Connecticut NOFA: Glyphosate News Round Up

Thursday, April 2, 2015, By Bill Duesing

Our current, conventional food system is based on the use of glyphosate, an herbicide which is designed to kill all green plants. (Remember for a minute that all of our oxygen and food comes from green plants. Then consider a business plan that depends on selling more of this green-plant-killing chemical every year.)

In 1970, a Monsanto scientist discovered that glyphosate killed plants. The company started marketing it as Roundup® in 1973 and held exclusive rights in this country until its patents expired in 2000. Now glyphosate and its formulations are made by many other toxic chemical companies all over the world. Over 100 million pounds of this herbicide are applied in this country alone; about half a billion pounds are applied worldwide, every year!

Glyphosate is the active ingredient in Roundup. You can buy it almost anywhere in a convenient spray bottle or by the gallon. You may presently have some in your home. Town and state governments spray it freely along our roadsides. (For a long time Monsanto advertised Roundup as “biodegradable” and “environmentally friendly.” In 1997, the New York Attorney General sued the company to stop that deceptive advertising. Monsanto paid a fine and stopped using that marketing strategy, at least in New York.)

Glyphosate’s most extensive use, however, is in the industrial food system where it is sprayed on the vast majority of our food crops. That’s because the plants have been engineered by the makers of Roundup and other herbicides to resist death when sprayed with this chemical. What is actually sprayed on our food crops is mixture of glyphosate with various, undisclosed “other ingredients” that make up over half of this toxic cocktail.

…(read more)

Food-Matters
Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

Right Livelihood Award: 2014 – Bill McKibben/350.org

Bill McKibben / 350.org (2014, USA)

“…for mobilising growing popular support in the USA and around the world for strong action to counter the threat of global climate change.”

Bill McKibben is one of the world’s leading environmentalists. He has been an influential author and educator for 30 years, and his 1989 book The End of Nature was one of the first-ever books written to inform a general audience about climate change. Over the last ten years he initiated and built the first planet-wide, grassroots climate change movement. With the organisation 350.org at its core, this movement has spread awareness and mobilised political support for urgent action to mitigate the climate crisis that is already unfolding.

Career as environmental author

Bill McKibben was born on 8 December 1960 and graduated from Harvard University in 1982. McKibben worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1982-87 and then went freelance. In 1989, he published The End of Nature, which has been considered to be the first book on global warming written for a general audience. The book became a bestseller and was published in more than 20 languages.

Wikipedia provides an overview of his subsequent writing: “His next book, The Age of Missing Information (…) is an account of an experiment in which McKibben collected everything that came across the 100 channels of cable TV (…) for a single day. He spent a year watching the 2,400 hours of videotape, and then compared it to a day spent on the mountaintop near his home. This book has been widely used in colleges and high schools. (…)

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice

Americans Most Likely to Say Global Warming Is Exaggerated

by Andrew Dugan

This article is the fourth in a series that will analyze Gallup’s latest March update on Americans’ views on climate change and examine how these views have changed over time. The series will explore public opinion on the severity and importance of climate change, its causes and effects, the extent of Americans’ understanding of the issue, and much more.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Even as most Americans report experiencing abnormal weather conditions lately, more than four in 10 say the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated in the news. These sentiments are lower than the record 48% who believed this four years ago, but higher than any year before Barack Obama became president.

Though the largest share of Americans specifically describe reports on the seriousness of global warming as exaggerated, a slim majority collectively see these reports as generally correct (23%) or generally underestimated (33%). On this basis, most Americans seem to accept that global warming is at least as serious a problem as news reports say it is. Viewed still another way, fully three-quarters of the country believe that reports about global warming are mistaken — for better or worse.

These results come from Gallup’s annual Environment poll, conducted March 6-9. Since 2011, attitudes about the perceived seriousness of global warming have been steady, but public opinion has changed notably since Gallup first asked the question in 1997. Fewer Americans now say the seriousness of global warming is generally correct; at the same time, the percentage finding the threat generally exaggerated has increased, and since 2009 has consistently been at or above 40%, a mark it never reached in the years before.

Views on Seriousness of Global Warming Vary by Party

Opinions about global warming vary by party identification, with Democrats typically more worried than Republicans about global warming and its potentially harmful effects on the environment. Democrats are most likely to say the seriousness of global warming is generally underestimated in the news, with about half (49%) saying so. Another 32% of Democrats believe reports about global warming are generally correct. Less than one-fifth (18%) find that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated.

…(read more).

Global Climate Change
Environment Ethics
Environment Justice