by Colin Todhunter
The herbicide glyphosate – the most widely used herbicide on the planet – is authorised for use in the EU until December 2022. The EU is currently assessing whether its licence should be renewed.
Environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to the head of the Pesticides Unit at the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), Jose Tarazona.
Concrete steps to improve pesticide regulation are proposed in a new open-access commentary, “Novel strategies and new tools to curtail the health effects of pesticides”, published on August 3, 2021 in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health.
A huge column of smoke from the Bootleg Fire in Oregon could be seen for miles on July 8. (National Interagency Fire Center, Wikimedia Commons)
By Shea Leibow
OtherWords
This summer, we’ve seen the Bootleg fire rage through Oregon. East Coasters have been breathing West Coast smoke. Massive floods have slammed towns from Germany to China. The town of Lytton, British Columbia, burned to the ground.
Bayer have announced that they will no longer sell glyphosate-based herbicides to U.S. gardeners as of 2023, following the costly litigation battle over their cancer causing weedkiller Roundup.
Barbara Van Dyck unpacks the narratives that underpin corporate campaigns to deregulate new GM technologies
EXCERPT: In repeating industry narratives, decision-makers (and the media) pave the ground for a handful of corporations to advance false solutions that serve their encroachment of food systems. To help clarify valid claims from technological bluff, we recommend institutions, regulators and funders to carry out a ‘hype test’ by asking: What makes gene editing superior to other, more systemic options including agroecology, that makes it successful in producing healthier plants, animals and crops and healthier food?
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14 July 2021 — GMWatch
The EU Commission has rejected criticism of its report on plants and New GE (New Genetic Engineering, genome editing). In a letter to Testbiotech, the Commission stated that there were no new risks associated with plants derived from genetically engineered plants compared to conventionally bred plants, as long as no transgenes were inserted. The Commission is directly repeating claims made by industry and affiliated experts that are contrary to existing scientific evidence. Testbiotech is therefore warning against the spread of misinformation and disregarding of science.
14 July 2021 — Caitlin Johnson
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As the world burns, as ecosystems die off, as the insects vanish, as the forests disappear, as soil becomes rapidly less fertile, as extinction takes over, as the oceans gasp for air and become lifeless deserts while continents of plastic form in their waters, it is interesting how often you hear the sentiment that this is the result of some flaw in humanity for which we all share equal guilt.
24 June 2021 — Global Research
A newly published analysis in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science argues that a toxic soup of insecticides, herbicides and fungicides is causing havoc beneath fields covered in corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops. The research is the most comprehensive review ever conducted on how pesticides affect soil health.
23 June 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Simon Butler is co-author, with Ian Angus, of Too Many People? Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis. He lives in Scotland.
by Simon Butler
In a recent Guardian article, Jacobin magazine’s founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara declared that “If we want to fight the climate crisis, we must embrace nuclear power.” He praised nuclear as a clean and reliable and suggested that opponents of nuclear power are either gripped by “paranoia … rooted in cold war associations” or are relying on “outdated information.”
7 May 2021 — MROnline
In a 2010 essay entitled “Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist,” the English émigré environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth recounts his journey into and out of the environmental movement. The essay appeared in the inaugural issue of Dark Mountain, the journal attached to the Dark Mountain group—inaugurated by Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine in 2009—a literary-philosophical project dedicated to uncivilization. What is uncivilization? Coauthors Kingsnorth and Dougald Stewart introduce their manifesto with a telling excerpt from Robinson Jeffers, in which the poet urges readers to “unhumanize our views a little.” Our Dark Mountaineers elaborate how “our whole way of living is already passing into history,” while urging their readers to “face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.” Whose way of life exactly? It presumably refers to the inhabitants of the Global North who represent the primary driver of the ecological crisis now ravaging the planet. While this sort of rough political economy is implicit in the remaining Dark Mountain principles, they notably eschew political solutions; they, for instance, “reject the faith that holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions.’”1
16 June 2021 — Socialist Project
In the wake of the global financial crisis, water services have come under renewed neoliberal assault across Europe. At the same time, the struggle against water privatization has continued to pick up pace; from the re-municipalization of water in Grenoble in 2000, to the United Nations declaration of water as a human right in 2010.
9 June 2021 — Pesticide Action Network
The latest report in our Toxic Trade series is out!!!
It reveals that the UK could be opening the door to 119 pesticides banned for health and environmental reasons as we attempt to join a huge trade deal currently agreed between 11 countries around the Pacific Rim.
21 May 2021 — Sustainable Pulse
Exposure to a chemical found in the weed killer Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides is significantly associated with preterm births, according to a new University of Michigan study published Wednesday. The study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, found that the presence of the chemical in women’s urine in late pregnancy was linked to an increased […]
21 May 2021 — DeSmogUK
Honestly, we’d really rather not be writing about the UK’s most prominent climate science denial group on a windswept Friday afternoon (or, indeed, any afternoon, tbh).
But in what feels like an alarming pattern of recent weeks, yet another high profile figure has joined the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a thinktank infamous for spreading misinformation on climate change.
18 May 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
(Andreas Kambanis via Flickr under CC by SA 2.0)
by Julie Brigham-Grette and Andrea Dutton
The Conversation, May 17, 2021
While U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken draws attention to climate change in the Arctic at meetings with other national officials this week in Iceland, an even greater threat looms on the other side of the planet. New research shows it is Antarctica that may force a reckoning between the choices countries make today about greenhouse gas emissions and the future survival of their coastlines and coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai.
That reckoning may come much sooner than people realize.
14 May 2021 — Origin: Climate & Capitalism
Ecosocialist Bookshelf is a monthly column, hosted by Ian Angus. Books described here may be reviewed at length in future. Inclusion of a book does not imply endorsement, or that C&C agrees with everything (or even anything!) these books say.
14 May 2021 — Sustainable Pulse
Editors’ picks
7 May 2021 — GMWatch
Zen Honeycutt explains why plans to grow GM carbon-sequestering plants are a dangerous distraction
On March 22, 2021, The Del Mar Garden Club of Southern California held an informational session called “Fighting climate change with plants”. As a person who is extremely concerned about the looming apocalyptic events due to climate chaos, but not extremely well informed about what we can do to prevent them, I signed up.
7 May 2021 — Sustainable Pulse
The New Dark Age 