There’s a strong correlation between pesticide use and cancer risk, especially in the Midwestern United States where farming is the main source of exposure to carcinogens. Counties with the highest pesticide use tend to have above-average cancer rates.

The link is even more clear when specific pesticides are matched with the cancers they’re known to cause. Take glyphosate and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In Iowa, 95 percent of the counties with the most glyphosate use have more than their fair share of late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnoses and 61 percent are non-Hodgkin lymphoma hotspots.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State Legislators to Ban the Pesticides Behind America’s Rural Cancer Crisis!

Edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Robert Egan, Frontiers, Phys.org:

“Each year, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is responsible for an estimated 1.1 to 1.4 million deaths worldwide. Now, scientists have found evidence that the spread of AMR isn’t always driven by bacteria evolving to resist the antibiotics themselves: rather, certain weedkillers can have the same effect.

‘Here we show that the most common species of multidrug-resistant bacteria from hospitals are not only resistant to multiple antibiotic classes, but also to high concentrations of the weedkiller glyphosate,’ said Dr. Daniela Centrón, a researcher at the Institute of Medical Microbiology and Parasitology in Buenos Aires and the senior author of the study in Frontiers in Microbiology.

‘These results suggest that weedkillers—which, unlike antibiotics, are widely applied in agricultural environments—may have the unintended side effect of selecting for AMR among bacterial communities within the soil.’”



Pesticide labels should warn that antibiotic resistant bacteria can spread from glyphosate-sprayed soils to hospitals through contaminated water

Erika Schelby, LAProgressive:

“The need to protect populations from environmental harm or contamination is not new. Whenever human welfare was imperiled, those in power within most ancient civilizations passed laws to address these issues.

History is replete with examples of this. For instance, there is evidence of the Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3000–1300 BCE) adapting to climate change, and early imperial China enacting protective laws, showing they were not ‘indifferent to environmental concerns.’ In 2550 BCE, Mesopotamia achieved the world’s first water treaty between city-states—the agreement is now housed in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire excelled in engineering and passed legislation to support public health and hygiene. Aqueducts carried fresh water into the cities while the CloacaMaxima, a vast sewer system in Rome, managed wastewater.



Nature and her ecosystems are increasingly being seen as having intrinsic value. These emerging views signal a shift toward ecocentrism, which is ‘derived etymologically from the Greekoikos (house) and kentron (center).’ Ecocentrism is Earth law. It asserts that Earth is the home of all beings.”



Through this article, we explore how and why a growing number of countries are granting legal personhood to nature, and why there is increasing interest in understanding the Earth system

The People Vs Poison:

“On April 27th, while Monsanto’s lawyers argue that they should never have to answer for what Roundup has done to people’s bodies, we will be outside — mothers and fathers, farmers and nurses, scientists and neighbors — standing together in the one place where the people still have a voice.

This movement doesn’t belong to one organization. It belongs to every parent who reads an ingredients label with a knot in their stomach. Every farmer who wonders what the chemicals are doing to their own body. Every nurse, every teacher, every grandparent who has watched someone they love fight cancer and asked why.

We are not asking for anything radical. We are asking for what should already be true:

* That the government should protect people before profits.

* That a chemical linked to cancer should carry a warning label, at minimum.

* That families who get sick should have the right to their day in court.

* That the Defense Production Act should be used to defend human lives — not corporate balance sheets.”

The power of April 27th won’t come from any single leader. It will come from the thousands of people who show up. People like you.

Bess Connolly, Yale, ​​Neuroscience News:

“In a new study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, they find that listening to harmonically consonant chord progressions during face-to-face interaction strengthened neural activity in brain areas that help people understand and respond to others.

The findings suggest that music may help promote social bonding on a biological level, they say, explaining why it often plays an important role in social rituals and group experiences.

The results could also have implications for therapies that use music to support people experiencing issues of social disconnectedness, such as neuropsychiatric conditions like autism or psychological conditions like social anxiety.

‘We’re hoping that our contribution will provide an evidence-based mechanism that shows how music actually enhances the neural systems that promote sociality,’ said Hirsch, the study’s senior author.”

When the harmonious chord progressions were played, researchers noted increased activity in regions of the brain associated with social perception, emotional processing, and interpersonal connection

In Iowa alone, 95 percent of the counties with the highest glyphosate use have above-average rates of late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnoses. This isn’t a coincidence — it’s a pattern playing out across the Midwest, where the pesticides sprayed on our food are leaving cancer hotspots in their wake.

But pesticides are just one front in a much bigger fight. The Organic Consumers Association has spent decades campaigning for pesticide bans, food safety reforms, and regenerative organic agriculture — pushing back against the corporate agribusiness interests that put profit before people and the planet.

We’re fighting to stop the spread of genetically modified microorganisms into our soil, campaigning to end avocado-driven deforestation in Mexico, and demanding that companies like Driscoll’s stop using toxic pesticides near the communities where families live and work.

The chemical industry has deep pockets and powerful lobbyists. We have you.

Your donation funds the research, organizing and advocacy it takes to push back — and to push for the bans and reforms that farmers, families, and communities desperately need.

The people growing our food shouldn’t be paying for it with their lives.

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

Have you considered making a grant request from your Donor-Advised Fund?

by Aaron Lerner, Arnon D. Lieber, Cass Nelson-Dooley, André Leu, Michelle Perro, Geoffrey Koch, Carina Benzvi, and Jeffrey Smith:

When most people hear “GMO,” they think of crops – corn or soybeans engineered to resist pests. But scientists have been quietly engineering something far smaller and potentially far more consequential: microorganisms. Bacteria, yeasts, and fungi have been genetically modified and, in some cases, released into the environment on a massive scale, sometimes without the public even knowing.

A new review article published in the journal Microorganisms by a team of eight scientists and physicians argues that we are moving too fast. The technology to create genetically modified microorganisms (GMMs) has outpaced the regulations designed to keep them in check, and the potential consequences, for human health, for soil, and for the climate, deserve urgent attention.

This summary is based on a peer-reviewed paper co-authored by André Leu, International Director of Regeneration International

Asimov Press:

“We tend to think of fermented foods as something humans invented and then chose to eat. But, increasingly, scientific evidence suggests the causality runs the other way. Fermented foods appear to have helped shape human biology itself, and our bodies may have been built, in part, to expect them. The case for this runs from changes in hominid gut anatomy millions of years ago to the HCA3 receptor, to a growing body of research linking fermented food consumption to immune function and gut health.

And it raises an uncomfortable question about what happened when the Western food system, in the name of safety and efficiency, quietly removed these foods from our diets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Around 14 million years ago, our hominid ancestors were arboreal species whose diet would have been primarily based on fresh fruits picked from the trees they lived in. When ripe fruit fell to the ground and underwent spontaneous fermentation, it would have been toxic to our ancient ancestors due to its high concentration of ethanol. Their bodies as yet had no efficient way to break down ethanol.

But then, about 10 million years ago, a mutation arose in the genome of the common ancestor of humans, gorillas, and chimpanzees. This mutation, a single amino acid change in the enzyme Alcohol Dehydrogenase 4 (ADH4), enabled it to break down and detoxify ethanol with 40x higher efficiency.”


The ability to tolerate ethanol may have been what allowed our ancestors to diversify their diet and survive while lineages without this mutation went extinct

Chemistry for Life:

“Fast fashion is an inexpensive way to dress rapidly growing kids. But preliminary research has found that the fabric in some of these items contains an unwanted, toxic ingredient: lead. After testing several shirts from different retailers, undergraduate researchers found that all samples exceeded U.S. federal regulatory lead limits. They also estimate that even briefly chewing these fabrics (which young kids tend to do) could expose children to dangerous lead levels.  

Previous studies have found high levels of lead in the metal parts in some children’s clothing, such as zippers, buttons, and snaps, which have led to product recalls. But lead has also been reported in adult fast-fashion textiles. Kamila Deavers, the principal investigator of the project, says that some manufacturers use lead acetate as an inexpensive way to help dyes stick to the materials and produce bright, long-lasting color.”



No matter the brand, brightly colored textiles, like red and yellow, tended toward higher amounts of total lead than muted colors

Charles Prior, the Conversation:

“The Trump administration’s drive to increase domestic production of fossil fuels and mining of key minerals likely cannot be accomplished without a key constituency: Native nations. The U.S. has 374 treaties with 574 governments of sovereign nations inside the United States’ borders, governing 2.5% of the country’s territory, predominantly west of the Mississippi.

Native American tribal lands contain 30% of the nation’s coal, 50% of its uranium and 20% of its natural gas. And they contain materials critical for advanced technologies, including renewable energy: copper for electric grids, lithium and rare earth elements for batteries and electronics, and water for agriculture and power generation.

Their rights to resources on their lands are enshrined in long-standing treaties whose legal power is on equal footing to the U.S. Constitution itself. They are not mere historical artifacts but rather key documents at the center of modern conflicts over drilling, mining, pipelines and energy infrastructure.

For Indigenous nations, access to natural resources is more than a matter of economic opportunity or environmental sustainability. Managing these lands is inseparable from questions of sovereignty, sacred land and treaty enforcement.”

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