Saturday 19 July 2014

Week 9 Earthjustice

Another environmental activist organization. Decided to make use of the match available up to July 15th.

Earthjustice http://earthjustice.org/about is essentially an organization made up of...wait for the oxymoron...a group of lawyers concerned about the environment.

What caught my attention is that earthjustice is taking on the EPA for approving he use of a certain pesticide - sulfoxaflor. Sulfoxaflor is a type of neonicotinoid pesticide which are connected to colony collapse in Bees (there are other factors too including other types of pesticides..however). These pesticides also harm butterflies and possibly songbirds. Neonicotinoids have been banned in Europe. Banning them in the US is not only the right thing to do it is the smart thing to do.


Earthjustice has been successful at getting the EPA to disallow other pesticides for example, vinclozolin, which in lab tests showed "sexual behaviors of the offspring of the male rats exposed in utero were impaired"...sometimes I wonder about the EPA....but I will continue to hope especially if carbon trading becomes a reality.

I'd love to see the end of synthetic pesticides. Perhaps I yearn for some utopia, perhaps I am naive. A CSA farmer I know commented that pests on crops is most often a sign of poor soil or imbalance in the ecology. Our current farming practices are scary. Small farms produce much more food per acre than large "mono crop" farms. The system seems so wrong.

People are waking up to this (wholefoods!), mostly from the concern of what we put in our bodies rather than what we are doing to the environment, but really these two things go hand in hand.


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