Whole Foods Market® partners with The Xerces Society to protect pollinator populations
One of every three bites of food comes from plants pollinated by honeybees and other pollinators, and pollinator populations are facing massive declines. At Whole Foods Market in University Heights, Rhode Island, some customers recently found out just how this may affect their lives.
To raise awareness of just how crucial pollinators are to our food system, the University Heights Whole Foods Market store removed all produce that comes from plants dependent on honeybees and other pollinators:
The before-and-after photo (above) is shocking – as are the statistics. Whole Foods Market’s produce team pulled from shelves 237 of 453 products – 52 percent of the normal product mix in the department. Among the removed products were some of the most popular produce items: Continue reading »
One need only do a quick search on the website InfluenceExplorer.com to see the reality that is special interest influence over lawmakers. The literal millions of dollars given to lawmakers should shed light on the fact that Washington D.C. does not represent your interests.CropLife America is a lobbying group for the giant chemical producers like Monsanto and DuPont. From 2011-2012 CropLife America has spent $4,929,594.00 lobbying on behalf of companies that think it is just fine to spray pesticides over waterways. But what about the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts? Shouldn’t these acts of legislation prevent the discharge of pesticides over waterways? Well if you have enough money, you can write laws that exempt your company from the CA/CW Acts, and that is exactly what CropLife America has done in SEC. 10013. USE AND DISCHARGES OF AUTHORIZED PESTICIDES. Of H.R. 1947:Continue reading »
BARCELONA — Sustainable entrepreneurship — a buzzword in an increasingly eco-conscious business world — is often described as a balance between profit and environmental impact.
It’s a subject that Douglas Tompkins seems to have thought a lot about. He founded Esprit and The North Face, two of America’s most iconic clothing and fashion brands, only to quit the business world to become a staunch conservationalist, environmentalist and critic.
“Remove ‘sustainable’ from your dictionary, there is no sustainable business. Only biological sustainability counts,” he told a room full of business students at the IESE business school Doing Great and Doing Good conference on responsible business. (Disclosure: I moderated a panel at the same conference).
“Economic activity has impact and we are just now doing a better job of measuring what those impacts are,” said Mr. Tompkins in an interview.
A strict conservationalist, he rejects the idea that big business can reform itself and thinks the answer lies outside what he calls the “techno-industrial culture.” He thinks measuring biodiversity is a yardstick for how society is doing.
“Healthy biodiversity is at the base of everything,” he said, with species extinction being the ultimate catastrophe. “We’ll be living on a sand heap with a Norwegian rat and a few cockroaches at the end.”
Despite having co-founded ESPRIT, the multinational clothing giant, and The North Face, the maker of outdoor equipment, in the 1960s and having earned millions of the sale of the former, Mr. Tompkins is critical of business’s paradigms.
“We have an economy that’s based on growth without limits,” he said. “How is that possible?”
“To grow and grow and grow without limits is out of the question,” he said.
Even the companies that he is famous for launching do not escape his disapproval.
The absurd new housing bubble created by Banana Ben Bernanke’s cheap money, private equity slumlords and crony foreign oligarchs looking to launder their ill-gotten funds, continues to provide what would be hilarious headlines if only they weren’t so sad. In the following story, we find that courtesy of the Department of Agriculture (USDA), the struggling folks on Martha’s Vineyard have access to zero money down home loans. The USDA you ask? Well, it turns out that the “entire island is designated as a rural area eligible for a USDA loan.” Why do we even have a government at this point?
The zero down mortgage is back—in Martha’s Vineyard.
Ira Stoll at the Future of Capitalism bloghas come across an article on “Home Buying 101″ in the spring of 2013 “Real Estate & Homes” supplement to the Vineyard Gazette. A local mortgage broker by the name of Polly K. Bassett is quoted as touting how.
Bassett, the “co-owner and a broker of Martha’s Vineyard Mortgage Company, L.L.C., said: “We have access to a wide range of programs such as USDA, which is a program where you can put no money down, 100 percent financing, and we also do a 97 percent financing with three percent down….There are a lot of programs out there for people buying their first home.”
The global Monsanto genetically modified wheat scandal is getting worse.
As a reminder, recently news broke out that a rogue genetically modified strain of wheat developed by Monsanto, had been found in an Oregon field late last month. But while modified food has long been a diet staple, this particular breed was the first discovery of an unapproved strain, and what made things worse is the lack of any information how the rogue grain had escape from a field trial a decade ago. As Reuters reports, “even after weeks of investigation, experts are baffled as to how the seed survived for years after Monsanto had ceased all field tests of the product. It was found in a field growing a different type of wheat than Monsanto’s strain, far from areas used for field tests, according to an Oregon State University wheat researcher who tested the strain.”
The USDA said the GM wheat found in Oregon posed no threat to human health, and also said there was no evidence that the grain had entered the commercial supply chain.
But the discovery threatens to stoke consumer outcry over the possible risk of cross-contaminating natural products with genetically altered foods, and may embolden critics who say U.S. regulation of GMO products is lax.
This is compounded by the still fresh memory of the glaring and repeated lies by the Japanese government in regards to the Fukushima explosion, making some wonder just how far the government is willing to go to cover up potential threats if the alternative is widespread panic. Continue reading »
The old saying, “You are what you eat,” poses troubling implications for public health in light of a new study on chicken meat, which found that most of it contains dangerously high levels of toxic arsenic. And the worst part is that industrial chicken producers are directly responsible for causing this, as they intentionally add arsenic-based pharmaceutical drugs to chicken feed in order to bulk them up quickly and improve the color of their meat, which in turn poisons you and your family.
You can thank researchers from the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in Maryland for exposing this little-known fact in a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. As it turns out, virtually all commercial chicken, including certified organic and “antibiotic-free” varieties, contain some level of inorganic arsenic. But it is the conventional chicken fed arsenic-based drugs that have the highest levels.
As reported by GRACE Communications Foundation Senior Policy Advisor Chris Hunt, writing for Ecocentric, Johns Hopkins researchers collected a variety of chicken samples from grocery stores in 10 cities across the U.S. Some of the meat samples came from conventional sources, while others were U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) certified organic or “antibiotic-free.” All the samples were tested side-by-side with each other, including in both raw and cooked form.
It has already begun: Japan has just cancelled a large contract to purchase U.S. wheat. “We will refrain from buying western white and feed wheat effective today,” Toru Hisadome, a Japanese farm ministry official in charge of wheat trading, told Reuters.
As many readers well know, I predicted precisely this scenario just yesterday in a Natural News article warning about the consequences of genetic pollution. There, I wrote, “All wheat produced in the United States will now be heavily scrutinized — and possibly even rejected — by other nations that traditionally import U.S. wheat. This obviously has enormous economic implications for U.S. farmers and agriculture.”
Now we’re already seeing the result: the ditching of U.S. wheat by world nations that want nothing to do with GMOs. Continue reading »
The genetic apocalypse we’ve been warning about for years may have already begun. The USDA just announced they found a significant amount of genetically engineered wheat growing in farm fields in Oregon. As the USDA announced yesterday, “…test results of plant samples from an Oregon farm indicate the presence of genetically engineered (GE) glyphosate-resistant wheat plants.”
Why is this a big deal? Because GE wheat has never been approved for commercialization or sale. These strains of GE wheat escaped from GMO field experiments conducted across 16 states by Monsanto from 1998 to 2005. As the USDA states, “Further testing by USDA laboratories indicates the presence of the same GE glyphosate-resistant wheat variety that Monsanto was authorized to field test in 16 states from 1998 to 2005.”
And that means genetic pollution is already out of control. The GE wheat for which Monsanto claims patent ownership is now invading farms that never planted GE wheat.
All U.S. commercially-grown wheat now suspect
There are at least five serious ramifications from this:
#1) Monsanto can now sue all the farms where GM wheat has been found growing. According to U.S. federal courts, those farmers have “stolen” Monsanto’s intellectual property.
#2) The spread of GM wheat from experimental fields to wheat production fields is proof that GMOs cause genetic pollution — self-replicating pollution with the potential to devastate global food production.
#3) All wheat produced in the United States will now be heavily scrutinized — and possibly even rejected — by other nations that traditionally import U.S. wheat. This obviously has enormous economic implications for U.S. farmers and agriculture.
No GE glyphosate-resistant wheat is currently approved for commercial sale; APHIS says it will work to determine how situation occurred
The USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service Wednesday announced that tests of plant samples from a field in Oregon indicate the presence of genetically engineered glyphosate-resistant volunteer wheat plants.
Further testing by USDA laboratories indicated the presence of the same GE glyphosate-resistant wheat variety that Monsanto was authorized to field test in 16 states from 1998 to 2005. There are no GE wheat varieties approved for sale or in commercial production in the United States or elsewhere at this time.
The detection of this wheat variety does not pose a food safety concern, APHIS said.
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