Cash Mob!Our goal is to support local family farmers by each spending $20 at the Alachua County 441 Farmers Market. Come check it out Saturday, February 4th 8:30AM to 1:00PM. Click here to see the flyer.

via Florida Organic Growers.

Tory-run Wandsworth council plans to introduce a borough-wide “smoke control area” to stop residents lighting fires in homes. A town hall report said the move was based on the “growing contribution of domestic smoke to deteriorating air quality” in the borough. According to clean air campaigners, London has the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide particles in the air of all 27 capitals cities across the European Union.

via SOUTH LONDON PRESS TODAY | NEWS | Enjoying a coal fire in Wandsworth may soon cost you £1,000 | 2012.

The American Chemistry Council has defended the wide use of BPA and said that low doses of the chemical pose no human health risks. Still, the National Institutes of Health noted in a September 2011 paper that research with laboratory animals has shown low doses of BPA produces a wide spectrum of developmental and reproductive side effects, including an increase in aggressive behavior and early onset of sexual maturation.

Recent studies also have raised concern that exposure to the chemical is as frequent as checking out at the grocery store. Receipts and canned food top the list of BPA sources for the average consumer. Here’s the evidence:…read more: Top BPA sources | cleveland.com.

When I wrote recently about the next generation of genetically engineered seeds, I was in truth referring to the next next generation. The fact is that the next actual generation of seeds is already out of the lab and poised for approval by the USDA.

And I’m not talking about Monsanto’s recently approved “drought-tolerant” seeds, which the USDA itself has observed are no more drought-tolerant than existing conventional hybrids.

No, the “exciting” new seeds are simply resistant to more than one kind of pesticide. Rather than resisting Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup alone, they will now also be resistant to Dow AgroScience’s pesticide 2,4-D .

“A new pesticide,“ you say. “How exciting!” Except 2,4-D, despite its catchy name, has been around since World War II. Not only is it one of the most commonly used pesticides in the world, but it came to further prominence in certain circles when it was incorporated as a main ingredient in Agent Orange.

Indeed, as with research into new antibiotics, research into new — potentially safer — pesticides has come to a virtual standstill. Like the drug pipeline, the pesticide pipeline has run dry. Instead, biotech companies are going back to the older, more toxic chemicals, like 2,4-D, for inspiration.

And while you’d expect opposition to these new products from the likes of Tom Philpott of Mother Jones or Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists, one place you might not expect to see it is the pages of the influential, peer-reviewed journal BioScience.

And yet there it is! Led by David Mortensen, a team of scientists from Penn State, Montana State, and the University of New Hampshire published a paper that describes the effects on agriculture from an over-reliance on glyphosate and an overuse of Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. It also discusses at length the risks of using new seeds that “stack” resistance to various pesticides into one genetically engineered package.

In short, they say that you can’t believe Monsanto and Dow when they hype gyphosate resistance plus 2,4-D resistance as two great tastes that taste great together. The two companies are promising to eliminate the growing superweed menace — the one that has caused farmers to abandon thousands of acres of prime farmland and to return to older, more toxic pesticides to protect their crops.

What these scientists conclude is that with so many weeds resistant to glyphosate already, it won’t take long for them to develop resistance to 2,4-D as well.  According to the study’s authors, almost half of the nearly 40 species of weeds that are already resistant to two pesticides have arisen since 2005 (i.e. since the Roundup Ready era began). In short, the crisis Monsanto and Dow are promising to head off is already here.

There are other problems with 2,4-D, such as a strong link to cancer and a much greater tendency to drift on the wind (and thus contaminate nearby fields and waterways) — problems that the development of the less toxic, less volatile glyphosate was supposed to have “solved.” Yet now, thanks to Big Ag’s over-reliance on these genetically engineered one-hit wonders, which encouraged farmers to use too much glyphosate too often, we’re back to square one — or rather to square toxic.

There is, however, an alternative — and one that doesn’t require a total transition to organic agriculture (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). Mortensen and his team describe in detail a practice called Integrated Weed Management (IWM). Like its sibling, Integrated Pest Management (IPM), IWM does involve the use of chemical pesticides. But it’s a judicious use that can act as a last resort rather than a first line of defense. As the paper states:

IWM integrates tactics, such as crop rotation, cover crops, competitive crop cultivars, the judicious use of tillage, and targeted herbicide application, to reduce weed populations and selection pressures that drive the evolution of resistant weeds.

It’s designed for production agriculture and would most likely increase farmer profits, since farmers would get the benefit of reduced seed and pesticide costs and no real loss of productivity. But, as with the climate-friendly agriculture I discussed the other day, you’re unlikely to see IWM embraced by Big Ag any time soon.

The USDA, along with the entire large-scale agriculture economy, is built around the profits of pesticide and biotech companies. You need only watch the USDA approve new genetically engineered products — which the agency admits represents a threat to other forms of agriculture — to see how deep in the tank to these companies our government is.

Tom Philpott observed that with this latest development, agriculture is at “a crossroads.” I disagree. I would say that if the USDA approves this new multiple pesticide-resistant GMO seed as it’s expected to, large-scale agriculture in the country will have reached a true dead end.

A 17-year veteran of both traditional and online media, Tom is a founder and Executive Director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a Contributing Writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. Tom’s long and winding road to food politics writing passed through New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, Florence, Italy and Philadelphia (which has a vibrant progressive food politics and sustainable agriculture scene, thank you very much). In addition to Grist, his writing has appeared online in the American Prospect, Slate, the New York Times and The New Republic. He is on record as believing that wrecking the planet is a bad idea. Follow him on Twitter.

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Green Drinks (www.gogreennation.org/category/green-drinks/) will be held 6 – 8 p.m. Feb. 1 at Cafe C, 424 Northwest 8th Avenue – opening this night just for us, so please come hungry and thirsty!

The UF Office of Sustainability is sponsoring Green Drinks this month as a kick-off event of their month-long Food For Thought series highlighting sustainable and local foods. The evening will be co-hosted by Cafe C, a sustainable restaurant owned by Celebrations Catering, in celebration of our partnership with Celebrations to use their lovely Villa East (301 N. Main) as our venue for Cinema Verde (Feb. 24 – March 2).

Cinema Verde NEWS

ATTEND AND ADVERTISE: Our plans for Cinema Verde are evolving rapidly. We’ll have fairs to “Celebrate Nature” and provide “Sustainable Solutions” Feb. 24 and 25, and we invite environmental organizations and sustainable businesses to participate. We’re also creating our program and Sustainable Business Directory, which we would to be as comprehensive a resource as possible – please let us know if you’d like to be included. Details on our schedule and program opportunities are here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

CHECK OUT OUR FILMS: While we won’t be releasing our full film schedule until the end of January, we have posted links to a few films we plan to include. Directors and principals of many of these films would like to attend – please help bring them in by making a donation to cover their expenses! View the trailers for these films and donate here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

FREE TICKETS!! Wear your Cinema Verde t-shirt around town, and if we see you we’ll give you a free ticket to one of our films! We’re selling tickets online and at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, where you can get a shirt, too!

We welcome support of our 2012 festival, which is just around the corner, Feb. 24 – March 2, 2012. There will be tabling and booth opportunities for environmental organizations and businesses during our opening weekend and also during the week at individual films.

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley, Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
www.CinemaVerde.org, PO Box 358711, Gainesville, FL 32635, 352.327.3560
Cinema Verde is a Florida not-for-profit corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) public charity by the IRS: Contributions are tax deductible.Thank you for your support!
Publisher: www.GoGreenNation.org

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Jan. 30 Sponsor Reception: Don Davis will host a reception to thank past and potential Cinema Verde sponsors at Capital City Bank, 1417 N. Main St., 5:30 – 7 p.m., please RSVP (Trish@CinemaVerde.org) if you’d like to join our circle of winners! Thank you, Don!

Green Drinks (www.gogreennation.org/category/green-drinks/) will be held 6 – 8 p.m. Feb. 1 at Cafe C, 424 Northwest 8th Avenue – opening this night just for us, so please come hungry and thirsty!

The UF Office of Sustainability is sponsoring Green Drinks this month as a kick-off event of their month-long Food For Thought series highlighting sustainable and local foods. The evening will be co-hosted by Cafe C, a sustainable restaurant owned by Celebrations Catering, in celebration of our partnership with Celebrations to use their lovely Villa East (301 N. Main) as our venue for Cinema Verde (Feb. 24 – March 2).

Cinema Verde NEWS

ATTEND AND ADVERTISE: Our plans for Cinema Verde are evolving rapidly. We’ll have fairs to “Celebrate Nature” and provide “Sustainable Solutions” Feb. 24 and 25, and we invite environmental organizations and sustainable businesses to participate. We’re also creating our program and Sustainable Business Directory, which we would to be as comprehensive a resource as possible – please let us know if you’d like to be included. Details on our schedule and program opportunities are here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

CHECK OUT OUR FILMS: While we won’t be releasing our full film schedule until the end of January, we have posted links to a few films we plan to include. Directors and principals of many of these films would like to attend – please help bring them in by making a donation to cover their expenses! View the trailers for these films and donate here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

FREE TICKETS!! Wear your Cinema Verde t-shirt around town, and if we see you we’ll give you a free ticket to one of our films! We’re selling tickets online and at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, where you can get a shirt, too!

We welcome support of our 2012 festival, which is just around the corner, Feb. 24 – March 2, 2012. There will be tabling and booth opportunities for environmental organizations and businesses during our opening weekend and also during the week at individual films.

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley, Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
www.CinemaVerde.org, PO Box 358711, Gainesville, FL 32635, 352.327.3560
Cinema Verde is a Florida not-for-profit corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) public charity by the IRS: Contributions are tax deductible.Thank you for your support!
Publisher: www.GoGreenNation.org

Huge thanks go to Brett Shipp for staying on this story. To recap:

• A chemical plant blew up and I knew right away that fracking was involved.
• Chemical fire spawns fish kill, criminal investigation
• Waxahachie chemical firm cited for environmental violations
• Chemical plant relocation upsetting Ellis County residents
• Ellis County Commissioners catch heat from chemical plant foes

So that was that. A bunch of fish died, people got sick, water was contaminated, the plant wants to locate next to a diary and… life goes on.

Then it started raining.

Now the rain is washing away the containment areas and the chemicals are causing massive foaming in the creeks. Here is Shipp’s story with some great video.  But, don’t worry because Jerrell with TCEQ is on the scene and they are monitoring it.

People, people, PEOPLE!!!  This is nothing new. We have been trying to tell you about foaming creeks, ditches and well water for years now.

WFAA-TV posts video with a report on its site.

If you missed watching Al Jazeera’s The Stream special on Monsanto’s biopiracy in India while advancing Bt Brinjal, and its implications, you can catch it on You Tube. Its about 45 mins. long).  The programme covers many diverse issues, in addition to biopiracy.

The strict new federal standards limiting pollution from power plants are meant to safeguard human health. But they should have an important side benefit, according to a study being released on Tuesday: protecting a broad array of wildlife that has been harmed by mercury emissions. Songbirds and bats suffer some of the same types of neurological disorders from mercury as humans and especially children do, says the study, “Hidden Risk,” by the Biodiversity Research Institute, a nonprofit organization in Gorham, Me., that investigates emerging environmental threats.

via Study Finds Mercury in More Northeastern Bird Species – NYTimes.com.

Anyone who’s been stung by a bee knows they can inflict an outsized pain for such tiny insects. It makes a strange kind of sense, then, that their demise would create an outsized problem for the food system by placing the more than 70 cropsthey pollinate — from almonds to apples to blueberries — in peril.

Although news about Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has died down, commercial beekeepers have seen average population losses of about 30 percent each year since 2006, said Paul Towers, of the Pesticide Action Network. Towers was one of the organizers of a conference that brought together beekeepers and environmental groups this week to tackle the challenges facing the beekeeping industry and the agricultural economy by proxy.

“We are inching our way toward a critical tipping point,” said Steve Ellis, secretary of the National Honey Bee Advisory Board (NHBAB) and a beekeeper for 35 years. Last year he had so many abnormal bee die-offs that he’ll qualify for disaster relief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

In addition to continued reports of CCD — a still somewhat mysterious phenomenon in which entire bee colonies literally disappear, alien-abduction style, leaving not even their dead bodies behind — bee populations are suffering poor health in general, and experiencing shorter life spans and diminished vitality. And while parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss can deal blows to bee health, research increasingly points to pesticides as the primary culprit.

“In the industry we believe pesticides play an important role in what’s going on,” said Dave Hackenberg, co-chair of the NHBAB and a beekeeper in Pennsylvania.

Of particular concern is a group of pesticides, chemically similar to nicotine, called neonicotinoids (neonics for short), and one in particular called clothianidin. Instead of being sprayed, neonics are used to treat seeds, so that they’re absorbed by the plant’s vascular system, and then end up attacking the central nervous systems of bees that come to collect pollen. Virtually all of today’s genetically engineered Bt corn is treated with neonics. The chemical industry alleges that bees don’t like to collect corn pollen, but new research shows that not only do bees indeed forage in corn, but they also have multiple other routes of exposure to neonics.

The Purdue University study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, found high levels of clothianidin in planter exhaust spewed during the spring sowing of treated maize seed. It also found neonics in the soil of unplanted fields nearby those planted with Bt corn, on dandelions growing near those fields, in dead bees found near hive entrances, and in pollen stored in the hives.

Evidence already pointed to the presence of neonic-contaminated pollen as a factor in CCD. As Hackenberg explained, “The insects start taking [the pesticide] home, and it contaminates everywhere the insect came from.” These new revelations about the pervasiveness of neonics in bees’ habitats only strengthen the case against using the insecticides.

The irony, of course, is that farmers use these chemicals to protect their crops from destructive insects, but in so doing, they harm other insects essential to their crops’ production — a catch-22 that Hackenberg said speaks to the fact that “we have become a nation driven by the chemical industry.” In addition to beekeeping, he owns two farms, and even when crop analysts recommend spraying pesticides on his crops to kill an aphid population, for example, he knows that “if I spray, I’m going to kill all the beneficial insects.” But most farmers, lacking Hackenberg’s awareness of bee populations, follow the advice of the crop adviser — who, these days, is likely to be paid by the chemical industry, rather than by a state university or another independent entity.

Beekeepers have already teamed up with groups representing the almond and blueberry industries — both of which depend on honey bee pollination — to tackle the need for education among farmers. “A lot of [farm groups] are recognizing that we need more resources devoted to pollinator protection,” Ellis said. “We need that same level of commitment on a national basis, from our USDA and EPA and the agricultural chemical industry.”

Unfortunately, it was the EPA itself that green-lit clothianidin and other neonics for commercial use, despite its own scientists’ clear warnings about the chemicals’ effects on bees and other pollinators. That doesn’t bode well for the chances of getting neonics off the market now, even in light of the Purdue study’s findings.

“The agency has, in most cases, sided with pesticide manufacturers and worked to fast-track the approval of new products, and failed in cases when there’s clear evidence of harm to take those products off the market,” Towers said.

Since this is an election year — a time when no one wants to make Big Ag (and its money) mad — beekeepers may have to suffer another season of losses before there’s any hope of action on the EPA’s part. But when one out of every three bites of food on Americans’ plates results directly from honey bee pollination, there’s no question that the fate of these insects will determine our own as eaters.

Ellis, for his part, thinks that figuring out a way to solve the bee crisis could be a catalyst for larger reform within our agriculture system. “If we can protect that pollinator base, it’s going to have ripple effects … for wildlife, for human health,” he said. “It will bring up subjects that need to be looked at, of groundwater and surface water — all the connected subjects associated [with] chemical use and agriculture.”

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.