How Organics Respects the Rule of Law
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Those who practice agriculture or horticulture using the organic method are following the rule of law—nature’s law. Her laws are fairly simple, but they are profound, and contravened at our peril. The salient laws can be summarized as follows:
1) Healthy soil is a living organism comprised of myriad microscopic bits of life, miniscule plants, fungi, worms, and a host of other denizens, all functioning together in a working ecosystem. The farmer or gardener’s job is to support and improve this organism by recycling every bit of organic waste material back into the soil through the composting process.
2) There is no place on the farm or garden for manmade toxic chemicals—pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, antibiotics, or hormones. Attempts to control life on the farm or in the garden by killing “bad” creatures only selects for the development of more troublesome pests and diseases. Nature’s law says all life forms are good, all necessary, and all contribute to a healthy ecosystem. Shakespeare said this 400 years ago in Romeo and Juliet, when the Friar remarked, “None so vile that on the earth doth live, but to the earth some special good doth give.”
3) Inserting genes from one genus into another genus, such as is done with genetically modified organisms, is an abomination and a complete contravention of nature’s elaborate system of keeping genus and species apart for very good reasons. No good will ever come of it, but much harm will.
4) Creating a farm or garden of a single crop will only encourage that crop’s predators and parasites to attack it. Rather nature’s law is to create a multiplicity of different crops. In diversity is stability.
5) Possession is nine-tenths of the natural law. If the soil and crops are diverse and part of a healthy ecosystem that thoroughly colonizes its niche, pathogens will still be present, but they will not be able to cause disease because all the trophic niches will be occupied. In other words, they won’t be able to get enough of a toehold to break out into disease.
6) Insects are the censors of nature, the way top-level predators like wolves keep herds of caribou healthy by picking off and devouring the weakest. Insects attack the weakest plants first, helping to insure that only the healthiest plants survive.
7) Following nature’s laws produces a confluence of benefits, many of which are unforeseen. Transgressing nature’s laws produces a perfect storm of problems, most of which are unanticipated.
Now let’s move from agriculture and horticulture to society and the rule of law. In this country, the basic law of the land is the U.S. Constitution, a brilliant document that, through its system of checks and balances, mimics nature’s laws as they operate to create healthy ecosystems, where health is the result of the checks and balances among the creatures that make up the interconnected web of life.
So, what about the rule of law and the primacy of the Constitution in America, 2014. How are we doing?
Well, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. But our federal government is claiming that newspapers like The New York Times, which is reporting on the revelations of the National Security Agency’s documents provided by Edward Snowden, should be prevented from such reporting. I suspect the framers of the Constitution would applaud Edward Snowden.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees that citizens should be safe from government intrusion into their private and personal affairs without probable cause that crimes are being committed, and yet the NSA and other governmental agencies are intruding on our privacy wholesale, in direction contravention of the Constitution.
The Constitution guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law, but the President has now determined that he can order the murder of American citizens by drone attacks without due process of law, in direct contravention of the Constitution. Not only that, he claims the right to direct lethal attacks against citizens of other countries that he declares are terrorists who threaten America, even if the attacks kill innocent civilians, without oversight or acquiescence from Congress. No President should have this power of life and death to use as he alone chooses. Is he any better than any other dictator in this regard?
Those who lie to Congress are supposed to be arraigned as felons, but our security officials lie to Congress without legal action, as James Clapper did when he told Congress that the NSA was not spying on American citizens. Outing a CIA agent is supposed to be a felony, but when Valerie Plame was outed, the culprit wasn’t prosecuted. Two black teenagers were recently murdered in Florida, but neither of their attackers was convicted of murder. Laws are flouted all the time in our lawless society. Children are gunned down by the dozens in schools but Congress will pass no laws to curb gun violence because of gun zealots like Ted Nugent who calls the President a “subhuman mongrel,” and this is a President who, at a State of the Union speech, was yelled at by a member of Congress who shouted, “Liar!”
Wall Street bankers committed all kinds of financial crimes but are not prosecuted. Yet an 84-year-old nun who trespassed at a Tennessee nuclear facility, exposing its security breaches, gets three years in prison. The men who murdered the black teenagers in Florida go free while a woman who fired a warning shot into the ceiling to stop her abusive husband from attacking her gets hard time.
Uh—rule of law? Excuse me? Those who think we are living in a civil society are delusional. It’s time for a change. You see what contravention of the rule of natural law has done to our food supply. The erosion of the Constitution is having the same toxic effect on our society.
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PRENATAL PESTICIDE EXPOSURE RESULTS IN LOWER CHILDRENS’ IQS
According to The Organic Center, a study carried out by a team at the Columbia University Center for Children’s Environmental Health focused on children born to a group of 265 mothers living in low-income, public housing. By age seven, children born to mothers in the group with the highest exposute to pesticides scored 5.5 percent lower on a common test of working memory and 2.7 percent lower in terms of IQ, compared to children born to mothers in a low-exposure group. The study suggested that even very low exposures might lead to some reduction in mental abilities.
Another study, carried out by U.C. Berkeley scientists, in cooperation with the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas, measured urinary metabolites of insecticides during pregnancy, and then from children at six months of age, and periodically through age five. A variety of intelligence and learning tests were used to measure the mental abilities of 329 children at age seven. Children born to the most heavily exposed mothers had an IQ deficit of seven points, or about 7 percent, compared to the low exposure quintile.
The senior author of this study, Brenda Eskenazi, told CNN.com that the impacts on intelligence found in their study were similar in magnitude to the adverse impacts associated with high lead exposures, in the 1960s and 1970s, and were comparable to a child performing six-months behind average in a school population.
The research team also reported that about 25 percent of pregnant women in the general U.S. population are exposed to organophosphate insecticides at levels comparable to the average Latino farm women included in this study.
A third study was carried out at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and measured prenatal organophosphate pesticide metabolite levels in urine and blood samples from 404 pregnant women. The babies of about 30 percent of the women in the study were at higher risk following exposures to OP insecticides.
These children suffered a 4 point decline in one measure of mental function.
Dr. Phil Landrigan, Director of the Mt. Sinai Children’s Environmental Health Center called the findings of the three studies “shocking” in a New York Times health blog (Tara Parker-Pope, April 21, 2011). He went on to say –
“Babies exposed to the highest levels [of OPs] had the most severe effects. It means these children are going to have problems as they go through life.”
“When we took lead out of gasoline, we reduced lead poisoning by 90 percent, and we raised the I.Q. of a whole generation of children four or five points. I think these findings about pesticides should generate similar controversy, but I’m cautiously optimistic that they will have the effect of having the EPA sharply reduce the use of organophosphate pesticides.”
Not to be cynical, Dr. Landrigan, but don’t hold your breath.
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POLAND BANS PLANTING OF MONSANTO’S GMO CORN
Following the anti-Monsanto activism launched by nations like France and Hungary, Poland has announced that it will launch a complete ban on growing Monsanto’s genetically modified strain of corn.
The announcement, made by Agriculture Minister Marek Sawicki, sets yet another international standard against Monsanto’s genetically modified creations. In addition to being linked to a plethora health ailments, Sawicki says that the pollen originating from this GM strain may actually be devastating the already dwindling bee population.
“The decree is in the works. It introduces a complete ban on this strain of maize in Poland,” Sawicki stated to the press.
Similar opposition to Monsanto occurred on March 9th, when seven European countries blocked a proposal by the Danish EU presidency to permit the cultivation of genetically modified plants on the entire continent. France lead the charge against GMOs by asking the European Commission to suspend authorization of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn. What’s more, the country settled a landmark case in favor of the people over Monsanto, finding the biotech giant guilty of chemical poisoning.
In a ruling given by a court in Lyon (southeast France), grain grower Paul Francois stated that Monsanto failed to provide proper warnings on the Lasso weed killer product label which resulted in neurological problems such as memory loss and headaches. The court ordered an expert opinion to determine the sum of the damages, and to verify the link between Lasso and the reported illnesses. The result was a guilty charge, paving the way for further legal action on behalf of injured farmers.
Since 1996, the agricultural branch of the French social security system has gathered about 200 alerts per year regarding sickness related to pesticides.
Nations are continually taking a stand against Monsanto, with nations like Hungary destroying 1000 acres of GM maize and India slamming Monsanto with “‘bio-piracy” charges.
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