March Glyphosate Awareness Newsletter

This one doesn't have a beautiful photo-enriched "creature feature" yet. (April's will. Promise.) Instead, by reader request, here's our official response to "You are preaching to the choir. Please tell us what we can do."

THE “WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT GLYPHOSATE?” CHECKLIST

[] Obviously, don’t spray pesticides on your property. If possible, buy and try devices people are putting on the market to control weeds by harmless mechanical means, to encourage these people.

[] Buy unsprayed food whenever you can. (Some of it will still contain glyphosate, but less than foods that have been sprayed contains.)

[] Raise your own fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes, strawberries, and greens growing in indoor pots or in greenhouses will be safer than those exposed to glyphosate vapor drift in gardens.

[] If your dog or cat acts sick after eating cheap pet food, it is probably having glyphosate reactions. Consider buying the pricier pet foods or, if it’s cheaper, feeding your pet human quality meat, eggs, and bread...but be very careful about the bread!

[] Join the Glyphosate Awareness network. It’s free of charge; you pay only the cost of any printed material I mail to you. (You can, of course, donate money to pay for more material to be mailed to more people, but our Newsletters consist of news, not fundraising appeals.)

[] Subscribe to the Children’s Health Defense newsletter. If you still think of this organization as Marian Wright Edelman’s anti-family lobby, you are in for a lovely surprise. Robert Kennedy is a Democrat but he’s been using CHD to study children’s actual health concerns—excessive vaccination, misdiagnosis and inappropriate medication, and also the effects of glyphosate on children’s growth and learning problems. The Newsletter is now science, not politics. It is free by e-mail or, if you don’t get e-mail, printouts are available for the cost of printing and mailing from Glyphosate Awareness.

[] Write “Letters to the Editor” of every newspaper you read. Gloria Steinem recommended writing one per newspaper per week toward the goal of getting one printed per month. (If you are not as well known as she was, your letters will probably not be printed every month. Save copies for your own future use, and persevere.) You can send the same message to different editors if you put the right name and address at the top of each letter. Don’t reuse a message that has been published.

[] Share your concerns about glyphosate with your elected officials. In each of the United States you have a Representative and two Senators in Washington, plus two officials in your state capitol. These people are paid to represent your views. They need to know what your views are. To keep them informed, send short polite messages, preferably e-mails or postcards, addressed to your official. These messages will probably be read by staffers, probably students, so don’t use language that might embarrass them. Most messages from constituents are simply tallied as being for or against something. Yours may get an answer from a staffer who is an official expert on a pertinent topic. This is good. You can address further correspondence directly to that person. (Follow your elected officials online, and when they support and oppose things that represent your views, thank them. And their staff, by name, when possible.)

[] Pay close attention to what you eat and how you feel afterward. If your glyphosate reactions are very unpleasant you probably eat only a few trusted commercially produced foods, gamble on only one new food item at a time, and know when you’re having a reaction to a new food product. You will want to avoid that food product. The manufacturer needs to know what you’re avoiding and why, so write a reasonably polite letter or e-mail saying that you were sick or ill after eating Product X and you suspect glyphosate is to blame.

[] Consider sharing your story on your web site and any social media you use. You don’t have to discuss your symptoms in detail; doing so will help the movement, but it might harm your career if being perceived as “young” is important to your image. Avoid using your real name, a recognizable picture of your face, your real home address, or any images of or information about children, on the Internet. If you don’t have an established business brand or other screen name, you might use “Online” or “Internet” in place of half of your real name—“John Doe” might become “John Online.”

[] Get the facts on vaccines. Glyphosate contamination is the biggest reason for severe adverse reactions to all those new vaccines that are urged on the young these days. If you are paying your own family doctor with your own money, you may be able to get accurate, up-to-date information about which vaccines help and which do more harm than the diseases they’re supposed to prevent. If not, you may want to request an exemption from vaccination requirements to keep children in school, or consider homeschooling. Griggs, Calvert, and Ron Paul are legitimate homeschool resources that any literate parent or grandparent can use to give a child a better education than most public schools offer.

[] Talk to people you know about how using pesticide sprays actually breeds hardier, more aggressive pest species. In our Twitter Live Chat I like to encourage inventive types to think about building weeding robots and devices that will kill weeds as efficiently as glyphosate does without harming animals or other plants. In some farming and gardening situations, digging up weeds may damage crop plants. For those situations, you can already buy steamers that will wilt the weed while actually watering other plants, or electric zappers that will fry the weed without touching other plants. You might be able to market a no-poison alternative for weed control and actually earn commissions for building your neighbors’ Glyphosate Awareness.

[] Promote awareness of the plants and animals this year’s monthly Newsletters will be featuring. (I’ll try to make that easy by picking pretty ones.)

[] Support the authors and artists in the Glyphosate Awareness Network. You won’t agree with them on every point; they don’t, or didn't, agree with each other, or with me, on everything. Nevertheless, buying as much of their work as you can afford will help offset the harassment, threats, boycotts, blacklisting, and other unpleasantness the living ones are getting. (Note that Glyphosate Awareness is not politically partisan. Hostilities come from both Left and Right. Glyphosate Awareness is global; issues and viewpoints vary, as do languages.) Some of these people's published work mentions glyphosate specifically or "pesticides" generally, and some does not.

[] Don’t buy products from Bayer, Monsanto, or affiliated companies. (Unfortunately, “affiliated companies” includes many brands built by successful small business owners many people admire, like Ben & Jerry’s.)

[] Buy products from smaller companies that have committed to delivering glyphosate-free food...NOW. (Don’t buy poisoned food from companies like Kellogg’s that promise to make their products fit to eat in another five years. Boycott those companies until their products are glyphosate-free.) Buy Barbara’s, Arrowhead Mills, etc. Company owners and policies change, so review their status frequently.

[] Anything that involves two or more humans is political, but try not to bog down in partisan politics. If you feel tempted to lock into hating or defending Trump, remember that our current glyphosate problem developed during the Obama Administration. Monsanto bought politicians in both parties, and Rand Paul. Glyphosate Awareness is not about preferring sold-out politician A to sold-out politician B.

[] Buy land. Raise fruit and vegetables on it if able. Keep it pesticide-free.

[] HANG IN THERE. We have won the debate—we are now at the enforcement stage.

PART II: MORE STUFF WE COULD DO IF WE CHOSE

There’s a lot more that can be done if people want to do it.

[] For example, George Soros is actively recruiting creative people who are interested in the natural sciences away from Glyphosate Awareness and back to Al Gore’s poor old outdated, soundly debunked, theory of global warming. (Soros is European; Gore’s theory looks more credible, due to their local warming issues, in Europe.) There is no reason why we can’t recruit them back by holding writing contests for poems, essays, or short stories that support our cause too, the way Soros is sponsoring contests for creative writing that supports the cause to which he’s still clinging. (Why hate him—most of us will, any day now, outlive him.) It costs only a couple hundred dollars to sponsor a writing contest, and they can be profitable for those who judge the writing.

[] I could not, but some of you might be able to, sponsor a video or graphics contest using the same ideas as the writing contest.

[] Every town, however small, has some sort of Town Festival celebrating something about its part of the world. What do your Town Festivals celebrate? What do they usually offer? Even when the main theme is a birthday, holiday, or anniversary, most festivals celebrate local natural events and wildlife—springtime, summer, autumn, flowers, harvests, etc.—in some way. What can you and your neighbors do with these celebrations? What flowers, fishes, butterflies, songbirds, maybe even wild mushrooms, can you celebrate (and mention, truthfully, how glyphosate endangers them)?

I’ve been reading up on wild morels, because I live in a house with chestnut-wood foundations in an orchard with apple trees, and people always ask me for morels at this time of year. “True” morels are one mushroom that’s impossible to mistake and always safe to eat, but in places where they’ve been exposed to glyphosate in the soil, and especially that mix of glyphosate and dicamba that made so many of my neighbors so acutely sick last summer, people are complaining that morels don’t stay down. Michigan readers, take note.

[] You can collect and print off your own copies of the scientific studies we’ve discussed—most of them are free to view online by now, and others will be in a few more months. Or you can send me the cost of printing them, at whatever size type your intended readers need, 12 cents per two-sided page of plain text, more if graphics are included. Printed copies are available at prices that include no profit for me, with pretty lightweight transparent covers for single articles or binders with tabs and reinforcements if you order six or more articles.

Well...that applies to 5 to 30-page articles. Please note that some articles, as we’ve noted in the Twitter Live Chat, were compiled on computers and classified as articles, reports, studies, or documents, but even in 7-point type (the point where complete letters don’t display on a computer screen) they print out to several hundred pages. They are available in binders only. At least one document I cite will fill two large binders.

If you want all the studies archived by URLs converted to T.co links at the Twitter Live Chat, the sturdy hardwood shelves or metal cabinet you’ll need to store them are not included.