GRIST– “Coca-Cola goes green,” announced a 2010 Forbes article. Indeed, the beverages giant maintains partnerships with Big Green groups like Conservation International and World Wildlife Fund. It recently even completed its takeover of Honest Tea, an organic bottled-tea company. It would clearly like to be seen as a paragon of “green capitalism” — the idea that doing good and doing well go hand in hand.

Let’s put aside questions over what can possibly be “green” about a business model geared to sucking in huge amounts of drinking water, blasting it with what are probably toxic sweeteners and other dodgy substances, and then packaging it in little aluminum cans and plastic bottles and sending them far and wide, to be chilled (using fossil energy) before consumption.

OK, so within those tight constraints, Coca-Cola says it wants to be a “green company.” So … WTF? Last week, Coca-Cola shareholders voted by a 3-to-1 margin to continue using BPA, a toxic industrial chemical, in the lining of its soft-drink cans.

According to an account in Food Production Daily, a company executive assured shareholders that “if we had any sliver of doubt about the safety of our packaging, we would not continue to use [BPA].” So, we’re supposed to believe that Coke execs have weighed the evidence and found BPA to be safe — and that they will immediately banish it if they decide otherwise.

Sorry, but that’s bullsh*t.

Read more about Coke, BPA, and the Limits of ‘Green Capitalism’

© 2011 Grist

Photo by Flickr user williamtillis

APRIL 23, 2011

HUFFINGTON POST– Children whose mothers are exposed to high amounts of certain pesticides while pregnant appear to have lower IQs than their peers when they reach school age, according to three recent government-funded studies.

The pesticides, known as organophosphates, are commonly sprayed on food crops and can be found in trace amounts on berries, green beans and other fruits and vegetables sold in stores. The pesticides have also been used in homes and gardens, although their indoor use has been widely restricted due to safety concerns.

Organophosphates, which kill pests by attacking the nervous system, have previously been linked to developmental delays and attention problems in young children who were exposed in the womb. Now, researchers in two different locations have found that a child’s IQ tends to decrease in proportion to the mother’s exposure while pregnant.

One of the studies followed hundreds of mostly Latino mothers and children in California’s Salinas Valley, a center of commercial agriculture. Many of the women were farmworkers, or had family members who worked on farms.

Read more about Pesticides During Pregnancy May Hurt IQ

© 2011 Huffington Post

Photo by flickr user scraplab

NATURAL NEWS– Twelve million New Yorkers, 8.4 million of which live in New York City (NYC), continue to involuntarily consume fluoridated water regularly, despite a report issued from the New York State Department of Health (DoH) back in 1990 which warned that the chemical additive is toxic. To this day, many officials not only deny this report, but also falsely insist that “water fluoridated at the optimum level poses no known health risks.”

The original report, entitled Fluoride: Benefits and Risks of Exposure, provided a sharp warning to officials that fluoride chemicals are especially harmful to kidney disease patients, diabetics, and those who are hyper-sensitive to the chemical. It also warned that because fluoride puts incredible toxic pressure on the kidneys, those with weaker kidneys are at an increased risk of developing skeletal fluorosis, a severe bone disease marked by symptoms of pain, tenderness and bone fractures.

The toxicity of fluoride is so great that in 2007, the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) withdrew its endorsement for fluoride as a beneficial water additive. The group has stated that “individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD) should be notified of the potential risk of fluoride exposure.”

GRIST – Bittman: Time to label GMOs

With the USDA’s recent flurry of green lights for genetically modified crops — evidently at the urging of the White House  — the Obama administration should brace itself for a big push on the labeling question. Popular sentiment may be swelling for something the agrichemical/biotech industry really doesn’t want: labels on food products proclaiming the presence of GM material. The New York Times’ Mark Bittman is a widely read and influential writer. His latest column puts the case for labeling in terms that the administration will have trouble refuting:

“Even more than questionable approvals, it’s the unwillingness to label these products as such — even the G.E. salmon will be sold without distinction — that is demeaning and undemocratic, and the real reason is clear: producers and producer-friendly agencies correctly suspect that consumers will steer clear of G.E. products if they can identify them. Which may make them unprofitable. Where is the free market when we need it?”

He who controls the research …

At the L.A. Times, the Union of Concerned Scientists’ wonderful Doug Gurian-Sherman has a must-read op-ed for anyone who thinks people are hysterical to oppose GMOs (or want them labelled). Writes Gurian-Sherman about the alleged benefits of GMOs:

“We don’t have the complete picture. That’s no accident. Multibillion-dollar agricultural corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent research on their genetically engineered crops. They have often refused to provide independent scientists with seeds, or they’ve set restrictive conditions that severely limit research options.”

Those facts should be pondered whenever you hear anyone mouth the platitude that GMOs “have been proven safe” or “never hurt anyone” or deliver X, Y, or Z benefits. Empowered by a generous intellectual-property regime, the seed giants dictate who does what research and how. As Gurian-Sherman reports, the industry and the EPA were embarrassed in 2009 when 26 university entomologists wrote a letter to the agency complaining of lack of access to seeds. “No truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions involving these crops,” they wrote. Monsanto and other companies have been shamed into reaching agreements to allow access to seeds to USDA and unversity researchers — but the deals are voluntary, opaque, and still quite limited. As Gurian-Sherman writes: “The Monsanto agreement with the USDA covers research into crop production practices, for example, not research into issues such as the health risks of genetically engineered crops.”

A defense of GMO alfalfa gets mowed down

James McWilliams is a vegan, so he deplores the planting of alfalfa, which is mainly used as cow feed. But if it must be planted, he argues on the Atlantic website, it might as well be from Monsanto-patented seed genetically engineered to withstand Roundup, Monsanto’s flagship herbicide. The USDA itself [PDF] and mainstream ag scientists are on record warning that Monsanto’s alfalfa will cross-pollinate with organic and non-engineered alfalfa. The USDA chose to “deregulate” it anyway, enraging the organic community. In his Atlantic piece, McWilliams set out to defend that decision by debunking the contamination fears. A few days later, Organic Inc. author Sam Fromartz completely obliterated McWilliams’ argument, documenting several past cases of GMO contamination.

Time’s Bryan Walsh: the food movement can revive environmentalism

Bryan Walsh makes a rousing case for the food movement as savior of environmentalism, which, he argues, has “stalled.” There’s a lot to what Walsh is saying here, but I think there’s something different going on than what he describes. I don’t think environmentalism has stalled; I think efforts to make big policy changes have stalled. Climate legislation failed ignominiously last year, and not before being hopelessly compromised and stepped on by industry interests. And that was with Democrats in charge of the White House and both legislative chambers. Meanwhile, global climate talks are in limbo. What now? No one has figured out a way to crack that nut.

What the food movement offers is a hands-on way to create a world that makes sense in your immediate community. It is environmentalism brought into the kitchen, the yard, the neighborhood, the city farmers’ market, the soil in the surrounding countryside. You can get your hands on food, taste it, make friends around it. The change you see is immediate. And just as the environmental movement spawned the environmental-justice movement — based on the idea that certain groups were more focused on whales than on toxic poisoning in low-income communities — a food-justice movement has sprung up. Indeed, much of today’s food movement sprouted in low-income urban areas in the early ’90s.

But on the grand policy level — Michelle Obama’s garden and kids initiative aside — the food movement is getting squashed, too, as Food and Water Watch’s Wenonah Hauter recently argued in a pungent essay. The lesson: Changing policy is hard, long, grinding work, often abstract and rife with defeats. To keep going, it helps to have on-the-ground successes, and that — often enough — is what community food work provides. (Not that there aren’t setbacks, squabbles, and frustrations built into it.) All that said, I agree with Walsh that the food and environmental movements are now intertwined and will thrive or languish together.

Click to continue reading full article the case for labeling GMOs.

Article by Tom Philpott, Grist’s senior food and agriculture writer.

© Copyright Grist, 2011

Image by flickr user, Askokas Change Makers

Monsanto Crop Circle photo by Melvyn Calderon:Greenpeace

YAHOO NEWS– The Environmental Working Group released a report Monday indicating that millions of Americans are regularly drinking hexavalent chromium, made famous in the film “Erin Brockovich” as a carcinogen, through their tap water.

The group — whose study was first reported in a story Sunday by the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton — tested water from 35 U.S. cities and found that samples from 31 cities contained hexavalent chromium. The highest concentrations were found in Norman, Okla.; Honolulu; and Riverside, Calif. The substance had been a widely used industrial chemical for decades and has evidently leached into the groundwater in many areas.

The EWG report states:

“Despite mounting evidence of the contaminant’s toxic effects, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not set a legal limit for chromium-6 in tap water and does not require water utilities to test for it. Hexavalent chromium is commonly discharged from steel and pulp mills as well as metal-plating and leather-tanning facilities. It can also pollute water through erosion of natural deposits.

“The authoritative National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has said that chromium-6 in drinking water shows ‘clear evidence of carcinogenic activity’ in laboratory animals, increasing the risk of gastrointestinal tumors. Just last October, a draft review by the EPA similarly found that ingesting the chemical in tap water is ‘likely to be carcinogenic to humans.’ Other health risks associated with exposure include liver and kidney damage, anemia and ulcers.”

Read full article about Cities’ Water Containing Hexavalent Chromium here.

Photo by Flickr user GFRPhoto