Author and essayist Charles Eisenstein writes:

“A central theme of my book on climate is that if we are to focus our attention on a single substance, it should be not carbon dioxide but water. Beyond greenhouse effects, water is crucial in the ways the world maintains conditions for life to thrive.

One function of water is as a vehicle of heat transport, part of the physiology of this living planet. Please watch this brand new animated video about how plants influence local and global temperatures through the movement of water.

This video, along with companion pieces on the biotic pump and hydrology, comes from an emerging understanding among many environmentalists that we have made a scientific, strategic, rhetorical, and political error by reducing the ecological crisis to climate, and the climate crisis to carbon. Earth is best understood as a living being with a complex physiology, whose health depends on the health of her constituent organs. Her organs are the forests, the wetlands, the grasslands, the estuaries, the reefs, the apex predators, the keystone species, the soil, the insects, and indeed every intact ecosystem and every species on earth. If we continue to degrade them, drain them, cut them, poison them, pave them, and kill them, earth will die a death of a million cuts. She will die of organ failure—regardless of the levels of greenhouse gases.

That is why, if I may be so bold as to make a prediction, that we will see increasingly dramatic derangement of weather patterns over the next few years. Indeed it has already begun. Floods, droughts, fires, anomalous heat, cold, wet, and dry at the wrong time of year will intensify—even in the absence of significant global warming. Such is already the case. I’m sure you’ve noticed. The weather has been weird the last few years; in some places, devastatingly so. Yet, global temperatures (according to the most reliable measure, satellite measurements of the lower troposphere) are about what they were in 2016. The overall trend since measurements began is definitely a warming trend (about 0.13 degrees per decade), but it has not been accelerating.

Herein lies the strategic error. Having hitched the environmental wagon to the global warming horse, what happens if the horse stops running? It won’t mean that our environmental problems will have been solved. It won’t mean the crisis has been averted, if temperatures stop rising. That is because the core of the crisis is not warming, it is ecocide—the killing of ecosystems, the killing of life.

The video and its companion videos illustrate clearly some of the ways this happens. Destroying soil and plant life, and all the other ecological actors they nourish and depend on, leads directly to flood-drought cycles that then get blamed on global warming. The complex, homeostatic feedback loops that maintain stability unravel. The loss of the Amazon can bring drought to Colorado. The loss of rainforests in Borneo and Sumatra might cause drought in China. The loss of the Congo causes floods in Nigeria. Everything is connected to everything else.”

Read more: How the Environmental Movement Can Find Its Way Again

Martha Rosenberg writes for the OCA:

Mention the COVID-19 vaccine and the first name that usually comes to mind is the drug maker Pfizer. While once known for its block buster pills like Viagra and the statin Lipitor, Pfizer’s COVID-19 franchise now leads its profits from its vaccine, which made $37 billion in 2022, to its oral COVID-19 treatment Paxlovid, which made $18 billion in 2022.

You do not have to dig deep to find questions about Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine marketing tactics which FT (Financial Times) termed “The biggest marketing coup in history.”

“Unlike AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer never considered selling its Covid-19 shot without making a profit,” wrote the newspaper. Pfizer not only “controlled commercializing the vaccine in every country except the founders’ home territories of Germany and Turkey, and China,” its vaccine price in 2021 “was effectively four times the price of J&J’s single dose shot, and five times higher than a dose of AstraZeneca’s.”

Some former Pfizer employees and government officials with whom The Financial Times spoke questioned whether the COVID-19 vaccine balance of power had “tipped too far in Pfizer’s favor,” and Lawrence Gostin, a global health law professor at Georgetown University, expressed concerns that Pfizer was not “wielding their power fairly, openly, with a sense of compassion.”

Even Moncef Slaoui, who served as head of Operation Warp Speed, was shocked at Pfizer pricing and warned Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, that the company could appear to be benefiting from a “once-in-a- century pandemic,” reported FT though his objections may have stemmed from the 155,000 shares of Moderna stock he owned. (More about the murky Operation Warp Speed and its military roots in a following article.)

Read more: Concerns About Pfizer Vaccine’s Link To Turbo Cancers

Make a pledge to boycott fake organic and stock up now on REAL organic blueberries!

The ecological and nutritional benefits of organic food come from the carbon-rich, nutrient-dense soil it’s grown in.

The “organic” blueberries in the grocery store aren’t really organic. They’re produced “hydroponically.”  They’re grown in plastic and fed liquid fertilizer solutions. “Organic” hydroponic operations even get away with spraying glyphosate (Bayer/Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller) to clear the land they build their greenhouses on!

Regenerative organic blueberry farmers like Hugh and Lisa Kent of King Grove Organic Farm in Eustis, Florida, can’t compete with big national corporate brands like Driscoll’s.

Fake organic is driving real organic to extinction.

If we want real, soil-grown blueberries, we have to buy from farms like King Grove and boycott the fakers.

Blueberry season is now happening in Florida and King Grove is currently harvesting 20 acres!

Blueberries have many health benefits and, like all plant nutrients, they’re enhanced by the quality of the soil they’re grown in.

If you love REAL organic, help King Grove bring in the harvest by ordering a 5-pound box delivered via carbon-neutral 2-day shipping today. If you’re in the Orlando-area, the farm is just 45 minutes north and you can pick up there.

Buy REAL organic blueberries

WATCH: Boycott FAKE Organic Brands Growing “Organic” Without Soil

Watch Hugh Kent of King Grove Organic Farm’s EcoFarm talk

Use Cornucopia’s Buyers Guide to Boycott Fake Organic Brands

Learn more about blueberries’ nutrition facts, health benefits, healthy recipes, and other fun facts to enrich your diet. 

Real Organic Project

Interview with Ronnie Cummins of Organic Consumers Association and Regeneration International by Kamea Chayne, Green Dreamer:

“In this podcast episode, Ronnie sheds light on his path to building a grassroots movement of millions of organic consumers; why he views fake foods, such as fake meat, as a false solution to our broken food system; how this new regeneration movement can help to unify our varied siloed movements focusing on different aspects of our social and ecological crises; and more.

To start, get a glimpse below into the conversation between Ronnie and Green Dreamer Podcast’s host, Kamea Chayne.

When people ask what regenerative food and farming is, the simplest way to explain it is that it’s the next stage of organic food and farming.

There was already a tradition of taking care of the soil, not using environmentally destructive chemicals, appreciating biodiversity, and allowing animals to exercise their natural behaviors in organic farming.

But when we first started the modern organic movement, we didn’t understand a lot of things about the soil and about forests and about the climate crisis that we know now.

We need to transform, in the U.S., several hundred million acres, where we’re growing genetically engineered corn and soybeans for factory farms, back to what they were before the European settlers came—prairies and grasslands.

Prairies and grasslands can only be converted away from row crops and chemical-intensive agriculture with a cooperation between the farmer, rancher, and the animals… the way the buffalo roamed, the way the wilder beasts roamed in Africa, the way that the keystone species we used to have in the U.S. like beavers and prairie dogs.

We had a very healthy ecosystem back when Native Americans were the stewards of the land. We’ve caused an amazing amount of damage since then, and we’ve got to get these landscapes back to their natural, carbon-sequestering, fertile state.”

Listen here: Building a Grassroots Movement for the Regeneration Revolution (Interview With Ronnie Cummins of Organic Consumers Association and Regeneration International)

Kate Raphael from Environment Heath News writes:

“In a first-of-its kind study, researchers found children exposed to the controversial herbicide were more likely in early adulthood to have a collection of symptoms that increase risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

Over the last decade, Dr. Charles Limbach noticed something strange in his family medicine practice in East Salinas, California.
Kids between 5 and 15 years old showed elevated levels of liver enzymes, a sign of liver inflammation. Limbach ordered a panel of medical tests on each patient and repeatedly saw the same result: fatty liver disease.

“When I trained in family medicine here in Salinas about 30 years ago, fatty liver was never even mentioned,” Limbach told Environmental Health News (EHN). Now, a hundred kids in his practice have fatty liver disease, characterized by excess fat stored in the liver, which can lead to long-term liver damage.”

Limbach read research led by Paul Mills, family medicine and public health professor at UC San Diego. Mills’ study showed a link between fatty liver disease in adults and exposure to glyphosate, the world’s most commonly used herbicide, and the active ingredient in Roundup.

“This bell rang in my head,” Limbach said, noting that many of the kids in his practice ate cereal products from crops treated with glyphosate.

Glyphosate has also been linked to cancer, and Roundup’s manufacturer, Monsanto and its parent company Bayer, are embroiled in hundreds of thousands of cancer-related lawsuits. Glyphosate use in the U.S. has skyrocketed in the last two decades, so while the study population lives in Salinas, California, an agricultural community, the findings have national implications.

Lead author Brenda Eskenazi, director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health, and her team used data from a study Eskenazi initiated two decades prior. From 2000 to 2002, the researchers enrolled pregnant women and babies born in the Salinas Valley, nicknamed “America’s salad bowl” and producing nearly half the country’s lettuce. From birth to age 18, Eskenazi’s team collected hundreds of thousands of biological samples, health records and glyphosate exposure data from 480 mother-child pairs.

Read more about this newly published study: Kids’ Glyphosate Exposure Linked to Liver Disease and Metabolic Syndrome

OCA can promise you that we will not give up our common struggle Hasta la Victoria, until victory. We intend to shut down the biolabs; drive GMOs, toxic pesticides, and chemicals off the market; expose unregulated and unlabeled gene-editing and synthetic biology as just another manifestation of reckless genetic engineering, and educate and mobilize the grassroots so we can build an organic and regenerative future where food as medicine, planting peace, and participatory democracy are the norm, not just the wished-for alternative.

But we need your help to carry on our crucial, indeed sacred, mission.

We thank you for your ongoing support. But if you haven’t donated recently, please consider giving us a donation today.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Order your OCA “Planting Peace”  bumper stickers from our Minnesota office

Donate $100 or more and we’ll send you a copy of Ronnie’s 2020 book, Grassroots Rising, or a copy of Ronnie’s 2021 book, co-authored with Dr. Mercola, The Truth About COVID-19

Click here for more ways to support our work

Ursula Billington reports on some of the inspiring takeaways and common threads from this year’s Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC).

1. Positivity nurtures hope and seeds change – Good things are happening ‘below ground’, but the movement needs better storytellers.

“‘The point of ORFC is not to attack the status quo but to look ahead: to ask what the world really needs, what’s possible, and to show what can be done. Always on the agenda is the dream to restore farming to its proper place at the heart of the economy, and all of our lives.” (Co-founder Ruth West).

Positive case studies are vital to bolster and drive transformation, but they are so often buried under news of everyday struggles, opposing governments and global crises. The conference provided countless heartening examples of real change happening on the ground.

From resistance against corporate land grabs across Europe such as Lenteland and Vereniging Toekomstboeren in the Netherlands, Poland’s Green Żurawlów Association fight against Chevron shale gas exploration and the ongoing struggles of the European Coordination Via Campesina; to system change successes implemented by policy as with Valencia’s democratic food council, agri-food reform in Misiones, Argentina and the scaling up of agroecological transition in Mexico (more from PAN here); and global examples of localised food systems, as championed by Local Futures: the overriding message was one of hope embedded in practical action.

Respected change agents provided attendees with renewed inspiration and mettle. A rousing keynote from Vandana Shiva demonstrated progress made while also building resolve for the fight ahead. As chair Jyoti Fernandes, another key figure in the movement, said, ‘Vandana herself is the seed and source of life and hope that keeps on giving.’”

Read more: Oxford Real Farming Conference 2023 | Agroecology Movement Gathers for Hope and Action

‘You Need a Dream To Fix Broken Wings.’

UK Data Regulator Issues Warning Over Generative AI Data Protection Concerns

Russell Brand and Jon Stewart on the Lab Leak

Women Smallholders Will Drive Africa’s Transition to Regenerative Agriculture

CHD Founder Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Files to Run for U.S. President

Amazon Illegally Harvested Kids’ Data Via Alexa-Powered ‘Smart’ Speakers

We Want Our Customers To Know That We Will Not Vaccinate Our Animals With mRNA Vaccines