The New Dark Age

A Shropshire vicar played a key role in a new two-part BBC documentary featuring Welsh Hollywood actor Michael Sheen’s investigation into toxic waste dumps. The Rev Paul Cawthorne is also a long time environmental campaigner. He began looking into the history of the former landfill site at Stoney Hill, in Telford, where Monsanto is known to have legally dumped waste in the mid to late 1980s. “When I found out about the Monsanto chemical dumping at Stoney Hill, I next identified Sutton Walls in Herefordshire, then Cefn Mawr in north Wales,” he said. “I then went around south Wales valleys identifying historically documented sites which needed additional testing,” he added. Cawthorne said he has been on a 20 year mission to uncover the truth. He said that “dangerously elevated levels” of polychlorinated biphenyls – toxic man-made chemicals which don’t easily break down in nature – were found in nine out of 10 sites discussed in the Buried BBC radio series. BBC News

A chemical giant’s toxic legacy is raising fresh questions about long-term contamination and community safety in Newport, Wales. Monsanto’s Newport plant operated from 1949 and produced PCBs in the 1950s and 60s. Waste from the factory was dumped at sites across South Wales, including Brofiscin Quarry near Groesfaen between 1965 and 1972. Concerns have long centred on the safety of land in the Glebelands area. By the early 1990s, media reports questioned the site’s suitability for development. In 1994, Newport council permitted up to 103 allotment plots on former landfill containing industrial waste, prompting soil and crop testing amid contamination fears. The allotments were later abandoned. John Browne, head of industrial disease for Wales and the South West at law firm Slater and Gordon, said: “Contamination by dangerous toxic chemicals can persist in the environment for generations and families in exposed communities will live with questions about their health, their land and whether this could all have been prevented. South Wales Argus

Two-thirds of Americans favour banning the use of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller Roundup, on crops grown in the United States, according to a nationally representative survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Support for banning glyphosate cuts across political and ideological groups, the survey finds. Seventy-two percent of people who identify as supporters of the MAHA movement, or Make America Healthy Again, favour banning glyphosate, as do 70% of those who do not support MAHA. Support for banning the herbicide is also strong among both major parties: 70% of self-identified Republicans and 69% of self-identified Democrats favour a ban. Annenberg Public Policy Center

When Beverly Ogle, an elder of the Maidu tribe, was growing up, she, her brothers, and her grandmother used to harvest plants in the forests surrounding Lassen Peak in northeastern California. “It was amazing the things my grandmother knew,” Ogle said, recalling how she would explain what different plants were used for — food, medicine, basket weaving. But today, as the government coats California’s forests in the controversial herbicide glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, Ogle can’t go out into the backcountry she grew up in without fearing: “Are we gathering something that’s got poison on it?” Nate Halverson reports on Monsanto’s plan to cover the world in herbicide, on Facebook and Youtube. Mother Jones

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