Organic Bytes: Beyond the Darkest Hours, Hope Rising

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December 23, 2009

Organic Bytes #205: Beyond the Darkest Hours, Hope Rising

Health, Justice and Sustainability News

from the _Organic Consumers Association_

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Edited by: Alexis Baden-Mayer and Ronnie Cummins

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In This Issue:

* Beyond the Dark Days: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

* The High Cost of So-Called Cheap Food

* Will We Survive the Climate Crisis?

* The Sun Returns! The Future is Organic!

* Making the Organic Transition: Taking on the Fertilizer, Garbage

and Sludge Industries

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Winter in America 2009. Passing through the darkest period of the winter

solstice, shrouded by the gloom and doom of climate destruction, war, and

economic depression, making our way around the broken promises of " change we

can believe in, " we nonetheless find ourselves celebrating life and the

redemptive power of a global Organic Revolution. We at the Organic Consumers

Association are fired up for action, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with you

and our sisters and brothers in the organic community, now millions

strong, at this turning point in history.

We believe that 2010 and the new decade is the end of the road for

chemical food and GMO agriculture. It is also the beginning of the end for

non-sustainable, fossil fuel-based transportation and industry, and a

" profit-at-any-cost " economy based upon over-consumption, war, and commercial

conquest. We invite you to join us on the organic road, the Via Organica, as we

dismantle the old system and rebuild the new, starting with our local

households, communities, and regions.

Now is a good time to look back and evaluate our work over the past year

and map out our goals and campaigns for the future. In 2010 we will continue

to safeguard and enforce strict organic standards, fight for Fair Trade

and labor justice, and take on Monsanto and Food Inc. But we also intend to

broaden our campaign focus to include the full range of our suicidal

industrial food and farming system: the chemical fertilizer industry, the solid

waste garbage industry, and the toxic sewage sludge cartel.

As we plan and strategize, we must also raise the money we need to carry

out our work. With virtually all of our support coming from grassroots

contributors such as yourself, we need your help more than ever. Please send us

a tax-deductible contribution now!

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Beyond the Dark Days: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

In 2009, indentured politicians, bought and sold by the corporate elite,

crushed our hopes for peace and prosperity by spending trillions of our tax

dollars on war, Wall Street, and corporate welfare, instead of funding

organic transitions and a Green New Deal. In 2010 we must begin to reverse

these warped and dangerous public policies and rein in corporate greed, before

it's too late.

In Organic Bytes, the Organic Consumers Association keeps you informed on

the corrupting influence of special interest money in politics. One of the

most striking examples of this moral and political corruption is the number

of " Monsanto Men " that Obama has appointed to his administration.

In the 2010 Congressional election year, we pledge to be your watchdog,

keeping track of Big Biotech and Food Inc.'s campaign contributions to

politicians, giving you the opportunity to defend the public interest and make

your voice heard.

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The High Cost of So-Called Cheap Food

Over the past 65 years, chemical agriculture, factory farms, and now

genetic engineering have devastated public health, wrecked the environment, and

destabilized the climate. The U.S. public now spends $2.4 trillion dollars

a year on health care, $800 billion of which is directly attributable to

consuming chemical-laden junk food.

After poisoning us with cheap food and destroying the environment, Big

Food Inc. turns us over to Big Pharma and the Industrial Health Complex to

repair the damage, or rather to keep us alive long enough to extract maximum

profits. But from the warped perspective of the for-profit health insurance

industry, overweight and diseased people aren't very profitable. That's

why health insurance corporations spend $350 billion per year trying to avoid

coverage and deny claims. The vast, paper-pushing bureaucracy the

for-profit insurance industry has created to help them avoid providing

services

soaks up 31% of all health care spending!

If we shifted the 31% of health care spending taken up by the

administrative costs of the for-profit health insurance industry to a

single-payer,

universal health care system, we could cover the uninsured without increasing

total health-care spending. The Organic Consumers Association supports

single-payer, universal health care, with a focus on preventive health, diet,

nutrition and stress-reduction.

However:

IF PRESIDENT OBAMA SIGNS A BILL THAT TAKES AWAY OUR HEALTH RIGHTS, THAT

FORCES AMERICANS TO BUY OVERPRICED, INADEQUATE COVERAGE FROM THE FOR-PROFIT

HEALTH INSURANCE INDUSTRY, OCA WILL LAUNCH A BOYCOTT!

Eventually, we have to stop arguing over who's going to pay for

out-of-control health care costs and restore public health! The real solution

to our

health care crisis is to stop subsidizing chemical and GMO food and

farming, along with the destruction of our environment and our climate, and

make

the long overdue transition to organics. Then, under universal healthcare

or Medicare for All, we can shift from health care that treats sickness

caused by unhealthy food and an unhealthy environment and lifestyle to health

care that promotes wellness.

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Will We Survive the Climate Crisis?

 

World leaders left the UN climate talks in Copenhagen without an agreement

to reduce the threat of deadly greenhouse gases. The level of CO2 in the

atmosphere already exceeds the dangerous tipping point of 350ppm. We're

currently at 387ppm. Even if we were able to reduce CO2 to 350ppm, we would

still experience a 2.7 degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature by 2100,

but life on the planet would remain possible.

If we continue with business as usual, in 2100 the level will be 965ppm

CO2 (+ 8.6 F). If the world acts on proposals for CO2 reduction confirmed in

Copenhagen, in 2100 the level will be 770ppm CO2 (+ 7 F). That's the

best-case scenario right now, a 7 degree temperature rise, and some predict it

could come as early as 2060, in time for you or your children to experience

Climate Hell first-hand.

Unless we reverse global warming, the earth, which is expected to have

nine billion people in 2050, will have a carrying capacity for only one

billion - or less.

With world leaders taking us off the cliff towards global suicide, the

life-saving organic transition is up to us. We need to come together as

like-minded people to make the changes in our own lives that will make survival

possible.

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The Sun Returns! The Future is Organic!

One way or another, either planned or through necessity, humanity will

return to organic and traditional agriculture, because it is the only farming

system that can supply the world with sufficient quantities of healthy food

in the emerging era of global warming, erratic weather, declining fossil

fuels and water scarcity. There is no other way.

In 2009, the Organic Consumers Association spent a good part of our

efforts focusing on the connection between global warming and industrial

agriculture and the promise of organic agriculture to mitigate and reverse

climate

change by:

1) Drastically reducing the global industrialized food system's 44-57%

share of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 2) Sequestering billions of tons

of CO2. If we converted the world's 3.5 billion acres of farmland to

organic, we would sequester 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions, removing

excess CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it in the soil, where it belongs.

If we also organically managed the world's 11 billion acres of pastures,

rangelands and forests we could potentially sequester 100% of greenhouse gas

emissions.

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Making the Organic Transition: Taking on the Fertilizer, Garbage and

Sludge Industries

The reason industrial agriculture erodes and depletes the soil food web,

destroying plants, trees, and soil's natural capacity to clean the

atmosphere and sequester CO2, is the suicidal use of billions of pounds of

synthetic

nitrogen fertilizers, soil destroying pesticides, herbicides and

fungicides, insecticidal GMO crops, factory farm waste, and toxic sewage sludge

instead of organic compost and cover crops. In 2010 OCA will expose this

deadly chemical and GMO attack on the planet's soil food web and make genuine

certified organic fertilizer and compost the norm, rather than just the

green alternative.

In the US, we throw away, as food waste, 40% of all of our food each year.

Production of that wasted food accounts for more than one-quarter of the

US's total annual freshwater consumption and equates to 300 million barrels

of oil. Even worse, this enormous volume of non-composted food waste

rotting in landfills emits tremendous amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas

20-70

times more damaging than C02.

In the U.S. today about 80 gallons of water per day per person is flushed

or drained into our vast and ill-designed sewage system, much of it being

valuable potable water flushed down the toilet. In the sewage or wastewater

stream, this household sewage (unfortunately, in most households, already

carrying toxic chemicals from non-organic body care, home cleaning products

and pharmaceutical drugs) is mixed with hospital and industrial waste,

pharmaceuticals, street storm water run-off and chemical lawn and farm run-off

as it enters into the so-called " sewage treatment " plant. After nominal

" treatment " this wastewater is sent downstream for the next community to

chemically treat it and declare it " safe, " while billions of pounds of toxic

sludge are left behind.

Instead of isolating and containing America's toxic sewage sludge as

hazardous waste - which is what it is - industry and city governments save

money

by renaming this toxic sludge as " biosolids " and spreading it on

non-organic farms (and backyard gardens and public lands) across the country.

One

of the most outrageous practices is the sale (in garden supply stores) or

giveaway (to schools and backyard gardeners) of toxic sewage sludge as

" organic fertilizer " or " organic compost. "

The EPA has aided and abetted this hazardous practice for several decades

by claiming that the toxic chemical poisons, heavy metals, pathogens,

pesticides, and pharmaceutical drug residues routinely contained in sewage

sludge are diluted to " acceptable levels. " In 1998 OCA and the organic

community

successfully fought to keep toxic sewage sludge out of national organic

standards, but we now need to ban sewage sludge on non-organic farms (and

all land applications) as well.

In the organic future, valuable organic matter in the waste stream will

neither be wasted nor mixed with other garbage or toxins. It will be

separated at the source, at homes and businesses, mixed with animal manures and

green wastes in a central location, and made into valuable organic compost

(natural fertilizer or food for the soil). This organic compost can then be

supplied to organic and transition-to-organic farms, backyard gardens,

landscaping, and other land use applications. This is the only way we can

eliminate the two billion pounds of chemical fertilizers applied to non-organic

farms every year in the U.S. which contaminate the atmosphere, kill the

soil, and destabilize the climate with nitrous oxide; meanwhile polluting city

tap water and killing fish and marine life, creating massive " dead

zones. "

Zero-waste recycling and the creation of an abundant, affordable supply of

organic compost is an essential part of our organic future. In 2010 OCA

will begin to expose and challenge business as usual in the fertilizer,

garbage, and sludge industries.

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OCA Needs Your Help to Spread the Organic Revolution

The OCA's yearly fundraiding drive kicked off at the beginning of

December, so please help us reach our goal of raising $75,000 by January 1st,

2010!

Please make a tax-deductible donation so we can carry out our work in

2010! And happy holidays from the OCA staff!

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Message from our Sponsors

Dr. Bronner's is Celebrating Our 60th Anniversary!

 

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5 Generations and 150 Years of Soapmaking Excellence

Marking the 60th Anniversary of the company, Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps is

pleased to announce that all classic liquid & bar soaps are now not only

certified under the USDA National Organic Program, but also certified Fair

Trade! In addition, we are pleased to introduce a revolutionary new range of

high-quality organic products, from hair rinses to shaving gels - all

certified under the same USDA program that certifies organic foods.

_Please visit us on the web at www.drbronner.com_

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