January 2014

GMO Bites: Why you never read about non-GMO success stories

Does mention of allergen-free peanuts, striga-resistant cowpeas, salt-resistant wheat, beta-carotene rich sweet potatoes and virus-resistant cassavas make you think of GM?

If so, you’ve missed the great unpublished story: all the non-GM breakthroughs solving precisely the kind of problems (drought-resistance, salt-resistance, biofortification etc.) that GM proponents claim only genetic modification can provide the answer to.

While speculative claims of potential GM “miracles” often win vast amounts of column inches, the non-GM success stories generally get minimal if any reporting in the popular media. Without GM’s often exaggerated crisis narratives and claimed silver bullet solutions, it seems there is no story.

The biotechnology industry and its PR people are keen to keep it that way, particularly because the non-GM solutions are often way ahead of the work on GM. They also bring none of the uncertainties that surround GM.

All of this makes keeping track of the many non-GM success stories especially important.

The GM breakthroughs that never were

Another reason it’s important is because thanks to the lack of success with GM “solutions,” non-GM success stories can end up being claimed as GM breakthroughs.

A classic instance is provided by the UK government’s former chief scientist, professor Sir David King, who has repeatedly used non-GM breakthroughs as evidence of why we need to embrace GM. In one case, King claimed a big crop yield increase in Africa was due to GM when it did not involve the use of any GM technology at all. On another occasion, King claimed a big success for GM flood resistant rice when what he was referring to was in reality a non-GM crop.

In both cases, King was under pressure to provide compelling examples of why GM crops were needed. But far from King’s examples showing why we need to embrace GM, they show the exact opposite, i.e. that we need to stop being distracted by GM and to get the funding and support behind the non-GM solutions to the problems we so badly need to address.

What the biotech industry doesn’t want you to know about GM “improved” crops

There’s another way in which crops touted as GM breakthroughs are not always what they seem and it’s the best-kept secret of the biotech industry. Most of the crops that are touted as GM breakthroughs are nothing of the sort.

In summer 2010, Monsanto bought out part of a West Australian cereal breeding company, Intergrain. An Intergrain spokesman explained Monsanto’s interest like this: “A really important concept is that biotech traits by themselves are absolutely useless unless they can be put into the very best germplasm.”

The process operates like this: the biotech company raids the germplasm of natural crop varieties that have been developed by farmers and breeders over centuries for the desired traits. It uses conventional breeding and sometimes marker assisted selection – not GM – to get the plant it wants. Its own proprietary genes are added primarily so that it can patent and own the seed and resulting crop.

This GM tweak often adds nothing to the agronomic performance of the crop but is usually either a Bt toxin to kill insects or a herbicide-resistance gene that allows it to be drenched in herbicide. But it has one magical effect – on the biotech company’s profit margins.

This process is never disclosed in the industry’s hyping of its new crop varieties to the media. The questions we should all be asking are these: which natural parent variety or varieties did the company pirate for its GM variety? How much improvement was made in the parent variety by conventional breeding and marker assisted breeding, aside from the GM tweak? How do the natural parent variety, the non-GM improved variety and the final GM variety compare with each other with regard to the desired trait in side-by-side field trials? In other words, how much value was added by the GM manipulation?

The answers would be educational. But we won’t usually get to hear them because the information is commercially confidential. And so the biotech companies are able to maintain their seductive lie that GM is necessary for the future of plant breeding.

One instance where we do know how the trick was pulled is Vistive soya, which has been described as the first GM product with direct benefits for consumers. These supposedly healthier low linolenic acid soya beans, designed to produce oil that would reduce or eliminate unhealthy trans fats in processed food made from the oil, were created by non-GM means. But Monsanto deliberately turned them into a GM crop by adding a GM trait – resistance to its Roundup herbicide – that has absolutely nothing to do with consumer benefits. Interestingly, Iowa State University conventionally bred an even lower linolenic acid soybean variety than the Monsanto one and did not add any GM traits to it. Unsurprisingly, very little has been heard about it, compared to Monsanto’s Vistive.

In late 2010 came news of an important breakthrough, this time regarding a drought-tolerant variety of corn/maize. Syngenta, we were told, “is leading the charge on a new generation of corn designed by its scientists to withstand drought.” Syngenta’s Agrisure Artesian drought resistant corn will be a GM corn, but not because GM led to the breakthrough – it didn’t. The drought resistance was obtained via conventional plant breeding and marker assisted selection. But unrelated herbicide tolerant and pesticidal transgenes were subsequently added to turn it into a GM variety. As one critic noted, “They could have released the non-GM variety without the added transgenes… This could have benefited many farmers in countries which are suffering from droughts but which do not allow GM crop production. So much for trying to solve global food security.”

Although there has been a massive amount of hype about how GM is the way to deliver drought-resistant crops, non-GM plant breeding has been much more successful. To date, there is not a single GM-bred drought-tolerant variety on the market.

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From www.gmwatch.org

An open letter

The talks on the possible Port Hardy/Bella Coola ferry closure are disturbing to us, to say the least. We are heavily invested in tourism here in the Chilcotin and we are continuing to invest in BC’s largest industry. You are probably well aware of the migration of people towards the north. What is not so obvious is the total by-pass of the Chilcotin by this economic thrust.

Eagle Lake in the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Region of BC
Eagle Lake in the Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Region of BC

A shortage of continuing industry has been depopulating the Chilcotin – a fact that is weighing on the locals and a fact we are trying to counteract vehemently. Tourism here feeds on breathtaking – as well as subtle – scenery and in combination with the ‘western image’ of ranching sells well.

In contrast to tourism and ranching, and its annually renewable resource of grass, the other resource-based booms created by large-scale logging and mining can be impressive but always only in the short-run; neither are appealing to the modern world traveller and never do they leave behind continuum.

The comprehensive round trip from the Island to the west coast or from metropolitan Vancouver on through an enticing countryside to Bella Coola, with an anticipated visit to charming Victoria, is a most inviting way to leave behind domestic, foreign and mostly private wealth and includes a lot of people living on reservations. Fact is the population on the reservations is the only one growing in the Chilcotin. These people’s need to integrate into economic development, social wellbeing and stability is no less than all other Chilcotin residents’ needs and the single biggest boost towards this development was the introduction of the ferry service in question now.

Service-oriented infrastructure like lodges, restaurants, processing and packing facilities, fuelling stations and stores, have sprung up over recent years, bringing work and financial security to many Chilcotin families and thus establishing a sense of worth and direction. All this happened as a result of the ferry service.

What do you imagine the Chilcotin will be like in another generation with this evolution being shocked to a stop? And you, as the elected leaders of our beloved Province, consider closing a service so very promising and proving to be essential to the betterment of your people?

Finally, we are seeing substantial investments in this area, with not only the “to be exported” dollar as the bottom line but also with a good measure of sustainability and a bit of sorely needed culture, moving away from subsidized welfare towards livelihoods that are worked for and ultimately earned.

I remember well Victoria’s promise to earmark surplus logging revenues from the Chilcotin for the Chilcotin. Alas, these dollars were spent on the magnificent Port Mann Bridge. I am not complaining but reminding and by doing so I hope to touch on human decency and the strong belief in democracy so ingrained in the people of this Province.

– Felix Schellenberg, Redstone, BC, www.pasturetoplate.ca

photo of Eagle Lake © Stefan Pircher

Kids and antidepressants

Out of this world

Pediatricians’ perspective on kids and antidepressants

DRUG BUST by Alan Cassels

• The people’s briefing note on prescription drugs
Portrait of columnist Alan Cassels

It’s the dawn of a new year and quite naturally we should be thinking about beginnings – about babies and children.

A few months back, in an article in Postmedia News, journalist Sharon Kirkey reported the most incredible nose-stretcher of a statement by the Canadian Paediatric Society: “The group representing the nation’s paediatricians says the potential benefits of Prozac-like antidepressants – drugs that have only ever been officially approved for use in adults in Canada – outweigh the potential harms when used in children.”

This means the medical specialty most interested in the health of our kids is telling parents, “Don’t worry your pretty little heads about feeding your child Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Cymbalta, Cipralex, Effexor or any other of the major antidepressants known as SSRIs because the ‘disease’ of depression is likely to be much worse than the drugs.”

Sound convincing?

Their recommendations are a bit more nuanced on paper, but at the risk of being overly bombastic, I have to ask, in the nicest of tones, “On which planet do these paediatricians live?”

The Canadian Paediatric Society arguably does some very good work, but when it comes to recommendations on children and antidepressants, my sense is they are many light-years away from rationality. (Read their position statements at www.cps.ca) In fact, when I looked at their advice about kids and antidepressants, I wondered if any voices in that organization are wondering if tossing more jet fuel on the flaming inferno known as childhood angst might make things worse?

According to their recommendations, “Within the context of a comprehensive management plan, SSRI medications may be effective in the treatment of child and adolescent depression and anxiety disorders.” They follow that up with: “Because depression in particular is associated with high rates of suicidal ideation, behaviour and completed suicide, untreated illness may be more harmful than appropriate use of SSRI medication.” Let’s translate: The drugs might work and the kids should take drugs because the harm of the drugs could be less than the risks of suicide. They add, “Following medication initiation, patients should be closely monitored for potential adverse effects, including suicidal ideation and behaviour.”

What does this mean in practise?

A “comprehensive management plan” complete with help from a psychiatrist or counsellor sounds good on paper, but in the real world that plan would include an adequate number of quality counsellors, relatively easy access to child psychiatrists and solid, dependable supports for families struggling with poverty, addictions and violence. Since the world doesn’t look like that, what do our physicians really do when worried about a child’s social and emotional well-being? Write a script for an SSRI antidepressant, that’s what.

A child who is sad, confused, upset and angry might have good reasons for feeling that way yet once inside the medical system, the child is likely to be told he has a brain disorder and out come the prescription pads. Like children, the paediatricians are innocent, hopeful and trusting when they say the meds “may be effective in the treatment of child and adolescent depression and anxiety disorders.” Yup, possibly true, but the reverse may also be true. SSRI medications may not be effective or they may actually make things worse.

We know about SSRIs’ short-term side effects including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, sleep changes – such as insomnia or wild dreams – as well as restlessness and headaches, but in the long term? Those are more scary to contemplate because we’re talking about the drugs’ effects on developing brains and bodies.

Author Robert Whitaker, whose book Anatomy of an Epidemic (Crown, 2010) explores why the number of adults and children in the US disabled by mental illness has soared over the last 50 years (in line with the soaring prescribing of SSRIs), demonstrates quite convincingly that SSRI prescribing is essentially part of the problem. Compared to depressed people not medicated with SSRIs, those on the drugs seem to actually do worse in the long-term, have high relapse rates and are more chronically depressed. The debilitating withdrawal symptoms when trying to stop SSRIs mean they are a one-way street: easy to start, with almost no going back. And we want to inflict that on a child?

These facts should be flashing red lights of caution around these drugs yet the paediatricians maintain, “Untreated illness may be more harmful than appropriate use of SSRI medication.”

That could be true, but how many studies have looked at the long-term effects of these drugs in children? Both the USFDA and Health Canada have issued warnings saying these drugs in children increase the risks of suicide. What do the paediatricians know that the regulator doesn’t? Why are they ignoring a substantial body of research, published in major medical journals like the Lancet and the BMJ, demonstrating SSRIs are largely ineffective and harmful in children and that children on antidepressants have a high rate of converting to bipolar disorder?

An FDA review of 2,200 children found four percent of those taking SSRI medications experienced suicidal thinking or behaviour, including actual suicide attempts which was twice the rate of those on placebos. Also, SSRIs in adolescence can cause long-term sexual dysfunction, loss of libido and so on, dangers that can continue even after the drug is stopped. (Google PSSD which stands for Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction and you’ll find a whole online universe of kids self-reporting the disastrous effects of SSRIs on their lives.) An exhaustive review of the literature published in the BMJ concluded that, in children and adolescents “recommending (any antidepressant) as a treatment option, let alone as first-line treatment, would be inappropriate.”

I’m not saying mental illness isn’t a problem or that we shouldn’t help withdrawn, sad or anxious kids, but when Canada’s paediatricians say it’s OK to use SSRIs in children as long as we ‘monitor’ them closely, maybe they are forgetting the child mental health system in Canada is largely a joke – an uncoordinated, inadequate system unlikely to be helped by pouring even more drugs of dubious value into the mouths of children.

Some might write off the Canadian Paediatric Society as somehow being in the pockets of the manufacturers of SSRIs, but I can’t buy that explanation. Paediatricians as a group are incredibly caring, intelligent and compassionate people, but is their Society really that naïve, unaware that the ‘real world’ of childhood mental healthcare in Canada largely features general practitioners facing anxious or confused kids in a standard 15-minute office visit with nothing but a prescription pad. A pad, I might add, that could well condemn these kids to a more miserable future than it should be.

So in contrast to the official voice of Canada’s paediatricians, let me issue a “position statement” on behalf of Common Ground magazine and my many loyal readers who are asking, “What do you really think, Alan?” Here’s my opinion: The Canadian Paediatric Society is in Lulu-land or at least orbiting another planet that looks nothing like Earth. That planet is inhabited by those making careless recommendations around powerful and potentially dangerous pharmaceuticals, threatening to turn many young people into long-term pill-takers. But we earthlings think differently.

Let me try to lure them back to Earth with one thought: It’s called the “Precautionary Principle” and it’s as important as gravity is here on Earth. It’s a useful concept and one worth considering the next time they make recommendations around the prescribing of powerful pharmaceuticals to our children.

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Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical policy researcher and author in Victoria. He acknowledges the work of Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, BC’s Representative for Children and Youth whose office is doing much to improve the health of BC’s children. www.alancassels.com

GMO Myths & Truths

GMO Myths and Truths Book coveer

by Michael Antoniou, Claire Robinson and John Fagan

• Myth: GM foods are strictly regulated for safety.

Truth: GM food regulation in most countries varies from non-existent to weak.

“Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the FDA’s job.” – Philip Angell, Monsanto’s director of corporate communications (the FDA is the US government’s Food and Drug Administration, responsible for food safety).

“Ultimately, it is the food producer who is responsible for assuring safety.” – US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

“It is not foreseen that EFSA carry out such [safety] studies as the onus is on the [GM industry] applicant to demonstrate the safety of the GM product in question.” – European Food Safety Authority (EFSA)

Industry and some government sources claim that GM foods are strictly regulated. But GM food regulatory systems worldwide vary from voluntary industry self-regulation (in the US) to weak (in Europe). None are adequate to protect consumers’ health.

The sham of substantial equivalence

“The concept of substantial equivalence has never been properly defined; the degree of difference between a natural food and its GM alternative before its ‘substance’ ceases to be acceptably ‘equivalent’ is not defined anywhere, nor has an exact definition been agreed by legislators. It is exactly this vagueness that makes the concept useful to industry but unacceptable to the consumer… “Substantial equivalence is a pseudo-scientific concept because it is a commercial and political judgment masquerading as if it were scientific. It is, moreover, inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests.” – Millstone E, Brunner E, Mayer S. Beyond “substantial equivalence”. Nature. 1999; 401(6753): 525–526.

The US FDA’s approach to assessing the safety of GM crops and foods is based on the concept of substantial equivalence, which was first put forward by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a body dedicated not to protecting public health but to facilitating international trade.

Substantial equivalence assumes that if a GMO contains similar amounts of a few basic components such as protein, fat, and carbohydrate as its non-GM counterpart, then the GMO is substantially equivalent to the non-GMO and no compulsory safety testing is required. Claims of substantial equivalence for GM foods are widely criticized as unscientific by Independent researchers.

A useful analogy is that of a BSE-infected cow and a healthy cow. They are substantially equivalent to one another, in that their chemical composition is the same. The only difference is in the shape of a minor component of a protein (prion), a difference that would not be picked up by a substantial equivalence assessment. Yet few would claim that eating a BSE-infected cow is as safe as eating a healthy cow.

When claims of substantial equivalence have been independently tested, they have been found to be untrue. Using the latest molecular analytical methods, GM crops have been shown to have a different composition to their non-GM counterparts. This is true even when the two crops are grown under the same conditions, at the same time and in the same location – meaning that the changes are not due to different environmental factors but to the genetic modification.

Examples include:

• GM soy had 12-14% lower amounts of cancer-fighting isoflavones than non-GM soy.

• Canola (oilseed rape) engineered to contain vitamin A in its oil had much reduced vitamin E and an altered oil-fat composition, compared with non-GM canola.

• Experimental GM rice varieties had unintended major nutritional disturbances compared with non-GM counterparts, although they were grown side-by-side in the same conditions. The structure and texture of the GM rice grain was affected and its nutritional content and value were dramatically altered. The authors said that their findings “provided alarming information with regard to the nutritional value of transgenic rice” and showed that the GM rice was not substantially equivalent to non-GM.

• GM insecticidal rice was found to contain higher levels of certain components (notably sucrose, mannitol and glutamic acid) than the non-GM counterpart. These differences were shown to have resulted from the genetic manipulation rather than environmental factors.

• Commercialised MON810 GM maize had a markedly different profile in the types of proteins it contained compared with the non-GM counterpart when grown under the same conditions.

GM crops also have different effects from their non-GM counterparts when fed to animals.

US government is not impartial regarding GM crops

The US government is not an impartial authority on GM crops. In fact, it has a policy of actively promoting them. Through its embassies and agencies such as the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), the US government pressures national governments around the world to accept GM crops. This has been made clear in a series of diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks, which reveal that:

• The US embassy in Paris recommended that the US government launch a retaliation strategy against the EU that “causes some pain” as punishment for Europe’s reluctance to adopt GM crops.

• The US embassy in Spain suggested that the US government and Spain should draw up a joint strategy to help boost the development of GM crops in Europe.

• The US State Department is trying to steer African countries towards acceptance of GM crops.

This strategy of exerting diplomatic pressure on national governments to adopt GM crops is undemocratic as it interferes with their ability to represent the wishes of their citizens. It is also inappropriate to use US taxpayers’ money to promote products owned by individual corporations.

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Excerpted from GMO Myths and Truths, an evidence-based examination of the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified crops. Version 1.3b by Michael Antoniou, Claire Robinson and John Fagan © Earth Open Source, www.earthopensource.org Earth Open Source functions as a science and policy platform to provide input to decision-makers on issues relating to the safety, security and sustainability of our food system.

GMO Bites

from the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network

• We are reporting some incredibly important developments from around the world, including the Canadian government’s new Agriculture Omnibus Bill. The news below exposes the intense fight around the future of GM crops.

In mid-December, your protests helped stall GM sterile seeds moving ahead (Terminator technology), despite an international moratorium. The update from Brazil is below. CBAN is coordinating the Canadian Ban Terminator Campaign as part of the international campaign. Industry will do everything they can to be able to use this technology and we will do everything we can to stop them.

Meanwhile, an Australian farmer is close to his court date; he lost his organic certification due to GM canola contamination. This is a familiar story to Canadians but it is a new fight in Australia; for the first time, a single farmer is taking his neighbour to court for contaminating his farm.

The right to save seed is under attack. Terminator technology is only one tool that could be used to stop farmers from saving seeds. Next year, CBAN will join with farmers across Canada in stopping further enclosures on seed saving.

Your actions worked! Terminator stopped for now

Confronted with 35,000 institutional and individual signatures on a petition growing by several hundred an hour, Brazil’s Judiciary Commission agreed to take the Pro-Terminator Bill off the agenda leaving open the possibility that the bill will not be passed until Congress reconvenes in early February. Terminator technology is GM sterile seed technology.

Supporters of the suicide seed legislation have privately argued that GMO opponents should welcome their bill since it will prevent farmers from reusing GM seeds. This is both technically and politically wrong. Terminator technologies are highly imperfect and the sterility trait will inevitably bleed into neighbouring fields and crops meaning farmers will unwittingly plant seeds that they will never be able to harvest. More ominously, Terminator is fundamentally a ground-shifting market strategy. If major seed companies are allowed to use Terminator technologies, they will immediately transfer all of their plant breeding research onto the suicide seed platform which affords them anywhere from two to four times the profitability of non-Terminator seeds.

Landmark legal case: Organic farmer sues neighbour for GM contamination

Steve Marsh is an Australian farmer who lost his organic certification when Monsanto’s genetically modified (GM) canola blew onto his farm from a neighbouring property in 2010. Since then, Steve has lost most of his income and has been struggling to get his organic certification back.

Monsanto has a no liability agreement with GM farmers that prevent them from being sued. The only avenue Steve had to protect his livelihood was to take his neighbour to court. It is due to start on February 10 in the Western Australian Supreme Court and is scheduled to run for three weeks. This is the world’s first case of an organic farmer using the courts to recover loss and damages from a GM farmer. This case has been described as a landmark case to determine who should take responsibility in case of GM contamination. If Steve wins, it will set a precedent to guide the application of common law to GM contamination and will be of interest to lawmakers worldwide.

Watch and share the short video explaining Steve’s story: www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpQHuUTfRro

Donate to support this landmark case:

The Safe Food Foundation, Australia: www.safefoodfoundation.org

www.facebook.com/safefoodfoundation

https://twitter.com/#!/SafeFoodFound

Seed saving under attack in Canada

Canada’s Minister of Agriculture, Gerry Ritz has introduced the Agricultural Growth Act (AGA). The government is calling the AGA an omnibus bill for agriculture because it proposes amendments to a number of acts dealing with plant breeders’ rights, feed, seed, fertilizer, animal health, plant protection, monetary penalties, ag marketing programs and farm debt mediation.

The Act would amend the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act to align it with the requirements of UPOV ‘91 (the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants). UPOV ‘91 is about restricting what farmers can do with seed and giving seed companies powerful new tools to extract money from farmers. “These seed corporations would be able to extract money from farmers on their entire crop,” Terry Boehm of the National Farmers Union explained… The plant breeder/seed corporation would have total control of seed… This upsets thousands of years of normal agricultural practice whereby farmers always saved seed for their next crop.”

The National Farmers Union Seed and Trade Committee is undertaking a thorough reading of the Act and will prepare a detailed analysis of its implications for farmers in the near future.

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Take action and donate to causes at www.cban.ca

Enbridge Pipeline will never be built

We won’t allow the Enbridge Pipeline say First Nations and NGOs to Joint Review Panel decision

• First Nations, environmentalists and representatives from northern communities held a press conference on December 20 in response to the 209 conditions on the Enbridge pipeline announced December 19 by the Joint Review Panel (JRP) of the National Energy Board (NEB).

“The JRP’s conditions are so flawed, they are to be ridiculed,” said Gerald Amos, Chair of the Wild Salmon Coalition, introducing the session. “They do nothing to protect communities, the land and the ocean from a catastrophic oil spill and the people of BC will not let this pipeline be built.”

“The JRP, in their 209 recommendations, did not take into consideration the facts presented to them by thousands of people,” said Des Nobels from the United Fishermen and Allied Workers Union. “The NEB failed to protect us from the very real danger posed by moving tar sands oil through this region. To suggest that any of these conditions could reduce this risk to our coastal fishing economy and our way of life is sadly mistaken.”

With the JRP recommending this pipeline be approved with conditions, it is now before Stephen Harper and the federal cabinet.

“The majority of people in BC are opposed to Enbridge’s pipeline and the question many people were asking me [on December 19] is what can we do now to stop it. There are basically three main ways we can stop this pipeline: in the courts, through political organizing and through direct action,” said Ben West, Tar Sands Campaign Director at ForestEthics Advocacy. “We are hoping the politicians do the right thing and listen to the people before things get more serious because this issue has the potential to end up making Clayoquot Sound look like a walk in the park.”

The groups highlighted the Hold The Wall initiative started by the Yinka Dene Alliance, in which, in only two weeks, 15,000 people pledged to stand with First Nations to stop this pipeline from being built. The groups called on the people of BC to get involved in the campaign.

Some have gone so far as to say that First Nations have a veto over projects, highlighting the more than 400 projects in Canada that have been stopped by First Nations challenges based on their land and title rights. Amongst the strongest concerns regarding this proposal are those from northern BC residents who will have the pipeline run through their backyard.

“The people who live along this proposed pipeline route participated in the review process believing that our voices meant something. The JRP recommendation and the weak 209 conditions prove the breakdown of democracy in this country, the priority given to big oil, and the abandonment of communities like mine. We are not going to stand for this,” said Kandace Kerr of the Ft. St James Sustainability Coalition.

“They have approved this project knowing that it is impossible to clean up after a spill — they call the devastation that will ensue ‘temporary and insignificant,’” says Karen Wristen, Executive Director of the Living Oceans Society. “The people of this coast would be forced to live in fear for their culture, their livelihoods, even their health and safety. No one should have to live like that. Coastal communities will stand with First Nations and the thousands of Canadians who know this project is wrong for Canada to stop this pipeline from being built.”

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Resources

Friends of Wild Salmon: Friends of Wild Salmon on Facebook

United Fishermen & Allied Workers: www.cope378.ca

T.Buck Suzuki Association: www.bucksuzuki.org

ForestEthics: http://forestethicsadvocacy.ca

Living Oceans Society: www.livingoceans.org

Fort St. James Sustainability Coalition: 250-642-0303

Taking back our power as eaters and citizens

Blessing The Hands That Feed Us Book Cover

READ IT by Bruce Mason

• “Relational eating,” you read it here first. Destined for buzz word status and “Aha!” moments on Oprah, fundamentally re-examining the role of food in our lives is at the heart and soul of best-selling author Vicki Robin’s new book Blessing the Hands That Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us About Food, Community and Our Place on Earth.

The title is a mouthful, but the contents are easily digested, jam-packed with highly nutritious, delicious, bite-sized pieces of wisdom, tips, anecdotes and recipes for a humanity hungry, if not starving, for a profound change on the planet. We all eat. We are what we eat. And focusing on food can be a unifying force in realizing sustainability and returning to sanity.

Robin invites readers to re-visit and renew their place in the web of eating. “Relational eating encompasses the whole shift from eating as a private affair from a vast, continuous smorgasbord heaped high by the industrial food system, to eating in a living system where food is precious because we know the farmers, the farms, the farm animals, the fruits and foraging spots, the vicissitudes of the seasons and that we live somewhere, not just anywhere,” she explained to Common Ground in her first interview about the book.

After the death of her partner Joe Dominguez and her own seven-year battle with cancer, in 2010, Robin took up the challenge from a market gardener near her home on Whidbey Island (in Washington State’s Puget Sound) to live for a month on food produced within 10 miles.

Thus began a personal journey, peopled with farmers living out their dream of self-sufficiency – such as a corporate executive turned milk producer – and a parade of characters, charming adventures and insights. This kind of personal transformation is available to us all, in one form or another, including awareness of why a free-range, farm-gate chicken really is worth five dollars a pound.

“For me, relocalization – revitalizing regional economies and ways of life – has become our one sane choice, given our crisis of exponential growth, despite limits and the inevitable overshoot and collapse. When I see truth, I want to test if I can actually live it: sustainability as an extreme sport,” Robin says.

“I’d been a dieting, binging, weight-obsessed American woman over six decades and was the perfect subject for a 10-mile, hyper-local eating experiment. With no axe to grind – I didn’t plan to even write about it – I was curious and convinced that I was testing a limit we were all facing – unaware.

“On semi-rural Whidbey, we have a three-day supply of food in grocery stores and less than a month from our fields. And that’s just during August. I understand the economics and practices of industrial food and honestly like a lot of what I call ‘anywhere food.’ But I’m aware that I’m eating the injustice, toxicity, economic distortion, soil depletion of that food – and the health consequences, as well.

“I shifted away from food as a commodity. Stores are like vending machines. All the hands that produced food – from human hands of farm-workers, processors, distributors and grocers, to the figurative hands of soil organisms and the vitality of the beings that sacrificed their fruits, leaves and lives, are invisible. Relational eating – connected to place and complementary food systems – pulls these beings out of the shadows and restores a sense of belonging.”

In the days leading up to her test in September and during the weeks that followed, she not only learned how to satisfy her appetite, but also whet her curiosity about where food comes from, how it arrives at our table, the costs involved, food policies, sovereignty, justice, customs, security, the sheer beauty and blessing of food itself and how we can once again live well, within regions, without so much of our food circling the planet in container ships and cargo planes.

“I began to wonder how food became such an antisocial, solitary act – in the car, grazing at the fridge, starving ourselves in public and gorging in private – and like many people, longed for the return of food as a shared celebration of nourishment and life,” Robin says. “As well, I wanted to help clear away the fog and confusion that disempower us in relation to the simple act of lifting a fork, savouring food on our tongues and letting what slides down our gullets actually transform itself into us and a life we love.”

The following February, she tested a 50% local diet within 50 miles – just to prove it can be done in every season.

Dubbed the “prophet of consumption downsizers” by the New York Times, Robin has helped launch myriad sustainability initiatives. She also co-authored (along with Dominguez) the international bestseller Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence.

“For years, I’ve worked on issues of over-consumption, over-spending and over-working, helping people extricate themselves from the thrall of the consumer culture, and the unexamined ‘keeping up with (imaginary) Joneses’ drive for ‘more.’ Your Money or Your Life reached a million people directly worldwide and through the media, spread the message to easily a hundred million. Somehow, that wasn’t enough to turn the tide, to have our culture turn its back on excess and embrace that exquisite space of ‘enough,’” Robin notes.

Blessing the Hands That Feed Us isn’t preachy. Part personal narrative and part global manifesto, it’s a call-to-action to take back our power as eaters and citizens, with consumer ‘purposes’ as well as ‘purchases,’ to wean ourselves from an unhealthy dependency on mass-produced, prepackaged foods and reconnect with our bodies and our environment. “Resistance begins at the dinner table,” First Nations advise.

Robin describes her journey as “putting my money where my mouth is.” Above all, it’s a journey rooted in community, an inspirational guide and testimonial to the locavore movement and a healthy food future. Like complementary medicine, complementary regional systems could increasingly supplement industrial food by 10% or 25% or even 50%, supporting security, sovereignty and creating meaningful work. In the meantime, be more grateful, become more engaged and vote with your food dollars.

Vicki Robin “Vicki Robin has helped millions of Americans reshape their lives in sound and beautiful ways, but this may be her most important project yet – and a crucial one for our tired planet too,” says Bill McKibben.

“It will challenge, as it did me,” says Robin who suggests starting with one local meal a week or one recipe. “But it will be an inspiring shared project for our civilization, creating meaning and nourishment for ourselves by blessing the hands that feed us. And this shift to local will eventually happen of necessity, not just preference.”

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Vicki Robin gives a talk and booksigning, 6:30PM, Banyen Books, 3608 West 4th Avenue, Vancouver. For more information browse her TedTalk.

 

 

Your food, your health

Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition

By T. Colin Campbell with Howard Jacobson

(BenBella Books, 2013)

Reviewed by Robert McCandless

 

• In the early 1900s when many of our great-grandparents were tough farm kids, North Americans were thought to be the healthiest people in the world. Many doctors had never even seen a heart attack patient. Heart disease was rare, as were strokes, cancer, diabetes, obesity and what are now called autoimmune diseases.

Things are different today. We suffer and die in rapidly increasing numbers from these costly, crippling modern diseases. And while our healthcare and insurance plans pay trillions of dollars a year to treat them, there are lots of treatments but no cures. With our fancy, high-tech medical system, we ought to be the healthiest people in the world, but we’re not. Meanwhile, we give billions of dollars to fund disease research, hoping that someone will come up with some answers.

For the last 40 years, Cornell and Oxford universities have been quietly researching human health from every possible angle, including animal lab studies, clinical studies (doctors working with patients), epidemiology studies (how lifestyle affects health in large populations over generations), genetics, microbiology and surveying the medical literature worldwide. Oxford is crunching the numbers – analyzing the massive amounts of incoming data.

This is the biggest ongoing information-gathering project in the history of modern science. The multi-million-dollar funding derives mostly from the US government and several US cancer agencies.

What have they found so far?

1. The #1 thing that determines health or illness is what we eat.

2. The world’s healthiest people eat a whole-food, plant-based diet.

Why this diet works is explained in detail by Dr. T. Colin Campbell, PhD, head of the research study, in his book The China Study.

Dr. Campbell’s new book, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition, reveals how and why there is so much confusion about food and health, why scientific research tends to focus on details but loses sight of the big picture and why a plant-based diet helps not only human health, but also our environment and our ability to feed the world’s people.

John McDougall (MD) calls Dr. Campbell “the most influential nutritional scientist of the past century,” noting “his work has already saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” And Caldwell Esselstyn (MD), a heart surgeon and author of Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease, has former president Bill Clinton on the whole-food, plant-based diet: beans, legumes, vegetables, fruit, no dairy.

Many top medical doctors now use plant-based nutrition to treat and reverse “incurable” diseases. Large numbers of their patients have had dramatic recoveries. Sports professionals, marathoners and firemen have more endurance with less recovery time.

North Americans are visiting organic farms to see fresh food being prepared, enjoy great meals, hear nutrition lectures and participate in barn dances. This is about a new lifestyle – empowering ourselves by taking our health into our own hands. Dr. Campbell’s book is unleashing a health revolution.

—

Robert McCandless is a Master Herbalist who practises at Gaia Garden Herbal Dispensary in Vancouver. He holds a certificate in plant-based nutrition from Cornell.

January 25

Robert McCandless gives a free talk on “Let Whole Foods Be Your Medicine,” 7PM, Science of Spirituality Meditation and Ecology Centre, 11011 Shell Road (@ Steveston Highway), Richmond, BC. To register, contact Linda at lindabbee@gmail.com or call 604-985-5840. Drop-ins welcome.

Create anew

Marianne Williamson for congress

Marianne Williamson
A nation, like an individual, is as sick as its secrets – as unhealed as its unlooked at places… and on its way to transformation to the extent that it’s willing to take a good look at itself and change course where needed. – Marianne Williamson

I have officially announced my candidacy for election to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s Congressional District 33.

I know many of you are not surprised. At my Sister Giant Conference in Los Angeles last year I urged almost two thousand women to consider running for office using the principles of non-violence to birth a new American politics. After experiencing the energy and enthusiasm of the conference, I spent long months pondering how I could best further such a movement. The response that feels most real and true to me is to run for office myself.

I do not think of this move as a career change. Rather, I feel I’m further expanding my work by taking the transformational principles to which I have dedicated myself for the last 30 years into another area where they are sorely needed. While a new paradigm, holistic, relational perspective now saturates many areas of our society – from education to business to medicine to spirituality – our politics seem to be outside its reach. And we cannot afford to turn away from politics. We might not touch it, but it certainly touches us. And the increasingly calcified thought forms that dominate U.S. politics today – based more on the past than the present, more on fear than on love and more on economic than humanitarian values – threaten to sabotage our collective good and undermine our democracy.

To me, the critical crisis that looms today is a crisis of democracy itself. For with every challenge that confronts us now – from economic disparity, to the clear and present danger of climate change, to our high incidence of child poverty, to the corruption of America’s food supply, to our high incarceration rate, to our over-reliance on military force and the need to develop more enlightened methods of peace-building – the most important issue of all, like a disease underlying all the other diseases, is the undue influence of money on our politics.

We have developed, over the last few decades, a system of legalized corruption in the United States, in which those with money are accorded much more political influence than those who are without. And that is not democracy. If only those with financial leverage can wield political influence, then those without such leverage – children, for instance – too easily see their interests sidelined.

Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people” is becoming, for all practical purposes, a government “of a few of the people, by a few of the people and for a few of the people.” Citizens of the United States should not be always on the defense, fighting for the biggest pile of crumbs left over after moneyed interests have feasted on the public purse. Adding additional and an equally critical injustice, the gerrymandering policies in the vast majority of our states – in which the dominant political party in each state redraws Congressional districts to protect their own party or incumbents – allows candidates to pick their voters rather than allowing the voters to pick their candidates! Yet these situations will not be corrected unless “we the people” correct them.

Those who have sought inner wisdom and spiritual understanding are the last people who should be sitting out the political process. For those who see into the cause of a problem know better than to simply address its symptoms. And those who have a clue as to what changes one heart have a clue as to what will change the world. Humanitarian values are democratic values and those who are most committed to them must find our political voice.

We cannot allow our government to continue drifting in a blind and heartless direction and expect to bequeath to our children the blessings of liberty that were bequeathed to us. There is need for a politics of conscience, a new era of public discourse in which love is not minimized, the voices of women and children are not marginalized and the future is not bartered for a pot of unrighteous gold.

Martin Luther King Jr. said we needed a quantitative change in our circumstances as well as a qualitative change in our souls. Now, as then, we must bring the fullness of our internal selves to the task of changing our country. Cynicism, complacency, disengagement and anger have no place in the politics that are called for now.

The people of the United States have been faced with serious problems before and we’re faced with serious problems again. But generations before us have risen to the task of correcting America’s course when it needed to be corrected and today it’s our turn.

I ask for your support, that this campaign might be more than simply an effort to send one woman to Congress. May it be a vessel for revitalized citizenship for those who participate and a new possibility for love in action.

Thank you very much for reading this and for sharing it with others. God bless you, God bless America and God bless the world.

—

www.marianneforcongress.com

Let’s raise the bar for 2014

Portrait of David Suzuki

SCIENCE MATTERS by David Suzuki

• It was a strange year. From the never-ending carnival of calamity at Toronto City Hall to the scandalous subterfuge on Parliament Hill, from horrific attacks by the Syrian government on its own citizenry to disasters inflicted by extreme weather on the people of the Philippines, 2013 recalls Queen Elizabeth’s description of 1992 as an annus horribilis.

It got tiring and demoralizing watching Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sink to new depths daily, the scandals in the Prime Minister’s Office and Senate grow deeper and wider and disasters of war and weather increase in frequency and intensity. On top of it all, those of us who have taken on the often-thankless task of trying to encourage people to care for the air, water, soil and diversity of plants and animals that keep us alive came under increasingly vituperative attacks from the media and even our own government.

Much of the corresponding commentary and analysis has become so stultifyingly stupid that people rely on late-night comedy shows for some semblance of insight to make sense of it all. It’s as if the standards of discussion and debate, political discourse and leadership, have been diminished to the point of absurdity.

It hasn’t been all bad, of course. When government focuses on the interests of the fossil fuel industry instead of the citizens it was elected to represent – spying on, demonizing and auditing citizens and organizations devoted to environmental protection and spending taxpayers’ money to promote pipeline and oil-extraction projects, as well as subsidizing the fossil fuel industry –people notice.

When media personalities and outlets throw their support behind the fossil fuel industry and launch malicious and unfounded attacks against anyone who dares call for rational discussion of energy and resource policies, they lose credibility and audience share.

Those who refuse to let disillusionment immobilize us are pushing back. Many who have become tired of media and governments ignoring our interests are joining the growing number of rallies and movements challenging Canada’s becoming a petro-state: from opposition to Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline project to November’s Defend Our Climate, Defend Our Communities National Day of Action.

And it’s not just environmentalists showing up and speaking out. First Nations, organized labour, students and youth groups, business people and tens of thousands of citizens from all walks of life are coming together to call for a country and world governed for people, not corporations, where clean air, water, soil and biodiversity are protected for the benefit of us all and for our children and grandchildren to come. That’s not an attack on corporations; many are ethically run. It’s just recognition that the planet and its inhabitants come first.

Many people are trying to raise the bar, to promote rational dialogue and solutions, from individuals to online media outlets to business leaders and even some politicians. None of that rules out criticism and scrutiny; in fact, it demands it. We must all hold ourselves to higher standards and learn from others, acknowledge when we’re wrong and change our views if new information calls for it. But we can’t sink to the constant personal attacks and lies so often employed to deliberately sow doubt and confusion around critical, life-threatening issues like pollution, climate change and environmental degradation.

We’re seeing more evidence every day of the damage we’re doing to our only home, the Earth, with our unbridled pursuit of profit and endless growth and our mad rush to extract all the planet’s precious fossil fuels so we can burn them as quickly as possible to make money while the market’s hot. We’re seeing increasing instances of the kind of extreme weather events predicted by climate scientists, from flooding in Calgary and Toronto to typhoons and cyclones in the Philippines, Italy and India to tornados in the U.S. We’re seeing mounting evidence of the consequences of our actions in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report.

We’re also seeing where solutions lie. There’s still time to turn around, but we need everyone to raise the bar on discussion and action – in politics, the media and our own lives. Let’s make the coming year a better one.

—

With contributions from David Suzuki Foundation senior editor Ian Hanington. Learn more atwww.davidsuzuki.org