Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought

http://qz.com/107970/scientists-discover-whats-killing-the-bees-and-its-worse-than-you-thought


Scientists discover what’s killing the bees and it’s worse than you thought

By Todd Woody@greenwombatJuly 24, 2013

Outlawing a type of insecticides is not a panacea. AP Photo/Ben Margot


As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Scientists had struggled to find the trigger for so-called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that has wiped out an estimated 10 million beehives, worth $2 billion, over the past six years. Suspects have included pesticides, disease-bearing parasites and poor nutrition. But in a first-of-its-kind study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, scientists at the University of Maryland and the US Department of Agriculture have identified a witch’s brew of pesticides and fungicides contaminating pollen that bees collect to feed their hives. The findings break new ground on why large numbers of bees are dying though they do not identify the specific cause of CCD, where an entire beehive dies at once.

When researchers collected pollen from hives on the east coast pollinating cranberry, watermelon and other crops and fed it to healthy bees, those bees showed a significant decline in their ability to resist infection by a parasite called Nosema ceranae. The parasite has been implicated in Colony Collapse Disorder though scientists took pains to point out that their findings do not directly link the pesticides to CCD. The pollen was contaminated on average with nine different pesticides and fungicides though scientists discovered 21 agricultural chemicals in one sample. Scientists identified eight ag chemicals associated with increased risk of infection by the parasite.

Most disturbing, bees that ate pollen contaminated with fungicides were three times as likely to be infected by the parasite. Widely used, fungicides had been thought to be harmless for bees as they’re designed to kill fungus, not insects, on crops like apples.

“There’s growing evidence that fungicides may be affecting the bees on their own and I think what it highlights is a need to reassess how we label these agricultural chemicals,” Dennis vanEngelsdorp, the study’s lead author, told Quartz.

Labels on pesticides warn farmers not to spray when pollinating bees are in the vicinity but such precautions have not applied to fungicides.

Bee populations are so low in the US that it now takes 60% of the country’s surviving colonies just to pollinate one California crop, almonds. And that’s not just a west coast problem—California supplies 80% of the world’s almonds, a market worth $4 billion.

In recent years, a class of chemicals called neonicotinoids has been linked to bee deaths and in April regulators banned the use of the pesticide for two years in Europe where bee populations have also plummeted. But vanEngelsdorp, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland, says the new study shows that the interaction of multiple pesticides is affecting bee health.

“The pesticide issue in itself is much more complex than we have led to be believe,” he says. “It’s a lot more complicated than just one product, which means of course the solution does not lie in just banning one class of product.”

The study found another complication in efforts to save the bees: US honey bees, which are descendants of European bees, do not bring home pollen from native North American crops but collect bee chow from nearby weeds and wildflowers. That pollen, however, was also contaminated with pesticides even though those plants were not the target of spraying.

“It’s not clear whether the pesticides are drifting over to those plants but we need take a new look at agricultural spraying practices,” says vanEngelsdorp.

The Bad Seed: The Health Risks of Genetically Modified Corn

" With symptoms including headaches, nausea, rashes, and fatigue, Caitlin Shetterly visited doctor after doctor searching for a cure for what ailed her. What she found, after years of misery and bafflement, was as unlikely as it was utterly common."

Read more: Genetically Modified Corn - Allergies to GMO Corn - ELLE
 

"The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I’d been sick for three and a half years.
During that time, when I wasn’t working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn’t have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I’d joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they’d been “Kathy Batesed,” à la the movie Misery); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia—my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who’d see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class—you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal."

10 American Foods That Are Banned in Other Countries

10 American Foods That Are Banned in Other Countries

Americans are slowly waking up to the sad fact that much of the food sold in the US is far inferior to the same foods sold in other nations. In fact, many of the foods you eat are BANNED in other countries.
Here, I‚ll review 10 American foods that are banned elsewhere, which were featured in a recent MSN article.1
Seeing how the overall health of Americans is so much lower than other industrialized countries, you can‚t help but wonder whether toxic foods such as these might play a role in our skyrocketing disease rates.


#1: Farm-Raised Salmon


If you want to maximize health benefits from fish, you want to steer clear of farmed fish, particularly farmed salmon fed dangerous chemicals. Wild salmon gets its bright pinkish-red color from natural carotenoids in their diet. Farmed salmon, on the other hand, are raised on a wholly unnatural diet of grains (including genetically engineered varieties), plus a concoction of antibiotics and other drugs and chemicals not shown to be safe for humans.
This diet leaves the fish with unappetizing grayish flesh so to compensate, they‚re fed synthetic astaxanthin made from petrochemicals, which has not been approved for human consumption and has well known toxicities. According to the featured article, some studies suggest it can potentially damage your eyesight. More details are available in yesterday‚s article.
Where it's banned: Australia and New Zealand

How can you tell whether a salmon is wild or farm-raised? The flesh of wild sockeye salmon is bright red, courtesy of its natural astaxanthin content. It‚s also very lean, so the fat marks, those white stripes you see in the meat, are very thin. If the fish is pale pink with wide fat marks, the salmon is farmed.
Avoid Atlantic salmon, as typically salmon labeled "Atlantic Salmon" currently comes from fish farms. The two designations you want to look for are: „Alaskan salmon,‰ and „sockeye salmon,‰ as Alaskan sockeye is not allowed to be farmed. Please realize that the vast majority of all salmon sold in restaurants is farm raised.
So canned salmon labeled "Alaskan Salmon" is a good bet, and if you find sockeye salmon, it's bound to be wild. Again, you can tell sockeye salmon from other salmon by its color; its flesh is bright red opposed to pink, courtesy of its superior astaxanthin content. Sockeye salmon actually has one of the highest concentrations of astaxanthin of any food.


#2: Genetically Engineered Papaya


Most Hawaiian papaya is now genetically engineered to be resistant to ringspot virus. Mounting research now shows that animals fed genetically engineered foods, such as corn and soy, suffer a wide range of maladies, including intestinal damage, multiple-organ damage, massive tumors, birth defects, premature death, and near complete sterility by the third generation of offspring. Unfortunately, the gigantic human lab experiment is only about 10 years old, so we are likely decades away from tabulating the human casualties.

Where it's banned: The European Union

Unfortunately, it‚s clear that the US government is not in a position to make reasonable and responsible decisions related to genetically engineered foods at this point, when you consider the fact that the Obama administration has placed former Monsanto attorney and Vice President, Michael Taylor, in charge of US food safety, and serious conflicts of interest even reign supreme within the US Supreme Court! That‚s right. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is also a former Monsanto attorney, but refuses to acknowledge any conflict of interest.


#3: Ractopamine-Tainted Meat


The beta agonist drug ractopamine (a repartitioning agent that increases protein synthesis) was recruited for livestock use when researchers found that the drug, used in asthma, made mice more muscular. This reduces the overall fat content of the meat. Ractopamine is currently used in about 45 percent of US pigs, 30 percent of ration-fed cattle, and an unknown percentage of turkeys are pumped full of this drug in the days leading up to slaughter. Up to 20 percent of ractopamine remains in the meat you buy from the supermarket, according to veterinarian Michael W. Fox.
Since 1998, more than 1,700 people have been "poisoned" from eating pigs fed the drug, and ractopamine is banned from use in food animals in no less than 160 different countries due to its harmful health effects! Effective February 11, 2013, Russia issued a ban on US meat imports, slated to last until the US agrees to certify that the meat is ractopamine-free. At present, the US does not even test for the presence of this drug in meats sold. In animals, ractopamine is linked to reductions in reproductive function, increase of mastitis in dairy herds, and increased death and disability. It‚s also known to affect the human cardiovascular system, and is thought to be responsible for hyperactivity, and may cause chromosomal abnormalities and behavioral changes.
Where it's banned: 160 countries across Europe, Russia, mainland China and Republic of China (Taiwan)


#4: Flame Retardant Drinks


If you live in the US and drink Mountain Dew and some other citrus-flavored sodas and sports drinks, then you are also getting a dose of a synthetic chemical called brominated vegetable oil (BVO), which was originally patented by chemical companies as a flame retardant.
BVO has been shown to bioaccumulate in human tissue and breast milk, and animal studies have found it causes reproductive and behavioral problems in large doses. Bromine is a central nervous system depressant, and a common endocrine disruptor. It‚s part of the halide family, a group of elements that includes fluorine, chlorine and iodine. When ingested, bromine competes for the same receptors that are used to capture iodine. This can lead to iodine deficiency, which can have a very detrimental impact on your health. Bromine toxicity can manifest as skin rashes, acne, loss of appetite, fatigue, and cardiac arrhythmias. According to the featured article:
"The FDA has flip-flopped on BVO's safety originally classifying it as 'generally recognized as safe' but reversing that call now defining it as an 'interim food additive' a category reserved for possibly questionable substances used in food."

Where it's banned: Europe and Japan


#5: Processed Foods Containing Artificial Food Colors and Dyes


More than 3,000 food additives -- preservatives, flavorings, colors and other ingredients -- are added to US foods, including infant foods and foods targeted to young children. Meanwhile, many of these are banned in other countries, based on research showing toxicity and hazardous health effects, especially with respect to adverse effects on children‚s behavior. For example, as reported in the featured article:
„Boxed Mac & Cheese, cheddar flavored crackers, Jell-O and many kids' cereals contain red 40, yellow 5, yellow 6 and/or blue 2, the most popularly-used dyes in the United States. Research has shown this rainbow of additives can cause behavioral problems as well as cancer, birth defects and other health problems in laboratory animals. Red 40 and yellow 6 are also suspected of causing an allergy-like hypersensitivity reaction in children. The Center for Science in the Public Interest reports that some dyes are also "contaminated with known carcinogens.‰

In countries where these food colors and dyes are banned, food companies like Kraft employ natural colorants instead, such as paprika extract, beetroot, and annatto. The food blogger and activist Vani Hari, better known as „Food Babe,‰ recently launched a Change.org petition2 asking Kraft to remove artificial dyes from American Mac & Cheese to protect American children from the well-known dangers of these dyes.
Where it's banned: Norway and Austria. In 2009, the British government advised companies to stop using food dyes by the end of that year. The European Union also requires a warning notice on most foods containing dyes.


#6: Arsenic-Laced Chicken


Arsenic-based drugs are approved for use in animal feed in the US because they make animals grow quicker and make the meat appear pinker (i.e. "fresher"). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has stated these products are safe because they contain organic arsenic, which is less toxic than the other inorganic form, which is a known carcinogen.
The problem is, scientific reports surfaced stating that the organic arsenic could transform into inorganic arsenic, which has been found in elevated levels in supermarket chickens. The inorganic arsenic also contaminates manure where it can eventually migrate into drinking water and may also be causing heightened arsenic levels in US rice.
In 2011, Pfizer announced it would voluntarily stop marketing its arsenic-based feed additive Roxarsone, but there are still several others on the market. Several environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the FDA calling for their removal from the market. In the European Union, meanwhile, arsenic-based compounds have never been approved as safe for animal feed.
Where it's banned: The European Union


#7: Bread with Potassium Bromate


You might not be aware of this, but nearly every time you eat bread in a restaurant or consume a hamburger or hotdog bun you are consuming bromide, as it is commonly used in flours. The use of potassium bromate as an additive to commercial breads and baked goods has been a huge contributor to bromide overload in Western cultures.
Bromated flour is „enriched‰ with potassium bromate. Commercial baking companies claim it makes the dough more elastic and better able to stand up to bread hooks. However, Pepperidge Farm and other successful companies manage to use only unbromated flour without any of these so-called „structural problems.‰ Studies have linked potassium bromate to kidney and nervous system damage, thyroid problems, gastrointestinal discomfort, and cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies potassium bromate as a possible carcinogen.
Where it's banned: Canada, China and the EU


#8: Olestra/Olean


Olestra, aka Olean, created by Procter & Gamble, is a calorie- and cholesterol-free fat substitute used in fat-free snacks like chips and French fries. Three years ago, Time Magazine3 named it one of the worst 50 inventions ever, but that hasn‚t stopped food companies from using it to satisfy people‚s mistaken belief that a fat-free snack is a healthier snack. According to the featured article:
„Not only did a 2011 study from Purdue University conclude rats fed potato chips made with Olean gained weight, there have been several reports of adverse intestinal reactions to the fake fat including diarrhea, cramps and leaky bowels. And because it interferes with the absorption of fat soluble vitamins such as A, D, E and K, the FDA requires these vitamins be added to any product made with Olean or olestra.‰

Where it's banned: The UK and Canada


#9: Preservatives BHA and BHT


BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) are commonly used preservatives that can be found in breakfast cereal, nut mixes, chewing gum, butter spread, meat, dehydrated potatoes, and beer, just to name a few. BHA is known to cause cancer in rats, and may be a cancer-causing agent in humans as well. In fact, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, National Toxicology Program's 2011 Report on Carcinogens, BHA "is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.‰ It may also trigger allergic reactions and hyperactivity, while BHT can cause organ system toxicity.
Where it's banned: The UK doesn't allow BHA in infant foods. BHA and BHT are also banned in parts of the European Union and Japan.


#10: Milk and Dairy Products Laced with rBGH


Recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH) is the largest selling dairy animal drug in America. RBGH is a synthetic version of natural bovine somatotropin (BST), a hormone produced in cows' pituitary glands. Monsanto developed the recombinant version from genetically engineered E. coli bacteria and markets it under the brand name "Posilac."
It‚s injected into cows to increase milk production, but it is banned in at least 30 other nations because of its dangers to human health, which include an increased risk for colorectal, prostate, and breast cancer by promoting conversion of normal tissue cells into cancerous ones. Non-organic dairy farms frequently have rBGH-injected cows that suffer at least 16 different adverse health conditions, including very high rates of mastitis that contaminate milk with pus and antibiotics.
"According to the American Cancer Society, the increased use of antibiotics to treat this type of rBGH-induced inflammation 'does promote the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, but the extent to which these are transmitted to humans is unclear,'" the featured article states.

Many have tried to inform the public of the risks of using this hormone in dairy cows, but their attempts have been met with overwhelming opposition by the powerful dairy and pharmaceutical industries, and their government liaisons. In 1997, two Fox-affiliate investigative journalists, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, attempted to air a program exposing the truth about the dangers of rBGH. Lawyers for Monsanto, a major advertiser with the Florida network, sent letters promising "dire consequences" if the story aired.
Despite decades of evidence about the dangers of rBGH, the FDA still maintains it's safe for human consumption and ignores scientific evidence to the contrary. In 1999, the United Nations Safety Agency ruled unanimously not to endorse or set safety standards for rBGH milk, which has effectively resulted in an international ban on US milk.4 The Cancer Prevention Coalition, trying for years to get the use of rBGH by the dairy industry banned, resubmitted a petition to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, in January 2010.5 Although the FDA stubbornly sticks to its position that milk from rBGH-treated cows is no different than milk from untreated cows, this is just plain false and is not supported by science. The only way to avoid rBGH is to look for products labeled as „rBGH-free‰ or „No rBGH.‰
Where it's banned: Australia, New Zealand, Israel, EU and Canada

Source: Mercola.com

79 Monsanto teen workers hospitalized after being crop dusted

Seventy-nine teens, some 13, were sprayed with a chemical fungicide from a crop-dusting plane near Pesotum, Illinois on Thursday. They were taken to a hospital in Urbana and, save for a few with minor skin irritations, none seem harmed.

The teenagers were detasseling corn for the company Monsanto when they were accidentally sprayed with a chemical from a crop dusting plane. The job of corn detasseling is done by teens as it is not considered hazardous; it entails yanking off the pollinating tassels from corn so they produce seeds to be planted in future.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/355288#ixzz2aIBd8s1k

Freddy McGregor - I'm A Revolutionist

Second-Largest Dutch City Bans Monsanto’s Roundup Herbicide

"Some cynics write off citizen action including petitions and sign-carrying protestors. They don’t believe such small efforts can make any big difference. But the more than 600,000 people of Dutch city Rotterdam disagree. Their efforts, which began with a petition, have led to a “green initiative” in their city including the banning of Roundup, Monsanto’s flagship product.
The petition campaign was called “Non-toxic Sidewalks for Our Children.” With support from that country’s Green Party, concerned citizens were able to make a significant change for their city and their future."

Read more: http://naturalsociety.com/second-largest-dutch-city-bans-monsantos-roundup/#ixzz2aBjqM1db
 

Seeds of Destruction: The Diabolical World of Genetic Manipulation

Seeds of Destruction: The Diabolical World of Genetic Manipulation

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research, July 20, 2013
Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/seeds-of-destruction-the-diabolical-world-of-genetic-manipulation/25303
“Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”* -Henry Kissenger

“Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl is a skillfully researched book that focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread.

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO.  Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms. The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Engdahl’s carefully argued critique goes far beyond the familiar controversies surrounding the practice of genetic modification as a scientific technique. The book is an eye-opener, a must-read for all those committed to the causes of social justice and world peace.

What follows is the Preface to ”Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation” by F. William Engdahl (available through Global Research):

Introduction

“We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so,we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”
-George Kennan, US State Department senior planning official, 1948

This book is about a project undertaken by a small socio-political elite, centered, after the Second World War, not in London, but in Washington. It is the untold story of how this self-anointed elite set out, in Kennan’s words, to “maintain this position of disparity.” It is the story of how a tiny few dominated the resources and levers of power in the postwar world.

It’s above all a history of the evolution of power in the control of a select few, in which even science was put in the service of that minority. As Kennan recommended in his 1948 internal memorandum, they pursued their policy relentlessly, and without the “luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.”

Yet, unlike their predecessors within leading circles of the British Empire, this emerging American elite, who proclaimed proudly at war’s end the dawn of their American Century, were masterful in their use of the rhetoric of altruism and world-benefaction to advance their goals. Their American Century paraded as a softer empire, a “kinder, gentler” one in which, under the banner of colonial liberation, freedom, democracy and economic development, those elite circles built a network of power the likes of which the world had not seen since the time of Alexander the Great some three centuries before Christ—a global empire unified under the military control of a sole superpower, able to decide on a whim, the fate of entire nations.

This book is the sequel to a first volume, A Century ofWar: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. It traces a second thin red line of power. This one is about the control over the very basis of human survival, our daily provision of bread. The man who served the interests of the postwar American-based elite during the 1970’s, and came to symbolize its raw realpolitik, was Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sometime in the mid-1970’s, Kissinger, a life-long practitioner of “Balance of Power” geopolitics and a man with more than a fair share of conspiracies under his belt, allegedly declared his blueprint for world domination: “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people.”

The strategic goal to control global food security had its roots decades earlier, well before the outbreak of war in the late 1930’s. It was funded, often with little notice, by select private foundations, which had been created to preserve the wealth and power of a handful of American families.

Originally the families centered their wealth and power in New York and along the East Coast of the United States, from Boston to New York to Philadelphia and Washington D.C. For that reason, popular media accounts often referred to them, sometimes with derision but more often with praise, as the East Coast Establishment.

The center of gravity of American power shifted in the decades following the War. The East Coast Establishment was overshadowed by new centers of power which evolved from Seattle to Southern California on the Pacific Coast, as well as in Houston, Las Vegas, Atlanta and Miami, just as the tentacles of American power spread to Asia and Japan, and south, to the nations of Latin America.

In the several decades before and immediately following World War II, one family came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of this emerging American Century more than any other. And the vast fortune of that family had been built on the blood of many wars, and on their control of a new “black gold,” oil.

What was unusual about this family was that early on in the building of their fortune, the patriarchs and advisors they cultivated to safeguard their wealth decided to expand their influence over many very different fields. They sought control not merely over oil, the emerging new energy source for world economic advance. They also expanded their influence over the education of youth, medicine and psychology, foreign policy of the United States, and, significant for our story, over the very science of life itself, biology, and its applications in the world of plants and agriculture.

For the most part, their work passed unnoticed by the larger population, especially in the United States. Few Americans were aware how their lives were being subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, influenced by one or another project financed by the immense wealth of this family.

In the course of researching for this book, a work nominally on the subject of genetically modified organisms or GMO, it soon became clear that the history of GMO was inseparable from the political history of this one very powerful family, the Rockefeller family, and the four brothers—David,Nelson, Laurance and John D. III—who, in the three decades following American victory in World War II, the dawn of the much-heralded American Century, shaped the evolution of power George Kennan referred to in 1948.

In actual fact, the story of GMO is that of the evolution of power in the hands of an elite, determined at all costs to bring the entire world under their sway.

Three decades ago, that power was based around the Rockefeller family. Today, three of the four brothers are long-since deceased, several under peculiar circumstances.However, as was their will, their project of global domination—“full spectrum dominance” as the Pentagon later called it—had spread, often through a rhetoric of “democracy,” and was aided from time to time by the raw military power of that empire when deemed necessary. Their project evolved to the point where one small power group, nominally headquartered in Washington in the early years of the new century, stood determined to control future and present life on this planet to a degree never before dreamed of.

The story of the genetic engineering and patenting of plants and other living organisms cannot be understood without looking at the history of the global spread of American power in the decades following World War II. George Kennan, Henry Luce, Averell Harriman and, above all, the four Rockefeller brothers, created the very concept of multinational “agribusiness”. They financed the “Green Revolution” in the agriculture sector of developing countries in order, among other things, to create new markets for petro-chemical fertilizers and petroleum products, as well as to expand dependency on energy products. Their actions are an inseparable part of the story of genetically modified crops today.

By the early years of the new century, it was clear that no more than four giant chemical multinational companies had emerged as global players in the game to control patents on the very basic food products that most people in the world depend on for their daily nutrition—corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, even vegetables and fruits and cotton—as well as new strains of disease-resistant poultry, genetically-modified to allegedly resist the deadly H5N1 Bird Flu virus, or even gene altered pigs and cattle. Three of the four private companies had decades-long ties to Pentagon chemical warfare research. The fourth, nominally Swiss, was in reality Anglodominated. As with oil, so was GMO agribusiness very much an Anglo-American global project.

In May 2003, before the dust from the relentless US bombing and destruction of Baghdad had cleared, the President of the United States chose to make GMO a strategic issue, a priority in his postwar US foreign policy. The stubborn resistance of the world’s second largest agricultural producer, the European Union, stood as a formidable barrier to the global success of the GMO Project. As long as Germany, France, Austria, Greece and other countries of the European Union steadfastly refused to permit GMO planting for health and scientific reasons, the rest of the world’s nations would remain skeptical and hesitant. By early 2006, the World Trade Organization (WTO) had forced open the door of the European Union to the mass proliferation of GMO. It appeared that global success was near at hand for the GMO Project.

In the wake of the US and British military occupation of Iraq, Washington proceeded to bring the agriculture of Iraq under the domain of patented genetically-engineered seeds, initially supplied through the generosity of the US State Department and Department of Agriculture.

The first mass experiment with GMO crops, however, took place back in the early 1990’s in a country whose elite had long since been corrupted by the Rockefeller family and associated New York banks: Argentina.

Seeds of DestructionThe following pages trace the spread and proliferation of GMO, often through political coercion, governmental pressure, fraud, lies, and even murder. If it reads often like a crime story, that should not be surprising. The crime being perpetrated in the name of agricultural efficiency, environmental friendliness and solving the world hunger problem, carries stakes which are vastly more important to this small elite. Their actions are not solely for money or for profit. After all, these powerful private families decide who controls the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and even the European Central Bank. Money is in their hands to destroy or create.

Their aim is rather, the ultimate control over future life on this planet, a supremacy earlier dictators and despots only ever dreamt of. Left unchecked, the present group behind the GMO Project is between one and two decades away from total dominance of the planet’s food capacities. This aspect of the GMO story needs telling. I therefore invite the reader to a careful reading and independent verification or reasoned refutation of what follows.

F. William Engdahl is a leading analyst of the New World Order, author of the best-selling book on oil and geopolitics, A Century of War: Anglo-American Politics and the New World Order,’ His writings have been translated into more than a dozen languages. 

Order this critically-acclaimed book from Global Research!



Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
by F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index

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How Pesticides Can Cause Parkinson's

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-pesticides-can-cause-parkinsons&print=true

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

How Pesticides Can Cause Parkinson's

Foreign chemicals may prevent the brain from disposing of its own toxic waste

By Melinda Wenner Moyer  | Friday, July 19, 2013



Many studies over the past decade have pointed to pesticides as a potential cause of Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative condition that impairs motor function and afflicts a million Americans. Yet scientists have not had a good idea of how these chemicals harm the brain. A recent study suggests a possible answer: pesticides may inhibit a biochemical pathway that normally protects dopaminergic neurons, the brain cells selectively attacked by the disease. Preliminary research also indicates that this pathway plays a role in Parkinson's even when pesticides are not involved, providing an exciting new target for drug development.

Past studies have shown that a pesticide called benomyl, which lingers in the environment despite having been banned in the U.S. in 2001 because of health concerns, inhibits the chemical activity of aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH) in the liver. Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, U.C. Berkeley, the California Institute of Technology and the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Medical Center wondered whether the pesticide might also affect levels of ALDH in the brain. ALDH's job is to break down DOPAL, a naturally forming toxic chemical, rendering it harmless.

To find out, the researchers exposed different types of human brain cells—and, later, whole zebra fish—to benomyl. They found that it “killed almost half of the dopamine neurons while leaving all other neurons tested intact,” according to lead author and U.C.L.A. neurologist Jeff Bronstein. When they zeroed in on the affected cells, they confirmed that the benomyl was indeed inhibiting the activity of ALDH, which in turn spurred the toxic accumulation of DOPAL. Interestingly, when the scientists lowered DOPAL levels using a different technique, benomyl did not harm the dopamine neurons, a finding that suggests that the pesticide kills these neurons specifically because it allows DOPAL to build up.

Because other pesticides also inhibit ALDH activity, Bronstein speculates that this pathway could help explain the link between Parkinson's and pesticides in general. What is more, research has identified high DOPAL activity in the brain of Parkinson's patients who have not been highly exposed to pesticides, so it is possible that this biochemical cascade is involved in the disease process regardless of its cause. If that is true, then drugs that block or clear DOPAL from the brain could prove to be promising treatments for Parkinson's.

The Monsanto Menace

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When you're good at something, you want to leverage that. Monsanto's specialty is killing stuff.

Lottie Hedley

Maine farmer Jim Gerritsen says that “Monsanto and the biotechs need to respect traditional property rights and need to keep their pollution on their side of the fence.”

Monsanto’s suburban St. Louis headquarters hides behind trees and security checkpoints. Its business hides behind lawyers, lobbying, and patents.

In the early years, the St. Louis biotech giant helped pioneer such leading chemicals as DDT, PCBs, and Agent Orange. Unfortunately, these breakthroughs had a tendency to kill stuff. And the torrent of lawsuits that comes from random killing put a crimp on long-term profitability.
So Monsanto hatched a less lethal, more lucrative plan. The company would attempt to take control of the world's food supply.
It began in the mid-'90s, when Monsanto developed genetically modified (GM) crops such as soybeans, alfalfa, sugar beets, and wheat. These Franken-crops were immune to its leading weed killer, Roundup. That meant that farmers no longer had to till the land to kill weeds, as they'd done for hundreds of years. They could simply blast their entire fields with chemicals, leaving GM crops the only thing standing. Problem solved.
The so-called no-till revolution promised greater yields, better profits for the family farm, and a heightened ability to feed a growing world. But there was one small problem: Agriculture had placed a belligerent strongman in charge of the buffet line.

Monsanto leaves farmers ‘enslaved in a new kind of serfdom’

link

"Monsanto will no longer be pursuing approval for the cultivation of new biotech crops in Europe but will instead focus on the import of existing crops. The easing of pressure is tactical, political analyst and author William Engdahl told RT.
The world’s largest seed company has been on a losing streak, especially in India and the Philippines. At the end of last week, Monsanto said that it was due to widespread opposition that it dropped its bid to get more genetically modified crops onto the European market – despite using tricks attempting to secure necessary political backing for their success.

RT:  Does the decision mean a victory for the anti-GMO movement in Europe?

WE: In a word, no. If you look at the fine print of the interview that the European managing director (MD) for Monsanto, Jose Manuel Madero, gave to Reuters, what he said is that they’re withdrawing a request for new approvals in the EU Commission here in Europe, but at the same time they’re going to increase their pressure to import GMO products from the US and other countries into Europe. So this is a tactical move – it’s not a strategic defeat or rollback by Monsanto in any way shape or…beans.

RT: What are the human and environmental risks?

WE: Well, the Mon810 is primarily being planted in Spain right now and the agri-multinationals have dominated the agriculture in Spain for the last 25 years, so they’ve managed to get a foothold in that country. In most other countries there’s a broad-based grassroots opposition to any and every sort of GMO crop – so they just haven’t been able to do it. In France, you have independent scientists in the universities who have come out with studies of Mon810, showing the indications of severe side effects that weren’t reported by Monsanto. So the popular outcry against that in France, Germany, and other countries is such that Monsanto’s unable to get it pushed through. So what they’re doing is resorting to a back doorway of proliferating their GMO in Europe by increasing the emphasis on imports of GMOs - because there they have a loophole in the European laws of labeling. The power feed – the animal feed that’s GMO corn and soy from Monsanto and other companies - is not required to be labeled as containing GMO."

25 Best Ways to Detox From Heavy Metals, Pesticides, Environmental Pollutants, and Metabolic Waste

"If you are endlessly tired, irritable, have trouble losing weight, or feel depressed, you might be suffering from the environmental onslaught of toxins being poured into our air, water and soil by greedy corporate monopolies. If you aren’t sure whether you are suffering from toxic overload, you can at least be certain you are not immune to the toxic effects of environmental pollution like oil spills, fracking, chemtrails, nuclear energy (think Fukushima), or even the domestic production of war materials. Even every day items like shampoo and rug cleaners also contain thousands of chemicals that are deadly toxic in higher dosages.
From concern about BPAs to heavy metals, pesticide residues and GMO foods, its time to take an offensive, instead of defensive, view of our health. Here are more than two dozen ways to purify the body from these ill-imagined pollutants:
1.  Support the liver and gallbladder with beetroot. Beets are a valuable source of iron, magnesium, zinc and calcium which all support healthy detoxification and better elimination. They are also full of B3, B6, C, and beta-catoene, important nutrients for supporting the liver and gallbladder in making bile acids which support detox."

link to article

Student Science Experiment Finds Plants Won’t Grow Near Wi-fi Router

 http://www.waldorftoday.com/2013/07/student-science-experiment-finds-plants-wont-grow-near-wi-fi-router/


Student Science Experiment Finds Plants Won’t Grow Near Wi-fi Router

Team_Karse_til_dr-dk

By MATHIAS BOHN

Five ninth-grade young women from Denmark recently created a science experiment that is causing a stir in the scientific community.

It started with an observation and a question. The girls noticed that if they slept with their mobile phones near their heads at night, they often had difficulty concentrating at school the next day. They wanted to test the effect of a cellphone’s radiation on humans, but their school, Hjallerup School in Denmark, did not have the equipment to handle such an experiment. So the girls designed an experiment that would test the effect of cellphone radiation on a plant instead.

The students placed six trays filled with Lepidium sativum, a type of garden cress, into a room without radiation, and six trays of the seeds into another room next to two routers that according to the girls’ calculations, emitted about the same type of radiation as an ordinary cellphone.

Over the next 12 days, the girls observed, measured, weighed and photographed their results. By the end of the experiment the results were blatantly obvious — the cress seeds placed near the router had not grown. Many of them were completely dead. Meanwhile, the cress seeds planted in the other room, away from the routers, thrived.

The experiment earned the girls (pictured below) top honors in a regional science competition and the interest of scientists around the world.

According to Kim Horsevad, a teacher at Hjallerup Skole in Denmark where the cress experiment took place, a neuroscience professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, is interested in repeating the experiment in a controlled professional scientific environment.





This article originally appeared at dr.dk in Danish, to see this summary in English at source on mnn.com, just click here.

Italy to Ban Monsanto GMO Corn with 80% Public Support

"First India gives Monsanto a run for their ill-gotten money by refusing their patent applications, and now Italy, with the help of three Italian ministries, will try to undo Monsanto. A decree has been signed which will ban Monsanto’s MON810 maize, one of the two genetically modified crops currently legally grown in Europe and sold commercially. The decree is not yet binding as it has to be published in the official gazette, but the public stands behind the three Italian ministers who put forth the document with a resounding 80% against GMO and Monsanto, as evidenced in a public survey."
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Delivery Day at the Emmanuel Dining Room on N. Jackson St. in Wilmington

Sister Cathleen delighting in the incredible tromboncino squash!

Chef Daniel getting ready to prepare summer squash soup with our lebanese squash and zucchinis fit for kings!

The Emmanuel Dining Room serves meals daily and volunteers are always welcome, just call to 302-652-3228 or stop by one of their locations.

Sister Cathleen signing us up for volunteer days.

(pardon the cell phone quality pics!)

Featured Recipe: Corn Flour Dipped Kousa Squash

In accordance with the permaculture ethic of fair share, our farm model runs by selling first pickings direct to consumers, retailers and local cafes, and bulk harvests donated to local homeless shelters, while the "farmer's harvest" goes to feed ourselves and our families.  Tonight's supper, prepared by Chef Ibra, featured Lebanese Kousa Squash, one of the heirloom summer squash varieties we are growing this season at the farm.  We happily share the recipe of this light summer dish with you this evening:  

Corn Flour Dipped Kousa Squash 
with Cherry Tomatoes, Candy Onions and Quinoa Pasta Shells in a Light White Sauce

For the squash:
1. Slice kousa squash into 3/4" rounds
2. Spread onto baking pan
3. Coat in olive oil, salt and pepper
4. Put into oven at 350F for 10 minutes (will bring out moisture)
5. Pull out of oven and coat both sides in NON-GMO corn flour
6. Place back into oven for 5 more minutes (bake through)
7. Finish in frying pan on HIGH heat to give corn meal a nice crust

For the white sauce:
1. Sweat down chopped onions and whole cherry tomatoes in a frying pan on medium heat with salt, pepper and olive oil
2. Crush cherry tomatoes in and turn heat to low
3. Add in just enough slices of sharp cheddar cheese to coat the veg
4. Finish with a dash of whole goat milk to impart a saucy coating for the pasta

For the pasta shells:
1. Cook pasta shells according to instructions until al dente
2. Add strained shells into pasta sauce
3. Mix into sauce until goat milk is absorbed

Serve and top with squash rounds!  Delicious!!!!
 
For residents local to northern New Castle County, DE, we offer the Lebanese Kousa Squashes in a 3-piece mix with Costata Romanesca Zucchinis for $3.00.  Check us out at: http://www.bottlegourdherbs.com/bgh-at-historic-penn-farm/ and be sure to sign up for our weekly mailing list!

Bottle Gourd Herbs at Historic Penn Farm: Mid-Summer Update with Photos

This week we've begun preparations for the fall growing season.  We created our first two new growing beds for growing mixed greens through to frost.  We received a 20 cubic yard delivery of quality aged compost from Laurel Valley Soils.  We double dig this compost into our existing soil, amended with bio-active mineral meal to increase soil biology, balance soil chemistry and provide a foundation for growing nutrient-rich crops.  Click here for our previous post on soil minerals to learn more.  Together with foliar feeding of liquid trace minerals throughout the early stages of crop growth, these low-cost practices make up our soil and plant fertility plan.  From our spring/summer crops, we have found these growing methods to produce great-tasting veggies with preserved freshness well after harvesting.

In flats we are starting fall crops for trialing including bulb fennel, cabbage, collards, broccoli, and bok choy.  By the recommendation of a fellow local farmer, we will be introducing beneficial nematodes to these fall crop growing beds to outcompete soil-born predator pests that tend to indulge in the cruciferous family crops. 

We continue to direct sow bush beans, carrots, beets, radishes and mixed greens.  In addition to continual sowing of our spring greens mix, we are trialing some new varieties of salad greens from different climate zones in the country.  We will be sure to document their development (and of course share their harvest!) 

At this time we are harvesting a bounty of zucchinis, squashes, and heirloom bush beans.  Soon will come our summer tomatoes and sweet peppers, followed by our melons!!!  We are posting frequent updates on our FACEBOOK page and send out a weekly newsletter we welcome you to sign up for: enter your email address via the DE Permaculture homepage. 

And now for a few photos:

This is what 20 cubic yards of compost looks like (the bed behind it is our newest leaf bed - a growing bed patterned after a leaf, with paths along the leaf veins and growing beds on leaf surface)

The jungle of vine crops that run through the center of our field (summer squashes, winter squashes, pumpkins, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers.....)

One of our new beds: a bermed raised bed (sown to drought tolerant greens mix) with swale to mitigate erosion from downslope bed sown to hot-climate acclimated mache (corn salad).

More photos coming soon.....

The Truthseeker: Eugenics Now! (E17)

What It Means That Monsanto Will Stop Pushing GMOs in Europe

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"If you didn't catch the news on Thursday: Monsanto, the much-reviled transnational agriculture consort, will cease its attempts to bring more genetically modified crops into the European farming market. Monsanto has one GM crop approved to cultivate in only a few places in Europe, the corn MON810, while BASF Plant Science, a smaller GMO concern owned by the massive German chemical company BASF, has one GM potato approved. That's it and going forward, that will be the end of it. At least for Monsanto. That's good but not because it's keeping GMOs out of Europe.
It's good because it's keeping a giant, ugly corporation that means bad things for agriculture and the future of food on Earth out of Europe. Practically, Monsanto weilds outsize influence on matters of food/food chain safety and punishes small/smaller farmers, both by owning and, thus, dictating the planet's agricultural markets and through nasty shit like GMO patents. Patents are one of the genuinely bad things about genetic modification generally and give purveyors like Monsanto the ability to totally patent an organism, from lab onward. Plant patents are nearly a century old in the United States—historically applying to hybrid plants, e.g. old-school genetic modification—but until recently still allowed farmers to save and use seeds. Not anymore. Thus, we wind up with situations like last fall's SCOTUS ruling against an Indiana farmer busted for using Monsanto seeds."

GMOs - PROFIT OVER HEALTH IS MONSANTO'S BUSINESS MODEL

"GMOs, genetically modified organisms, are a hot topic lately. Many people have safety concerns, some don't know what to think. The term GMO, usually refers to laboratory created crops that began infiltrating our food supply in the mid nineties. However, most people still don't understand the differences between hybridization and genetic modification.

Natural hybridization is nothing more than a cross between two closely related species – usually two plants. Hybrids have happened naturally throughout history via cross-pollination. Wind, water and animals are common facilitators in this process . Even when gardeners or farmers help the process along, hybridization has always occurred between closely related species. In the animal kingdom, an example of a hybrid is a mule, which is a cross between a male donkey and a female horse. Generally, mules are more patient, sure-footed and more willing workers than either parent.

In contrast, GMOs are created in labs by scientists combining organisms from two totally different biological kingdoms that could never be blended by the forces of nature alone. For example, Monsanto has crossed genetic material from a bacterial pesticide, Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis), with corn. The goal was to create a pest-resistant plant. This means that any pests attempting to eat the corn plant will die since the pesticide is part of every cell of the plant. The resultant GMO plant, known as Bt Corn, is itself registered as a pesticide with the EPA so, if you feed this corn to your cattle, your chickens, or yourself, you’ll be feeding them an actual pesticide in every bite. Bt could never naturally become part of the corn seed."

link 

 

5 Million Farmers Sue Monsanto for $7.7 Billion

"Launching a lawsuit against the very company that is responsible for a farmer suicide every 30 minutes, 5 million farmers are now suing Monsanto for as much as 6.2 billion euros (around 7.7 billion US dollars).
The reason? As with many other cases, such as the ones that led certain farming regions to be known as the ‘suicide belt’, Monsanto has been reportedly taxing the farmers to financial shambles with ridiculous royalty charges."
read 

Birth defects linked to bad water in California's San Joaquin Valley

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"An extensive new study confirms a long-suspected link between crippling birth defects and the nitrate contamination that threatens drinking water for 250,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley.
The study took place in the Midwest, but its findings hit hard in the Valley, where research last year showed farm-related nitrate pollution is extensive and expanding in the underground water of Fresno, Tulare and Kern counties.
The birth defects involved include spina bifida, cleft palate and missing limbs.
Valley clean-water advocates say the study again raises the profile of safe drinking water as a human right. Bureaucratic and funding delays have slowed fixes for years in many small towns.
"This contamination is so dangerous," said Maria Herrera of the Visalia-based Community Water Center. "Many towns need help with their drinking water, and we're still not seeing enough."

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/15/196723/birth-defects-linked-to-bad-water.html#.UeZXGI2TjjJ#storylink=cpy

Monsanto to withdraw EU approval requests for new GMO crops

Reuters) - Monsanto Co said on Wednesday it will withdraw all pending approval requests to grow new types of genetically modified crops in the European Union, due to the lack of commercial prospects for cultivation there.
"We will be withdrawing the approvals in the coming months," Monsanto's President and Managing Director for Europe, Jose Manuel Madero, told Reuters by telephone.

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An Emergency Measure Against Monsanto Corn in Italy

"BARI, Italy—An acre of farmland in northeastern Italy is at the center of a national debate.
Giorgio Fidenato, head of the Italian Federated Farmers, feels strongly about the right to grow genetically modified organisms (GMOs), prompting him to plant Monsanto’s GM corn strain Mon810 amid much protest.
Fidenato took advantage of the European Union’s decision in September 2012 to deny Italy the right to stop cultivation of Mon810. It was the only GMO permitted in the country, but Italy required cultivators to have a government-issued permit for its growth."link

US Military, Monsanto Targeting GMO Activists and Independent Scientists, New Investigation Alleges

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"A highly concerning new investigative report from the largest daily newspaper in Germany alleges that Monsanto, the US Military and the US government have colluded to track and disrupt both anti-GMO activists and independent scientists who study the adverse effects of genetically modified food.
As revealed yesterday by Sustainable Pulse, on July 13th the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung detailed information on how the US Government "advances the interests of their corporations," focusing on Monsanto as a prime example.
The report titled, "The Sinister Monsanto Group: 'Agent Orange' to Genetically Modified Corn," described a 'new fangled cyber war' being waged against both eco-activists and independent scientists by supporters and former employees of Monsanto, who are described as "operationally powerful assistants" and who have taken up sometimes high ranking posts in the US administration, regulatory authorities, and some of whom have connections deep within the military industrial establishment, including the CIA. "

JAH MASON - FARMER MAN

South Korean court says Dow, Monsanto owe Korean Agent Orange victims

see where the money goes when buying, i.e. supporting, some of the most diabolical, nefarious corporations in the world. every bottle of Round Up goes into their coffers.

"The Korean Supreme Court has ruled that chemical companies Monsanto and Dow Chemical must pay 39 Korean Vietnam War veterans $415,000 for certain skin diseases they suffered when they came into contact with the defoliant Agent Orange.
According to a story from Agence France-Presse, the court also sent back to a lower court for review, a 2006 case that ordered the U.S. firms to pay a total of 63 billion ($61 million) in compensation to 6,795 South Korean veterans and their families."
link

Fracking's Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/03/does-fracking-cause-earthquakes-wastewater-dewatering


Fracking's Latest Scandal? Earthquake Swarms
Turns out that when a barely regulated industry injects highly pressurized wastewater into faults, things can go terribly wrong.

—By Michael Behar
| March/April 2013 Issue
186


Update (7/11/2013): A new study in the journal Science found that earthquakes thousands of miles away can cause increased seismic activity in areas with underground injection wells. The injections increase pressure on faults, which can trigger tremors in Prague and other Midwestern areas where there's been an increase in fracking activity.

At exactly 10:53 p.m. on Saturday, November 5, 2011, Joe and Mary Reneau were in the bedroom of their whitewashed and brick-trimmed home, a two-story rambler Mary's dad custom-built 43 years ago. Their property encompasses 440 acres of rolling grasslands in Prague, Oklahoma (population 2,400), located 50 miles east of Oklahoma City. When I arrive at their ranch almost a year later on a bright fall morning, Joe is wearing a short-sleeve shirt and jeans held up by navy blue suspenders, and is wedged into a metal chair on his front stoop sipping black coffee from a heavy mug. His German shepherd, Shotzie, is curled at his feet. Joe greets me with a crushing handshake—he is 200 pounds, silver-haired and 6 feet tall, with thick forearms and meaty hands—and invites me inside. He served in Vietnam, did two tours totaling nine years with the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then, in 1984, retired a lieutenant colonel from the US Army to sell real estate and raise cattle. Today, the livestock are gone and Joe calls himself "semiretired" because "we still cut hay in the summers."

More Mother Jones coverage of fracking.

   Confirmed: Fracking Triggers Quakes and Seismic Chaos
   The Surprising Connection Between Food and Fracking
   Mark Ruffalo, The Fracking Foe
   WATCH: "It's the Wild F*ing West Out There"
   Meet Harold Hamm, Oil Tycoon and Romney's Top Energy Advisor
   The Texas Fracking Billionaire Who's Bankrolling National Politics

On that night in November, just as he and Mary were about to slip into bed, there was "a horrendous bang, like an airliner crashing in our backyard," Joe recalls. Next came 60 seconds of seismic terror. "The dust was flying and we were hanging onto the bed watching the walls go back and forth." Joe demonstrates by hunching over and gripping the mattress in their bedroom. He points to the bathroom. "The mirror in the vanity exploded as if somebody blew it out with a shotgun." When the shaking stopped, Joe surveyed the damage. "Every corner of the house was fractured," he says. The foundation had sunk two inches. But most frightening was what Joe discovered in the living room: "Our 28-foot-tall freestanding chimney had come through the roof." It had showered jagged debris onto a brown leather sofa positioned in front of their flat-screen TV. Joe shows me the spot. "It's Mary's favorite perch. Had she been here…" He chokes up.
Joe and Mary Reneau
Joe and Mary Reneau Photographs by Ben Sklar

The earthquake registered a magnitude 5.7*—the largest ever recorded in Oklahoma—with its epicenter less than two miles from the Reneaus' house, which took six months to rebuild. It injured two people, destroyed 14 homes, toppled headstones, closed schools, and was felt in 17 states. It was preceded by a 4.7 foreshock the morning prior and followed by a 4.7 aftershock.

The quake baffled seismologists. The only possible culprit was the Wilzetta Fault, a 320-million-year-old rift lurking between Prague and nearby Meeker. "But the Wilzetta was a dead fault that nobody ever worried about," says Katie Keranen, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Oklahoma. We're driving in her red SUV, just south of the Reneaus' property, when she stops to point out where the quake tore open a footwide fissure across State Highway 62. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) maintains a database of seismically risky areas. Its assessment of the Wilzetta Fault, Keranen notes, was "zero probability of expected ground motion. This fault is like an extinct volcano. It should never have been active."

When the Wilzetta mysteriously and violently awakened, Keranen wanted to know why. So she partnered with scientists from the USGS and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The morning after the initial foreshock, Keranen's team scrambled to install three seismometers around Prague. They did so in time to capture the quake system in unprecedented detail. She says, "We got this beautiful image of the fault plane." Within a week, her team and other scientists had placed a total of 25 devices around the fault zone. One is buried in the Reneaus' backyard. Now, having completed a yearlong study (just published in the journal Geology), Keranen's research indicates the Oklahoma earthquakes were likely attributable to underground injection of wastewater derived from "dewatering," separating crude oil from the soupy brine reaped through a drilling technique that allows previously inaccessible oil to be pumped up. "Pretty much everybody who looks at our data accepts that these events were likely caused by injection," Keranen concludes.

"We still feel tremors weekly," complains Joe Reneau. "They rattle our windows." The couple hasn't bothered to rehang family photos in their living room. Instead, the framed snapshots are stacked in tidy piles on a coffee table.
"The Wilzetta was a dead fault that nobody ever worried about." Then the drillers came. And so did a swarm of quakes.

Such seismic activity isn't normal here. Between 1972 and 2008, the USGS recorded just a few earthquakes a year in Oklahoma. In 2008, there were more than a dozen; nearly 50 occurred in 2009. In 2010, the number exploded to more than 1,000. These so-called "earthquake swarms" are occurring in other places where the ground is not supposed to move. There have been abrupt upticks in both the size and frequency of quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Texas. Scientists investigating these anomalies are coming to the same conclusion: The quakes are linked to injection wells. Into most of them goes wastewater from hydraulic fracking, while some, as those in Prague, are filled with leftover fluid from dewatering operations.

The impact of fossil fuels is no secret, but until now the short list of dirty energy's villains never included water. Together, oil and gas extraction and production generate about 878 billion gallons of wastewater annually, roughly what tumbles over Niagara Falls every two weeks. More than a third is injected back into disposal wells. With natural gas production on the rise—it has jumped 26 percent since 2007, chiefly because fracking now makes it economically viable to pursue gas trapped in shale deposits—and unconventional practices such as dewatering ramping up domestic oil development, the wastewater deluge is expected to get worse. Operators are injecting more water than ever into drilling wells, while boring new wells to accommodate the overflow. Yet nobody really knows how all this water will impact faults, or just how big an earthquake it could spawn. In the West, small quakes don't often cause much damage because of stricter seismic regulations but also because the underground formations—buckled, with younger rock—absorb all but the biggest events. Induced quakes, however, are happening primarily in flatter states, amid more rigid rock, making them more destructive—a stone makes a bigger splash when it's hurled into a glassy pond than a river of raging whitewater.

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For its part, industry is doing its best to avoid discussing the issue publicly, even as its leading professional guild, the Society of Petroleum Engineers, recognized the matter was serious enough to call its first-ever meeting devoted to "injection induced seismicity." Held in September, the SPE's 115-member workshop sought to "better understand and mitigate potential risks." When I reached out to SPE coordinator Amy Chao, she told me, "I appreciate your interest but press is not allowed to attend in any fashion." My requests to speak with geophysicists at leading oil and gas companies implicated in injection-induced earthquakes were also ignored or denied. I did manage to speak with Jean Antonides, vice president of exploration for New Dominion, which operates one of the wells near the Wilzetta Fault. He informed me that people claiming to know the true source of the Oklahoma quakes are "either lying to your face or they're idiots."

Nonetheless, there's growing concern among state officials. After a spate of quakes linked to injection wells shook northern Arkansas, the state's oil and gas commission declared a moratorium on underground wastewater disposal activities within a 1,000-square-mile area encompassing the towns of Guy and Greenbrier and required seismic-risk studies in the greater Fayetteville Shale area. Affected residents filed a class-action lawsuit against Chesapeake Energy and BHP Billiton Petroleum—the first time anyone has sued oil and gas companies for causing an earthquake. After an injection well was linked to quakes in Youngstown, Ohio, Gov. John Kasich issued an executive order requiring operators to conduct seismic studies before the state will issue well permits. So far, Ohio is alone in this regard; no other state—or the federal government—requires any type of seismic-risk assessment for all of its injection wells. And that worries scientists: "Nobody is talking to one another about this," says William Ellsworth, a prominent USGS geophysicist who's published more than 100 papers on earthquakes. Among other mishaps, Ellsworth worries that a well could pierce an unknown fault "five miles from a nuclear power plant."


The EPA classifies and regulates underground injection wells—some 700,000 and counting—based on what goes into them. There are six categories. Class VI wells sequester carbon dioxide; Class V wells store nonhazardous fluids; nuclear waste is stashed in Class IV wells; Class III wells are used in mining salt, uranium, copper, and sulfur; industrial chemicals get stored in Class I wells. Wastewater from oil and gas operations is discharged—typically by injecting it under pressure—into Class II wells.

There are at least 155,000 Class II wells in the United States. Of these about 80 percent are involved in recovering hydrocarbons, predominantly through slick-water hydrofracking, a technique developed by Halliburton. Fracking fluid—water blended with lubricants, thickeners, disinfectants, and other compounds—is pumped into well bores at extremely high pressures. Eventually, the fluid reverses course and—along with millions of gallons of salt water that resides underground—ascends to the surface. The "flowback," now laden with natural gas, is collected, the gas is extracted, and the residual fluid is pumped into disposal wells. There are roughly 40,000 of these, and they can be up to 13,000 feet deep.

The extraction process itself doesn't generally produce earthquakes. This is because of something known as pore pressure, a measurement of how much stress a fluid exerts into the "pores" of surrounding rock. The whole aim of fracking is to rapidly increase pore pressure just long enough to cleave fissures into sediment and free trapped gas, after which time pore pressure equalizes, easing the subterranean stress. Only rarely is pore pressure high enough in a fracking well to cause an earthquake that can be felt at the surface.

But while fracking wells are intended to withstand high pore pressure, wastewater disposal wells are not. When pore pressure spikes in disposal wells, it can move rock. Disposal wells are drilled into vast, permeable formations—think giant sponges—where there's plenty of space for water to spread out. But because water is heavy, the more of it that is sluiced into a well, the more it weighs on the rock below. And as Scott Ausbrooks, a geologist with the Arkansas Geological Survey, points out, "Water does not like to be squeezed." Eventually it finds an escape route, "just like a room of people. The more you put in, the more crowded it gets, and at some point, people are going to start being pushed out the doors."
Animated GIF: fracked Up?

Drillers inject high-pressure fluids into a hydraulic fracturing well, making slight fissures in the shale that release natural gas. The wastewater that flows back up with the gas is then transported to disposal wells, where it is injected deep into porous rock. Scientists now believe that the pressure and lubrication of that wastewater can cause faults to slip and unleash an earthquake.
how fracking causes earthquakes

Illustration: Leanne Kroll. Animation: Brett Brownell

With the oil and gas boom generating record amounts of wastewater, these rooms are getting increasingly jam-packed. Exactly how much? The EPA tracks volumes but wouldn't provide them; agency officials declined numerous requests for interviews. Companies are also pumping into denser rock, or into deeper formations that are inherently unstable. "There's much more injection going on today where there wasn't injection before," says Cliff Frohlich, associate director of the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas-Austin, who recently identified a cluster of wells at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport as the likely culprit for nearby earthquakes.

Too much wastewater in a disposal well forces liquid downward and outward, he adds. It can meander for months, creeping into unknown faults and prying the rock apart just enough to release pent-up energy. Frohlich describes this as the "air hockey" effect. A puck on an air hockey table won't move even if the table is tilted upward a few degrees. "It would just sit there," he says. "But when you turn on the air, it reduces the friction and the puck will slide. There are faults most everywhere. Most of them are stuck, because rock on rock is pretty sticky. But if you pump a fluid in there to reduce the friction, they can slip."

*It should be noted that the United States Geological Survey used two different techniques to estimate the earthquake magnitude at 5.6. The Global Centroid-Moment-Tensor Project at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University used different methods to measure it at 5.7. As Justin Rubinstein of the USGS told us, this type of variance is not unusual, and the measurements are considered consistent.
Next Page: "This well caused these earthquakes. There were no felt earthquakes in Youngstown in 100 years."

Mutant Super-Wheat Spreading By Itself! Alarmed Farmers Sue Monsanto

predictable outcome, and they deal with the lawsuits for the larger agenda of full spectrum dominance of the food, in an unfurling self fulfilling prophecy of pesticide/herbicides and gmo foods creating more problems and pests that require more chemicals to combat.

Mutant Super-Wheat Spreading By Itself! Alarmed Farmers Sue Monsanto

Read more at http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/07/11/monsantos-gm-wheat-contaminates-other-fields-farmers-sue-150381

 

 

" From 1998 to 2005, agricultural biotech giant Monsanto planted genetically engineered glyphosate-resistant wheat in experimental fields in 16 states. It was not intended for commercialization; genetically engineered wheat has never been approved by the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sale. But, nine years after Monsanto’s experiment was discontinued, strains of this GM wheat have been found in other wheat fields, the USDA announced on May 29.
Immediately after the news leaked, South Korea and Japan banned all U.S. imports of wheat. And a handful of wheat farmers have since sued Monsanto, charging that this genetic pollution is financially damaging their business, reported Natural News."

Bottle Gourd Herbs at Historic Penn Farm

some photos from the farm, beautiful farmer girl holding beautiful radishes and a newly constructed leaf bed with cardboard paths, sowed intensively with mixed salad greens noted for their heat resistance for places like Harvest Market and Fresh Thymes Cafe. Also, a big thanks to Dan Dougherty for pitching in and helping to dig a bed this evening, our first volunteer! 

Dallas chef rids the menu of genetically-modified foods

 this is where the activism meets the plate, we hope other chefs around the globe will take the initiative and demand gmo labeling, and force the big agricultural giants to capitulate. we hope Delaware chefs will take notice, and follow the example of such kitchens as Fresh Thymes Cafe in Wilmington

 rest of article and video clip from local news
"DALLAS — Meet the leader of the Mohawk Militia: Patrick Stark.
As executive chef of Sundown at Granada, he's one of the first to revamp his entire menu to be GMO-free. There's nothing that's been "genetically modified" here — just natural, organic products.
"It's got an opening sheet, and it will be handed out with every menu, to be completely transparent with our customers, saying we are about 97 percent GMO-free right now," Stark said."