is still not fully understood. But it may be a risk factor for conditions like Hodgkin's lymphoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and certain leukemias, which were often found in Vietnam veterans exposed to Agent Orange. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has stated that the chemical could have "endocrine disruption potential" and interfere with the human hormonal system. It may prove toxic to honeybees, birds and fish, according to research conducted by the US Forest Service and others. In 2004, a coalition of groups spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Pesticide Action Network, wrote a letter to the EPA taking it to task for underestimating the health and environmental impacts of 2,4-D.

Large-scale industrial farming has grown dependent on ever-increasing applications of agrochemicals. Some have compared this to a drug addict who requires larger and larger fixes to stay high. Herbicide use has increased steadily over time as weeds develop resistance and need to be doused with more and deadlier chemicals to kill them. This, in turn. requires more aggressive genetic engineering of crops that can withstand the escalating chemical assault.

Many agricultural scientists warn that this growing addiction to agrochemicals is unsustainable in the long run. The fertility of the soil decreases as earthworms and vital microorganisms are killed off by pesticides and herbicides. They also pollute the groundwater and compromise the health of farm animals that are fed with the chemical-infused grain.

These impacts are poised to grow. US Department of Agriculture (USDA) figures reveal that herbicide use rose by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008. Significantly, nearly half of this increase (46 percent) took place between 2007 and 2008 as a result of the hawking of new herbicide-resistant crops like the new corn hybrid developed by Dow.

Nobody knows what effect introducing this hybrid would have on the health of American consumers. Corn laced with high levels of 2,4-D could taint everything from breakfast cereals to the beef of cattle, which concentrate the toxin in their flesh. Given that corn and high-fructose corn syrup are key elements in so many processed foods, some public health experts warn that all Americans will soon be guinea pigs in an ill-conceived mass experiment with one of the staples of our food supply. America's agriculture department, the USDA is considering deregulating Monsanto's new genetically modified corn variety (the one which will be used in conjunction with the 2,4-D) and is accepting final public comments on the matter until the 27th of this month.

Until recently, herbicide-resistant crops were popular with farmers who benefited from higher yields and nearly effortless management of weeds. But now that the weed problem is coming back with a vengeance, some are reconsidering the wisdom of this chemical-intensive mode of farming. Dow biotech corn costs nearly three times more than conventional seed. And the projected doubling of pesticide use in the years ahead will be expensive, as well as destructive to farmland and ecosystems.

There are viable alternatives to chemical-intensive farming, time-tested methods like crop rotation, use of cover crops, and other practices which allow farmers to compete naturally with weeds. The time has come for farmers to revive the knowledge of their ancestors in this regard.

Some agricultural scientists advocate developing a system of integrated weed management to replace the unsustainable use of chemicals. But the big agrochemical companies have no interest in supporting the sustainable agriculture that would put them out of business. So long as there are billions of dollars to be made in selling herbicide and herbicide-resistant genetically modified seed, there won't be much research money available to explore the natural alternatives to the destruction of our nation's heartland.

(Image credit: EcoTopical)

Every lawn in America could become a garden.

Nourish The Earth. Nourish Yourself.

 #F27. RECLAIM SEEDS

Join us, for a seed exchange at the stock exchange.

Celebrate and share our ancestors heritage.

Fight gmo by growing,saving, and exchanging non-gmo seeds.

Poster Design: Paula Winograd

Across the country rage is growing about GMOs and their being unleashed one after another on the country.  While Europe, despite immense pressure from the Clinton administration, banned them altogether, the FDA hid 40,000 documents indicating their extreme toxicity, to get them introduced in the US.

Ten years after Monsanto’s Bt corn was first planted in 1996, diabetes had increased 90% with the highest incidence among Hispanics for whom corn is a sacred and central part if their diet.

Those GMOs are being kept unlabeled.  A Monsanto official once said to label them would be like putting a skull and cross bones on them.

The vast majority of the country believe people have a right to know what is in their food and that GMOs must be labeled.

Meanwhile students and professionals, most of whom  agree that GMOs  should be labeled, are complacently eating unlabeled GMOs daily at Starbucks.

The GMO situation has become starkly clear.  They do not even qualify as food. Food, by normal definition, supports life and fertility and heals.  But GMOs are in fact causing infertility and spontaneous abortions in animals and are destroying reproductive organs.  This comes on top of studies indicating a relationship to diabetes, cancer, asthma, and birth defects.

The Starbucks clientele purchasing elegant looking items believes what they are eating is nourishing food but the pesticides and GMOs, aside from being toxic in themselves, bind to the crucial micronutrients in soil and in the plants, preventing them from being accessed for use by micro-organisms or animals or humans.  What matters in food; what makes food, food – is unavailable.  It is not by accident that the corporations have actually gotten food redefined as “stuff.”

If they contain corn, soy, canola oil, sugar or cottonseed oil, present in most processed “stuff” in the US, the tempting pastries at Starbucks include GMOs.  Those pastries contain GMOs developed by Monsanto which also developed the nuclear bomb, PCBs (considered the most toxic substance known), chemicals weapons, Agent Orange.

If one were to be more accurate about GMOs not being food, one would say that the “stuff” actually meets the definition of bioweapon.  This should not be startling since Monsanto has made its fortune in creating weapons of destruction, and with GMOs they shifted to biologic ones (that are patented) that people are tricked or trapped into being exposed to.

It is no wonder that people hate Monsanto and consider it the most evil corporation on earth – it is conducting a war against them, albeit a stunningly surreptitious.

Every day students and professionals who likely have signed petitions against Monsanto sit at Starbucks eating Monsanto’s “stuff.”

Starbucks could easily label the GMOs there (their food offerings are standardized and quite limited) if its educated clientele demanded it do so.  It could also let its customers know how artificial (and potentially GMO as well) its syrups are.  It could tell the truth and begin to sell real food.

Starbucks has a quality image but since it is selling GMOs, it is solely image.  The reality is the company is buying cheap “stuff” and serving Monsanto toxins to their customers.

They also sell the New York Times – more “quality” image – which in response to the surging national demand for GMO labeling, said there was no evidence that GMOs are harmful.

No evidence.  Strange.  The evidence is overwhelming.

Just as Monsanto hid documents showing the extreme toxicity of their PCBs for decades even as people in Anniston, Alabama were dying, but the truth finally came out, so, too, is the truth coming out on the hidden FDA files,  the disturbing early studies by  Puszstai, the subsequent studies by Seralini and scientists in Argentina and elsewhere, the reports of abnormal reproductive organs by midwives in Asia, along with highly disturbing evidence from agricultural bioweapons expert Don Huber.  Revelations of GMO toxicity is pouring out from country after country.

Meanwhile as people learn the truth and seek organic food, at the FDA, the same Monsanto executive who unleashed GMOs in the US in the first place, who designed the “food safety” bills and then became Czar of “food safety” at the FDA, having given himself power over all food and farms, is now sending out armed FBI agents against farmers and buying clubs involved with organic (the only actual) food.

Customers at Starbucks are paying to eat GMOs, thinking they are getting actual food, while the Monsanto executive at the FDA has his agency arguing in court that the public has no right to choose its food.  And, tipping off how serious this all is,  no right to their bodily and physical health.

As students and professionals consume unlabeled GMOs at Starbucks here, in Europe GMOs must be labeled.  And then they don’t sell. So Starbucks is forced to serve real food in Europe.

Here, whether customers drive through or come in, “Welcome to Starbucks!” is the cheery prelude to Starbucks selling its American clientele GMOs.

Protests against GM food in Spain [Image: ImgDos  under CC-BY-NC-SA ]

Via TRAP

By Chris Hedges

Love, the deepest human commitment, the force that defies empirical examination and yet is the defining and most glorious element in human life, the love between two people, between children and parents, between friends, between partners, reminds us of why we have been created for our brief sojourns on the planet. Those who cannot love—and I have seen these deformed human beings in the wars and conflicts I covered—are spiritually and emotionally dead. They affirm themselves through destruction, first of others and then, finally, of themselves. Those incapable of love never live.

“Hell,” Dostoevsky wrote, “is the inability to love.”

And yet, so much is written and said about love that at once diminishes its grandeur and trivializes its meaning. Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, cautioned all of us about preaching on love, reminding us that any examination of love had to include, as Erich Fromm pointed out in “Selfishness and Self-Love,” the unmasking of pseudo-love. 

God is a verb rather than a noun. God is a process rather than an entity. There is some biblical justification for this. God, after all, answered Moses’ request for revelation with the words, “I AM WHO I AM.” This phrase is probably more accurately translated “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” God seems to be saying to Moses that the reality of the divine is an experience. God comes to us in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permits human beings to cope with inevitable despair and suffering, in the healing solidarity of kindness, compassion and self-sacrifice, especially when this compassion allows us to reach out to others, and not only others like us, but those defined by our communities as strangers, as outcasts. “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE.” This reality, the reality of the eternal, must be grounded in that which we cannot touch, see or define, in mystery, in a kind of faith in the ultimate worth of compassion, even when the reality of the world around us seems to belittle compassion as futile.

“The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt,” wrote Paul Tillich.

Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. The most acute form of human suffering is loneliness. The isolated human individual can never be fully human. And for those cut off from others, for those alienated from the world around them, the false covenants of race, nationalism, the glorious cause, class and gender compete, with great seduction, against the covenant of love. These sham covenants—and we see them dangled before us daily—are based on exclusion and hatred rather than universality. These sham covenants do not call us to humility and compassion, to an acknowledgement of our own imperfections, but to a form of self-exaltation disguised as love. Those most able to defy these sham covenants are those who are grounded in love, those who find their meaning and worth in intimate relationships that cut through the loneliness and isolation of the human condition.

There are few sanctuaries in war. Couples in love provide one. And it was to such couples that I consistently retreated. These couples repeatedly acted to save those branded as the enemy—Muslims trapped in Serb enclaves in Bosnia or dissidents hunted by the death squads in El Salvador. These rescuers did not act as individuals. Nechama Tec documented this peculiar reality when she studied Polish rescuers of Jews during World War II. Tec did not find any particular character traits or histories that led people to risk their lives for others, often for people they did not know, but she did find they almost always acted because their relationship explained to them the world around them. Love kept them grounded. These couples were not able to halt the destruction and violence around them. They were powerless. They could and often did themselves become victims. But it was with them, seated in a concrete hovel in a refugee camp in Gaza or around a wood stove on a winter night in the hills outside Sarajevo, that I found sanity and peace, that I was reminded of what it means to be human. It seemed it was only in such homes that I ever truly slept during war.

Love, when it is deep and sustained by two individuals, includes self-giving—often tremendous self-sacrifice—as well as desire. For the covenant of love recognizes both the fragility and sanctity of all human beings. It recognizes itself in the other. And it alone can save us, especially from ourselves.

Sigmund Freud divided the forces in human nature between the Eros instinct, the impulse within us that propels us to become close to others, to preserve and conserve, and the Thanatos, or death instinct, the impulse that works toward the annihilation of all living things, including ourselves. For Freud these forces were in eternal conflict. All human history, he argued, is a tug of war between these two instincts.

“The meaning of the evolution of civilization is no longer obscure to us,” Freud wrote in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” “It must present the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and instinct of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species. This struggle is what all life essentially consists of.”

We are tempted, indeed in a consumer culture encouraged, to reduce life to a simple search for happiness. Happiness, however, withers if there is no meaning. The other temptation is to disavow the search for happiness in order to be faithful to that which provides meaning. But to live only for meaning—indifferent to all happiness—makes us fanatic, self-righteous and cold. It leaves us cut off from our own humanity and the humanity of others. We must hope for grace, for our lives to be sustained by moments of meaning and happiness, both equally worthy of human communion. And it is this grace, this love, which in our darkest moments allows us to endure.

Viktor Frankl in “Man’s Search for Meaning” grappled with Eros and Thanatos in the Auschwitz death camp. He recalled being on a work detail, freezing in the blast of the Polish winter, when he began to think about his wife, who had already been gassed by the Nazis although he did not know it at the time.

“A thought transfixed me,” he wrote, “for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set down by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart. The salvation of man is through love and in love.”

Love is an action, a difference we try to make in the world.

“We love our enemy when we love his or her ultimate meaning,” professor Adams told us. “We may have to struggle against what the enemy stands for; we may not feel a personal affinity or passion for him. Yet we are commanded for this person’s sake and for our own and for the sake of the destiny of creation, to love that which should unite us.”

To love that which should unite us requires us to believe there is something that connects us all, to know that at some level all of us love and want to be loved, to base all our actions on the sacred covenant of love, to know that love is an act of will, to refuse to exclude others because of personal difference or race or language or ethnicity or religion. It is easier to be indifferent. It is tempting to hate. Hate propels us to the lust for power, for control, to the Hobbesian nightmare of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Hate is what people do when they are distressed, as many Americans are now, by uncertainty and fear. If you hate others they will soon hate or fear you. They will reject you. Your behavior assures it. And through hate you become sucked into the sham covenants of the nation, the tribe, and you begin to speak in the language of violence, the language of death.

Love is not selflessness. It is the giving of one’s best self, giving one’s highest self unto the world. It is finding true selfhood. Selflessness is martyrdom, dying for a cause. Selfhood is living for a cause. It is choosing to create good in the world. To love another as one loves oneself is to love the universal self that unites us all. If our body dies, it is the love that we have lived that will remain—what the religious understand as the soul—as the irreducible essence of life. It is the small, inconspicuous things we do that reveal the pity and beauty and ultimate power and mystery of human existence.

Vasily Grossman wrote in his masterpiece “Life and Fate”:

My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious leaders, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

To survive as a human being is possible only through love. And, when Thanatos is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others, even those with whom we are in conflict—love that is like our own. It does not mean we will avoid suffering or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has the power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist and to affirm what we know we must affirm.

Via Truthdig

By Kelly Fragale

Andrew Faust, renowned Permaculture Scholar, has been captivating audiences with his message of how we can use permaculture to redesign the current, vulnerable economic landscape to reflect the most resilient systems functioning in nature. With over 20 years of teaching experience, he has, to date, successfully graduated over 400 students from his Permaculture Design Certification (PDC) course that is helping spawn a new wave of green businesses and organizations. The Permaculture movement is growing in the greater NYC area and has also found a home within the Occupy Wall Street community.

Permaculture is a design science rooted in the observation of natural living eco systems.  Through years of study on how nature functions, Ecologists, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, discovered a set of principles at work within an ecosystem, that can be applied to the construction of human systems to ensure resiliency and efficiency. These principles allow for all basic human needs to be met without compromising the integrity of the natural environment. The core ethics behind Permaculture are care of the earth, care of the people and share the surplus, also known as earth care, people care and fair share.

MOBILE DESIGN LAB AT OWS from ONE PACK PRODUCTIONS on Vimeo.

Faust makes a strong case outlining how we can begin, at once, to utilize these principles and start participating in a new, regionally specific economy that supports the local ecology rather than exhausting it, and create a new system out of the shell of the current structure that is failing to meet our most basic needs.  He also stresses the great need for these principles to be applied in an urban setting and highlights many of the opportunities to do so in the PDC.

“I believe more than a few of my fellow PDC students came into the class with plans to escape the city and build their Permaculture homestead-- myself included. And most of us left with goals of focusing our energies right here in the city, where Permaculture principles and applications are needed most urgently.”-- Jenna Spevack, PDC 2010

As Faust sees it, we need to move away from a consumer based economic model and become a culture of producers, in which local communities start redeveloping basic, long forgotten skills that are currently outsourced.  He believes that this is where new sustainable green jobs will ultimately come from, for the people and by the people.

Faust also challenges the basic understanding of what sustainability actually is.  He says, quoted from a recent talk, “first if we are going to talk about sustainability, we must ask the question, what is it that we are trying to sustain?  If we refer to NYC, the city has never, once, been in compliance with the clean air or water act.”

Most view sustainability as a movement towards decreasing our impact on the environment by reducing our carbon footprint.  He suggests that we need to participate with our local ecologies and increase our impact to begin shifting into a new regenerative phase, repairing and reversing severely damaged portions of the environment while simultaneously participating in an economy that supports this endeavor.

“I think the biggest shift for me that came out of the Permaculture Design Certification with Andrew, was taking this false idea that we need to reduce our impact on the planet and flipping it on it's head. We need to be improving our influence on the planet, and expanding toward a positive impact not shrinking our footprint.” -- Liz Neves, PDC 2009

Faust’s work has struck a cord within the Occupy Movement. He gave his first presentation to the movement at The Atrium Building at 60 Wall Street, where organizers and activists meet to report back on various projects and plan actions. The Food Justice Working Group, the Sustainability Working Group and the Brooklyn General Assembly have hosted him on multiple occasions, to speak on various topics. New York based Occupy farm projects are incorporating Permaculture principles with the assistance of Andrew’s knowledge and rich history in the field.

Among participating in various speaking engagements, Andrew teaches 4-5 PDC’s per year in both NYC and at Yestermorrow, a progressive green building school in Warren, Vermont. The Spring 2012 Permaculture Design Certification Program will run from February 18th to April 7th at the 6th St Community Center, in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.  Registration is still open, on a first come first serve basis. Andrew Faust is currently the only Permaculture Teacher offering the PDC Program here in NYC.

If you would like more detailed information about classes, workshops, speaking engagements or would like to request Andrew to speak at an event, visit the Center For Bioregional Living at: http://www.homebiome.com

Note from the Editor:

We're excited for the opportunity to learn more about Permaculture Design Systems, Apiary Culture, Natural Building and Biodynamic Planting with Andrew this spring. Classes begin next week at The Sixth Street Community Center. Register now if you're ready for a life transforming educational experience!

Learning To Live Well With The Earth : Andrew Faust : Permaculture Design from Costa Boutsikaris on Vimeo.

Via: A Taste Of The Social Media