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General News    H3'ed 5/28/13

Farmer Sued by Monsanto for Planting Seeds

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  • Stealing money from the 99% to Give huge subsidies to the 1% wealthiest, most chemical and energy-intensive farms and food producers

  • Organic Consumers summarizes and pleads with the people reading to:

    Save the Planet From Monsanto! It's not enough to stop eating genetically engineered food. If we want a liveable planet we've got to boycott all factory farmed food and make the Great Transition from energy and chemical-intensive agriculture to a re-localized and organic system of food and farming. The World According to Monsanto is a recipe for disaster. Monsanto and Big Ag contaminate every link in the food chain, threatening the very foundation of life: living nutrient-rich soil, clean water, resilient crops, healthy animals, stable climates, and diverse food sources. The good news is that agro-ecological and organic methods can reverse this thr eat and sustain food production for future generations, but we don't have much time to turn things around.

    Armed with this information, I decided to take a closer look at a Monsanto claim that they are combating deforestation and the extinction of species.

    Let me reflect upon my research. First of all, I identified several websites that were anti-Monsanto. When putting in the url to read what they had to say, I was told that the "link is unavailable.". Could it be that Monsanto is orchestrating a drive to control information on the internet just by making it unavailable? Is the internet becoming corporate control?

    As evidence for my suspicion of a cover-up, I was linked to many apparently Monsanto driven websites that state how wonderful they are. For example, according to The Ecologist:

    Monsanto was nominated for its promotion of genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to climate change and for pushing its crops to be used as bio-fuels. They wanted their crops to be given carbon credits and be at the forefront of tackling climate change despite their link to deforestation.

    My God, it's "Leave It To Beaver" all over again. I fall to Monsanto feet in adoration for its purity and innocence.

    In terms of deforestation, Monsanto is founded in a corporate model of standardization. This model reflects our culture's corporate idealism. Standardization has taken over in such diverse arenas as education to psychotherapy to grocery stores to farming. In food production, standardization is reflected in farms that focus on a few crops and in many cases just one. For example, a farmer in Iowa may focus on corn.

    Standardization kills the biodiversity of forests. For example, "What is the Importance of Studying Ecology" states:

    One need only look at examples of ecological catastrophes to understand the need to study the subject as much as possible. The fight against mosquitoes is a good example. Shortly after World War II, a program was initiated by the World Health Organization to control malaria- spreading mosquitoes in Borneo with the chemical DDT. The method drastically decreased the mosquito population, just as advertised. However, the DDT caused unwanted side effects. Rooftops in the area where it was used began to collapse. As it turns out, the DDT also was killing off a type of wasp that kept roof-eating caterpillars under control. Goodbye wasps, hello caterpillars. And goodbye roofs.

    Controlling mosquitoes had major implications for the diversity of the ecosystem.

    The new motto for the human race should thus be:

    "If we change one thing, we change all."

    This motto has scientific backing. For example, the article on chaos theory in Wikipedia describes the "butterfly effect" as being

    the sensitive dependence on initial conditions, where a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences to a later state. The name of the effect, coined by Edward Lorenz, is derived from the theoretical example of a hurricane's formation being contingent on whether or not a distant butterfly had flapped its wings several weeks before.

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    Burl Hall is a retired counselor who is living in a Senior Citizen Housing apartment. Burl has one book to his credit, titled "Sophia's Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature." For more information, search the book on Amazon. (more...)
     
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