The Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter is published weekly by Priscilla
King, c/o Boxholders, P.O. Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. It’s
available free, in plain text as an e-mail or attachment. Printed or
audiocassette versions are available for the cost of production. (Audiofiles
are free to anyone who can convince me that s/he is blind and can’t read a
document aloud using widely available software.) Reprinting, recirculating, and
sharing this information at the reader’s own expense is encouraged, provided
that all sources of material are credited.
1. GLYPHOSATE AWARENESS NEEDS A WEBSITE
Wouldn’t it be great if people could ask “Which studies mention
glyphosate reactions that include vomiting?” or “Which study mentioned ‘diarrhea,
nasal discharge, and death’ as the most common glyphosate reactions in rabbits?”
and all of us could, at any time, say “That’d be page 3 of Study A and page 157
of Study B...” instead of thinking slowly and grumpily, as even I now do, “Meh,
I think that was an older study someone shared in October or was it November?”
Computer systems like Microsoft Word, Blogger, Weebly, and arguably even
Wordpress could be doing those searches now. My Blogspot does it, in a clunky
way—it’s a blog, it pulls up the comments rather than the actual studies. Twitter
was doing a fine job of documenting everything we’ve ever shared with the
#GlyphosateAwareness hashtag, for the first six months or so...but that’s a lot
of tweets, and by now scrolling back through them is likely to crash people’s
browsers.
We need one place where people can find links to all the scientific
documents we’ve been collecting and sharing over the past year. Ideally people
could go to a web site, type in search terms, and pull up the studies that
include those terms right away. Just one or two clicks would empower anybody to
print out the information most useful to them. At the bottom of the page we
could even index song lyrics, video presentations, cartoons, and other fun
stuff for those whose computers are set up to process it. Would anyone like to
offer their expertise to build such a site?
2. BRAZIL SELF-SABOTAGES
Brazil’s President Bolsonaro promises greedheads he’ll roll back what
restrictions on the use of poison sprays, the destruction of the rain forest,
and the encroachment on indigenous people’s territories, Brazil has had so far.
Does the world need more tribal homelands turned into favelas...to produce more
alleged food that’s unfit for consumption by humans or even by domestic animals?
https://www.rt.com/news/465348-brazil-pesticides-regulation-banned/
3. “ORGANICALLY GROWN” GMO?
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s current Undersecretary of
Agriculture, Greg Ibach, thinks the words “organically grown” and “genetically
modified” can be used to describe the same things. He needs education. https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/should-gmos-be-allowed-organic-food-usda-sparks-debate
4. HOW GLYPHOSATE AND/OR CHLORPYRIFOS HARM FISH
Two scientists in Argentina have e-published a study documenting how
exposure to these “pesticides,” separately or together, harmed one species of
wild fish. This study is still breaking news; it’s not been printed yet and you
may have to pay or subscribe to see the whole document for a few more weeks. The
short version is already online at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004565351931522X?via%3Dihub
and at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31310974
.
5. CHILDREN’S BODIES CONTAIN MORE GLYPHOSATE THAN ADULTS’
A disturbing study in California finds that, for families that consciously avoid glyphosate exposure, children’s
bodies contained more glyphosate than their parents’, possibly due to exposure to
sprayed schoolyards and glyphosate-tainted school food. https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2019/07/24/weed-killer-roundup-kids-epa-higher-levels-parents/
6. CONTINUING NEED TO FOCUS ON ST. LOUIS
Although Bayer’s lawsuit in St. Louis is being delayed, giving us a
little more time to spread Glyphosate Awareness there, a deleted tweet suggests
we may need more attention to security than I would have thought. Here’s what’s
been made “unavailable” at Twitter:
Replying
to
Yep, buy some #glyphosate and your house will never burn
down.
3:21 AM · Aug 6, 2019
The context of this tweet was a careless effort to burn weeds near a
house that caused a fire in Europe, but Bayer certainly has not demonstrated
any noticeable sense of ethics in fighting to lower people’s awareness of how
harmful Bayer products are.
Please reach out to anyone you know in St. Louis, reminding them that
Bayer’s value as an employer will depend on Bayer’s ability to switch to
non-poisonous technologies that can replace that foolish old idea of spraying
poison on the soil. Safe weed-steaming or weed-boiling technology does not need
to be limited to those who can afford robots, although what I’ve been nagging
the tech companies about, all this time, is tiny skinny robots that can nip in
between closely-packed stalks of wheat and similar-looking “tare” weeds. Gardeners
could be using hand-held attachments with heating elements that allow water
flowing through the garden hose to be hot enough to wilt a targeted weed. Bayer
could be paying scientists to
engineer safe, durable versions of this technological development, which was at
least marketed as safe for installment in U.S. home water lines in 1983.
Until Bayer shifts its focus to developing safer physical, rather than
chemical, ways to control nuisance species, we’ll all need to keep using this
link to make sure we’re not buying any of these products: https://www.bayer.com/en/products-from-a-to-z.aspx
.
7. LAKE ERIE REACTS TO GLYPHOSATE POLLUTION
Several Ohio scientists have been studying the effects of glyphosate,
among other pollutants, on Lake Erie and the Maumee River; they think
glyphosate is to blame for “toxic algae bloom” effects. https://www.ecowatch.com/glyphosate-sprayed-on-gmo-crops-linked-to-lake-eries-toxic-algae-bloom-1906543478.html
8. THERE SHE GOES, FORMING HYPOTHESES AGAIN: GLYPHOSATE AND KIDNEY
DISEASE
Three U.S. researchers, including Stephanie Seneff, report on the
evidence that supports their hypothesis that glyphosate is causing outbursts of
chronic kidney disease among highly exposed populations. I’ve not even printed
and read this long impressive-looking study myself, yet. I’m putting it off for
the weekend. Glyphosate Awareness can’t afford a cash reward, but we’ll
certainly tweet congratulations to anyone who can spot a mistake in this
document: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/15/2734/htm
.
9. LET’S SHARE THE GOOD NEWS
Glyphosate Awareness has been wary of advertising food products that we’ve
found safe to eat. Main reason: as long as brands aren’t held to standards that
require all food sold under a brand to be verifiably 3-G-Free, food safety
depends on the unreported, untraceable fate of specific individual fruits,
nuts, greens and grains. Things labelled “organic” and “gluten-free” can and
often do contain enough glyphosate to cause adverse reactions. Often this
contamination is the result of drifting vapors, and the farmer who has worked
hard to raise a field of peanuts that contain no gluten, glyphosate, or GMO is
profoundly discouraged to learn that, because some idiot half a mile away felt
a need to poison a daisy, his peanuts are still unfit for human consumption.
Large corporations that trade with several farmers can try to deliver 3-G-Free food. I’d like
to call out Lundberg Farms (my mother says “We used to know those Lundbergs”) , and Riviana Foods (the parent corporation
of Zatarain’s, Mahatma, Success, and other branded rice products) for really
working to keep 3-G-Free rice in American supermarkets. I’d like to commend Ben & Jerry’s,
too...but I can’t because, although Ben and Jerry and their pals in Vermont
have done what they could, B&J ice cream is in fact poisoned. Ben and Jerry
have no way to control this. I’ve been in contact with Planters and M&Ms,
the makers of my favorite road foods; they have made a real effort to keep
Planters Cocktail Peanuts and M&M chocolate candies 3-G-Free; this summer,
they’ve failed. I can’t feel really confident about how long I’ll be able to
enjoy Riviana rice either.
However, a Canadian correspondent (who didn’t mention being celiac)
wanted to call out the Karma Cooperative
in Toronto for at least trying, and, so far as he can tell, succeeding in
delivering 3-G-Free beans. Cheers! I like his idea, at least. Let’s continue to
commend those who at least try to keep edible foods in the food supply. This
will allow those of us who find ourselves in the vicinity of Toronto to look
for the Karma Coop, those of us whose supermarkets stock Riviana rice products to
try all of those, and so on.
...and let there be more of these links in subsequent Newsletters and
on the Glyphosate Awareness page.
Many American farmers are going to have a difficult transition ahead. There’s
no use blaming politicians but it has been observed that the current administration
has made some policy decisions that aren’t likely to help.The real problem is
that the more we poison nuisance species, the more we lose natural predators
and breed “super” resistant nuisances, so when a farmer stops spraying poison,
the local ecological reaction will be a nightmare. Let’s do what we can to help
farmers go through the first nightmare year, sell what few edible crops they
can produce, and get back on track for succeeding years, by all means. Though I
will maintain that they should’ve paid more attention to my father when he was
saying this in 1971.
10. GOING GREEN IS GOOD FOR BIRDWATCHING
“Really? That’s news?” Here’s
a formal study that quantifies the obvious: When we stop poisoning nuisance
species, one of the first things we notice after the plague of nuisance species
is the richness of cute little songbirds around us. https://non-gmoreport.com/articles/studies-find-organic-farms-benefit-birds-and-bees/
11. OATS, PEAS, BEANS, AND BARLEY? NO!
Grains and legumes are ripening across North America and Europe, and
once again farmers are spraying glyphosate on them as a “desiccant” to force
apparent ripening of whole fields at once, allowing maximum yield from only one
picking...and, of course, making these foods toxic. Most people should be able to eat oats, peas, beans,
and barley. Even celiacs should be able to eat oats, peas, and beans. Well,
news flash: This year, once again, we probably won’t be able to eat these
things without becoming sick, or sicker, as the case may be. This link
documents how a site hypocritically called “Keeping It Clean” instructs farmers
to poison canola crops; similar instructions have been circulated for many
other crops including all the “dry” ones like grains, nuts, and beans. https://keepingitclean.ca/uneven-maturity
There’s no link for this tidbit, but...in warm climates, some of us may
still have a chance at growing a few legumes,
at least sprouting them, in our own homes, if we can get unpoisoned seeds to
work with.
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