According to NASA, 2010 was the fourth warmest year on record.7 And CO2 levels are continuing to increase at a frightening pace.8I believe it is time for a new human experiment. The old experiment . . . is that we have sprayed pesticides, which are inherent poisons . . . throughout our shared environment. They are now in amniotic fluid. They're in our blood. They're in our urine. They're in our exhaled breath. They are in mothers’ milk. . . . What is the burden of cancer that we can attribute to this use of poisons in our agricultural system? . . . We won't really know the answer until we do the other experiment, which is to take the poisons out of our food chain, embrace a different kind of agriculture, and see what happens.
—Sandra Steingraber, Ithaca College, Scholar in Residence, Department of Environmental Studies and Sciences, President's Cancer Panel Report
The challenging thing about writing a book like Organic Manifesto is that the story never ends. Twists and turns in the plot appear daily. But since I turned in the original manuscript, many very interesting things have happened that further underscore the urgency of my message.
Shortly before my book was first published in March 2010, a team of scientists at the University of Illinois published research showing that artificial chemical nitrogen fertilizer contributes to global warming in previously unrecognized ways.1 They also found that long-term usage of this fertilizer destroys the productivity of soil.2 Ironically, this idea is not new at all—Sir Albert Howard, author of An Agricultural Testament, wrote about the danger of soil depletion from artificial nitrogen use in 1940. One of the authors of the study, Dr. Richard Mulvaney, who holds a PhD in soil fertility and chemistry from the University of Illinois and is now a professor in the university's Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, does credit Sir Albert Howard despite the fact that this historical information has been long overlooked in the curriculum in that school, which receives generous bio-tech industry funding. Not coincidentally, the University of Illinois is home to the Morrow plots, where corn growth and productivity have been studied since 1876.
Reporting on the study in Grist, Tom Phillpott noted:
A particularly stark set of graphs traces soil organic carbon (SOC) in the surface layer of soil in the Morrow plots from 1904 to 2005. SOC rises steadily over the first several decades, when the fields were fertilized with livestock manure. After 1967, when synthetic nitrogen became the fertilizer of choice, SOC steadily drops.3
This is important stuff, but it may not register with the same immediacy as the findings of the 2008–2009 President's Cancer Panel: Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk—What We Can Do Now, which came out in the spring of 2010. Written by two George W. Bush–appointed doctors, the panel reported that the risks of artificial chemicals in our environment are understudied and most likely responsible for much more cancer than we currently realize. A careful reading of the report shows that few researchers are trained to look for environmental or human health hazards of chemicals and that, as the study reports, the industry has exploited the lack of research and government oversight in order to release untested chemicals into the enviroment.
The panel also reports that children who grow up on chemical farms have consistently higher rates of leukemia than other children, as do those who live in houses where pesticides and insecticides are used regularly.
Additionally, the report states that the US standards for safety are significantly more lax than international standards, a state of affairs that impacts not only our health as a nation, but also our ability to engage in global trade.
With each new finding, every frightening new revelation, I ask myself: What is wrong with us? How can we allow these loosely regulated industries to poison us and our children? Would we truly not be willing to pay a little more for real, healthy, organic food and keep our children healthy?
And that's not the end of the bad news.
In May, a study conducted at the University of Adelaide, Australia, ranked all countries in the world on their environmental degradation.4 Only Brazil bested the United States for the distinction of “most degraded environment.” No doubt had these rankings been compiled just a few months later,5 after an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, unleashing an unprecedented gusher of oil for four months, the United States would have taken the top spot. Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, spent many weeks in the Gulf region after the April 20, 2010, spill and is gravely concerned not only with the impact of the gusher itself but also with the long-term effects of the chemical dispersants used to “hide” the oil. He says, “The BP well explosion, in addition to killing workers, polluted the Gulf with 4.1 million barrels of oil, 2 billion barrels (equivalent) of methane and 1.5 million gallons of chemical flocculants. Seven hundred thousand gallons of the chemical Corexit were pumped into waters that were one mile deep.
“Much of the oil and Corexit went to the bottom. This untested approach turned a more manageable two-dimensional oil spill into a more complex three-dimensional one, as oil dragged to the bottom breaks down slowly in dark, cold waters with low oxygen and little sunlight. This practice has never been tested and was outside of the chemical registration required by EPA. Patents and trade secrets protect the exact chemical makeup of Corexit yet all of this oil dispersant has been fed to the fish and shellfish of the Gulf with unknown consequences. Anyone who suggests they know the extent, duration or magnitude of the fisheries and ecological damages caused by this spill and the poor response efforts is either grossly misinformed or they are not telling the truth.”
Speaking of the Gulf of Mexico, 2010 was the worst year so far for its ever-growing dead zone.6 Unrelated to the oil spill, agricultural farm runoff deposited into the Gulf by the Mississippi River has now created an oxygen-deprived area the size of Massachusetts in which nothing can survive—and this is in addition to the area contaminated by oil and dispersants.
There's more.
According to NASA, 2010 was the fourth warmest year on record.7 And CO2 levels are continuing to increase at a frightening pace.8
Nashville flooded, likely as a result of soil degraded from chemical farming and no longer able to store water as it should.
In a fairly predictable attempt to revive the tarnished reputation of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the corn industry is trying to re-brand HFCS as “corn sugar.”
Oh, and despite research that shows Roundup (glypho-sate) causes birth defects9 and weed resistance, 40 percent of farmers still plan on increasing their use of glyphosphate10 and mixing it with other, more potent herbicides to fight ever stronger weeds. Monsanto is even paying for farmers to use other, more toxic herbicides to augment the effectiveness of Roundup.
And I'm just starting to understand enough about fracking to recognize that it's bad. Really bad. This process involves using lots of water to remove natural gas from shale, and in that process, drinking water can become so polluted that neither people nor animals should drink it.
Is there any good news? A bit.
The pesticide Aldicarb was banned—an interesting story for a number of reasons. First, this comes twenty-five years after it caused the worst pesticide poisoning in American history. And second, that event inadvertently illustrated that the idea that chemicals can be “peeled off or washed off” was a lie. How so? Well, in the summer of 1985, 2,000 people got sick from eating watermelon contaminated with Aldicarb (made by our friends at Bayer Crop Sciences).11 They didn't eat the rind of the watermelon; they ate the flesh inside, yet they were still sickened by the presence of the chemical in the fruit. As this example shows, chemicals are systemic. You cannot always avoid them by washing or peeling your produce.
(Note that even though Aldicarb has been banned, it won't be phased out entirely until 2015. Until then you might want to avoid potatoes, citrus, watermelon, and cotton that are not certified organic, since these are the primary chemical crops that are treated with Aldicarb today.)
And in one of the few studies comparing chemical food to organic, the organic strawberries won!12 Yes, they were smaller since they weren't doped up on chemicals, but they had more antioxidants and lasted longer without rotting, and the soil they grew in was much more alive with microbes (that's a good thing for storing carbon!).
Finally, Monsanto, despite being named Forbes’ Company of the Year for 2009 (disgusting!), had fairly poor financial results in 2010. It may be too soon to hope that the GMO tide has turned, but for the first time in many years, farmers are planting fewer of Monsanto's GMO seeds, not more. Monsanto's GMO sugar beets got turned down by the government—for now—and farmers are starting to complain about the high price of GMO corn seed that does not perform as promoted.
Furthermore, new research from the Rodale Institute is showing that while Monsanto has set a stretch goal of increasing the drought tolerance of their GMO seeds by 6 percent to 13 percent, organically farmed crops are already 31 percent more drought tolerant.13 Before we celebrate the demise of GMO seeds, though, it should be noted that competitor Pioneer's GMO seeds are picking up market share from Monsanto.
When will we learn? What will it take to finally create the change we need?
In a private meeting this year with a junior policy aide to an experienced senator, I was told the problem in Washington isn't so much the money that Monsanto gives to candidates, it's the pressure—the PR pressure, the legal and lobbying pressure—that the company, as a campaign contributor, puts on politicians if they show any sort of support for organic. Of course, all that pressure takes lots of cash—cash harvested from farmers who believe they need chemicals they don't really need, from government subsidies, and from people who are too willing to just buy whatever food is cheapest and easiest. The only antidote to this sort of pressure is the pressure that we citizens en masse can put on our elected officials, which thankfully also seems to be happening.
I am angrier now than when I first started writing Organic Manifesto. But I can't create the change that is needed alone, and I need all your help to figure out what to do next. Where is our courage? By the time you read this, much more will have changed, some for the better and some for the worse. But one thing won't change, and that is the fact that each of us bears personal responsibility for our world. I need each and every one of you to demand positive, thoughtful, and constructive change. Spread the word, and for the sake of all of us, DEMAND ORGANIC!