Tag Archives: GMO

Calling Things by Their Name: The World’s Urgent Summons to Agrosanity

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For industrial-chemical-genetically-modified agribusiness, this has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad, butt-kick summer. Maximally so.

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The whole, gargantuan, super-efficient, hyper-technical, chemical-dependent agriborg has been repeatedly whacked upside the head by reality. Yet despite a steady assault of paradigm-shattering facts, the mega-tentacled, bottom-line corporate complex plows systematically onward into toxic drainage ditches of its own fouling.

As made inescapably evident by the flood of ag-related news stories arising through summer 2015, corporate chemical GMO systems have over time spawned a deeply problematic matrix of land, animals and human beings. For the sake of life, it’s time to stop, to look at reality, to terminate intoxication, and to change direction. It’s time to act fast.

The news stories cited below represent a chorus of sharp alarms. At the same time they also represent an urgent summons to agrosanity – the necessity to act with intelligence and common sense to transform the contaminating status quo into clean, sustainable, agroecological farm and food systems in America and globally.

That summons to agricultural sanity is the call of the land. The call is plain: to actively transform and retrofit existing systems to agroecological enterprises that will heal rather than harm the land and the people. This ideal, given eloquent expression in the Seventh Generation teaching which is native to North America, is a critical thread in the rising network of community farm and food initiatives. Many of the emerging agroecological initiatives offer models that could be of high service for the wholesale agriculture transformation which is now imperative.

Here’s a roundup of gut-wrenching, paradigm-annihilating Ag news just for the months of summer 2015.

Cavalcade of Contamination

o – Major study finds GMO soy is not equivalent to normal soy. Even in 2015, it is premature and unscientific to label such GMOs as safe (August 18). The study published in the journal Agricultural Sciences revealed that GM soy generates a significant increase in levels of a known carcinogen, formaldehyde, in plants. GMOs also disrupt the development of glutathione, an important anti-oxidant necessary for cellular detoxification.

The study concludes that the U.S. government’s current standards for the safety assessment of GMOs – based on the dubious principle of “substantial equivalence” – are both outdated and unscientific. The study’s findings call into question the FDA’s food safety standards for the entire country. The authors conclude, “…we believe it is premature to approve GMOs and to consider them safe.”

0 – Doctors issue a resounding call for a complete scientific review of glyphosate (aka Roundup), and for labels on GM food (August 19). The ubiquitous and infamous “weed killer” called glyphosate, toxic handmaiden to GM crops, is now officially suspected as a carcinogen. According to a column published in the New England Journal of Medicine, “There is growing evidence that glyphosate is geno-toxic and has adverse effects on cells in a number of different ways.”

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

Image courtesy of Creative Commons.

The authors cite this summer’s determination by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) that the most commonly used herbicide, glyphosate, is a probable human carcinogen, Despite its claimed non-toxicity at low levels, accumulation over time is problematic. GM foods and the herbicides applied to them may pose hazards to human health that have notbeen assessed. Regulators have relied on flawed and outdated research to allow the expanded use of this herbicide.

Evidence shows that glyphosate may well be a factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases. The journal noted that labeling of GM food is “essential for tracking the emergence of novel food allergies and assessing effects of chemical herbicides applied to GM crops.” Without labeling, there is no such thing as long-term safety research.

In the face of direct blowback from the chemical-GMO corporate public relations industry, and several shoulder-shrug, what’s-the-big-deal? articles in mass media, WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer went to the trouble of making a second public announcement to specifically reiterate their finding that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen. Meantime, Pesticide Action Network (PAN) added the weedkiller to its list of highly hazardous substances.

o – New study suggests that chronic exposure to glyphosate at ultra-low doses can result in liver and kidney damage (August 26) After the WHO report on glyphosate and the demand for a complete scientific review of the plant-killing chemical, yet another deeply troubling study on glyphosate was published. The new study showed significant potential health implications for both animal and human populations. Glyphosate is spread far and wide on land to kill other plants that GMO crops may dominate. Thus for both animals and human beings, there is already extensive exposure to ultra-low doses.

Yet another study published this year found that glyphosate in combination with aluminum induces pathology in the pineal gland. That crucial degeneration of the pineal gland has been in turn linked to gut dysbiosis and neurological disease. As the researchers note, “many neurological diseases, including autism, depression, dementia, anxiety disorder, and Parkinson’s disease, are associated with abnormal sleep patterns, which are directly linked to pineal gland dysfunction.

o – Synthetic nicotine chemical insecticides found in half of USA streams (August 18) – The US Geological Survey released a study showing that insecticides known as neonicotinoids contaminate more than half of the streams sampled across the dedbeUS and Puerto Rico. Published in Environmental Chemistry, the study represents the first national-scale investigation of the environmental occurrence of these insecticides. Use of neonicotinoids to control insects has increased over the past decade, especially on corn and soybeans. Most scientists consider neonicotinoids as the main culprit in Colony Collapse Disorder, which is killing bees around the world. The poisons have been banned outright in many nations around the world, but not fully by theS. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). For its determinations the EPA relies on studies done by others, including companies that manufacturer the poisons.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that there are traces of at least 29 different pesticides in the average American’s body. Overall, both individually and collectively, the cocktail of synthetic chemicals infesting almost every human being in North America increases the risk of birth defects, diminished IQ, cancer, depression, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and more.

o – Colossal zombie zone in the Gulf of Mexico metastasizes (August 3) – As reported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the infamous dead zone in Gulf of Mexico — a vast, noxious, oxygen-starved area in the sea that suffocates shrimp, fish, and other sea creatures — is bigger than ever in the summer of 2015. The dead zone is caused mainly by runoff of chemical fertilizer and manure from factory farms and corporate livestock confinement operations (CAFOs).

This year’s dead zone spans about 6,500 square miles. That’s size of Rhode Island and Connecticut combined. According to NOAA, there are more than 550 of these zombie zones floating around in the world this summer. The dead zones happen when runoff from industrial agriculture stimulates furious overgrowth of algae, analogous to the unchecked growth of cancers. The pumped-up masses of algae then sink, decompose and gobble up the oxygen necessary for healthy aquatic life, spawning massive, infernal zombie zones.

o – Industrial agriculture found to be contaminating America’s major aquifers with uranium (August 17) – A study

Uranium Electron shell. Courtesy of CC.

Uranium Electron shell. Courtesy of CC.

conducted by researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) showed dramatically high levels of uranium contamination in both the Great Plains and the Central Valley (CA) aquifers. The toxic silvery-white metal known as uranium is released in the aquifers through interaction with nitrates – a common groundwater contaminant that originates mainly from chemical fertilizers spread on fields, and mass quantities of manure from industrial livestock confinement operations (CAFOs). The researchers found that the aquifers contain uranium concentrations up to 89 times the EPA standard for safety, and nitrate concentrations up to 189 times greater. This acute concentration of uranium has a detrimental impact on human health.

o – Industrial commodity corn is scorching our planet (July 27) – The University of Minnesota published a blockbuster study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study showed that our foremost industrial corn production systems are frying the planet with the release of nitrous oxide, a compound that traps far more heat in our atmosphere than CO2 does. The extent of nitrous oxide arising from industrial corn has been grossly under-measured to date. New data show that it is a critical factor in climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), industrial agriculture is responsible for a huge detrimental impact on climate change: almost a quarter of the continuing increase of greenhouse gas emissions.

Nowadays the dominant industrial Ag production systems are glyphosate-drizzled rotations of GM soy with GM corn. The corn harvest largely gets funneled toward the production of taxpayer-subsidized ethanol, livestock feed, and the sickly-sweet substance which has become notorious among dietitians and health advocates: high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

o – Major ethical violation for GMO scientists (July 29) – The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, retracted a major study on GMOs because of ethical transgressions. The authors of the often-cited study had claimed that GM rice (so-called Golden Rice) was an effective Vitamin A supplement. This study has served the well-funded GMO industrial agriculture public relations industry as a key talking point for years. The industry has relentlessly touted this flawed study about Golden Rice as proof that a patented GM product would solve a major global health problem by providing children with extra Vitamin A. Editors at the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition determined that the study was afflicted with major ethics violations and thus they had to retract the study and it’s claims.

o – Interlocking ties between GMO industry and scientists probed for conflict of interest (August 6) – According to

Sculpture by Antony Gormley, Quantum Cloud. Courtesy of Creative Commons.

Sculpture by Antony Gormley, Quantum Cloud. Courtesy of Creative Commons.

report in Nature, US universities, including taxpayer-supported land grant institutions, have been targeted by a private advocacy group, US Right to Know. The group is investigating collusion between the agricultural biotechnology industry and academics involved with science, economics and mass communication. The activist group has so far used the courts to compel records from 40 researchers at US public universities. The report in Nature pointed out that “at least one institution, the University of Nebraska, has refused to provide documents requested by the group.”

There are 106 US land grant institutions. They have at their disposal an annual budget of nearly 2 billion taxpayer dollars, and many millions more from corporate funding. The land grant universities have decades-old relationships with agricultural groups, corporations and state legislatures.

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Individually and collectively the studies cited above sharply call into question the foundation and the principal thrust of the industrial-chemical-GM Ag industry, of the USDA, and also of America’s public land grant institutions.

Despite the well-known capacity of agroecology to address many of the problems created by corporate industrial agriculture, and to help mitigate the accelerating damage of climate change, such clean, sustainable approaches are treated either like neglected children, or like an enemies at the gate of corporate bank vaults. That’s got to change.

In the governmental realm, sustainable agriculture is currently allocated only about 2% of the multi-billion dollar USDA budget. True clean, agroecological and sustainable farm and food systems remain at best an adjunct concept – an outlier — at most land grant institutions.

By far the lion’s share of our tax dollars goes to benefit corporate-industrial-chemical agriculture systems. In 2015, in the face of all the head-whacking realities, this pathway emerges as truly shortsighted, ill advised, and profoundly perilous.

Consideration for the human beings

fire-forestThe bundle of disturbing Ag reports cited above came forward this summer only to be obscured behind an inferno of news about record-breaking wildfires, the ongoing meltdown in arctic regions, flood-inducing deluges, and the hottest months ever recorded on Earth. Those months – summer 2015 – set us all firmly on course to finish out the hottest year ever recorded. So far.

At the start of summer 2015 Pope Francis threw down a gauntlet in the global controversy about industrial-chemical-GM agriculture systems. He raised not just environmental and health concerns, but also the glaring social and economic imbalances that corporate Ag systems intensify. He asked for an honest debate.

Perhaps as he visits the US in late September, 2015, the Pope will press the demand for debate on industrial-chemical-genetically modified agriculture. I hope so. He pulls media attention. People will be informed and will talk. But the Pope is just one prominent voice articulating deeply and widely held concerns for life. The real debate challenge – the one that must for the sake of integrity be answered – arises from the many millions of human beings who want to live healthy lives on a healthy planet and to ensure the well being of their children unto seven generations. Their voices are so far mostly unheeded.

In all respects ethical, economic and environmental, the farm and food challenge of the human beings to the corporations and their manifold matrix of contamination is valid, worthy and necessary. America’s land grant institutions should take the lead in focusing public attention on this critical debate.

  • In Laudato Si, the Encyclical published this summer, the Pope wrote: In many places (around the world), “following the introduction of these (GM) crops, productive land is concentrated in the hands of a few owners due to the progressive disappearance of small producers, who, as a consequence of the loss of the exploited lands, are obliged to withdraw from direct production.”
  • As a result of this general model of development, the Pope noted, farmers are driven to become temporary laborers. Many rural workers end up in urban slums, ecosystems are destroyed, and “oligopolies” (markets dominated by a few huge corporations) expand in agricultural production. While the trend to Ag oligopoly is global, America experienced this pattern playing out as a result of the massive ag consolidations and vertical integrations of the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and ongoingly. “Get big or get out,” was the infamous mantra of Earl Butz, Secretary of Agriculture (1971-76). That is just what happened across America’s heartland, a hard reality attended by great waves of family heartbreak, widespread depopulation of rural communities, and a troubling cavalcade of contamination.
  • The Pope’s Encyclical called for broad, responsible scientific and social debate, a debate capable of considering all the available information and of “calling things by their name.”
  • In his encyclical the Pope included a telling remark instructive for America’s Land Grant institutions which are now so critically dependent on corporate financing: “It sometimes happens that complete information is not put on the table; a selection is made on the basis of particular interests, be they political, economic or ideological.”

In service to the actual human beings who are citizens, our public land grant institutions should not dodge this debate by pretending that it’s not happening. That would constitute an outright betrayal of humanity in favor of corporate hegemony over the earth. This is shortsighted in the extreme.

Go Sustainable, or Go Extinct

Rachel Carson sounded the alarm on the environmental consequences of industrial agriculture well over 50 years ago in her book, Silent Spring. Then in his book Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times (1978), Jim Hightower documented the reality that America’s land grant institutions were by and large turning their interest and focus from the working people of America that they were initially chartered to help, and instead more and more frequently casting their lot with deep-pocket corporations.

In light of the deeply troubling facts coming forward, especially now in summer of 2015, it’s time for everyone to stop, to take a deep breath, detox, and seriously to weigh the true costs and true consequences of their actions. It’s that serious. Industrial Ag business as usual is lunacy.

The realities of summer 2015 underscore the critical importance of the resilient, community farm and food initiatives that have been arising so dynamically in the US and abroad over the last 30 years or more. The emerging, networked community food movement with its emphasis on clean, sustainable, democratic agroecological farming systems – along with economic and social justice – arises in an era of vast environmental contamination.

Agroecology in its many permutations offers a multitude of pathways for reforming and redeeming our farm and food systems. We can have clean agriculture, and we can use it to help cleanse and heal our distressed lands.

seekingAs we move from summer 2015 on to December, the United Nations will sponsor in Paris the 21st session of the Conference on Climate Change: COP21. This will be a huge event. The conference aims to demonstrate the commitment of non-state actors (companies) to reach new legal agreements that will help protect the earth.

Among the ideas being floated is something that appropriates the acronym CSA, which for 30 years has been recognized as a term of integrity referring to Community Supported Agriculture.

But now through the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) which floated the concept, corporate actors are now promoting their vague, loosely defined concept of CSA. This second “CSA” ought to be clearly labeled as CSA, Inc.  It’s not about community. It’s essentially corporate green washing, a flaccid concept that is in no way makes corporations accountable to democracy, health, food security, climate reality, or the spirit of the land and the people.

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Borage for courage, bee for life. Photo by Ferran, Creative Commons.

One must hope that in the context of the COP21 global gathering and all the troubling paradigm-shattering realities of industrial Ag, that the corporations themselves, the USDA and America’s array of land grant institutions will find the wisdom, the integrity, and the courage to change course. They can become leaders embracing and developing clean, intelligent, authentic community and global agroecological systems in the face of climate change, resource scarcity, and the growing demand for food.

To date the most prominent global spokesperson for this kind of healing trajectory has been UN Rapporteur Olivier De Schutter. After intensive study of the big questions, in his final official report to the world on food, he sounded a salient summons to agroecology and food democracy. He urged swift and radical transformation of the world’s food systems, and emphasized the importance of rebuilding and strengthening clean, local democratic community food systems.

In what should be universally recognized by now as profound common sense, the UN Rapporteur recommended shifting the emphasis in agricultural policy from productivity and profit to “well-being, resilience and sustainability.”

In the spirit of calling things by their true name, and based on the realities of summer 2015, it’s time to uproot from our agricultural vocabulary Earl Butz’s menacing mantra: “get big or get out.” We must supplant that thought-form with something based on the realities of 2015, something wiser, something that serves human beings and the land we all depend upon for life: “Go sustainable, or go extinct.”

No No Nano: Macro-Objections to Micro-Machinations of Industrial Processed Food

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“To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.” – Wendell Berry

by Steven McFadden ~ 10.2.2014
Steadily, stealthily, corporations are driving the goodness of natural life itself from our food, and cleverly – though unwisely – infesting it with dim bits of microscopic material substance that are obscured from human awareness. I object. Wholeheartedly.

Mammona (Aaronsims)

Mammona (Aaronsims)

Just as synthetic chemicals, manufactured additives, irradiation, and then genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been corporately imposed upon processed food, now a micro-invasion of nanoparticles is gaining momentum. Patented lab-created nanoparticles are even penetrating the realm of organic food, as the USDA’s organic program chooses to do nothing.

The invisible, insidious micro-mechanistic food interventions being aggressively advanced by industry are now incarnate via nanotechnology. That’s the practice of manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular scale, and then incorporating the synthetic molecules into processed stuff, including our food.

The scale of nanotech is so infinitesimal that it’s a mindstretch for most people. A sheet of newspaper, for example is about 100,000 nanometers thick.

The chemical-food industry has already incorporated nanomaterials into dietary supplements as well as packaging materials and cutting boards. They claim their nano-products make food safer, and they have dozens of direct food applications in development.

A MishMash of Micro-Machinations
Overall, at this early stage of the 21st Century, corporations are churning out a complex mishmash of novel, man-made, synthetic materials to impact the industrial food chain, and eventually our bodies and souls. They are doing it with minimal or no regulation. Consider:

  • The market right now offers more than 300 foods and food packaging materials that likely contain engineered nanomaterials, according to the Center for Food Safety. Nanomaterials can cause damage to ecosystems by transporting toxic contaminants through the environment, potentially causing cancer and organ damage.
  • Researchers are now developing nanocapsules containing synthetic nutrients that can be released in your intestines when nanosensors detect a vitamin deficiency in your body.
  • Nanoproducts already on sale in Europe purport to smuggle fat through your stomach and into your small intestine. This triggers a feeling of satiety and manufacturers claim it can help people cut their food intake.

atomsNano is the latest dimension, but by no means the whole of the manufactured machinations impacting the corporately patented and processed food chain:

  • We are consuming a wholesale eruption of food additives. In the 1950s there were only about 800 food additives. Today there are an estimated 10,000, many of them dubious and provoking a cascade of health complaints. Since the days of the Bush-Quayle Administration in the early 1990s, the FDA has shrugged its regulatory shoulders. It provides no scrutiny of food additives to determine whether they are safe for human consumption. The government allows corporations to monitor themselves.
  • Over 275 chemicals used by 56 companies appear to be marketed as GRAS (Generally Recognized as Secret) and are used in many products based on companies’ safety determinations that, pursuant to current regulations, do not need to be reported to the FDA or the public. This is probably just the tip of an iceberg.
  • The science is just not in on the safety of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and their long-term impact on health and the environment. Yet against the explicit recommendation of FDA scientists, the FDA does not test GMOs. The FDA, in fact, does not even have a testing protocol for GMOs. Since the Bush-Quayle era, the federal government has placed faith in the corporations and their dubious dogma of “Substantial Equivalence.”
  • Fake DNA is now worming its way toward our food chain. As Tom Philpott reports in Mother Jones, synthetic biology – synbio for short – is tantamount to “genetic engineering on steroids.” Synthetic biologists generate new DNA sequences for food the way programmers write code for computers. Like nanotech, food additives and GMOs, synbio foods may well also escape government oversight, independent testing, and the requirement of labels so people may know what they are eating.

This foreboding fiesta of micro-mechanistic manipulations to our human food chain is happening in the context of an assault of disinformation being perpetrated through both social and mass media. As reported by Reuters, GMO, chemical and processed food corporations have committed themselves to a multi-year, multimillion-dollar campaign to defeat attempts to require GMO labels.

The campaigns pursue a number of different strategies to manipulate public opinion, including false claims that there is scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs, and the oft-echoed meme that we (citizens and consumers) are just too stupid to appreciate corporate scientific brilliance. Meanwhile, well-funded attacks continue in efforts to corrupt or undermine the integrity of organic food.

My Macro Objections
Although in time some innovations may prove worthy, in general I’ve got a skullful of reality-based objections to these micro-materialistic manipulations of the natural world and our food. But for the sake of brevity, here’s a half dozen of my macro-objections:

1. Free Will. First, I object to corporate micromanipulation of our human food supply on the spiritual basis of free will. As consumers of processed food, we are not asked for input or permission. We are not even afforded the basic respect of being informed about the material substances being mechanically ingrained to alter our food. That constitutes a direct violation of free will. That’s unacceptable.

I suspect that – if more widely known – such fundamental transgressions would be unacceptable to the vast majority of human beings. With no corporate or governmental transparency there can exist no trust on the part of citizen consumers. That’s pretty damn basic, despite the info war to convince us that our knowledge is wanting, and that our free will is irrelevant.

Scientific research indicates that when nucleic acids are introduced into our foods – such as through genetic engineering – they can survive digestion and wind up woven into the fabric of our blood and our body organs. Corporate GMOs can become part of our human bodies, and interact with our normal, natural genes in ways not understood or predictable.

Thus, I object to having corporately designed, produced and patented genes intermingling with my natural genes without my informed consent, or my even knowing about it. My genes are a key part of the spiritual, biological recipe for me. They are sacrosanct, and not available against my will for corporate exploitation with their unknowable synthetic entities.

2. Relationship. My second objection is spiritual as well. It has to do with our relationship with the earth and the land and all the animals and plants that are part of our world. These relationships are integral to our health and well-being. The complex relationship of the web of life is identified and appreciated in both leading-edge science and in ancient native knowings concerning The Sacred Hoop.

web-of-lifeWhen corporate science isolates factors such as genes, and studies them short-term for isolated results, it’s examining perhaps half of reality, and ignoring the rest. That is dangerously myopic. We are part of a cosmic web. All of life is related and interconnected whether corporations allow themselves to be aware of it or not. When you pluck a single thread on the web and it vibrates throughout the whole. This basic reality must become a consideration for the entire technological realm.

The establishment of synthetic constructs between human beings and nature – as is the case with the action of many drugs, chemicals, GMOs and other materials concocted in the lab — causes distortions, and tends to incrementally divorce human beings from the natural world and its rhythms.

Many materials used in industrial agriculture have the capacity to enhance plant growth and performance. But at the same time they exterminate or otherwise suppress the billions of life forms found with healthy soil biology. Industrial-chemical agriculture has already diminished vast tracts of the earth into denser, dimmer material substance. This conquering and controlling approach to nature in the food chain tends intensify the material aspect and blunts the animating spiritual life elements. With chemical-mineral fertilizers, and synthetic chemical herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides, industrial agriculture systematically snuffs out or reduces life so that a dull monoculture may exist.

zomSoil forms the basis for healthy food, and food forms the building blocks of our bodies and health. Deader, denser soil yields duller, denser food which over time — as I see it — yields denser, duller people. Even our mental health is linked to healthy soil, rich in living microbes. So when the soil is deadened, ultimately the light (biophotons) in our bodies and souls is deadened as well. Metaphorically speaking, zombie soil gives rise to zombie culture.

3. Precaution. I object to the heedless velocity of these synthetic enterprises. As a core value, I embrace thoughtful, independent science and sober progress. I advocate accuracy of perception of the whole, not just a few precise but narrow peeks and pecks at the web of life.

For this reason I stand with the moral community in championing the common sense embodied in the Precautionary Principle. The principle states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, in the absence of scientific consensus that the action or policy is not harmful, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those taking an action – in this case that would be the corporations manufacturing micro chemicals, synthetic materials, and GMOs for the human food chain. The fundamental level of conservative common sense expressed in the Precautionary Principle is generally missing from these enterprises.

The probability of major problems underlying this mish mash of mechanistic meddling with nature and our food is exceedingly high. The risks of GMOs are far higher than nuclear energy, and far less well understood. Statistically speaking, GMO risks are extreme, global, unknown, and perpetual.

With a fundamental matter such as human sustenance, we are wise to take a conservative stance and proceed more prudently, honestly appraising both the short and long-term consequences of actions on the web of life. This is the essence of Seventh Generation thinking, a core ethical principle in North America for many thousands of years.

4. Oversight. My fourth macro objection is that these manufactured micro materials are entering the market place, and eventually our bodies, with little if any regulatory oversight.

As established under the Bush-Quayle Administration, the FDA relates to GMO foods as part of a team of federal agencies that includes the EPA and the USDA. Their policies (unchanged since 1992) place responsibility on producers or manufacturers to assure the safety of the food. If a company tells the government their stuff is safe, the government takes their word for it. There’s rarely independent scientific review.

Meanwhile, both corporocrats and bureaucrats are busily striving to establish further hegemony for industrial food through new rules under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FMSA). These 600 pages of proposed rules tend to favor indsutrial-scale operations, and to place onerous burdens on small and moderate-scale organic and agroecological farm operations.

5. Mechanistic Metaphysics. My fifth macro objection is to the widely held corporate-scientific materialist yang notion that mechanistic “fixes” can and will trump nature. The industrial food juggernaut strives for control and domination, and apparently rejects the possibility of working in respectful relationship with nature.

free willWe see this kind of thinking embodied, for example, in many CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). The animals, crowded together, are systematically injected with antibiotics and growth hormones at a notoriously high rate according to reports from a Reuters investigative team. Eighty percent of all antibiotics used in America are given not to human beings directly, but rather to the animals that we human beings eat. This practice of food-chain drug abuse is giving rise to superbugs that directly impact human health.

circleoflifmalsWith thousands of pigs, chickens, or beef cattle all crowded together and essentially treated as Units of Production in ruthlessly efficient industrialized settings, the creatures tend to be disregarded as individual, sentient beings, even though they are. Animals are our relatives, part of the Sacred Hoop or Circle of Life. They merit basic respect.

As with the CAFO meat factories, similarly utilitarian and materialistic ethics and procedures hold sway in the realms of micro and nano manipulations of processed food. The subjugation of living interests to the impersonal mechanisms of corporate profit-seeking by the artificial, mechanical “person” or “citizen” that is the modern corporation is establishing a chain of troubling consequences for the environment and human health.

This mechanical material approach of corporately striving to trump nature arises in a realm of abstract thinking. It’s devoid of connection to soul of the world and of human beings. It’s a kind of automatic intelligence, often disguised as science, yet so rigid and narrow as to disregard half or more of whatever it considers. The world is just not a material conglomeration of bits and mechanical processes open to ongoing exploitation. There are consequences.

6. Obsfucation. My sixth macro objection is to the obscured nature of the whole corporate enterprise. Almost all of this stuff that’s happening to our food is lacking in transparency, but is patented to ensure corporate profit and control. Without full-time vigilance – a challenge far beyond the capability of almost every citizen consumer – you cannot know what the chemical, bioscience, agriculture and industrial processing conglomerates are doing to the land and to the material substances they sell us as food.

Integrity of Body, Mind & Soul
I choose to stand on — and to eat from — conservative turf.  I also choose in my own life to buy, or to grow, and to consume what I have come to call “agrarian food.” By that term I mean to suggest food that is clean, that is grown with organic or agroecological techniques. I cultivate a large organic garden and I buy clean, natural food that is grown with sustainable organic, biodynamic, or agroecological techniques from a co-op (Open Harvest), which does business with over 100 local farms, and that I and my fellow townspeople own and manage for the benefit of our community.

Agroecological growing techniques have long, established solid track records for environmental and dietary excellence. Even the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is now declaring definitively that the world must change from  radically polluting, petroleum-based industrial ag practices to sustainable agricultural systems as the heart of our efforts to manage climate chaos. Agroecological approaches have become so sophisticated and dependable in recent decades, that they can supply all the clean food necessary to feed the world. And they can do it while improving soil, air, and water quality, helping to stabilize Earth’s climate, and enhancing human physical and mental health.

There is genuine 21st century wisdom in knowing your farmer, or in knowing where and how your food was grown and processed, or in having some kind of food firewall that gives you information and allows you to make informed choices for yourself and your family. Of this I am certain.

For the moment co-ops, CSAs, Farmers Markets and the burgeoning local food movement are the firewalls, and the clear choice for people who recognize the troubling mish mash of patented mechanical material corporate factors, ethics and practices at work on our daily sustenance, and who choose something that is clean, more natural, more full of life.

Historic Pivot Point for Food Democracy

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Dr. Vandana Shiva. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer, from Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Vandana Shiva. Photo by Dominik Hundhammer, Wikimedia Commons.

“Something is happening at this point in history,” Katherine Kelly said as she brought to conclusion an April 17 lecture by international farm activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. “We are at a point in time where we can make an important change. Dr. Shiva is helping to lead the way. The rest is up to us.”

Kelly, the Executive Director of Cultivate Kansas City, articulated an overarching context for Shiva’s acute critique of the food system as well as her inspirational entreaties.

The context of Shiva’s presentation was further framed by three signal events. National Geographic had just published a cover story focused on the increasingly pertinent “New Food Revolution.” Meanwhile, more significantly, US merchandizing behemoth Walmart announced a program to create an industrialized organic food production system that they intend to use to “drive down the price of organic food.” The same week merchandizing rival Target Corp. also announced it was increasing its offerings of “natural, organic and sustainable” food.

Love Window CROPPED and STRAIGHTENEDIn counterpoint to these industrial-scale, profit-focused initiatives, when Dr. Shiva took the stage at Unity Temple in Kansas City, she swept her arm back, gesturing to a stained-glass window with a star burst and the word love spelled out. “That’s it,” she said. “Love. Love is the altar. It’s all about love, about bestowing attention, fostering, cherishing, honoring, tending, guarding, and loving the Earth which provides our food. The only way we can cultivate that essential ingredient of love is with community and diversity.”

The 61-year-old physicist, ecologist and author from Delhi, India then served up a penetrating deconstruction of the mechanistic mindset and the industrial food system it has spawned. This is the same mindset Walmart and Target now intend to apply to organic food.

“For a short time,” Shiva said, “the mechanistic mind has projected onto the world the false idea that food production is and must be of necessity an industrial activity. That’s a world view that is in profound error.”

“When food becomes a commodity it loses its quality, its taste, and its capacity to provide true nutrition,” she said. Industrial agriculture turns the earth into units of production, farmers into high-tech sharecroppers, and is the single biggest contributor to our declining environment. She said industrial agriculture distorts the proper relationship between humans and the natural world.

* * * * * * * *

A physicist by training, Dr. Shiva became an activist for small-scale, decentralized sustainable agriculture in 1987. That’s when she acquired insight into the motivation behind industrial farming and genetic engineering. She attended a conference on biotechnology and heard representatives of chemical corporations say that they must do genetic engineering on crops because it is a way to start claiming ownership over life.

“If we can claim ownership,” the corporate representatives reasoned according to Shiva, “then we can then collect rent or royalties on the seeds’ capacity to reproduce themselves.”

Shiva argued that it is absurd that corporations are allowed to codify life as a patentable and profitable form. “GMO,” she said, “has come to mean ‘God Move Over.’ It violates the rights of the Earth, the rights of the farmers, and the rights of the people who need to eat food to live. The patenting of life violates every principle of law and ethics and morality.”

278187This kind of one-dimensional, profit-based thinking is the core of what Shiva wrote about in her seminal 1993 book, Monocultures of the Mind. Coming at the subject from her mastery of particle physics and her understanding of the fundamental inseparability of all facets of life, she concluded that “issues about environment, economics and politics are inter-related through the way humans interact with their surroundings and with each other.”

Shiva argues in her book and in her lectures that a mechanical monocultural mindset has led to vicious circle of injurious impacts in the realms of farms, food and the environment.

“A monoculture of the mind in the economic system is what has led to corporate globalization,” she said in her Kansas City talk. “A monoculture of the mind makes it appear as if the only market that there is, is the globalized market controlled by the global giants, whereas the real market, and the real economy, are the economies of nature. That is where local food movements and systems are becoming the solution to the multiple crises created by the monoculture monopoly system.”

Our mainstream food system is designed by corporate entities having a responsibility to shareholders, investors, and private owners, she said. The bottom line is the almighty dollar. But in maximizing certain kinds of production, we are systematically ‘weeding out’ other kinds of life.

Through the monoculture of the mind we have been establishing what Shiva termed an “Empire of Man” over the earth and lesser creatures (which for people immersed in the monoculture of the mind also includes women and indigenous peoples). It constitutes an attempt at a mechanistic takeover of the universe.

“Diversity has everything to do with food,” Shiva said. “In fact, any system that is not a diversified agriculture system is something else. It’s an industrial system that is producing non-food, food that is unworthy of being eaten and that is creating huge problems in health. Real food provides the diversity of nutrients that our body needs – the trace elements, the micronutrients…Diversity creates decentralization, and decentralization creates democracy.”

Having greater diversity of seeds and of local, smaller-scale farms and food processing operations creates a wealth of options, Shiva said. “We need to intensify diversity and biology, and we can do that only through love.”

Diversity loves diversity, because it is freedom. This, she has said, is a political act, a kind of revolution. To further that revolution, and to save seeds in her home nation of India, Shiva founded Navdanya, a nonprofit organization named for the nine crops that provide food security in India.

* * * * * * * *

With Dr. Shiva’s analysis in mind, one cannot help but question the impact and outcome of Walmart’s and Target’s announced intentions to aggressively exploit what Wall Street financial analysts have branded as “the hot organic market.”

Doubtless some good will arise from increasing the number of farms using chemical-free growing practices, and the wider availability of food with decreased chemical contaminants. But the entry of such large-scale corporate players into a traditionally modest-scale and decentralized endeavor is a game changer. It’s also representative of the industrial mindset that Vandana Shiva – and advocates of food democracy – regard as profoundly troubling.

The burgeoning interest of people in clean, local food, and the accelerated entry of Walmart and Target into the realm of organic food and sustainable agriculture, establishes a critical pivot point for the food democracy movement.

As farmer John Peterson of Angelic Organics recently explained to me, farmers get beat in to the ground when they work for prices set by wholesalers, and must struggle to make their mortgage, equipment and labor payments and all the rest.

When retailers and wholesalers are in command – as they are in industrial-scale operations – efficiency and profitability become the dominant values. Farmers are contracted under these values and thereby relegated to the role of corporate vassals, laboring in servitude to fulfill the terms of contract on quantity, quality, timing, and pricing – all factors that have little to do with nature or with the rising spirit of the food democracy movement.

“You cannot have the stewards of the land struggling under that much pressure,” farmer Peterson told me. “A farm is not just an economic unit to produce food. It’s also a living social, environmental and educational organism. It cannot be thought of as just a unit of economic production. That just commodifies the farms and farmers, as food is commodified also.”

Cultivate KC Director Katherine Kelly and Dr. Shiva.

Cultivate KC Director Katherine Kelly and Dr. Shiva.

This is one of the key points Vandana Shiva strove to get across in her Kansas City visit. We have arrived at a pivot point for the food democracy movement. We need a fundamental transformation in the way we regard and relate to farms and food. An industrial-scale monoculture of the mind, and a monoculture of putative organic farms and food, are unlikely to fulfill this ideal. Instead they present a complex range of potentially corrupting possibilities.

“We need to cultivate freedom, to cultivate hope, to cultivate diversity,” Shiva told the Kansas City audience. “We need to build the direct relationship between those who grow the food and those who eat it. Care for people has to be the guiding force for how we produce, process, and distribute our food.”

“We need to shift the paradigm of economics to measure the well being of people,” she said, “not the profits of the oligarchs.”

Shiva spoke about the drastic climate changes underway, and also the corporate hegemony at work around the world. “Our responses must be quick, but not desperate, and also simple,” she said. “Simplicity is the highest order – the simplicity of good food, safe food, and food produced and consumed in love. This can only come out of community. Cultivate compassion, love and food democracy. Food democracy is about action, changing the way we eat every time we take a bite. It’s about people learning, engaging and acting in our food systems.”

“Every movement for human freedom throughout history has needed people to lead, people who stand for love and for higher law. That’s the challenge we face now,” Shiva said. “That is what we need.”

The Kansas City audience of about 1,200 people gave Dr. Shiva a standing ovation.

The Kansas City audience of about 1,200 people gave Dr. Shiva a standing ovation.

Bowl of BioPhotons or Crock of Corporate Life Forms?

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cherrykirilian

What would you like for breakfast: a bowl of fresh, clean organic food naturally radiating the golden goodness of the Sun (aka biophotons), or a crock bulging with lab-engineered, genetically-modified, profit-patented, corporately-owned, food product (aka “novel life forms”)?

Unbidden, this queer question came to the forefront for me last week when two stories arrived all but simultaneously in my email in-box. One story was about novel genetically engineered life forms, and the other was about biophotons. I found the distinctions starkly dismaying.

First I read news from The Cornucopia Institute that Monsanto and DSM Nutritional Products are soon likely to be constructing even more “novel life forms” such as genetically engineered algae, processed with synthetic petrochemical-based solvents, then incorporating these substances, more or less surreptitiously, into “food products.”

If they follow what has so far been their standard corporate operating procedure, these concocted substances will be disseminated without labels or any other way for people to understand what they are ingesting.

In this unsettling, unknowable manner is the industrial food chain being relentlessly infiltrated with “novel life forms” generated in laboratories away from the light of the sun, and owned not by nature, but by corporations. For this I have no appetite.

Then I read about biophotons. Turns out that’s a word for describing the smallest known units of light. Biophotons are sparks of life within biological systems, and best explained by quantum mechanics: subatomic phenomena that exhibit properties of both waves and particles.

Biophotons are used by and stored in all organisms, including the food we eat, the water we drink, and our bodies. When our food is vibrant with high-quality life energy (biophotons), that energy – not just the material substance of vitamins and minerals — is absorbed into our bodies.

The existence and the importance of this basic life force has been known for centuries in China where it is spoken of as chi, in Japan where it is known as ki, in India where the ancient Sanskrit term is prana, and by various terms among many of the native peoples of the Americas.

In recent decades, the reality of the animating life force has been increasingly recognized in Western science. Physicist Fritz-Albert Popp, Ph.D., of Marburg University, researched and named this phenomenon as biophotons – particles of light that infuse life.

Dr. Popp was among the first Western investigators to indicate that this light must come, at least in part, from the foods we eat. The more light a food is able to store, the more nutritious it is.

plant-kirilianNaturally grown fresh fruits and vegetables, for example, are rich in biophotons. It’s obvious. You need not be a mystic who can see auras to understand. The reality of light waves, or biophoton energy, is obvious to any receptive and discerning eye.

Biophotons elevate the organism – such as your physical body – to a higher oscillation. As I read that, basically, if you eat fresh, clean food grown on healthy natural land, you support your body at a higher, healthier vibe.

Our bodies are made up not just of organs, tissue, and blood vessels, but are also composed of light. Biophotons enliven, order and regulate living organisms.

The greater your supply of light force from fresh, clean foods, the greater the vitality of your overall electromagnetic field (aura), and consequently the more energy available for maintaining optimal health. In matters biophotonic, quality as much as quantity is key.

Physicist Popp theorizes that the biophoton light emissions of healthy people follow biological rhythms, and that those rhythms are connected to the measureable biorhythms of the earth. There is a direct correlation and an active resonance amidst land, food, and people.

Clean, healthy land tended organically or Biodynamically gives rise to clean healthy food rich in biophotons (chi, ki, prana, life energy). It’s that simple. Starkly simple.

Organic Justice: An Update for the Common Good

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The Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., has announced that on January 10, 2013 it will hear the appeal in a landmark legal case of critical importance to all who eat organic food: Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA) et al v. Monsanto.

This case is also, notably, of direct relevance to Evrett Lunquist, who was the subject of my November 14 report – America’s Organic Inspectors Chilled by Libel Case. In addition to that precedent-seting libel case, Lunquist and wife Ruth Chantry of Common Good Farm in Raymond, Nebraska are also among the coalition of organic farms and organizations which have banded together to press the class-action lawsuit against Monsanto.

The Organic Seed Grower’s lawsuit challenges the validity of Monsanto’s transgenic seed patents, and seeks preemptive court protection for farmers when Monsanto’s genetically engineered seed trespasses onto their farms and contaminates their natural, organic crops.

The plaintiff community of organic farmers asserts that this case is not just an academic dispute of patent law. Rather it is a critical issue affecting family farmers across the USA, with implications of global significance.

With the defeat of the GMO labeling proposition in California earlier this month, the OSGATA suit against Monsanto takes center stage in the national debate about genetically engineered food.

While the GMO invasion matter is being contested in court, this November the final report of the USDA’s Advisory Committee on Biotechnology & 21st Century Agriculture threw another hatchet at the roots of organic farming and food. The committee formally recommended that organic farmers be obliged to pay money to self-insure themselves against unwanted GMO contamination. The National Organic Coalition immediately issued a statement of opposition to this measure.

If the USDA implements such a requirement, it would be tantamount to  a mob “protection plan” — forcing farmers to pay protection money to insure that they are not ruined financially by the full-scale onslaught of the GMO Industrial Complex, Inc.

No amount of insurance, however, will protect the land, the farmers themselves, or the food they produce, from GMO contamination.

Rather than protecting clean land and farms, this recommended policy would place full cost and full responsibility for contamination not on the perpetrators, but instead on the farmers whose land and crops have been transgressed. It would, in effect, turn the common-sense understanding of justice on its head. In no way would such a policy serve the common good.

Stop Trying to Genetically Modify My Free Will

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Back off, everyone. I will have none of it.

Ultimately, when I strip away all the arguments pro or con about labeling genetically modified food (GMOs), for me it comes down to the core issue of free will. I have no flexibility whatsoever around that issue. I refuse to surrender my free will. In this regard I am an unrepentant fundamentalist.

Spiral Meditation in felt and fiber by Kalyna Pidwerbesky.

The dreadful reality of the moment is that my free will – and your free will – is continually stripped away by the anonymous promulgation of unlabeled, largely untested and increasingly suspect GMO food.

Twice in the last year I have written at length about my whole range of GMO concerns: The Dangerously Deranged Ethics of Biotechnology in September, 2011, and Left Behind by the Transgenic Tsunami in January, 2012.  But now, as matters come to a head, I again feel the need to add my voice to the majority chorus demanding respect for basic human free will, and for nature: Stop sneaking genetically modified food into my diet. It is an act showing utter disregard for my — and everyone else’s — basic and sovereign free will.

I value honesty and integrity. Consequently, I demand to know what is in the food I take into my body. The free market is in theory supposed to provide consumers with accurate information about products so we can make informed choices. But in the case of genetically modified food it is not doing it’s job. At all.

Deliberately veiling the truth from consumers, corporations have planted millions of acres of land, and foisted GMO food or GMO constituents into every conceivable morsel of the human and animal food chain, save for true organics.

Finally now, as governments have abdicated their responsibility to the people, the people themselves are rising up to assert their right to know what’s in their food, and to exercise their collective free will in choosing which foods they will take into their bodies through their mouths. We see this rising up everywhere, including in the national Just Label It campaign, as well as in the crucial Proposition 37 campaign for GMO labels in California.

As the Organic Consumers Association put it, “It’s not a stretch to say that if we lose the GMO labeling battle in California, we may never get another chance to force Big Biotech to come clean about what they are doing to the food…”

In this primary matter of moral liberty, I will not acquiesce. Millions of people – the great majority of people – have similar feelings. They want a choice. Government and corporations must be made to name what they are doing to our food, and to allow us choice.

As expressed by old friends, the Native American founders of Her Native Roots Herbals, this is the core of it: “The American public does not, and never has had, any way to actively choose, or actively avoid GMO food. The real nature of the food is hidden. Consumers have no opportunity whatsoever for informed consent about the nature of the food they feed themselves and their children.

“The danger is real and the scientific evidence validating this is beginning to accumulate…we cannot escape this new assault on our lives, our health, our environment. Our bodies are not designed to mutate fast enough to accommodate the barrage of alien and synthetic ingredients…

Some suggestions from the Native teachers on ways we can exercise our free will and take care of our bodies in an effort to reclaim our sovereignty:

  • Wash all produce to reduce the pesticides, which generally accumulate on the outside. But if the food is GMO in origin, then the food itself is the problem, not just the pesticides which are then in the food not just on it.
  • Look for labels that clearly state “Non-GMO” even on cooking oils, snacks, breads, pasta. Most chicken, beef cattle and hogs are being raised on GMO feed. Surreptitiously, it’s in your meat, It’s in your milk. It’s in your eggs.
  • Support the health of your liver, which is interior to the body and thus not visible or otherwise noticeable. Yet as a filter for substances passing through the body, the liver may accumulate toxins and develop hideous tumors internally long before they are detectable.
  • Ask restaurants to serve only non-GMO foods. If they hear this message from enough patrons, they are more likely to consider taking a stance.

To these steps I would add four others:

  • As much as possible avoid processed foods, which often contain hidden GMO additives, in favor of fresh, whole, organically grown foods.
  • Invest a half an hour of time to become educated on the subject by watching the free Youtube version of Genetic Roulette, a film by Jeffrey Smith and the Institute for Responsible Genetics.
  • Support passage of California’s Proposition 37, even if you live in another state. As California goes on the Right to Know question, so goes the nation.
  • Support and participate in  local community farms and food projects. These are realms where you can be certain — with the advantage of first-hand knowledge — that the food you are obtaining and eating is clean.

++++++++

The image Spiral Meditation used by permission of Kalyna Pidwerbesky.

 

Left Behind: Unraptured by the Transgenic Tsunami

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When Stewart Brand spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in mid-January, he broadcast a vision of a Genetically Modified (GM) future toward which he felt we should all be charging with bright-eyed enthusiasm. “Get out there where it’s getting weird,” he exhorted, “and get weird with it.”

As I sat and listened to Brand talk of the future, I was carried in reverie not forward but backward to 1964. That’s the year my mom took my sister, my brothers and me to the New York City World’s Fair where we made a pilgrimage through the most celebrated exhibit of all, Futurama. Sponsored by another GM (General Motors), the exhibit offered a glimpse into what life would be like in the future — as GM engineers wanted to conceive of it. Of course, the future materialized its own way, not in accordance with immaculately engineered visions.

Likewise, Stewart Brand’s exhilarating vision of a corporately-owned, genetically-modified World of Tomorrow — a world subsisting on a diet of what he calls ‘Green Ag BioTech’ — seems to me unlikely and ill advised.

Stewart Brand

Founder of the famously countercultural Whole Earth Catalog back in 1968, Brand now styles himself as an “ecopragmatist.” He said that three global dynamics – climate change, urbanization and biotechnology – are causing people like himself to reverse long-held opinions and to embrace nuclear power and genetically modified food.

Brand is vivid and likeable on the stage, and his talk was expansive and entertaining. Because he is such a prominent convert to biotech, his philosophical reincarnation as an ecopragmatist advocate for nuclear power and GMO food might well have a measure of influence. But not with me.

His talk left me unconvinced and unraptured by the whole vast global laboratory experiment on nature and our food that is currently being executed with slam-bam systemic speed. I just don’t hear the call of the land as a plea for more industrially created, corporately owned genes and the petrochemicals necessary to sustain them. What I hear instead is a full-throated call for natural respect. Same as it ever was.

Special Pleading

Brand told the story of how on his way to Nebraska to speak he had flown over the Sierras. While in the air he saw that there was no snow pack at all on the mountains this year. This kind of ominous drought, he said, has not occurred since the 1880s. Climate change is catastrophically real, he then affirmed, saying it was a central motivating force for the work he does in the world.

In the context of our unfolding climate calamity, Brand asked rhetorically, “What is moral and ethical?” He answered his own question in the same breath, saying that nuclear power, genetically modified plants and animals, and geo-engineering are all essential ways to the future, and that we — corporations, universities, governments and amateurs — ought to go full steam ahead into a more fully nuclear-powered, genetically modified world.

Brand said that at this point in history environmentalists have only hand wringing to contribute to the future. He derided “enviros,” saying they are people caught up in a web of suspicions and superstitions. They are just “sad reactionaries,” he lamented.

Aflame with hot scriptures of material technology, Brand allowed his rap to devolve. He uttered a disheartening damnation of unbelievers. In the years to come, Brand warned from his pulpit on stage, the leading edge of biotech will not be here in America but rather far afield in China, Africa and the Third World. Those places lack opposition, and have minimal regulation. In places like America where there is opposition to these thrusts, he warned, people such as organic and sustainable farmers and their supporters will be “left behind.” Organic farming will be more expensive and will yield food with less nutritional value than patented transgenic crops. Organics will become irrelevant.

Brand tossed off several ad hominem slams to imply that opposition to a GM future arises not from authentic, evidence- and ethics-based concerns, but rather from irrational fear.

In that sense his presentation was a special pleading: a form of argumentation where a person excludes facts or details that would upend the case they are attempting to make. Enraptured with his subject, Brand stuck to sweeping generalizations, and neither acknowledged nor refuted the substantial body of legitimate concerns about GM corporate industrial farms and food. This struck me as a disservice to the debate.

Likewise, Brand said nothing about the ramifications of corporate ownership and monopoly over various life forms. He said nothing about informed choice or human free will, absolutely massive aspects of the GM miasma. He said nothing about the mounting studies and literature reviews documenting concern about the impact of GMOs on human health and the natural world over time. He said nothing of the Precautionary Principle. And he said not a word about the suicides in India of hundreds of thousands of farmers — the largest wave of suicides in human history — in consequence of the debt and suffering incurred by becoming involved with corporate biotech.

These matters — scientific concerns about GMOs, the free will of human beings, and a saddening, stupefying wave of suicides — must be addressed in any discussion of corporate industrial agriculture and GM seeds and food. To ignore them, or to gloss them over, creates a dangerous distortion of reality.

Sans Spectrum

At one point Brand showed a PowerPoint slide with a double-headed arrow to illustrate the spectrum of opinion on climate change: from total denial to full acceptance. But he made no allowance for a justifiable spectrum of opinion on GM food. In his view, at least as I heard him express it, there are only two stances: sanguine acceptance of corporate genetic manipulation of the food chain, or pitiful irrational fear of the future.

There are millions of people who, for sound ethical, scientific, and spiritual reasons, oppose GMO-chemical farms and food. And there’s a mounting library of research that should give any thoughtful person pause.

The health consequences of eating genetically modified organisms are still largely unknown. GMOs just have not been proven to be safe over the long term. Increasingly, studies are suggesting that grave health problems — for plants, animals and humans — may well be caused by GMOs. We’re all still guinea pigs. Make no mistake: the jury is still out.

Consider. Nearly 50 countries — including Brazil, China, South Korea and the European Union—already ban many genetically engineered foods altogether. They also generally require labeling of GMO products so their people will know what they are eating.

As expressed by UC Berkeley professor of microbial ecology, Ignacio Chapela, “…the fundamental truth stands that over the decades no real benefit has offset the proven harm caused by GMOs.”

Most Americans, however, are every day ingesting plate loads of lab-created DNA while having absolutely no idea about what they are doing, and no choice in the matter. There are no labels. Our free will has been rendered inconsequential, even though surveys show overwhelmingly (93%) that Americans do want labels. More than half a million people have already signed a petition to the FDA asking for the basic information and protection of labels.

For these and other reasons I have written about, I am altogether at peace with the idea of being left behind by the corporate GM onslaught. I remain unraptured. I’ll take my stand for the future on clean, organic land and food. Same as it ever was.

A Titanic Transgenic Courtroom Clash

The debate about GM food will amp up considerably this year, starting on January 31. That’s the day that the courts will hold a preliminary hearing on the lawsuit the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association (OSGATA), and others have brought against Monsanto. The hearing will determine whether this landmark case goes forward.

Along with 83 family farmers and organic ag groups — a group totaling over 300,000 members — OSGTA is challenging Monsanto’s patents on genetically modified seed.  The plaintiffs are carrying a banner in a crucial courtroom stance for everyone concerned about GM transgenic food.

The 300,000 member plaintiff group will set their case out in opening remarks at the hearing: “Society stands on the precipice of forever being bound to transgenic agriculture and transgenic food. Coexistence between transgenic seed and organic seed is impossible because transgenic seed contaminates and eventually overcomes organic seed.”

The Plaintiffs say they are seeking relief from the court because organic, biodynamic, and other farmers need legal protection against contamination by Monsanto’s transgenic crops. They will present evidence to show transgenic food does not serve the public interest, nutritionally, environmentally, agronomically, or genetically.

This case is of resounding significance not just for farmers but also for consumers. There are far-reaching potential health consequences of transgenic food, particularly for future generations of plants, animals, and people. All this and more will arise for courtroom debate.

Futurama – GM at the 1964 World’s Fair

Cereal Crimes: the Bottom of the Breakfast Bowl

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Parents, children, anyone who routinely sits down to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal, will want to take a look at the new report on ‘Cereal Crimes‘ released by the Cornucopia Institute.

The report makes plain the sharp and important difference between cereals that are actually grown and produced with clean, sustainable, organic methods and materials, and those cereals marketed with the vague and often misleading label ‘natural.’

The term ‘natural’ on a food product should, at this point, simply raise questions for consumers, who will want to read the product label more carefully. What is really in it?

In the USA there are no restrictions whatsoever for foods labeled “natural.” According to Cornucopia, the term often denotes little more than marketing hype from companies seeking to exploit consumer desire for clean food produced in a genuinely sustainable manner. So called ‘natural’ products may well be grown with chemicals and include genetically engineered grains or other ingredients.

If you eat cereal, or if your children do, you will want to check Cornucopia’s online Cereal Scorecard to see how your favorite brands have been rated.

The Dangerously Deranged Ethics of Biotech Ag

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My unease about genetically engineered crops and animals dates back to the beginning. I had immediate concerns in the late 1980s and early 90s as I began to learn about the technology and associated marketplace machinations. Over the following decades as more and more facts emerged my concerns deepened.

Then just a couple of weeks ago my misgivings were rudely provoked to the forefront when I read an op-ed column by Nina Federoff, published in The New York Times. Her column amounted to a fact-deficient apologia for the GMO industry, and an exhortation to charge heedlessly forward with genetically engineered food. For me, and for millions of other people, this is a massively deranged and dangerous proposition.

So many factors are coming to a head now. Widespread famine, a global land grab, soaring food prices, a horde of profit-mad speculators, drought on the scale of the Dust Bowl, a host of other wildly wobbling environmental events, and a huge, well-organized, well-funded propaganda push by corporate industrial agriculture to claim that the only sensible way forward is with genetic engineering and its allied cauldron of petrochemical-based herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides. But it’s not the only way forward. It is, instead, a profoundly perilous pathway encouraged by what I regard as dangerously deranged ethics.

After the Times published Federoff’s column, well-reasoned rebuttals came swiftly from Anna Lappe writing for Civil Eats, from Tom Philpott in Grist, and from Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, Senior Scientist, Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). Individually and collectively, their articles constitute a convincing, fact-backed refutation of Federoff’s claims for GMO safety and suitability. They effectively assert the case for a global 21st century agrarian vision of human-scale organic sustainable farms and food.

Their responses to the Times column deepened my understanding of why it’s fundamentally important to advance clean natural organic practices and products. They also impelled me to consider again my anxiety about the deranged ethics evidenced in the GMO industry: utter disregard of the baseline Precautionary Principle, repeated roughshod override of human free will, and a radically impudent abnegation of the Seventh Generation teaching.

Seventh Generation Teaching

Tipi for the Prayer Vigil for the Earth at the Washington Monument. All people of all traditions are welcome. This year the Vigil is set for September 30 - October 2, 2011 in Washington, DC. Photo courtesy of The Circle.

In the market-driven rush to bring GMO crops into the fields and thence into the people, I see forces and institutions fundamentally averse to the common sense teaching of the Seventh Generation. That precept — native to North America — holds that leaders are responsible for considering the impact of their decisions on the seventh generation yet to come.

Most memorably, I heard the seven generations teaching expounded by Leon Shenandoah, the late elder and chief in service to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Six Nations).  I shook hands and spoke with Leon in 1995 in a ring of tipis set up for the annual, ecumenical Prayer Vigil for the Earth at the base of the Washington Monument in our U.S. capital city.

“Look behind you,” Grandfather Leon said. “See your sons and your daughters. They are your future. Look farther and see your sons’ and your daughters’ children and their children’s children even unto the Seventh Generation. That’s the way we were taught. Think about it: you yourself are a Seventh Generation.”

Another Six Nations elder, Oren Lyons, has commented, “As a general injunction to live responsibly and respectfully, and as a practical guide to specific moral decision-making, the seventh generation principle may be without equal.”

I agree. I look around and I see that just one generation has passed since the widespread introduction of GMO crops. Already potentially catastrophic problems have begun to arise by the bushel. These are amply documented in the rebuttals to Federoff’s column.

Free Will

A second troubling realm of GMO industry ethics and practices involves the ongoing violation of human free will. From the outset, the industry has insisted and aggressively lobbied to make sure there are never any identifying labels on GMO products.

The American public does not, and never has had, any way to actively choose, or actively avoid GMO food. The real nature of the food is hidden, and consumers have no opportunity whatsoever for informed consent about the nature of the food they feed themselves and their children.

Out of respect for the sacrosanct nature of human free will, we should be able to know the truth of the food that is set before us. But we do not know this in 2011, nor can we. There are no identifying labels to let people know they are eating genetically engineered food. Our free will, thus, is continually disregarded and disrespected.

In response to this abuse, many citizens and organizations are actively advocating the labeling of all genetically engineered foods: to restore for consumers a free-will choice in the marketplace. You can begin to learn about the burgeoning movement for labeling GMO foods at the Non-GMO Project, and at the Truth in Labeling project.

Precautionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle is a simple and sensible ethical guideline. It holds that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm to the public or to the environment, the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those promoting the product or action. In other words, you must establish that your action or product will not cause harm before you promulgate it and actually cause irreversible harm to human beings or to the natural world essential to life.

This common-sense principle is a statutory requirement in the law of the European Union, but not in the USA. The USA has, in fact, lobbied actively and secretly — without citizen knowledge or approval — to pressure European governments to ease or overlook legitimate objections to genetically engineered food.

Mounting Evidence

The evidence continues to mount that GMO technologies and practices are causing profound harm. Respected agricultural researchers are repeatedly raising serious concerns.

In mid-August Robert Kremer, a microbiologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, told a Kansas City audience that repeated use of the chemical glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup herbicide, adversely impacts plant roots.

He said also that fifteen years of research indicates that the chemical is causing harmful changes in soil, and potentially reducing yields of the genetically modified crops that dominate vast acreage in North America and elsewhere around the world.

Research shows that genetically engineered crops do not, in fact, yield more than conventional crops, he said. Nutrient deficiencies tied to the root disease problems are likely a limiting factor for crop yield, as is the burgeoning plague of poison-resistant Superweeds unleashed by the overuse of chemical herbicides used on GMO crops. Further and alarmingly, news reports revealed this week that researchers are now finding significant levels of the poison widely infesting both the water and the air of farm states.

Meanwhile, Michael McNeill, an agronomist who owns Ag Advisory Ltd. in Algona, Iowa, has pointed out that scientists are seeing new, alarming patterns in plants and animals due to increased use of glyphosate on GMO crops. “When you spray glyphosate on a plant, ” McNeill has said, “it’s like giving it AIDS.”

McNeill reports that he and his colleagues are seeing a higher incidence of infertility and early-term abortion in cattle and hogs that are fed on GM crops. He adds that poultry fed on the suspect crops have been exhibiting reduced fertility rates.

Ominously, the warnings of these scientists echo what Purdue University professor emeritus Don Huber has been saying: “I believe the threat we are facing from this pathogen (nurtured in the context of GMO crops and glyphosate) is unique and of a high-risk status…it should be treated as an emergency.”

Huber said he sees the GMO-glyphosate industrial ag complex as having led to an increase in cancers of the liver, thyroid, kidneys, and skin melanomas, as well as sharp increases in allergic reactions in general,  and an increase on an epidemic-scale in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Ethos and Mythos

Corporations, universities, and governments are racing blithely forward as if the benefits and safety of GMO technology are above question. But for anyone paying attention now, that is clearly not so. A comprehensive 2011 literature review documents the reality that nothing is settled. The GMO debate is still wide open.

The authors of the literature review reported that most studies claiming that GM foods are as nutritional and as safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates. They conclude: “the controversial debate on GMOs…remains completely open at all levels.”  That conclusion should raise ethical red flags for everyone.

The words ethos and ethics derive from the Greek root ethikos, meaning moral, and it’s the root of our modern term for moral competence. While ethics may be individual, ethos is communal and arises out of common experience and insight. It denotes a characteristic spirit—the guiding beliefs and values of a team, a company, a tribe, or a nation.

As we confront radically changing circumstances in our economy, energy supply, and food chain, we have an opportunity to change and reconstitute our ethos and the way we live with the land.  The corporate, university, and government institutions that comprise industrial biotech agriculture have embraced an ethos of speed, efficiency, and profit and as a consequence created an environmental behemoth of threatening mien. Yet we have potential to make a deliberate shift to embrace a conservative but enlightened ethos not just out of necessity, but also out of wisdom. Perhaps mythos will be a factor in bringing about this urgently necessary shift.

Forty years ago a small group of citizens — seeing profound harm being inflicted upon the natural world that supports human life, and impelled by their shared ethos — formed the nucleus of Greenpeace.

While the actions of that seed group were mandated by immediate realities, much of their inspiration came from the realm of mythos — specifically, the legend of the rainbow warriors. The myth tells of how in a time of great peril, people of all colors and faiths — in response to ominous degradation and disturbance of the natural world that supports us all — band together peacefully and give birth to a clean world based on principles of respect. That modern myth is so powerful and offers so much hope that as a journalist I’ve been drawn to write about it repeatedly in several nonfiction books: Legend of the Rainbow Warriors, Odyssey of the 8th Fire, and most recently in Tales of the Whirling Rainbow.

Greenpeace long ago embraced a life-preserving ethos including the Precautionary Principle, respect for human free will, and the teaching of the Seventh Generation. The orrganization has called for a ban on all genetically engineered crop field trials in Australia and elsewhere.

A new report from Greenpeace and GM Freeze analyzes almost 200 independent and peer-reviewed scientific studies. Those studies show that the culture of genetically engineered food and its chemical supplements has serious problems, and is linked with upsurges in rates of cancer, birth defects and neurological illnesses including Parkinson’s. This study also echoes resoundingly the sharp warnings of Don M. Huber.

As The Wall Street Journal noted in a recent article about Greenpeace, an emerging consensus among eco-activists is that environmentalism is now a matter of life and death. It is in this alarming context that new executive director Kumi Naidoo and all of Greenpeace are preparing this month to mark their 40anniversary with the launch of Rainbow Warrior III, a successor to the group’s famous flagship sunk by the French government in 1985.

Perhaps the new ship —  a visible manifestation of the mythos and a powerful action-oriented expression of a wisdom-based ethos — will help spark and encourage a necessary moral evolution in citizens, governments, universities and corporations.

The new Rainbow Warrior III will be launched this month to mark the 40th anniversary of Greenpeace, fusing mythos and ethos.

Overheard at the County Fair

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Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) faced a heaping dose of raw voter intensity last week, as news accounts told the tale. At a town meeting in the capital city of Lincoln on Monday, August 8, he heard from a variegated crop of angry Nebraskans venting from the right and the left about America’s dizzily declining economic prospects and the political ploys in Washington that provoked the most recent twists and downturns.

But when Johanns arrived at the Lancaster County Fair later that afternoon, the scene was serious and generally sedate. He came to the fairgrounds to talk about the farming outlook for the nation and for Nebraska. Because he is a former Secretary of the USDA (2005-07), and current member of the Senate Agriculture Committee, his words have potential for resonance. But he didn’t say much. He was smooth, polished, and adroit at skirting potential triggers of controversy. His main points of information:

  • The downgrading of USA debt rating, and the wobbly economy, mean the USDA budget will be drastically diminished. When he was Secretary, he said, about 63% of the USDA budget went to nutrition programs like SNAP and school meals; but now that figure is up to about 83% leaving only about 17% for actual farm programs. “Be prepared for further downgrades,” Johanns said. “The weak economy will inevitably have a huge influence on the next ag bill.”
  • “There will be no sacred cows,” Johanns said in reference to impending budget cuts. The USDA ethanol subsidies that have aided and abetted the spread of GMO corn across the Heartland is all but certain to be cut. “There just aren’t votes for it,” said Johanns, who has been a big supporter of the subsidies in the past. Undoubtedly the decline of support among other Senators is the basic realization that it takes more energy and money to produce a gallon of ethanol that you can get from it. It’s a losing proposition.
  • The 2012 Farm Bill is on its way, Johanns also noted, but he expects that nothing much will happen this year (2011). As he sees it, there is no momentum for action in either the Senate or the House. The key areas of debate for the 2012 farm bill will be around crop insurance, the safety net for farmers.

The meeting soon gave way to questions. Chuck Hassebrook stood to ask Johanns to take a good look at the Grassley Johnson Rural America Preservation Act. Proposed by Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IN) and Tim Johnson (D-SD), the act could close loopholes and make the existing subsidy limits real.

Hassebrook, who is not only executive director of the Center for Rural Affairs but also a Regent for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a major land-grant institution, said that it’s time to put an end to mega subsidies for mega farms.

He said we need to put effective and meaningful caps on payments to the nation’s largest farms because we cannot afford them, and they harm rural America since the payments are often used to drive smaller operations out of business.

In the late August afternoon at the county fair, though, the most heartfelt and insightful message came from Nancy Packard of Lincoln. She attended the listening session with her elderly mother. Ms. Packard introduced herself as a Nebraskan with deep roots. She noted the Heartland farming efforts of her father, her grandfather, and her great grandfather.

“It takes 10,000 years to make a prairie,” Ms. Packard said, “I know that because I have been working on re-establishing the prairie on a piece of our land for 20 years. It’s not easy…Now we are using this resource, this ancient beautiful prairie soil not to grow food but to grow GMO corn with toxic chemicals to supplement fuel for motor vehicle fuel. It’s very, very wrong.

“We need to go back to smaller, family scale farms,” she told Senator Johanns. “And we need to stop ripping up and destroying the earth for energy. We need to draw our strength from the land and our energy from the Sun.”