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Biodiversity / Biodevastation

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Stories about Biodiversity and Biodevastation.

In California, families fear pesticide poisoning after EPA reverses ban

By: 
Sam Levin

A white cloud of pesticides had drifted into Fidelia Morales’s back yard, coating her children’s swing set.

The 40-year-old mother of five gestured toward the citrus groves that surround her house in California’s Central Valley as she recounted when an air blast sprayer sent chemicals floating onto her property last year – landing on her family’s red and blue jungle gym.

Why we can’t just leave environmental protection to the states

By: 
Cynthia Giles

The Trump budget proposal for the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t just slash funding for the EPA. It contains a less-noticed but important policy shift: eliminating federal enforcement where states and the EPA share enforcement authority. The budget plan directs the EPA to stop enforcing laws to protect clean air and water in most cases, based on the false assumption that if the EPA pulls back, the states can pick up the slack. Here’s why that’s wrong.

First, states often don’t enforce the laws within their own borders when the people primarily harmed live downwind or downriver in another state. States don’t want to spend their money or their political capital to benefit other states. The federal government has the responsibility to protect everyone — like the millions of people on the East Coast who suffer the effects from large air polluters in the Midwest.

The Biotech Industry Is Taking Over the Regulation of GMOs from the Inside

By: 
Jonathan Latham

The corporate takeover of the International Society for Biosafety Research (ISBR) and its biennial ISGBMO conference is a case study in the methods and the goals of the biotech industry. It exemplifies industry efforts to capture international GMO regulation and showcases the specific regulatory objectives of the biotech industry.

Beyond Democrat Dead-ends: What Real Climate Action Looks Like

By: 
CAROL DANSEREAU

The global warming situation is absolutely crazy.  Millions of people are already experiencing drought, famine, floods, wildfires, superstorms and other climate disasters.  As a species, we are teetering on the edge of full-blown catastrophe, with extinction a distinct possibility.  Yet, we can’t seem to put in place obvious solutions that are sitting right there in front of us.


Big Pharma's pollution is creating deadly superbugs while the world looks the other way

By: 
Madlen Davies

Industrial pollution from Indian pharmaceutical companies making medicines for nearly all the world’s major drug companies is fuelling the creation of deadly superbugs, suggests new research. Global health authorities have no regulations in place to stop this happening.

A major study published today in the prestigious scientific journal Infection found “excessively high” levels of antibiotic and antifungal drug residue in water sources in and around a major drug production hub in the Indian city of Hyderabad, as well as high levels of bacteria and fungi resistant to those drugs. Scientists told the Bureau the quantities found meant they believe the drug residues must have originated from pharmaceutical factories.

Diet for a Warming Planet

By: 
George Wuerthner

I read two different studies this week that are connected but were not related in the media.

The first is record warmth across the country. Denver recorded 80 degrees in mid-November. And 29 states had the warmest December ever recorded. Instead of a white Christmas, it was 70 degrees on Christmas Eve in Vermont!

Such freakish weather might be written off as the normal variation, except that an analysis by NOAA found the last five years were the warmest ever recorded in the past 122 years.

With the Arctic sea ice melting and glaciers disappearing, along with record high temperatures across the planet, it is getting increasingly difficult to deny that the planet is heating up.

How Burger King's Palm Oil Addiction Is Devastating Local Communities—and Planet Earth

By: 
Hannah Lownsbrough

There’s nothing new about fast food corporations unleashing environmental chaos to maximize their profits. But the recent explosion of palm oil usage is a new threat. Burger King is at the front of the pack of corporations abusing human rights and the environment to satisfy its ever-growing appetite for the oil.

Burger King has always been a corporation defined by its competition. But now it is in danger of becoming the leader in a competition nobody should want to win: fueling the development of rapacious oil palm plantations. Burger King is one of a number of food and drink corporations that rely on palm oil for everything from fry oil to puddings. The recent increase in its use has been exponential: 485 percent in the last decade alone.

Fukushima Catastrophe at 6: Normalizing Radiation Exposure Demeans Women and Kids and Risks Their Health

By: 
Cindy Folkers

Since the election of President Trump, certain words have taken prominence in our lexicon: “alternative facts”, “gaslighting”, “normalization”. But the techniques these words represent have been used by the nuclear industry and its purveyors in government since the Cold War love affair with nuclear weapons began.

And as we deal with the continuing fallout 6 years after the Fukushima, and 31 years after the Chernobyl, catastrophes began, the nuclear industry continues to put these techniques to good use. They have labeled “radiophobic” those who question nuclear power or who refuse to move back to contaminated areas or eat contaminated food. They shame people into taking health risks and socially isolate those who refuse to comply. They sell the lie of decontamination despite the fact that what has been decontaminated one day, may be recontaminated the next.

Smokey was wrong. You can’t prevent wildfires, and you shouldn’t try.

By: 
Aura Bogado

Richard Minnich, a professor of science at University of California at Riverside, likes to play a word game that sums up how confused the general public is about wildfires. It starts with a well-known slogan.

“Smokey the Bear says, ‘Only you can prevent forest fires,’” Minnich says, then takes a pregnant pause. “Let’s change that last part. Smokey the Bear says, ‘Only you can prevent earthquakes.’ Or how about, ‘Only you can prevent tornadoes’ — except no one thinks that,” he says with a chuckle.

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