Seed and crop management company Syngenta Crop Protection LLC has petitioned U.S. EPA to increase the legal tolerance for a neonicotinoid pesticide residue in several crops — in one case increasing the acceptable level by 400 times, according to a notice in today's Federal Register.
As the California drought approaches its fourth year, Seville’s well is one of hundreds of private water holes coughing up sand and spitting air in the Central Valley, according to Tulare County officials. As many as 100,000 more wells are at risk around the state if the rains don’t come by October.
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“To shower, I use a cup, just like when I was in ‘Nam,” he said, stepping away from a stream of glistening neighbors, most of them just back from the fields. Some had dust on their ear lobes and deep in their wrinkles. None had a simple way to shower in town that night. “We’re living in a third world country now,” he continued.
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“Everything was so nice,” admitted Maria. But not anymore. “California is going dry.”
Phi Beta Iota: All of this was understood by Jimmy Carter and his most professional civil servants. Also understood was that he would be assassinated if he tried to do anyting in relation to controlling energy and water use in the public interest and against special interests. We are entering an era in which portions of the USA are going to die and create internal displaced persons. While it is not too late to avert massive national catastrophe on multiple policy fronts, the government lacks both integrity in its electoral and governance systems, and integrity in intelligence (decision-support). Hence, the next decade for the USA is likely to be very grim.
Because we are controlled by carbon interests we rank 33rd on the Environmental Performance Index. Other countries not as encumbered have already begun to move to sustainability. In the coming decades they are going to prosper, we are going to suffer increasing decline until we change our social policies to reflect well as the first priority.
Here is more on agricultural toxins. It never fails to amaze me that what seems so obvious: plants mutate and so do the bugs that attack them is not, in fact obvious. The siren call of more profit seems to trump all other considerations. Only citizen pushback is going to stop this trend.
Despite its own admission that it will cause an up to seven-fold increase in chemical pesticide use, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is poised to approve a new type of genetically engineered seed built to resist one of the most toxic weedkillers on the market.
Here is some very good news. The Fish and Wildlife Service has announced “uses of neonicotinoid pesticides on wildlife refuges… will stop… along with GMO crops, at farming projects by 2016.”
After facing a series of legal challenges from environmental groups, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service will phase out the use of genetically modified (GMO) crops and controversial neonicotinoid pesticides at farming projects on national wildlife refuges.
National Wildlife Refuge System chief James Kurth has directed the agency to stop using GMO crops and neonicontinoids on refuge farms by January 2016, according to a July 17 memo obtained by activists last week. The Fish and Wildlife Service is the first federal agency to restrict the use of GMOs and neonicotinoids in farming practices.
It is my view that there exist profoundly immoral and malevolent — the formal definition of evil — corporations. Their corporate vision creates profit by doing something that reduces wellness. Halliburton is one, Monsanto is another. One of the skills these corporations focus on is maintaining high level government connections, and to get your executives in senior positions. So great is the corruption of our government as a result that, as this report de! scribes, the regulatory agencies created to oversee these corporations are tailored to the corporation's wishes.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been taken over by an outside organization. RootsAction has launched a campaign demanding a Congressional investigation.
