January 2010

  • Tell the EPA to Tell the Truth About Pesticides

    By sarajean on 1/29/10 10:40pm
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    “Inert ingredients.”

    Okay, if that were listed on our bananas, our strawberries, or our green beans, chances are we wouldn’t buy them. Remember that Progresso Soup commercial where the clerk keeps scanning the can and it reads different vegetables with each different scan? This would be like that, only with a bright red light flashing, sirens flaring, Hazmat men storming the scene with big metal tweezers to handle the can—all the while, the register reading, “ERROR.”

    That’s exactly what’s listed on our pesticides, though—“inert ingredients”—the very same things that are used on lots of the fruits and vegetables we by, the very same things that we buy to tame our lawns and get rid of six-legged critters from our cabinets.

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  • Big Farms Angry About Climate Change Legislation

    By ecoscott on 1/10/10 10:30pm
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    Will Farms Grow Food or Carbon Capture Trees?Will Farms Grow Food or Carbon Capture Trees?Farms and environmental concerns- seems like two groups that would be likely to lobby alongside each other, right? Afterall, you need clean water and healthy soil to grow the food that people actually want to buy, and if you’ve read any of Michael Pollan’s books (you should) then you know that the future of our food depends on our ability to take care of the ground that we grow it in. In the larger sense, it’s important for farmers and the land to both be healthy, working in a sort of mutually beneficial relationship. What doesn’t work is for farming to destroy the land through excess fertilizer or other kinds of chemicals, at least not in the long term.

    So what do farming groups and the farming lobbyists think of the newest climate change bill? Are they celebrating the ecological wisdom of our national legislative body? Not hardly.

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