Extinction of animals and plants, #climate disasters, #Desert conditions could spread rapidly from groundwater depletion and plant destruction.

By Erika Schelby

The planet is facing multiple severe challenges that require our immediate attention. Putting an end to the dirty and suffocating fossil fuel emissions may be the most significant global priority, but limiting the misuse of water and restoring degraded land are also essential projects.

These two actions could help put the brakes on extreme weather events and slow down mounting losses in biodiversity, biocapacity, and the economy.

The Seeds of Preparedness

Human encroachment, especially in areas rich in biodiversity, has been one of the major threats to the survival of plants and nonhuman animals.

A 2023 report by NatureServe, a conservation group that networks with and analyzes the research of more than 1,000 scientists in the U.S. and Canada, puts the biodiversity crisis into perspective.

Their findings are worrisome: 40 percent of animals and 34 percent of plants are at risk of extinction in the United States. Many of these species are losing their natural habitats: 41 percent of ecosystems are threatened by collapse.

“At this moment, species are going extinct faster than any time in human history,” the report stated. “Given limited resources available for land management, conservation, and research, we need to make the most effective decisions to ensure the survival of natural communities. Data should be driving these decisions.”

The repercussions of our thoughtless actions are finally catching up with us. They threaten our existence. The United States is already experiencing natural disasters at an unparalleled scale. “The U.S. experienced 23 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first eight months of 2023—the largest number since records began,” according to Axios.

Using resilient native seeds to repair “Earth’s Green Mantle” may help support those Americans who are losing everything due to storms, floods, landslides, or fires. It could offer them a fighting chance to start over and rebuild in a safer spot—for keeps, and not in vain.

What use would reconstruction be if the climate crisis deepens and destroys their homes again? “Without native plants, especially their seeds, we do not have the ability to restore functional ecosystems after natural disasters and mitigate the effects of climate change,” states the report, “National Seed Strategy for Rehabilitation and Restoration.”

To keep the human population sheltered, we can get help from something ancient and fundamental: native seeds, “which have adapted to their local environments over the course of thousands of years,” explained NPR. Sadly, we no longer have enough of them to do even the most urgent repairs. Making sure there will be a sufficient supply is the first task.

In January 2023, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) released the report “An Assessment of Native Seed Needs and the Capacity for Their Supply.” It leaves no doubt about the dire shortage of native seeds and the urgency of supplying them to restore damaged natural areas.

“A limited supply of native seeds and other native plant materials is a widely acknowledged barrier to fulfilling our most critical restoration needs,” said Susan P. Harrison, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and chair of the committee that wrote the NASEM report.

The document outlines a detailed course of action, covering topics ranging from federal to state and local governments, tribal uses of native seeds, cooperative partnerships, and the problematic situations seed suppliers face. Another critical study called “Collection and Production of Native Seeds for Ecological Restoration” by Simone Pedrini and her colleagues in 2020 offered an excellent analysis of native seed requirements.

The “just-in-time” inventory business model of late capitalism is a fiasco for seeds and seedlings. Cities want to plant many more trees to mitigate extreme heat. The U.S. Forest Service intends to plant 1.2 billion trees between 2022 and 2032 to restore scorched land. But the ample supply of hardy seedlings to do this is not available.

“Seedling production in the northern U.S. fell by more than half between 2012 and 2020, the researchers found,” stated an August 2023 article in Anthropocene. It takes planning and years of careful work to harvest the desired seeds and grow the seedlings. The limited quantities of baby trees found in nurseries usually belong to vulnerable species that will not survive the harsh conditions resulting from extreme weather conditions.

Evolution: The Ultimate Disaster Proofing

The resilient seeds needed are the end-product of a long evolution. Plants have accomplished much since starting on solid ground some 500 million years ago, and they have gained far more experience on how to persist on this Earth than we have. They’ve endured the harshest conditions and have been tested and retested to the limits. Those plant species that made it know how to hold on even when heat, drought, erosion, and other perils will cause other plants to fail. Insects, animals, and humans depend on these plants for sustenance, shelter, and more.

In fact, plants have been essential for all living things in the planet’s history, and their germplasm will be crucial for the future. Humans are the new kids on the block, and our cavalier attitude toward the genetic richness of this inconspicuous and diverse greenery has gotten us into the current dilemma.

Global Boiling

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA, July 2023 was the hottest month based on NASA’s records dating back to the 1880s. In the United States, a rising percentage of the population has been confronted by extreme weather events: storms, floods, fires, landslides, long-lasting extreme heat, smoke, toxic air pollution, and drought.

To pick just one day: on July 13, more than 100 million people in several states in the United States faced extreme weather alerts. Then, by July 28, nearly 200 million Americans were under extreme weather alerts, and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres announced that the “era of global boiling has arrived.”

Extreme weather change is no longer something remote and abstract; it is with us, and it is real. We feel it, live it, and must deal with it. It saps energy, sabotages productivity, and destroys livelihoods. The heat boils the human body and precipitates illness and death. Governments, including our own, appear unprepared to deal with the consequences of global warming—their responses look inadequate or sluggish. And to be fair, all this might be too much for our institutions and agencies to handle.

Unprepared to Survive the Climate Catastrophe

A closer look at October 2023 figures provided by the Danger Season map, released by the Union of Concerned Scientists, reveals how the situation is slowly spiraling out of control, as a whopping “96 percent of people in the United States faced an extreme weather alert during Danger Season 2023.”

This climate catastrophe has thrown up a new set of challenges to reckon with at home and globally. While there is a vast Pentagon apparatus in place to protect Americans against threats from abroad—real or invented—we seem unprepared to protect the U.S. population who are being subjected to extreme weather aggression.

Increasingly, images of people who have lost everything in a storm or a wildfire have become common. Often depleted by shock, stress, and the elements, looking worse for wear, they are seen putting on a brave face for the camera, and saying they are thankful to have survived. Then, in tune with their reputation as can-do Americans, they make pledges to rebuild. But the question remains: how? The costs of reconstruction have risen sharply during the last few years. And what about the required homeowners’ insurance that’s far too expensive for many or unavailable altogether?

The big insurance companies, like State Farm General Insurance Company and Allstate Corporation, have stopped providing insurance coverage to new homeowners since June 2023 in climate-stricken states like California and Florida. But these are only the aftermath stories. Just like the people left behind by the weather-related calamities, these stories will rapidly fade away from public attention, when they are no longer deemed newsworthy. But make no mistake: the survivors of these catastrophes are alive. They feel and think.

Desertification of the Sahara

At this point, it is helpful to recall that long ago, the world’s largest hot desert was a lush green place. Between 11,000 and 4,000 years ago, what we now know as the Sahara had rivers, lakes, abundant vegetation, thriving wildlife, and human populations. Later, during Roman times, Tunisia and then Egypt became the breadbaskets of the empire.

Yet today, blending with and bordering on the great Sahara Desert, these countries, which receive little rain, must import much of their wheat to feed their people. What happened? A cyclical change occurred due to the “changing orbital conditions of the [E]arth,” as it has happened since time immemorial.

The Earth’s orbital axis affects climate change. It wobbles. That’s called “the polar motion,” leading to a tilt that alters the angle of solar penetration in the atmosphere. The greater the axial tilt angle, the more extreme our seasons become. This is what happened across the vast Sahara area.

This prompted the desertification of the Sahara, which is “land degradation in arid, semiarid, and subhumid areas, accruing from multiple factors.”

Our continued disregard for nature has led to the expansion of the Sahara Desert, which seems to have grown by 10 percent since 1920. “The results suggest that human-caused climate change, as well as natural climate cycles, caused the desert's expansion,” according to the National Science Foundation.

Ecosystems interact, blend, cooperate, accommodate, get along, and find solutions.

In contrast, humans tend to focus on a problem, plunge in, intervene, and achieve good results in a linear fashion, which may produce unintended side effects and disturbances that can escalate, cause severe difficulties, and even end up in ecological collapse. Projects may succeed in the short term and make a mess in the long term.

These risks shouldn’t scare doers away, but perhaps this could teach us to have far more respect, insight, and even a little awe about the marvelous, interconnected functioning of natural systems. Fit in with it instead of fighting and wrecking it.

Solutions That Become Problems

One instance of how a temporary solution led to more problems comes to mind: the development, use, misuse, and final banning of DDT in 1972. Did we get rid of a bad and toxic habit? Yes, for a while, but then we went a step further and invented neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, and these neurotoxins harm the insect’s nerves. Neonics are widely used to coat seeds to protect plants from bugs. But they do much more: they kill pollinators, birds, and butterflies, persist in the environment, and leak into surface water, groundwater, and the soil.

As Amy van Saun of the Center for Food Safety wrote, “Now, almost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds.” The EPA still permits the use of neonicotinoids. They are super-toxic: one GMO corn seed coated with a neonicotinoid can kill more than 80,000 bees or one songbird, according to Saun. In 2023, scientists discovered that more than half of all species live in the soil, and here we are, saturating that valuable earthly skin with poisons.

It’s not proven that Albert Einstein said it, but he may have done so, and this quote fits the pesticide charade perfectly: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” And that is what we do by holding on to the same bad habits.

How We Tipped the Balance

We have disturbed the equilibrium in nature because of our bad habits, which have caused irreversible damage to the planet. For instance, humanity influenced the Earth’s wobble and made the prolonged transition from wet to arid much faster in some regions than others. They initiated desertification. How? Archeologist David Wright thinks that “humans and their goats tipped the balance.”

Archeological and environmental data show that with the beginning of pastoralism, the raising of domesticated grazing animals, and overgrazing, the elimination of local grasses and plants spread. This changed the albedo, the amount of sunlight reflected off the ground’s surface. Concurrently, subtle orbital changes and atmospheric fluctuations reduced the monsoon rainfall. The result was an unrelenting loss of vegetation, a decreasing albedo, and rising temperatures.

In contrast, an increasing albedo signifies more snow and ice on the planet, and more sunlight is reflected back to space. This allows the planet to stay cooler.

For the Sahara, the combination of human activity decreased albedo, and erasure of the green mantle put regions of this vast terrain on the fast track to desertification.

Another interesting case in point based on the latest research and related to a shift in the Earth’s rotational axis is happening right now—with a focus on water. Anyone not infected by hubris would assume that humans are too inconsequential to initiate momentous orbital alterations, but evidence shows they can do it. Moving and redistributing mass on Earth impacts the planet’s rotation. It makes sense: if you load one side of a vessel—car or boat—with greater weight, there will be a tilt.

Published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in June 2023 is a study by geophysicist Ki-Weon Seo and his team at Seoul National University that researched the impact of water (which includes shrinking ice sheets, glaciers, and snowpacks in the Rocky Mountains or other mountain ranges) on Earth’s rotation.

Seo’s latest findings show that “among climate-related causes, the redistribution of groundwater has the largest impact on the drift of the rotational pole.” Water is heavy, and the rotational pole “has shifted almost one meter in a 20-year period due to groundwater being pumped from one location.”

If just 20 short years of depleting groundwater can shift Earth’s rotational pole, where does this leave us in the arid U.S. Southwest and West? As long as we insist on extreme and unsustainable practices we can expect more dramatic results.

Examples of such practices include growing large-scale water-thirsty irrigated crops like alfalfa in Arizona to feed cattle and dairy cows in other countries; filling every private swimming pool in water-starved states; ignoring about 13 percent of evaporation from our antediluvian way of storing, moving, and managing water (ancient civilizations had somewhat smarter methods); and allowing some 1.5 million grazing cattle to erase native plants on millions of acres of public land whose forests are scorched by wildfires each year.

It is no wonder that we are facing a climate crisis in response to this abuse. It also becomes clear why our age is called the Anthropocene: geological time now seems to be the bygone past; it’s too slow for contemporary Masters of the Universe. The majority of us tend to shoot first and ask questions later. Is that why we are pumping groundwater like there is no tomorrow, stamping out native vegetation, rushing toward desertification, and endangering the food supply?

Little Steps and Multiplying Seeds

It does not have to be this way. The world is beautiful, and we do not have to passively witness how it gets despoiled. People can vote, volunteer for seed-collecting agencies, tend community gardens, rewild small city plots, and get kids involved locally. Or they can do things alone, as independent individuals. Equally, no one is forced to outwait the endless political jousting and the tiresome struggles with vested interests. After all, we have agency, or don’t we?

By simply multiplying one seed collected, one plant raised, one bee spared, less red meat eaten, no food wasted, and personal fossil fuel use reduced as much as possible, there can soon be some significant positive results. As Eduardo Galeano understood: “Many small people, in small places, doing small things can change the world.”

Author Bio: Erika Schelby is the author of Looking for Humboldt and Searching for German Footprints in New Mexico and Beyond (Lava Gate Press, 2017) and Liberating the Future from the Past? Liberating the Past from the Future? (Lava Gate Press, 2013), which was shortlisted for the International Essay Prize Contest by the Berlin-based cultural magazine Lettre International. Schelby lives in New Mexico.

 This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

The only way to steer American democracy to safety is to wrest money out of the claws of the wealthiest elites, who now control finances rivaling the economies of whole nations.

By Sonali Kolhatkar

As we count down toward the 2024 general election, we should expect to hear from media pundits about candidates and their viability, swing states and the electoral college, likely voters and poll results, and much more. Occasionally we may hear about some issues of importance. Most likely, we will hear little about the urgent need for wealth redistribution in the United States. Extreme inequality remains an invisible scourge underlying so much of what ails society and, even when discussed, is touted as an unavoidable and inevitable outcome of our economy.

However, there is abundant evidence that wealth inequality is the product of intentional design and the idea that what is good for billionaires is good for society. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Switzerland-based global bank UBS just released its 2023 Billionaire Ambitions report and concluded, “For the first time in nine editions of the report, billionaires have accumulated more wealth through inheritance than entrepreneurship.” Benjamin Cavalli, Head of Strategic Clients at UBS Global Wealth Management said, “This is a theme we expect to see more of over the next 20 years, as more than 1,000 billionaires pass an estimated [$5.2 trillion] to their children.”

That’s more than the economy of the entire United Kingdom. It’s more than the economies of Canada and Mexico combined.

The UBS report was not a critical one and hardly blinked an eye about the obscenity of wealth being hoarded in dynasties. About half of all billionaires around the world use UBS’s banking services, so the bank merely analyzed the investment habits of its most important clients. It did so candidly, referring to “the great wealth transfer” from one generation to the next, avoiding mention of the wealth transfer from the majority of the public to an elite minority.

The report also declared with pride that intent on “continuing the current family legacy, 60% of heirs want to enable future generations to benefit from their wealth.” Of course, they meant future generations of their own families, not in general.

But this wealth transfer is directly the result of tax codes written to benefit the uber-rich. ProPublica’s 2021 analysis of the tax returns of the richest Americans found that they paid an average of 3.4% in taxes, employing armies of lawyers to exploit every loophole carved out to offer special advantages to wealthy elites. Meanwhile, middle-class and working-class Americans pay double-digit tax rates. What this amounts to is collective theft from government revenues.

It’s time to reverse this trend by resorting to a concerted project of wealth redistribution. It’s time to wrest billions, if not trillions, out of the hands of billionaires and their heirs and pour it back where it belongs: to the rest of us.

Call it socialism—which is what the pro-rich rightwing GOP does—or call it progressive taxation, or economic justice. It doesn’t matter; the nation’s fiscal conservatives will demonize any ideas of wealth redistribution and will attempt to instill baseless fears of creeping communism, no matter what specific language we use around fairness. So, we might as well start spelling it out instead of trying to appease the right. After all, there’s a reason why conservatives and wealthy elites want the public to be afraid of socialism: they’re terrified that Americans might be thrilled to embrace policies such as wealth redistribution through taxation.

And if we need any more reasons to put a bullseye on billionaire wealth, it turns out they are vicious, dangerous fascists, whose children are an even more callous lot than their parents.

Billionaires don’t need the protections that democracy offers: earned benefits like Social Security or Medicare, access to free or affordable health care including abortion, labor and wage protections, and due process (they can buy the best legal help when they get in trouble).

In fact, democracy is a threat to their wealth hoarding, which is why they are backing the most dangerous demagogue to have ever occupied the White House: Donald Trump. Economic analyst and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich lists the numerous billionaires backing Trump for a second term and cites Trump’s promise to wealthy elites, that he plans to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Wealthy elites helped bring us Trump’s first term, and they’re itching for a second.

Why wouldn’t billionaires back fascism? It benefits them in ways democracy doesn’t. Indeed, billionaires exist as a design flaw in democracy. The greater the number of billionaires and the greater the wealth they hoard, the weaker the democracy that binds them.

Legislation like Senator Ron Wyden’s Billionaire Income Tax is what they fear if democracy trumps fascism. Wyden’s bill is so modest that it doesn’t target wealth, only income, and would affect fewer than 1,000 Americans, trimming off tiny slivers of their unprecedented hoardings, leaving them as fabulously wealthy as before. After all, is there a real difference between being worth $10 billion versus $9.9 billion?

As to the children of billionaires being worse than their parents, there is a small mention in the UBS report of how heirs of billionaires are far less philanthropic than first-generation billionaires: “while more than [two-thirds] (68%) of first-generation billionaires stated that following their philanthropic goals and making an impact on the world was a main objective of their legacy, less than a third (32%) of the inheriting generations did so.” One could conclude that empathy among children of the ultra-wealthy drops by half each generation. This could be a generation even more determined to fund and fuel fascism in order to protect their riches compared to their parents.

The wealthy are so secure in the protections they have from democratic curbs on their financial power that their biggest worries, as per the UBS report, include “geopolitical tensions,” inflation, recession, and higher interest rates. Fears around a “tight jobs market” and “stricter sustainability rules,” fall low on their list. In other words, they feel secure against threats of wage rebellions and government regulations.

And so, as we hurtle toward authoritarian aristocracy, we must normalize the idea of wealth redistribution. There is no good reason against it, not a single one. We can have either billionaires or democracy, not both.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

 

Known by its brand name Roundup, glyphosate is a clear and present danger to human health.

By Caroline Cox

Glyphosate, known by its famous brand name, Roundup, is a widely used herbicide (a pesticide designed to kill plants). It is a broad-spectrum herbicide that kills or damages all plant types: grasses, perennials, vines, shrubs, and trees. Glyphosate has been sold as an herbicide since 1974. Its use dramatically increased in the 21st century as its patents expired and genetically modified crop varieties that tolerated exposure to glyphosate became popular.

Experts now believe it is the “most heavily” used herbicide globally. In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen.

Glyphosate: Widespread Use and Exposure

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated glyphosate usage in 2019—based on data collected between 2012 and 2016—and concluded that almost 300 million acres of farmland were treated with about 280 million pounds of glyphosate yearly. Another 24 million pounds of the herbicide is used every year in home yards, roadways, forestry, and turf, according to a 2020 analysis by the agency.

Given this enormous use of glyphosate in the United States, it is perhaps unsurprising that exposure to it is widespread. A unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did the largest and most comprehensive study to determine glyphosate exposure using urine collected from a sample of Americans selected between 2013 and 2014 to accurately represent the entire population. Researchers found that more than 80 percent of participants, who were six years and older, had been exposed to glyphosate. In discussing the results, the CDC suggested that food was an important source of exposure to the chemical. “Participants who had not eaten for eight or more hours had lower levels of glyphosate in their urine.”

The Salinas Study: Liver Diseases and Diabetes

A growing number of studies link exposure to glyphosate with various human health problems other than the cancer hazard that IARC evaluated. Typically classified as epidemiology, this research does not formally determine cause and effect but is more realistic and often more compelling than research done using laboratory animals or cell cultures.

One example of an epidemiology study comes from the agricultural town of Salinas, California. Starting in 1999, the University of California, Berkeley, scientists recruited pregnant mothers and then their children as volunteer participants in a study called the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS), which was conducted over a period of more than 20 years. These “480 mother-child duos” mostly belonged to farmworker families in the Salinas area. The mothers provided their blood and urine samples and other health information during pregnancy, while the samples from children were collected when they were 5, 14, and then 18 years old. All of this data was used to answer essential questions about glyphosate exposure.

The CHAMACOS study compared teens with higher-than-average exposure to glyphosate as children to those with lower exposure. Teens with higher exposure to glyphosate and its primary breakdown product, aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), were more likely to show signs of liver inflammation, meaning they had a higher risk of developing liver disease. They were also more likely to have metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high blood sugar, low levels of “good” cholesterol, and several other health problems), which could make them more susceptible to serious health concerns such as liver cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, later in life.

The study had several other interesting results. In the early years of the study (2000-2002), glyphosate exposures in children were infrequent and low. Most participants did not have glyphosate in their bodies. This changed dramatically as time went on. Glyphosate and AMPA were found in 80 to 90 percent of the 14-year-old participants. The researchers note that this mirrors the national and global increase in glyphosate use.

In addition, the Salinas study showed that glyphosate exposures in this agricultural farmworker community were similar to exposures across the country in people who were not farmworkers. According to the researchers, this suggests that the primary source of glyphosate exposure was food, concluding that “diet was a major source of glyphosate and AMPA exposure among… study participants… as indicated by higher urinary glyphosate or AMPA concentrations among those who ate more cereal, fruits, vegetables, bread, and in general, carbohydrates.”

American Women: Pregnancy Problems

Another example of epidemiology showing glyphosate hazards comes from a study of pregnant women living in California, Minnesota, New York, and Washington. This study found that more than 90 percent of these women were exposed to glyphosate and that higher exposures to glyphosate and AMPA during the second trimester were linked to shorter-than-normal pregnancies. The study participants represented all American pregnant women in terms of race, ethnicity, economic status, and urban versus suburban families. The report concluded that exposure to glyphosate “may impact reproductive health by shortening length of gestation.”

Canadian Study: Glyphosate in Food

A detailed evaluation of glyphosate exposure comes from a study of about 2,000 pregnant women in 10 cities across Canada between 2008 and 2011. Based on urine analysis and questionnaires, the researchers concluded that food was a more likely source of glyphosate exposure than household pesticide use or pesticide drift. The foods linked to higher glyphosate exposures were spinach, whole grain bread, soy and rice beverages, and pasta. The strongest link was “between consumption of whole grain bread and higher urinary glyphosate concentrations.”

Government Testing

Government agencies in North America have tested foods for glyphosate contamination. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration started testing food for glyphosate in 2016-2017. In more recent testing of more than 2,000 samples from 2020, the FDA found relatively high levels of glyphosate in lentils (up to 20 parts per million, or “ppm”), garbanzo beans (up to 12 ppm), and black beans (up to 1 ppm). The U.S. Department of Agriculture tested corn (unprocessed grain) for glyphosate in 2021. Glyphosate was found in about 35 percent of the samples tested. The highest contamination level was relatively low at 0.14 ppm.

The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) tested a much wider variety of foods (almost 8,000 samples) between 2015 and 2017. More than 40 percent were contaminated with glyphosate. Consistent with the FDA data, CFIA found relatively high levels of glyphosate in beans (up to 8 ppm), chickpeas (up to 3 ppm), and lentils (up to 3 ppm).

The researchers found other commonly eaten foods with relatively high glyphosate levels, including couscous (up to 1 ppm), pasta (up to 1 ppm), pearl barley (up to 2 ppm), oatmeal (up to 1 ppm), infant oatmeal (up to 2 ppm), and rye flour/flakes (up to 6 ppm). Two foods with somewhat lower concentrations, but important because they are eaten often, were flour (77 percent of the samples were contaminated; with levels up to 0.8 ppm) and pizza (90 percent of samples contaminated; with levels up to 0.5 ppm). The research by CFIA found that “The highest glyphosate levels were observed in pulses and wheat products.”

Consumer Advocacy Group Testing

Several nonprofit organizations have also conducted testing of popular foods for glyphosate contamination. This testing is beneficial because the results identify brands contaminated with the herbicide, which would typically not be part of the government agency testing. Some 2022 results from the Detox Project, a research platform, provide details about glyphosate residue levels for brands such as Village Hearth’s 100% whole wheat bread (1 ppm), 365 Whole Foods Market’s whole wheat bread (1 ppm), and Quaker Oats (0.5 ppm).

In some good news, the Environmental Working Group reported in 2023 that glyphosate contamination of oat cereals and other oat-based products has decreased, with the highest levels found in Quaker Oatmeal Squares (less than 0.5 ppm).

Organic Farming

Certified organic farmers do not use glyphosate or most other synthetic pesticides. Buying and eating organic food is an excellent way to reduce glyphosate exposure. For example, a 2020 peer-reviewed study found that glyphosate exposure in four U.S. families was reduced by 70 percent within six days after they switched to an organic diet. In the CFIA study of glyphosate contamination of Canadian foods, testing of more than 1,000 organic items found that 75 percent were free of glyphosate, and most of the remaining organic products had only small amounts of the chemical. Organic products can be contaminated by drift, contaminated water, or contaminated equipment, but these levels are typically low.

The amount of organic farmland in the U.S. was almost five million acres in 2021, and organic food sales topped $60 billion for the first time in 2022, according to a 2023 survey by the Organic Trade Association.

“Organic has proven it can withstand short-term economic storms. Despite the fluctuation of any given moment, Americans are still investing in their personal health, and, with increasing interest, in the environment,” said Organic Trade Association CEO Tom Chapman, according to a May 2023 press release.

If organic farming continues to expand and is made accessible to consumers across the U.S., a future with glyphosate-free food seems within reach.

Author Bio: Caroline Cox is a retired pesticide scientist. She was a staff scientist at the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides from 1990 to 2006 and a research director and senior scientist at the Center for Environmental Health from 2006 to 2020. She has been writing about glyphosate hazards since the 1990s. She is a contributor to the Observatory

 This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

WHAT'S STANDING IN THE WAY? 

 

 By Sonali Kolhatkar

 

It’s true that the number of uninsured Americans has dropped to an all-time low. But that fact obscures the failures of our patchwork, profit-driven health care system.

Here’s one of many indicators about how broken the United States health care system is: Guns seem to be easier and cheaper to access than treatment for the wounds they cause. A survivor of the recent mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, California, reportedly said to Gov. Gavin Newsom that he needed to keep his hospital stay as short as possible in order to avoid a massive medical bill. Meanwhile, the suspected perpetrator seemed to have had few obstacles in his quest to legally obtain a semi-automatic weapon to commit deadly violence.

Americans are at the whim of a bewildering patchwork of employer-based private insurance plans, individual health plans via a government-run online marketplace, or government-run health care (for those lucky enough to be eligible). The coverage and costs of plans vary dramatically so that even if one has health insurance there is rarely a guarantee that there will be no out-of-pocket costs associated with accessing care.

It’s hardly surprising then that the latest Gallup poll about health care affirms what earlier polls have said: that a majority of Americans want their government to ensure health coverage for all. In fact, nearly three-quarters of all Democrats want a government-run system.

Gallup also found that a record high number of people put off addressing health concerns because of the cost of care. Thirty-eight percent of Americans said they delayed getting treatment in 2022—that’s 12 percentage points higher than the year before. Unsurprisingly, lower-income Americans were disproportionately affected.

Women are especially impacted, with more women than men delaying treatment as per the same Gallup poll. The findings were consistent with results published by researchers at New York University’s School of Global Public Health—that women’s health care was increasingly unaffordable, compared to men’s—in a study that solely focused on people with employer-based health coverage. Imagine how out-of-reach health care is for uninsured women.

Added to that, Republican-led abortion bans have made it even harder for American women to obtain reproductive health care. On the 50th anniversary of the recently overturned Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, abortion providers in Massachusetts, for example, reported a steady stream of people driving to their state—one where abortion remains legal—to access care.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party appear to think that this grim status quo is perfectly acceptable. Democrats’ reliance on the Obama-era Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a bulwark against Republican opposition to any government intervention in health care seems to be resoundingly successful—on paper. In December 2022, Biden touted the fact that 11.5 million Americans, a record high number, had signed up for ACA plans during the last enrollment period. He said, “Gains like these helped us drive down the uninsured rate to eight percent earlier this year, its lowest level in history.”

His administration, rather than working to fulfill what a majority of his party’s constituents want—a government-run health care system—has continued instead to tweak the ACA by extending a period of discounted monthly premiums for private insurance plans. Such tweaks are not permanent. Neither are they a panacea for accessing adequate care. If anything, they are a façade protecting profit-based private insurance companies.

A survey by the Commonwealth Fund found that although the number of insured Americans is now at an all-time high, more than 40 percent of those who bought ACA plans and nearly 30 percent of those with employer-based plans were underinsured—that is, the plans were inadequate to cover their health care needs.

By focusing solely on the number of people who had health plans as a measure of success, the White House is participating in a great coverup of the ongoing American health care tragedy.

Meanwhile, just over the horizon from Biden’s celebration of record numbers of ACA signups is the fact that millions of people currently enrolled in the Medicaid government health plan could lose access because of the end of an emergency provision that allowed for “continuous enrollment.” That provision expires at the end of March 2023. If all Americans were automatically enrolled in government-provided health care regardless of eligibility, this would not be a concern.

Right-wing sources, so terrified that too many Americans want a government-run health system, are busy shaping public opinion against it. The Pacific Research Institute’s Sally Pipes published an op-ed about how Canada’s national health system was a good reason why the U.S. should not have a similar program. Using the deadly logic of a free marketeer, she wrote, “In Canada, health care is ‘free’ at the point of service. As a result, demand for care is sky-high.”

The implication is that charging people for service would reduce the demand, just as it would for, say, an electric vehicle. In Pipes’ world, people are accessing health care just for fun, and if they were charged money for it, their ailments might resolve themselves without treatment.

The Heritage Foundation also published an attack on Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), gleefully claiming that it is “cratering,” and warning that it is a lesson for American liberals who might support a similar “single-payer” system in the United States.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a similar warning, claiming that the NHS was “failing patients, with deadly consequences.”

It’s puzzling why the Pacific Research Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Wall Street Journal appear unconcerned about the 330,000 Americans who lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic simply because they don’t live in a nation with a universal health care program.

The U.S. spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care than other comparable high-income nations. According to Health Affairs, excessive administrative costs are the main reason for this discrepancy—these are nonmedical costs associated with delivering health care in a patchwork system of employer-based private health and publicly subsidized plans. In fact, “administrative spending accounts for 15–30 percent of health care spending.”

Again, right-wing media outlets and think tanks appear unconcerned by this disturbing fact. They only want to convince Americans that a government-run health plan is a bad idea. And, sadly, the Democratic Party leaders like Biden seem to agree implicitly.

The National Union of Healthcare Workers together with Healthy California Now created an online calculator for individuals to determine how much money they would save if the U.S. had a single-payer system.

I have an employer-based health care plan that is considered very good. Using the calculator, I determined that I would save more than $16,000 if California, the state where I live, had a single-payer system. That’s money I could be saving for my children’s higher education or for my retirement.

The victims of mass shootings, like the Half Moon Bay survivor, are saddled with high costs of care on top of the trauma of having been shot. Every year, there are more than 80,000 survivors of injuries from firearms in the United States. Having a single-payer health care system would not fix our epidemic of gun violence. But it would certainly make it easier to bear.

Canada and Britain’s state-run systems of health care may be imperfect, but they are a vast improvement on the survival-of-the-fittest approach that the U.S. takes.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio: Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.