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Documenting the history of pesticide hazards in the United States

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toxic

Video: Biotechnology, Agrichemicals, and the Value of Life

October 17, 2018 By Allison Wilson

On a recent trip through Hawai’i as a guest of Hawai‘i Seed, Jonathan Latham, Director of the Project, talked at the University of Hawai’i.

Industrial agriculture is logically dependent on infringing on the quality of life, often catastrophically, of diverse creatures. The islands comprising Hawai’i exhibit those harms perhaps more than anywhere else on earth. Using new revelations of the Poison Papers (www.poisonpapers.org) as examples of how regulators fail to protect us I discuss the true extent of those toxic impacts. Even without revelations such as the Poison Papers however, we already know enough to stop supporting industrial agriculture, yet governments continue to do so, showering them with subsidies and other incentives. The reasons they decide wrongly are in part about economics and in part about scientific corruption; but here I point to an underlying conceptual flaw in our collective cultural understanding of life itself. Critiquing our standard, but illogical, modern interpretation of the nature of life is an overlooked key to understanding the the tragic and disastrous policies and practices prevailing in agriculture. But immediately obvious too is that the misunderstanding of life pervades much more broadly–into the justice system, into education, and into healthcare, to name just a few of those domains.

Filed Under: Poison Papers News Tagged With: agriculture, Hawai‘i, toxic

Mongabay Series: Amazon Agribusiness, Cerrado Brazil’s pesticide poisoning problem poses global dilemma, say critics

August 29, 2018 By Allison Wilson

Written by by Anna Sophie Gross and published on 27 August 2018 in Mongabay: News and Inspiration from Nature’s Frontline.

 

Brazil’s pesticide poisoning problem poses global dilemma, say critics

Filed Under: Latest News Tagged With: 2, 4-D, atrazine, banned pesticides, BASF, Bayer, Brazil, food, Glyphosate, GMO animal feed, health, Monsanto, paraquat, soy, Syngenta, toxic

Pesticide Studies Won E.P.A.’s Trust, Until Trump’s Team Scorned ‘Secret Science’

August 24, 2018 By Allison Wilson

For years, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have been studying the effects of pesticides on California farm workers and their children. Partly funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, findings from this important epidemiology research have been used to argue for restrictions on toxins such as insecticides.

The research has found links between pesticides sprayed on fruit and vegetable crops and “respiratory complications, developmental disorders and lower I.Q.s among children of farm workers.”

According to the article:
“.. weeks after Donald J. Trump was elected president, CropLife America, the main agrochemical trade group, petitioned the E.P.A. to “halt regulatory decisions that are highly influenced and/or determined by the results of epidemiological studies” unless universities were forced to share more of their data.”

The article, published in the New York Times on August 24, 2018 was written by Danny Hakim and Eric Lipton.

Read the full article at: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/24/business/epa-pesticides-studies-epidemiology.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Filed Under: Latest News Tagged With: attacks on science, California, chemical industry, collusion, CropLife, developmental disorders, EPA, health impacts, industrial agriculture, respiratory complications, Tobacco Industry, toxic, Trump

Worse Than Lead? Special Investigation: The chemical industry strikes again, shifting from lead to flame retardants that also sicken and kill.

August 21, 2018 By Allison Wilson

“Today, thanks in part to the efforts of a single Virginia family, as many as 97 percent of Americans have toxic flame retardants in their blood. Deeply poisonous, and linked to cancer, genetic damage, and behavioral and learning difficulties, the prevalence of flame retardants, here and around the world, owes to the fact that these chemicals have been placed in many of the objects of daily life—in our homes, automobiles, and workplaces, even in our beds.”

As Jamie Lincoln Kitman illustrates in his new investigative piece for The Nation, flame retardants are yet another Chemical Industry example of reckless disregard  for human suffering and environmental damage. In this case, key perpetrators are the Gottwalds, the most powerful shareholders of the Albemarle chemical company. The Gottwalds chose the same methods favored by all manufacturers of unnecessary and harmful products, from tobacco to lead to pesticides to GMOs:

“..these manufacturers mounted aggressive scare campaigns to create a perceived need for their products: They crafted regulations and lobbied legislatures to adopt them; attacked scientific findings they didn’t like; ridiculed public-health advocates; spun journalists; and bought political access with millions of dollars in campaign contributions.”

Of course, despite their toxicity and pervasiveness, flame retardants are just the tip of an enormous poison-laced iceberg,

“A shocking fact: The EPA maintains a database of some 85,000 chemicals that have been manufactured or processed in the United States, but it has subjected less than 300 of these to rigorous testing under the Toxic Substances Control Act and has banned only five (including PCBs.)”

Read the full story at: “Worse Than Lead? Special Investigation: The chemical industry strikes again, shifting from lead to flame retardants that also sicken and kill,” by Jamie Lincoln Kitman. Published by The Nation on August 15, 2018.

Filed Under: Latest News Tagged With: Albemarle, cancer, chemical industry, EPA, flame retardants, genetic damage, Gottwald, Jamie Lincoln Kitman, lead, learning difficulties, PR, public relations, toxic

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