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Online Petitions–a Rich Source of Data

Organic Lifestyle Comments Off on Online Petitions–a Rich Source of Data

I keep getting these emails encouraging me to do useless things, and I’m sure you get them, too. “Tell Monsanto to Stop Poisoning America’s Farmland with Roundup,” one says. “Sign our petition to tell the GOP to stop threatening Medicare,” says another.

No, Monsanto isn’t going to stop doing what it does for a living, just because you sign a petition. And the GOP is never going to give up trying to destroy Medicare and the social safety net. It’s what they do for a living.

What I think is that these useless petitions are put in your inbox in order for you to reveal your contact information when you sign them, whereupon the people creating the useless petitions will bundle them by demographics and sell them to list brokers and other marketers.

Just sayin’.

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HERE’S WHO SPENT HOW MUCH ON LOBBYING IN 2ND QUARTER 2015

You’’ notice that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outspent every other lobbying group. That’s because the organization has nothing to do with your hometown’s Chamber of Commerce. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is a powerful business lobbying group that “has become a fully functional part of the partisan Republican machine” since CEO and president Thomas J. Donohue took office in 1997. Prior to Donohue’s tenure, the Chamber “used to be a trade association that advocated in a bipartisan manner for narrowly tailored policies to benefit its members.” The Chamber’s 2010 budget is approximately $200 million, but as a trade organization, its donors can remain anonymous. The New York Times reported in October, 2010, that half of the Chamber’s $140 million in contributions in 2008 came from just 45 big-money donors, many of whom enlisted the Chamber’s help to fight political and public opinion battles on their behalf (such as opposing financial or healthcare reforms, or other regulations). The Chamber is “dominated by oil companies, pharmaceutical giants, automakers and other polluting industries,” according to James Carter, executive director of the Green Chamber of Commerce.

Organization Quarter 2 Lobbying

U.S. Chamber of Commerce $22,970,000
American Medical Association $12,400,000
Boeing $9,288,000
General Electric $8,460,000
National Association of Realtors $8,180,000
Business Roundtable $6,430,000
National Association of Manufacturers $4,840,000
Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America $4,820,000
American Hospital Association $4,770,000
Google $4,620,000

These data are from Maplight. MapLight is a 501(c)3 research organization that tracks money’s influence on politics.

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YOU THINK MONSANTO CARES ABOUT INDIAN FARMERS’ SUICIDES?

For generations, farmers have saved seeds from year to year — but Monsanto has now made that illegal by genetically modifying and then patenting seeds, and charging farmers outrageous annual royalties to keep using its seeds. Farmers are hopelessly saddled with crippling debt. Since Monsanto’s crops were introduced, over 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide.

Now, the new Indian government has opened GMO testing on eggplant, corn, rice and chickpeas, which could mean even more royalties across the agricultural industry. The result is a crippling cycle of poverty, from which farmers see no way out.

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‘RESPONSIBLY GROWN’? WHAT’S THAT EVEN MEAN?

The Cornucopia Institute reports that this spring, 17 certified organic farmers signed a letter to Whole Foods Market CEO John Mackey asking him to withdraw the company’s “Responsibly Grown” produce labeling program, at least temporarily. The farmers, all of whom sell produce to the 400+-store high-end grocery chain, objected to having to pay for the grocer’s marketing program and to the fact that non-organic produce could qualify to be labeled “GOOD,” “BETTER,” or even “BEST” under the program.

The Cornucopia Institute supported these growers, as did many other certified organic farmers and consumers around the country. It was a righteous fight – what we called “Robin Hood in reverse.” Here was a corporation, with a market capitalization exceeding $14.5 billion, asking mostly family-scale farmers, some of the best farmers in this industry, to pony up between $5,000 and $20,000 to comply with the program’s reporting requirements and, for some, purchase new equipment. That’s not an inconsequential amount for small- and medium-sized family farms. And the added record-keeping labor could crush some mom-and-pop outfits.

But most of all, the farmers took exception to one corporation hiring its own private scientist, and coming up with a list of good and bad agrichemicals. Most organic consumers don’t want to pick or choose. They buy organic and they shop at stores like Whole Foods because they don’t want to treat their children like laboratory rats.
Not surprisingly, researchers at The Cornucopia Institute, with PhDs in plant pathology and other related disciplines, found that a number of highly disturbing agrichemicals were not on the relatively short list of toxins that Whole Foods prohibits their top-rated conventional produce suppliers from using. So the certified organic farmers who signed the letter to Mr. Mackey had good reason to object when photos taken in several Whole Foods stores showed conventional produce being rated higher than organic.

There is nothing wrong with farmers implementing good employment practices or putting solar panels on the roof of their barn – practices that win them points in Whole Foods’ rating scheme. But the prerequisite – the “ante,” if you will – to get into the Whole Foods’ Responsibly Grown game should be a supplier’s certified organic status.
Quite frankly, how could anyone who knows as much about organics as WFM founder Mr. Mackey, and the other top management at Whole Foods, could ever call conventional food the “BEST”?

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TWO NEW SWEET CORN VARIETIES ARE OPEN POLLINATED

Two new varieties of open-pollinated, super-sweet corn will be available in limited quantities for the 2016 planting season, thanks to ongoing research by Oregon farmer and Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) research partner Jonathan Spero. Open pollination means that the varieties’ seeds produce corn that is true to the parent variety. And that means farmers can save seed from year to year.

According to Spero’s report, breeding and improvement of open-pollinated corn was largely abandoned 60 to 70 years ago, with the introduction of hybrid seed varieties. Most hybrid seeds are the product of traditional breeding techniques, and therefore not considered GMOs. But hybrid offspring do not uniformly resemble the parent plant, and farmers relying on hybrids must purchase new seed every year.

In addition to fostering dependence on seed companies, hybrids do not allow farmers to participate in ongoing crop improvement, which over millennia has resulted in a rich heritage of regionally-adapted crop varieties around the globe.

The commercial release of Top Hat and Tuxana sweet corn seed is a welcome milestone in the movement to revive traditional crop breeding, and increase the selection of organic-friendly varieties whose seed can be saved by farmers. Spero’s sweet corn breeding project was supported by a four-year research grant from OFRF.

Spero expects his new varieties of white and yellow sweet corn to see additional improvements in coming years, as they are planted in new regions and the seed is saved and replanted by numerous farmers and gardeners.

“I have shown how these crop improvements can be made, and new varieties created, without advanced technology or large amounts of money,” Spero said in his report. “Others may see that they too can step up from gardening or farming to plant breeding and crop improvement. It may help return crop improvement and varietal ownership to the farmer.”

In addition to breeding for enhanced sweetness, Spero worked to make Top Hat and Tuxana more competitive against weeds, better able to resist insect pests, and tolerant of lower-fertility soils.

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KEEP AN EYE OUT FOR NOCCIOLATA

We all love Nutella, right? But Nutella isn’t organic. Now here comes Nocciolata, an Italian version of Nutella that’s a delicious mix of ground hazelnuts, cocoa, and milk—and it’s entirely organic. It’s a little more oriented toward the hazelnuts and less toward the chocolate, but it’s great over ice cream. Ask your grocer to stock it.

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ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A REPTILE?

The following was written by William B. Miller, Jr., M.D. I think its subject is one that every person interested in organic food and farming will appreciate. Here’s Dr. Miller:

“Are you smarter than a reptile? In many respects, you certainly are. After all, no reptile is going to read this article. However, our clearly superior intellectual abilities for certain skills has seduced us towards a dismissive attitude towards the surprisingly deep and broad range of analytical gifts of our companion creatures. A growing body of research now indicates that other animals of all sizes and varieties are highly intelligent problem solvers within their own realms. After all, their cognitive skills have enabled them to successfully survive for eons and that may not necessarily prove to be true of we humans.

“Consider termites. They are strikingly social animals and have constructed elaborate societies for 200 million years. They engage in a primitive sort of agriculture, farming varieties of fungus for food. As individuals, they demonstrate remarkable intelligence and an even more surprising group intelligence that enables complicated feats of soil engineering in a diverse range of environments. Within their complex societal structure, termites divide labor between varied types of specialized workers, for example, infant care, manual labor, reproduction or soldiers for the defense of the colony. All of this proceeds via highly evolved and complex patterns of communication and signaling.

“Individual bees are intelligent and can even solve problems that are mathematically based. For example, they effectively decide the Traveling Salesman dilemma of optimizing the most efficient route to visit large numbers of locations in a single day. Bees communicate in a rich symbolic non-verbal language that enables them to transmit abstract concepts to others such as the location of particular flowers over large distances based on angles of the sun. They even seem to understand some rudimentary concepts of medical care utilizing medications within their hives. For example, honeybees colonies have been demonstrated to self medicate with plant resin to combat fungal infections.

“What about ants? They’re no slouches. They can navigate long distances to find food and can communicate its location to others with facility. As individuals, they can seek family members, memorize multiple alternate locations and can integrate a large number sources of information. They are even altruistic and will help other ants in distress.

“Modern research is teaching that intelligence is not directly linked to brain volume. All sizes can be demonstrate high intelligence. Birds have small brains but are terrific problem solvers. They are highly cooperative and exhibit a wide range of highly intelligent behaviors. For example, they use vocal learning. Their songs are a complex language. Did you realize that they give lifelong names to their young? They are even known to mourn the loss of others. Birds also have a gyroscopic sense of geography and can store seeds in thousands of places that they can remember. Can we do that?

“Perhaps you suppose that only humans are capable of understanding analogies. However, crows can use analogies to solve higher order tasks. They understand sharing, can use rudimentary arithmetic and can invent meanings for words. Cockatoos can solve puzzles with at least 5 steps. They can even keep time to music.

“Might fish be intellectually impaired? In fact, fish lead complex social lives and are highly intelligent. In a comparison of the intellectual capacity of primates and fish, who do you think should win? In a food test comparing fish with monkeys, chimpanzees and orangutans, it was the fish that proved more adept at learning the advantages of certain patterns of food choices and were faster at it. And individual fish have personalities. Timid ones stay timid and aggressive ones remain bold. They also demonstrate individually distinguishable levels of curiosity and social ability. Fish can play, have excellent memories and perform complex courtship rituals. And Tusk fish even use tools to open shells for food, an act of intellect, which used to be considered as exclusive to humans but is now known to be widely distributed among species.

“Certainly then, we must be much smarter than microbes. However, if intelligence is construed as using information to solve problems to successfully reproduce and survive in hostile environments, then they might be considered among the most intelligent. Some bacterial strains and even some viruses have survived essentially unchanged in any significant manner for hundreds of millions of years, in part this by using elaborate signaling patterns for communication among themselves and others.

“So what might we make of this widely distributed worldwide intelligence?

“Our intelligence might be of a unique kind, but it is not the only intelligence of consequence on this planet. Ours is just different and suited to the types of problems that we need to solve.

“We have vastly underestimated the intelligence, feelings and complexity of the inner lives of our companion creatures on this planet. The implications are profound for our relationship towards them and our stewardship of the planet we share.

“The ubiquity of refined intelligence requires a thorough re-examination of our evolutionary narrative. Intelligence exists at every scale and underscores every aspect of evolutionary development.

“This emerging understanding teaches us that all cognitive ability starts at the cellular level. All complex creatures must in turn be viewed as integrated collections of intelligent cells, vast collaboratives of cellular intelligence – we in our human package, and they in theirs.

“While our form of collective intelligence may be privileged compared to others, it is not different in its essence. As a species, we would do well to grasp this vital truth.”

Dr. Bill Miller has been a physician in academic and private practice for over 30 years. He is the author of The Microcosm Within: Evolution and Extinction in the Hologenome. He currently serves as a scientific advisor to OmniBiome Therapeutics, a pioneering company in discovering and developing solutions to problems in human fertility and health through management of the human microbiome. For more information: www.themicrocosmwithin.com.

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