Center for Food Safety: The U.S. Department of Agriculture has quietly approved the first of a new generation of GE crops resistant to more toxic herbicides. The first crop to pass the low regulatory bar was a Bayer soybean variety genetically engineered to withstand direct application of the herbicide isoxaflutole (IFT), which according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a “probable human carcinogen.”

Center for Food Safety (CFS) projects at least a four-fold rise (.PDF) in national use of this toxic herbicide thanks to these new GE soybeans, and a host of related human health and environmental harms. Additional scientific detail about this and other new GE crops can be found here.

“Bayer’s new GE soybeans represent the next wave in agricultural biotechnology – crops that dramatically increase famers’ use of and dependence on toxic herbicides,” said Bill Freese, science policy analyst at Center for Food Safety.

Dubbed FG72, these GE soybeans were developed by Bayer CropScience, the second-largest agrichemicals firm in the world.

EPA has designated IFT as a “probable human carcinogen” based on animal tests in which it triggered liver and thyroid tumors in rats. IFT and its major breakdown product persist in surface waters, and despite its limited use at present is frequently detected in tests. It is also toxic to aquatic organisms, wild plants and important crops (e.g. vegetables.). IFT is so toxic that three states – Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota – rejected the Bayer-EPA label for this herbicide as insufficiently protective of human health, the environment, and neighboring crops. [Continue reading…]

IPS reports: Soil is becoming endangered, and this reality needs to be part of our collective awareness in order to feed nine billion people by 2050, say experts meeting in Reykjavík.

And a big part of reversing soil decline is the use of carbon, the same element that is helping to overheat the planet.

“Keeping and putting carbon in its rightful place,” needs to be the mantra for humanity if we want to continue to eat, drink and combat global warming, concluded 200 researchers from more than 30 countries.

“There is no life without soil,” said Anne Glover, chief scientific adviser to the European Commission.

“While soil is invisible to most people it provides an estimated $1.5tn to $13tn dollars in ecosystem services annually,” Glover said at the Soil Carbon Sequestration conference that ended this week.

The dirt beneath our feet is a nearly magical world filled with tiny, wondrous creatures. A mere handful of soil might contain a half million different species including ants, earthworms, fungi, bacteria and other microorganisms. Soil provides nearly all of our food – only one percent of our calories come from the oceans, she said.

Soil also gives life to all of the world’s plants that supply us with much of our oxygen, another important ecosystem service. Soil cleans water, keeps contaminants out of streams and lakes, and prevents flooding. Soil can also absorb huge amounts of carbon, second only to the oceans.

“It takes half a millennia to build two centimetres of living soil and only seconds to destroy it,” Glover said. [Continue reading…]

Rebecca Giggs writes: It is peak sakura — the short, spring season of cherry-tree flowering that so besots Japan. In Ueno Park in Tokyo, falling blossoms settle over the sleeping salarymen, recumbent on tarpaulins with traffic masks yanked down around their necks. Curtains of petals draw open and closed in the wind around huddled teenagers. The flowers land on bitumen and bare soil, sometimes drifting into the open food containers of gathered observers. A distracted child places a piece of yellow eel, festooned with sakura, into her mouth.

For all their abundance, these branches are more likely to produce the candied maraschino cherries used to trim cocktails than the grocer’s fruit with which we are familiar. Japan’s urban cherries are ornamental, neutered cousins of orchard varieties. Planted to mark out places or events of note, some of the trees are thought to be more than 1,000 years old. Despite their lack of edible fruit, for two to three weeks in late March or early April, the city’s cherries become the most important trees in Japan. The nation’s climatic range triggers a staggered cherry flowering — a ‘blossom front’ that is monitored by the Japanese tourism agency as it sweeps up from Fukuoka, through Tokyo and north towards Sapporo. The cherries, and late, slow-moving plum flowers, jostle as they race around the Japanese Alps (cold snaps advantage the plum buds). When the sprays of blossom finally break open through the capital, their momentum is as forceful as floodwaters returning. The cherries’ high, white foam pours through avenues that lead to shrines, into graveyards, over public lands, and then to the brink of rivers and lakes where great canopies of petals spread above koi fish the size of corncobs.

During sakura, families and other groups, from workplaces or social clubs, assemble to celebrate a tradition known as hanami: flower-viewing picnics. These picnics first flourished in the Heian period, and are featured in the 11th-century courtly novel The Tale of Genji. When the hanami are in full swing, it can seem as if Ueno Park — one of Tokyo’s most popular locations for the celebration — has become the staging ground for a hundred small re‑enactments of scenes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Young women in short crinolines, chalk tights and dark Rococo-era dresses dart between the trees like insistent fairies. Some carry lace umbrellas (‘Goth Lolita Wear’ occupies a whole floor in a nearby department store). Junior wage-earners, sent to stake a patch for their superiors, set to dreaming in intimately vulnerable postures; their arms and legs flung out to indicate an intention to occupy more space. Paired shoes in a row belong to no one nearby. Nihonshu (saké) turns cheeks ruddy and friends garrulous.

As the sun sets, the mood of enchantment reveals other themes: metamorphosis and attraction. Flash cameras twig at the edge of perception all through the night. The shots later come to colonise social media — sakura, stark and fibrous against the black sky. The flowers are extended electronically, long after they have withered, dropped, and ceased to be.

Gazing into the throats of flowers is surely one of the most trite, and universal, acts of environmental appreciation. From hand-picked posies displayed on a mantelpiece to the questing of the German Romantics for the impossible blue flower — a symbol of inspiration for the 18th-century poet Novalis — flowers induce an apparently effortless contemplation of aesthetic beauty in nature. Yet, for all the stock wonder of cherries crowned in blossom, contemporary Western environmentalism has an uneasy relationship with notions of the beautiful.

Political environmentalism has learnt to take a functional view of nature, turning a blind eye to cultural values such as beauty and to aesthetic practices such as hanami. In striving to establish an impartial, globally consistent means of gauging nature’s value, local forms of environmental imagination have been relegated to the work of poets. Nature is viewed as systemic and quantifiable, neither mysterious not resplendent. In an overburdened world, this is how we have come to debate the comparative significance of habitats and organisms: as ecosystem services.

Perhaps, for environmental thought to be accepted in the political mainstream, it was always necessary to discard the drippy spiritualism of a former age and embrace the numbers game. Yet, something important has been lost in the exchange. Sidelining the environmental imagination — particularly its manifold local variations in different cultures — has narrowed the green movement. Better science, accountancy and leadership might well be essential to confronting the realities of our current environmental crises, but without developing a way to talk about the unreal aspects of our environmental relationships and our imagined attachments to natural phenomena, progress will only ever be tenuous. Ancient as it is, the Japanese tradition of sakura offers germane insight into this very contemporary problem. [Continue reading…]

(There’s no sense reading about cherry blossom without being able to see it — and if not in real life, then at least on a video. For some reason, it’s near impossible to find a nicely made video that doesn’t have a saccharine soundtrack.)

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Forests, trees on farms and agroforestry are critical in the fight against hunger and should be better integrated into food security and land use policies, FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today at the International Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition in Rome (13-15 May).

“Forests contribute to the livelihoods of more than a billion people, including many of the world’s neediest. Forests provide food, fuel for cooking, fodder for animals and income to buy food,” Graziano da Silva said.

“Wild animals and insects are often the main protein source for people in forest areas, while leaves, seeds, mushrooms, honey and fruits provide minerals and vitamins, thus ensuring a nutritious diet.”

“But forests and agroforestry systems are rarely considered in food security and land use policies. Often, rural people do not have secure access rights to forests and trees, putting their food security in danger. The important contributions forests can make to the food security and nutrition of rural people should be better recognized,” Graziano da Silva said.

One major and readily available source of nutritious and protein-rich food that comes from forests are insects, according to a new study FAO launched at the forests for food security and nutrition conference. It is estimated that insects form part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people. Insect gathering and farming can offer employment and cash income, for now mostly at the household level but also potentially in industrial operations.

With about 1 million known species, insects account for more than half of all living organisms classified so far on the planet.

According to FAO’s research, done in partnership with Wageningen University in the Netherlands, more than 1900 insect species are consumed by humans worldwide. Globally, the most consumed insects are: beetles (31 percent); caterpillars (18 percent); bees, wasps and ants (14 percent); and grasshoppers, locusts and crickets (13 percent). Many insects are rich in protein and good fats and high in calcium, iron and zinc. [Continue reading…]

This lecture was given at the Woodrow Wilson Center on September 18, 2008, to accompany the publication of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment.

Leyla Acaroglu writes: Americans replace their cellphones every 22 months, junking some 150 million old phones in 2010 alone. Ever wondered what happens to all these old phones? The answer isn’t pretty.

In far-flung, mostly impoverished places like Agbogbloshie, Ghana; Delhi, India; and Guiyu, China, children pile e-waste into giant mountains and burn it so they can extract the metals — copper wires, gold and silver threads — inside, which they sell to recycling merchants for only a few dollars. In India, young boys smash computer batteries with mallets to recover cadmium, toxic flecks of which cover their hands and feet as they work. Women spend their days bent over baths of hot lead, “cooking” circuit boards so they can remove slivers of gold inside. Greenpeace, the Basel Action Network and others have posted YouTube videos of young children inhaling the smoke that rises from burned phone casings as they identify and separate different kinds of plastics for recyclers. It is hard to imagine that good health is a by-product of their unregulated industry.

Indeed, most scientists agree that exposure poses serious health risks, especially to pregnant women and children. The World Health Organization reports that even a low level of exposure to lead, cadmium and mercury (all of which can be found in old phones) can cause irreversible neurological damage and threaten the development of a child.

The growing toxic nightmare that is e-waste is not confined to third world outposts. It also poses health problems in the United States where, for several years, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has kept inmates busy processing e-waste. There are concrete steps the government, manufacturers and consumers could take to better dispose of electronic trash and to help prevent the pileup of more e-waste and the hazards e-waste processing poses.

The United States, for example, remains the only industrialized country that has not ratified the Basel Convention, an international treaty that makes it illegal to export or traffic in toxic e-waste. Fully implementing the treaty would be a step toward joining global efforts to contain toxic waste troubles. [Continue reading…]

The Independent reports: Environmentalists hailed a “victory for bees” today after the European Union voted for a ban on the nerve-agent pesticides blamed for the dramatic decline global bee populations.

Despite fierce lobbying by the chemicals industry and opposition by countries including Britain, 15 of the 27 member states voted for a two-year restriction on neonicotinoid insecticides. That gave the European Commission the support it needed to push through an EU-wide ban on using three neonicotinoids on crops attractive to bees.

Tonio Borg, the EC’s top health official, said they planned to implement the landmark ban from December. “I pledge to do my utmost to ensure that our bees, which are so vital to our ecosystem and contribute over €22bn annually to European agriculture, are protected,” he said.

Britain was among eight nations which voted against the motion, despite a petition signed by 300,000 people presented to Downing Street last week by fashion designers Vivienne Westwood and Katharine Hamnett. The Independent has also campaigned to save Britain’s bee population.

Four nations abstained from the moratorium, which will restrict the use of imidacloprid and clothianidin, made by Germany’s Bayer, and thiamethoxam, made by the Swiss company, Syngenta. The ban on use on flowering crops will remain in place throughout the EU for two years unless compelling scientific evidence to the contrary becomes available.

Grist reports: Environmental activist Daniel McGowan is out of prison, but he’s not out of the woods. He was incarcerated for seven years for his alleged involvement in arson at an Oregon lumber company, then thrown back in prison for writing about how his beliefs got him branded a terrorist. He’s now been released, but only after being told he can’t publish his opinions or talk to the press.

McGowan is the central figure in the 2012 Oscar-nominated documentary If a Tree Falls, which details the lead-up to his prison sentence for arson credited to the Earth Liberation Front. He was released this past December to a halfway house in New York City.

McGowan spent more than two years of his sentence in a Communication Management Unit (CMU), where his contact with the outside world through letters and phone calls was highly restricted. In a piece published in The Huffington Post on April 1, McGowan explains how he ended up in the CMU: The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) didn’t like what he was writing about environmental activism from his cell. “In short, based on its disagreement with my political views, the government sent me to a prison unit from which it would be harder for me to be heard, serving as a punishment for my beliefs,” he writes. McGowan learned these details after filing a lawsuit on behalf of himself and other CMU prisoners. Through the lawsuit, the BOP was forced to reveal some damning internal memos. McGowan:

The following speech is listed in these memos to justify my designation to these ultra-restrictive units:

My attempts to “unite” environmental and animal liberation movements, and to “educate” new members of the movement about errors of the past; my writings about “whether militancy is truly effective in all situations”; a letter I wrote discussing bringing unity to the environmental movement by focusing on global issues; the fact that I was “publishing [my] points of view on the internet in an attempt to act as a spokesperson for the movement”; and the BOP’s belief that, through my writing, I have “continued to demonstrate [my] support for anarchist and radical environmental terrorist groups.”

On April 4, three days after McGowan’s post was published, the BOP responded by — what else? — throwing him back in prison for talking about what he wasn’t supposed to talk about. [Continue reading…]

BBC News reports: The UK government should suspend the use of a number of pesticides linked to the deaths of bees, a committee of MPs has said.

Members of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee are calling for a moratorium on the use of sprays containing neonicotinoids.

Britain has refused to back an EU ban on these chemicals saying their impact on bees is unclear.

But MPs say this is an “extraordinarily complacent” approach.

Wild species such as honey bees are said by researchers to be responsible for pollinating around one-third of the world’s crop production.

In their report, MPs say that two-thirds of these species have suffered population declines in the UK.

They argue that a “growing body of peer-reviewed research” points the finger at a group of pesticides called neonicotinoids. [Continue reading…]

On March 28, Agri-View reported: Last week, a year after groups formally petitioned the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), four beekeepers and five environmental and consumer groups filed a lawsuit in Federal District Court against the agency for its failure to protect pollinators from pesticides. The coalition, represented by attorneys for the Center for Food Safety (CFS), seeks suspension of the registrations of insecticides that have repeatedly been identified as highly toxic to honey bees, clear causes of major bee kills and significant contributors to the devastating ongoing mortality of bees known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). The suit challenges EPA’s ongoing handling of the pesticides as well as the agency’s practice of “conditional registration” and labeling deficiencies.

“America’s beekeepers cannot survive for long with the toxic environment EPA has supported. Bee-toxic pesticides in dozens of widely used products, on top of many other stresses our industry faces, are killing our bees and threatening our livelihoods,” said plaintiff Steve Ellis, a Minnesota and California beekeeper. “Our country depends on bees for crop pollination and honey production. It’s time for EPA to recognize the value of bees to our food system and agricultural economy.”

On March 29, The Guardian reported: Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar.

These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants.

The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations.

It has also been revealed that a separate government field study on the impact of the pesticides on bees was seriously compromised by contamination because the chemicals are so widespread in the environment.

The government put the field study at the heart of the UK’s resistance to a Europe-wide ban on the controversial pesticides earlier this month. The UK was one of nine out of 27 member states that opposed suspending some uses of the insecticides across the EU, after environment secretary Owen Paterson said, “I have asked the EC to wait for the results of our field trials, rather than rushing to a decision”. On Wednesday, his department said more field research was needed.

The new findings on the effect of pesticides on bee brains showed that within 20 minutes of exposure to neonicotinoids the neurons in the major learning centre of the brain stopped firing. Christopher Connolly at the University of Dundee, who led the peer-reviewed work published in the online journal Nature Communications, said it was the first to show the pesticides had a direct impact on pollinator brain physiology.

Interview with James K Boyce, author of Economics, the Environment and Our Common Wealth:

Part Three:

Part Two:

Part One:

The Guardian reports: Ecuador plans to auction off more than three million hectares of pristine Amazonian rainforest to Chinese oil companies, angering indigenous groups and underlining the global environmental toll of China’s insatiable thirst for energy.

On Monday morning a group of Ecuadorean politicians pitched bidding contracts to representatives of Chinese oil companies at a Hilton hotel in central Beijing, on the fourth leg of a roadshow to publicise the bidding process. Previous meetings in Ecuador’s capital, Quito, and in Houston and Paris were each confronted with protests by indigenous groups.

Attending the roadshow were black-suited representatives from oil companies including China Petrochemical and China National Offshore Oil. “Ecuador is willing to establish a relationship of mutual benefit – a win-win relationship,” said Ecuador’s ambassador to China in opening remarks.

According to the California-based NGO Amazon Watch, seven indigenous groups who inhabit the land claim that they have not consented to oil projects, which would devastate the area’s environment and threaten their traditional way of life. [Continue reading…]

National Geographic: Mahogany is the crown jewel of the Amazon, soaring in magnificent buttressed columns high into the forest canopy. Its rich, red grain and durability make it one of the most coveted building materials on Earth, favored by master craftsmen, a symbol of wealth and power. A single tree can fetch tens of thousands of dollars on the international market by the time its finished wood reaches showroom floors in the United States or Europe.

After 2001, the year Brazil declared a moratorium on logging big-leaf mahogany, Peru emerged as one of the world’s largest suppliers. The rush for “red gold,” as mahogany is sometimes called, has left many of Peru’s watersheds — such as the Alto Tamaya, homeland of a group of Ashéninka Indians — stripped of their most valuable trees. The last stands of mahogany, as well as Spanish cedar, are now nearly all restricted to Indian lands, national parks, and territorial reserves set aside to protect isolated tribes.

As a result, loggers are now taking aim at other canopy giants few of us have ever heard of — copaiba, ishpingo, shihuahuaco, capirona — which are finding their way into our homes as bedroom sets, cabinets, flooring, and patio decks. These lesser known varieties have even fewer protections than the more charismatic, pricier ones, like mahogany, but they’re often more crucial to forest ecosystems. As loggers move down the list from one species to the next, they’re cutting more trees to make up for diminishing returns, threatening critical habitats in the process. Primates, birds, and amphibians that make their homes in the upper stories of the forest are at increasing risk. Indigenous communities are in turmoil, divided between those favoring conservation and those looking for fast cash. And some of the world’s most isolated tribes are in flight from the whine of chain saws and the terrifying crash of centuries-old leviathans hitting the ground. [Continue reading…]