Posts Tagged ‘ industrial agriculture ’

Plainview, Texas: Dead Town Waking

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March 4, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download An all-time favorite movie line (The Missouri Breaks), uttered by Jack Nicholson leaning over Marlon Brando, who is starting up from sleep: “Do you know why you woke up? I just cut your throat.” That is the way Plainview, Texas, woke up the other day to some bitter truths, [...]


Farmers Renounce Industrial Methods, Get World-Record Yields

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February 25, 2013

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The grotesquely misnamed “Green Revolution” that since the 1960s has been replacing traditional farming around the world with genetically modified, mechanized, chemical-intensive, debt-ridden industrial agriculture has worked so well in India that a quarter of a million farmers there have committed suicide in 16 years. The Center for [...]


Corn Growers Suffer Quintuple Whammy

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August 20, 2012
Drought-stressed corn, maybe also toxic, bug-bit and weed-plagued, in Kentucky last week. (Photo by CraneStation/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The failure of industrial agriculture is on display everywhere in America’s “breadbasket” — now we should probably call it the ethanol basket,  or the high-fructose-corn-syrup basket — and the consequences are already spreading around the world. You thought it was just a drought? It would be bad enough [...]


Running Out of Water and Time

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August 15, 2012
Drought-stricken corn under a hot and rainless Iowa sky last week. Two more studies say, things are going to get worse. (Photo by USDA)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The train is coming at 80 miles per hour. Children are playing on the railroad tracks, oblivious. The train is closer now. The children are not aware of it. You can hear the train, people are yelling at you that it is coming, and you, my friend, stand [...]


USGS: World on Really Bad Acid Trip

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February 29, 2012
It has become a fad to argue about the effect of industrial smokestacks on changing climate. But that is far from all they do, as the USGS has just reminded us. (Photo by Eric Schmuttenmaer [akeg] /Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The US Geological Survey has been getting things right since at least the 1930s, when it correctly identified the Dust Bowl — while it was occurring — as a human-caused, not natural, event. Few people recognized the implications at the time, few know them today, and not many [...]


Soy: It Isn’t So

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December 2, 2011
One of the worst things you could eat is a fresh soybean -- even sauteed, as there have been. But there are lots of soy products that are even worse. (Photo by FotoosVanRobin/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Once upon a time there was a lowly bean. Unlike other beans, in its natural state it was highly toxic to people and animals. Poor people in Asia discovered somehow — no doubt through desperate trial-and-error — that when fermented, the soy bean was edible. It became part [...]


UN, Oxfam Reports: Brace for Impact.

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November 28, 2011
Oxfam volunteers demonstrate for non-readers the combined effects of rising seawater (climate change) and rising food prices. (AFP Photo/Alexander Joe)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download The drumbeat of dire warnings continues about the inevitable and imminent collapse of the world’s food supply before the combined onslaughts of industrial agriculture and climate change. Despite the increasing number of scientific reports documenting ever more ominous conditions and prospects worldwide, the response from the people who [...]


The United States of Monsanto

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November 4, 2011
Genetically mutilated corn (this is not actually how they do it) is more than an insidious product inflicted on the world by Monsanto and others -- it is now an instrument of US foreign policy. Sort of like drones. (Photo by illuminating9_11/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download It is no longer enough for the seed and chemical company Monsanto to use its rivers of cash to own and operate the United States Congress (in the language of corporations, there is no word for “enough”); it is now using the US Department of State as its [...]


Zombie Lake Erie is Dying Again

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October 28, 2011
Algae blooms on Lake Erie, virtually covering its Eastern bay in this August photo from space, are killing the lake. Again. And we know who the killer is.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download Declared dead in the 1970s, brought back to life by the environmental movement it did much to inspire, Lake Erie is once again expiring, killed by industrial agriculture. Specifically, phosphorous from synthetic fertilizers, which the aforementioned environmental movement never gained the clout to regulate. After having been reduced [...]


Monsanto: More Crimes Against Humanity

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September 1, 2011
Monsanto’s declining reputation worldwide is reflected in this French street art of an imagined member of “Monsanto Youth.” (Photo by Thierry Erhmann/Flickr)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download When we come to our senses and begin to mete out capital punishment to corporations, Monsanto will surely be the first to mount the scaffold (see Capital Punishment for Corporations: Time to Start). Just in the past week, there emerged two new examples of its abuse of the [...]


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