Take Action Tuesday: Speak up for Children, Communities of Color, Rainforests and Gray Wolves

Food for thought: One in five children live in poverty, and they rely on school lunches to meet some or all of their nutritional needs. (Photo credit: National Institutes of Health)

S.E. Smith, Truthout: More than 12 million children in the U.S. experience food insecurity — and that doesn’t just mean they don’t always know when their next meal is. The backpack program, which is often administered through a food bank that partners with a school, is just one tactic being used by advocacy groups and schools to combat hunger and poverty.
>>>Fight child hunger this winter by supporting a backpack program.

Rainforest Rescue: Policymakers and industries in more than 20 countries have signed on to a “Biofuture Platform” that would use biofuels, bioplastics and biomaterials as an alternative to fossil fuels. The consequences for land, food production, ecosystems and human rights would be dire.
>>>Urge governments to reject the misguided Biofuture Platform and embrace real solutions such as reducing consumption, protecting ecosystems and promoting agroecology instead.

Ju-Hyun Park, 350.org: In 2014, after years of grassroots organizing, Governor Andrew Cuomo bowed to public pressure and banned fracking in the state of New York. But that hasn’t stopped the progress of a massive new fracked gas infrastructure project — the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement Pipeline, which would stretch along the floor of New York Harbor for 23 miles, passing by Staten Island, Coney Island, just 4 miles south of the Rockaways. There’s no new demand for the gas that this pipeline would carry, and it endangers coastal communities, most of which are low-income communities of color.
>>>Tell Governor Cuomo to stop the Williams Pipeline.

Kevin Mathews, Care2: The House of Representatives passed a bill to remove protections from the gray wolf in the U.S, which would allow hunters and landowners to shoot the wolves at whim. Before these protections were instituted, the gray wolf was nearly wiped out entirely in the same way. The measures taken have helped the wolves to rebound to over 5,000, which is still way under what the population used to be. Although they may not be considered “endangered” anymore, reviving hunting is a recipe for decimating the population all over again.
>>>Urge Senate Energy & Natural Resources Chair Lisa Murkowski and the U.S. Senate to reject this bill .

Patagonia: Tasmania’s takayna/Tarkine is a 495,000-hectare region in northwestern Tasmania and one of the last undisturbed tracts of ancient rainforest in the world. The area is a crucial habitat for sixty of Tasmania’s rare and endangered species including the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle and the iconic Tasmanian devil. Despite its immense ecological and cultural value, it remains unprotected and at the mercy of destructive extraction industries, including logging and mining.
>>>Urge Tasmanian State Premier Will Hodgman to nominate takayna/Tarkine for World Heritage protection to protect it from extractive industries.

The Hunger Site: The fast fashion industry promotes cheaply made products that are “in style” for a single season, and then pushes out the next style as fast as the first. It is the second greatest pollution-causing industry on the planet and a huge exploiter of women and children.
>>>Tell the CEOs of Zara, H&M and Forever 21 to stop exploiting people and harming the planet by buying low-quality goods from unethical suppliers.

PETA: Since 2017, Johns Hopkins University experimenter Shreesh Mysore has received more than $800,000 in tax-funded grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct cruel and useless tests on barn owls, in which he restrains the birds, cuts into their skulls and inserts electrodes into their brains — even though the evidence is overwhelming that data from experiments on animals can’t be reliably applied to humans.
>>>Urge NIH not to squander taxpayer dollars on Mysore’s cruel and worthless experiments and instead to redirect funds to modern, superior, non-animal research methods.

Parting thought…

“It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth.” —John Locke

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Take Action Tuesday: Speak Up for Safe Drinking Water, Laboratory Dogs and the Arctic Refuge

Drinking water
Dangerous waters: More than 70 million pounds of the pesticide atrazine — which has been linked to serious health effects like hormone disruption, shorter pregnancy and even cancer — are dumped on American farmland each year.

 

 

Olga Naidenko and Sydney Evans, Environmental Working Group: Seasonal spikes of atrazine, a weed killer that disrupts hormones and harms the developing fetus, contaminate the drinking water of millions of Americans at potentially hazardous levels as run-off from corn-growing areas finds its way into source waters and reservoirs. In 2016, California state scientists listed atrazine, simazine and related chemicals as substances known to cause reproductive toxicity. The European Union completely phased out atrazine in 2003 because of its potential to contaminate drinking water sources. Yet in the U.S., the EPA continues to allow the pollution of drinking water with atrazine and similar weed killers.
>>>Tell the EPA to ban atrazine and protect America’s drinking water.

Priyvrat Gadhvi, Change.org: The single biggest reason for poaching of tigers, rhinos, elephants, several reptiles and a host of other mammalian species is to feed the huge demand for their body parts for use in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) — one of the greatest threats to wildlife globally. TCM uses a range of wildlife parts and claims to cure a host of ailments, using therapies which have no basis in science, but the World Health Organization is about to endorse TCM in its annual medical compendium.
>>>Tell the World Health Organization: Don’t endorse any TCM product that uses ingredients made from wildlife parts.

Alka Chandna, Ph.D., PETA: Experimenters at Colorado State University trap American crows, American robins, and house sparrows in the wild; infect them with West Nile virus; watch as they develop painful and debilitating symptoms from the viral infection; and kill them. These experiments don’t help birds or humans — but our tax dollars have bankrolled this cruelty for years.
>>>Urge CSU to end these cruel, deadly experiments.

Adam Kolton, Alaska Wilderness League: New members-elect of Congress from across the country have already committed to protecting the Arctic Refuge by signing Alaska Wilderness Action’s Pledge for the Refuge. They will join more than one hundred current members who have committed to protect the Arctic Refuge from oil drilling, so we’re on the right track.
>>>Urge the newly elected House to quickly begin restoring protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Care2: Chickens raised for meat in factory farms spend their miserable lives crammed into sheds where they can barely move before they’re hung upside down and stunned — although some birds remain fully conscious — and their throats are slit. Because of this cruelty, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Subway and nearly 90 other companies have promised to stop using chickens from factory farms — but not fast-food giant McDonald’s, which sold 490 million pounds of the birds in one year alone.
>>>Urge McDonald’s to switch to more humanely raised chickens.

Causes: Dow Chemicals is attempting to expand its use of a bee-killing pesticide, despite federal regulations that have repeatedly tried to reign in the dangerous chemical. Earlier this month, Dow Chemicals submitted an application to the EPA to receive a waiver that would allow them to massively expand their use of sulfoxaflor, an insecticide that is detrimental to bee populations.
>>Urge EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler to deny Dow’s request.

White Coat Waste Project: An investigation by White Coat Waste Project revealed that more than 1,100 beagles, hounds and mixed-breed dogs — even puppies — are subjected to secretive, wasteful and cruel experiments inside government laboratories each year. Most agencies including the VA, DOD, FDA and CDC do not reveal details of how our taxpayer dollars are being used for experiments on dogs, but on one of the few projects for which spending data is available, NIH experimenters have used nearly $6 million of taxpayers’ money since 2011 to give dogs heart attacks.
>>>Urge Congress to end this cruel, wasteful government spending on flawed research.

Care2: After the announcement of the approval of a third bat cull since 2015, the scientific community is extremely alarmed. In 2018, the Mauritian government plans to kill 20 percent of the current population: 13,000 out of 65,000. 38,000 bats were officially killed in the past two years — and this does not count the undocumented killing carried out by the public. Now, the population is weaker and less resilient to natural calamities — the two previous cullings resulted in the species being uplisted to Endangered in 2018.
>>>Urge the government of Mauritius to stop the planned cull.

One Green Planet: While many of us will attend family gatherings this Thanksgiving, let’s not forget about the awesomeness that is Friendsgiving. For those who don’t know, Friendsgiving is a relatively new holiday celebration (the term first emerged in 2007) and has become a much-anticipated part of many of our lives.
>>>Check out 15 budget-friendly vegan dishes to bring to Friendsgiving.

Parting thought…

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” ―Arthur Schopenhauer

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

Take Action Tuesday: Speak Up for Animals, Sustainable Food and Small-Scale Farmers

Robin
Egypt is definitely not for the birds: Robins are among the many species of birds that will be captured and killed along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast during their winter migration.

 

 

Reinhard Behrend, Rainforest Rescue: The 14th UN Biodiversity Conference will take place in Egypt in late November. Ironically, while the delegations gather in a luxury resort in Sharm El Sheikh, millions of migratory birds from Europe, on their journey to their winter quarters in Africa, will face a gauntlet of nets, snares, glue traps and loudspeakers playing bird calls that stretches 700 km along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Some of the captured birds are sold alive, but most are plucked and frozen. Songbirds such as robins and nightingales, as well as turtledoves, quail and wild ducks end up on the plates of “gourmets” in dubious restaurants. Some birds of prey such as falcons are sold alive to wealthy “bird lovers” in the Gulf States for their private aviaries.
>>>Tell the Egyptian government to put an end to this heinous crime against nature.

John Gilroy, The Pew Charitable Trusts: Bears Ears National Monument was designated in 2016 to safeguard one of the most significant cultural areas in the United States and to honor tribal nations that have ancestral and contemporary connections to the region. On Dec. 4, 2017, President Donald Trump signed a proclamation significantly reducing the size of the monument and breaking it up into two units. Now the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has drafted land use plans for the new smaller monument, despite active litigation regarding the action to reduce the monument.
>>>Urge BLM to protect Bears Ears’ important cultural, scientific and historic resources.

Real Meals Campaign: Instead of siding with Big Food corporations like Tyson, food service companies like Aramark, Sodexo and Compass Group should support small-scale producers, disenfranchised farmers and fishers and sustainable suppliers to help create a more just and sustainable food system.
>>>Urge Aramark, Sodexo and Compass Group to purchase at least 25 percent of the food they sell on US college campuses from sources that are local, community-based, fair, ecologically sound and humane.

PETA: An eyewitness investigation of Hemopet, a canine blood bank in California, found approximately 200 greyhounds bred for and discarded by the racing industry, kept in tiny crates and barren kennels for about 23 hours out of every day so their blood could be repeatedly taken and sold. Some of these inhumane blood banks even masquerade as dog rescues.
>>>Tell the National Greyhound Association to bar its members’ dogs from being held captive in blood banks.

Center for Biological Diversity: Horrible news out of Washington state: Wildlife officials have just issued death warrants for two more wolf packs. Last week, the state authorized the killing of wolves from the Smackout pack and approved taking out the mother and remaining pup from the Togo pack. In September a helicopter sniper gunned down the sole adult male wolf of the Togo pack, pictured above. He was the father of two pups and left behind his mate to fend for them on her own. Now Washington is gunning for her. And since 2012 the state has killed 21 state-endangered wolves—17 of which were killed for the same rancher. Killing wolves is not just cruel and inhumane. It also leads to more conflicts, breaks up wolf families and reduces social tolerance for wolves.
>>>Urge Governor Jay Inslee to bring an immediate halt to the senseless wolf killing.

Environmental Working Group: Bees are dying at alarming rates worldwide—and because bees are responsible for roughly one in every three bites of food we eat, we’re all in trouble. A decade of research has made it clear that neonicotinoid pesticides are highly toxic to bees and are at least partially responsible for the pollinators dying in record numbers. Earlier this year, the EPA finally confirmed this troubling fact. The agency even concluded the benefits of one of the most common uses of neonic treatments, as a coating on soy and corn seed, are questionable for farmers.
>>>Tell the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to require farmers to use these pesticides only when they can prove they need them.

Lacey Kohlmoos, Change.org: There are so many cruelty-free ways to enjoy the world, but Fodor’s, the world’s largest publisher of English language travel and tourism information, has shamelessly decided to promote attractions that exploit and hurt elephants. Elephants don’t do tricks because they “enjoy showing off their skills,” as Fodor’s claims. They do them because they will be hurt if they don’t. The only way to teach wild elephants to paint, play instruments, roll logs and carry people on their back is by torturing them into submission using bullhooks and other cruel methods. This is well-documented, and yet Fodor’s doesn’t mention a thing about this abuse on their website or in their books.
>>>Tell Fodor’s to follow the lead of Lonely Planet by making a commitment to stop promoting elephant rides and shows on their website and in their books.

PETA: Marmosets, which comprise 22 species of New World monkeys, live high up in the canopies of rainforests in social groups composed of up to three generations of family members. They’re highly vocal, communicating with each other in complex, high-pitched calls that convey information about a wide range of emotions and situations. The National Institutes of Health (NIH)—the largest funder of animal experimentation worldwide—announced that it’s planning to launch “funding opportunities to support centralized infrastructure” for research on these intelligent and curious animals.
>>>Tell NIH to scrap plans to expand the use of marmosets in laboratory experiments and redirect funds to modern, non-animal research methods.

African Wildlife Foundation: Wildlife criminals are driving Africa’s wildlife to extinction. But the RAWR Act can help put an end to the multi-billion dollar wildlife trafficking industry. The act authorizes the US State Department to use rewards for any information leading to the capture and conviction of wildlife criminals. The bill has passed in the House of Representatives and is now before the Senate.
>>>Urge your senator to vote yes on the RAWR act.

Gina Florio, Hello Giggles: Eating tasty, nutritious food doesn’t necessarily mean we’re also eating sustainably. It’s just as important to ask about the sustainability of our eating habits as it is to wonder whether we’re maintaining a balanced diet. Our planet is suffering from the inflated animal agriculture industry, and we’re becoming more dependent on foreign soil for produce than ever before. We need to all take a time-out and ask ourselves how we can do our part to cook and eat in a way that will slow down the deterioration of the planet, rather than speed it up.
>>>Check out these 8 easy ways to eat more sustainably.

Parting thought…

“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” — George Bernard Shaw

Earth | Food | Life (EFL) explores the critical and often interconnected issues facing the climate/environment, food/agriculture and animal/nature rights, and champions action; specifically, how responsible citizens, voters and consumers can help put society on an ethical path of sustainability that respects the rights of all species who call this planet home. EFL emphasizes the idea that everything is connected, so every decision matters.

Click here to support the work of EFL and the Independent Media Institute.

Questions, comments, suggestions, submissions? Contact EFL editor Reynard Loki at [email protected]. Follow EFL on Twitter @EarthFoodLife.

The EPA Can’t Do Its Job Until There’s a Revolutionary Restructuring

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.
EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (credit: Coolcaesar/Wikipedia)

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt may have resigned in shame, but the agency still needs to be fixed.

The following op-ed is by Jonathan Latham, Ph.D., co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, and was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Insitute.

The Environmental Protection Agency has never been an institution whose primary allegiance was to the public interest. How do I know this? I have the agency’s own words for it. In late 2017 my organization, the Bioscience Resource Project, along with the Center for Media and Democracy, made available a vast trove of documents called the Poison Papers. These documents are two and a half tons of internal minutes, correspondence, reports, unsealed court documents, and more from the chemical industry and its regulators. Many of them originate from the EPA and date back to its inception in 1970.

The papers show many things, but one of them is that the agency has repeatedly overlooked strong evidence that independent chemical toxicity testing was fraudulent. EPA has known that laboratories skewed results in favor of applicants’ products. Sometimes, the agency has actively covered up such fraud.

EPA’s internal procedures for evaluating chemical safety were no better. Staff “cut and pasted” industry text into their reviews, failed to share evidence with external reviewers, and told applicants that products would be approved before applications had been fully evaluated. The agency also adopted reviewing procedures that make it highly unlikely that hazardous products would be identified as such. For example, data evidencing carcinogenic activity in test animals were repeatedly subjected to review and re-review until ways, as one employee wrote, “calculated to impress the uninitiated and the gullible” were found to disregard them. Meanwhile, evidence of non-carcinogenic toxicity was simply ignored. The situation was so bad in its Office of Pesticides that one EPA official accused his superior of having “downright contempt for the health of the American people.”

Having studied the documents as well as the agency itself, I would like to offer a diagnosis and propose some solutions. The inappropriate activities described in the documents are highly noteworthy on several counts. One is that they span a long time period; second, they occur across much of the agency; third, they are extremely diverse, spanning numerous procedural and scientific aspects; and fourth, they are spread across many complicit individuals. In other words, these derelictions do not demonstrate local branches gone rogue nor specific corrupted individuals, nor even specific situations. Rather, they reflect a deep conflict at the agency that is vastly more powerful than its written mandate to protect the public.

To understand why, it is necessary to get inside the head of the EPA. Imagine that zealous action on the part of EPA to protect human health from chemical toxicity or corporate malfeasance will engender strong feedback from the affected corporation, its lobbyists, and its other friends in Washington. The affected parties and its powerful friends will appeal to the president at whose “pleasure” the chief administrator of EPA serves. If that administrator does not have the president’s support for strong action, which he or she likely does not, then the best possible outcome for that agency—to avoid it suffering a damaging and embarrassing public humiliation—is for that evidence to never come to light. It should either be lost or buried, preferably as early in the evaluation process as possible.

This is the primary—unwritten—rule that has guided EPA from the beginning. The rule, known to every agency official, is that every finding of toxicity or corporate malfeasance is an institutional problem. The inevitable result is an institutional culture that regards findings of chemical toxicity as mistakes and aberrations.

The following represent some simple suggestions that, taking the above into account, would vastly improve the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Agency.

First, divide EPA into two agencies. One half should be responsible for lawmaking and the other for enforcement. This removes what is at present a confusion of responsibilities in which the rule makers at EPA are incentivized to create loopholes so that no successful prosecutions will occur and result in conflicts such as described above.

Secondly, the leaders of each of these separate agencies should be responsible to Congress and not, as EPA’s chief administrator is now, to the president. The reason is that presently EPA can enforce environmental laws only if the president agrees. Under such circumstances the agency can never be a better environmental and health advocate than the person in the White House. With Donald Trump in charge of the White House the danger of this should be immediately clear.

The third proposal is to protect and reward whistleblowers. Whistleblowers are potential assets to society. They are individuals courageous enough and independent enough to bring the misdeeds of colleagues and other officials to public attention. Supposing they can prove that the performance of their colleagues is truly inappropriate or illegal, then whistleblowers should be positively rewarded, which at present they are not.

Public health and the environment need effective and independent advocates, for the sake of the climate, the oceans, and communities. These changes can make EPA into an agency that truly advocates for them, rather than one that merely pretends to act in their interest.

Jonathan R. Latham, PhD, is the co-founder and executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, director of the Poison Papers Project, and editor of the Independent Science News website. He holds a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology.