Food safety reform on a faster track
Organic Consumers - 5/19/2009.Agri-Pulse Communication – Creation of a new Food Safety Working Group, announced by President Obama in his weekend radio address, moves in the direction charted by a National Academy of Sciences committee more than a decade ago but largely ignored by two previous administrations. |
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Climate change odds much worse than thought
MIT News Office - 5/19/2009. By David Chandler – The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that. The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. |
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Pesticides indicted in bee deaths
Salon - 5/18/2009.By Julia Scott – Gene Brandi will always rue the summer of 2007. That's when the California beekeeper rented half his honeybees, or 1,000 hives, to a watermelon farmer in the San Joaquin Valley at pollination time. The following winter, 50 percent of Brandi's bees were dead. "They pretty much disappeared," says Brandi, who's been keeping bees for 35 years. |
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Maine may get cease-fire in pesticides war
Kennebec Journal - 5/18/2009.Editorial – It shouldn't be this hard. For years, state lawmakers, regulators and farmers have discussed, debated, argued about and then discussed some more how to establish an effective program to notify neighbors when farmers spread pesticides. The arguments have pitted conventional farmers against organic ones, and the Maine Department of Agriculture against environmental activists who charge the state is too closely aligned with pesticide users. |
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