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Documents and Recommendations on moving toward sustainability from the HPKCC Sustainable Environment Action Task Force Presented by Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference, its Sustainability Task Force, and hydepark.org. hpkcc@aol.com. Chairman Vicki Suchovsky. Join us. |
Envoromental Sustainability in our community is our goal. Presented here are several articles and links passed along by the founding chairman Vijayarani Fedson, ranging from rising costs of food and how to change the supply chins for everything to becoming more sustainable to how /why interests, trends and inertial militate against achieving sustainability.
An article that shows why "cheap food" may be coming to an end (also a topic of a recent feature in the Chicago Tribune) and how these changes might be turned to advantage of more and of a more sustainable planet. This tells what's happening with one beginning point in the global supply stream we all live in. See more articles on how to change these streams and ourselves practically live more sustainably and green, in the Green Hyde Park page.
Recommended by the Task Force:
We need to consider the question of sustainability in demolishing vs recycling buildings, for example with regard to Doctors Hospital. See:
http://www.alternativesjournal.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=295&Itemid=1What do the current recycling symbols on plastics mean?
http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/latest/recycling-symbols-plastics-460321
Britain's most green structure:
" IHT, which stands for Interseasonal Heat Transfer, takes heat from the sunshine that falls on the tarmac playground, then stores it and releases it in the winter to heat the school."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/too-cool-for-school-britains-most-ecofriendly-building-806892.htmlSee Environ's CO2 map and why drastic action may be called for:
http://www.physorg.com/news126801696.html
Truth Out gives m ore reasons action must be taken:
http://www.truthout.org/issues-06/040908EA.shtml (if fails sub _ for - after "issues".)
The tie-in of environmental and personal health and sustainability are set forth in and Alternet article:
http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/82013/?page=1
Lower cost and reliable LED house lighting is coming on line:
http://leisureguy.wordpress.com/2008/04/11/theyre-here-reasonable-led-bulbs/
Change diet
Non-petro fertilizers
Most corn and soybeans grown here are gm
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/exposed-the-great-gm-crops-myth-812179.html
Agricultural revolution endorsed
http://us.oneworld.net/article/view/159879/1/
Forget carbon, check your water footprint
Global Warming Cafe/Low Carb Diet from Empowerment Institute- getting neighbors together for seminars, practice in going green. Bill Morisette is working on this for Hyde Park.
http://www.empowermentinstitute.net/lcd/lcd_files/Global_Warming_Cafe.html
Environ 5 May 2008 "the current extinction crisis, with species vanishing every day, is a serious threat to humanity equal to, if not greater than, climate change."http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42221
Civic and community organisations have to take a stand against multinationals and globalisation.There have been several reports that the growing middle classes in India and China have increased the demand for food, especially since they are eating more meat, and grain is used as food for the animals killed for meat. I don't know about China, but in South India, cattle are fed on hay and grass, with some occasional millet. They're not fed on maize as in the west, or on wheat, or rice. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/multinationals-make-billions-in-profit-out-of-growing-global-food-crisis-820855.html " Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation...In the present context, a freeze of speculative trade in food staples, taken as a political decision, would immediately contribute to lower food prices. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=
Environ 10 May 08.Important articles.
This article draws a parallel to the 12-Step programme of Alcoholics Anonymous http://www.countercurrents.org/baker090508.htm plastics to avoidhttp://green.sympatico.msn.ca/article.aspx?cp-documentid=478795
http://www.plastics.ca/ http://www.alternet.org/environment/84982/A group to join: http://www.wecansolveit.org/content/solutions
"Allen
Young's book, "Priority One," says that if we increased the organic
matter in soil by 1.6 percent in all our cropping lands, we would sequester
all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere."
Preparing for Permaculture
By Kelpie Wilson
t r u t h o u t | Environmental Editor
Monday 02 July
An interview with permaculture expert Robyn Francis in New South Wales, Australia.
While in Australia for the International Agrichar Initiative conference in April,
I got a chance to visit Djanbung Gardens, a farm and learning center founded
by permaculture expert Robyn Francis in the alternative community of Nimbin,
New South Wales. After a wonderful hour touring the garden with students from
Canada, South Africa and France, I sat down with Robyn for a chat about permaculture
and the future of Australia's and the world's agricultural systems.
KW: Robyn, please tell
me - what got you interested in permaculture?
RF: In the early 1970s, I was part of the whole counterculture movement and
not very happy with the way society was going. I traveled overseas for five
years and saw a lot of things good and a lot of things wrong, and one of the
things I found that really fascinated me in my travels was the sustainable traditional
systems of farming and village culture. Then I lived in Europe, in southern
Germany, in a small farming hamlet, for three and a half years, just out of
Munich, where I got to see the traditional European farming systems. There were
still old farmers who were doing their crop rotations, and the only input to
the farm was diesel fuel to put into the tractor and the Mercedes Benz. It was
all mixed cropping, and they had their cows and their pigs, and they would use
the manures and compost them and put them out in the fields. These types of
farms would have a little forest that was managed over 200-year rotations, from
generation to generation, and it was just
such a stark contrast to the mono-thinking, monoculture, broad-acre agriculture
that I grew up with here in Australia.
KW: How did we end up abandoning those kinds of systems?
RF: Post WWII; that's when society went on the most incredibly manic fossil-fuel
binge. From the end of the Second World War you can track this corporatization
of Western culture and commoditization of land. And all the chemical weapons
that they created for war, well, those chemicals then went into chemical-based
agriculture, so they could continue manufacturing and have a new market. We
really see those major changes in agricultural systems occurring then.
KW: It hasn't been that
long, really, has it?
RF: It hasn't, and I think places that didn't have really strong traditions,
like Australia and the US, were just the perfect breeding ground for this kind
of phenomenon to take off, whereas in Europe, people were a lot more grounded
in their long-term traditions. There have been big changes since I lived there.
I felt particularly blessed to be living there at the tail end of that old generation.
I went back ten years later, and the landscape had changed. The sons who had
gone to agricultural college and had done their agribiz science had come back,
and all these patchwork rotational fields were turned into monocultures for
feedlot cattle. So, yeah, it's amazing how things can change in a generation,
and what we need is a very big generational change right now. Basically going
back, with more intelligence, into the future.
KW: Well, isn't that what
you're doing with the students you have here? I just asked them when we were
walking around, "Do you think more people are going to be farmers in the
future?" They looked at me and simply said, "Yes."
RF: You have to look at the phenomenon of Cuba. What an amazing example that
is of a country that just suddenly had its fossil fuels, its fertilizers - all
of those taps - turned off, including its market for its exports, when the USSR
collapsed. I don't know if you've seen the video "Power of Community."
It shows how now the farmers are the most revered and respected people in the
community. They are the ones who have the most money.
KW: Does that amaze you?
RF: It is how it should be, because it is a struggle in every society. I've
worked a lot in the Third World too, where this global cutthroat market is pitting
country against country to get stuff cheap. And the people who are missing out
are the farmers. They're getting screwed with their prices right across the
board; farmers just can't make ends meet operating a farm, be it Third World
or First World. The First-World farmers have got to compete with Third-World
farmers in terms of wages and try to deliver a crop at similar cost, so farming's
not worth anything, anywhere. In the Third World, you don't see young people
working on the farms. It's the old people out in the fields, and they're dying
off. None of them are encouraging their kids to become farmers, because it doesn't
pay. You can't survive as a farmer because prices are so suppressed. David Suzuki,
for years, has been saying that we're only paying 20 percent of the true cost
of our food. There are all these
hidden subsidies.
KW: Remember, it used to be that, in the US anyway, people expected to spend
about 25 percent of their income on food, and 25 percent on housing, and 50
percent for everything else, and now it's more like about 50 percent for housing
and maybe 10 percent on food.
RF: You know, oil has now hit peak. This is not going to last. We've been talking
about global warming since the early '80s and sustainability for longer than
that. And we haven't just been talking about it. That's what I like about permaculture
- permaculture has actually been doing it, and it has grown rapidly, and mainly
through training, empowering people through education. That has been at the
heart of permaculture's success, training people to be trainers. I don't know
how many hundreds of thousands of trained permaculturists there are around the
planet. It's being practiced in 80, maybe, even over 100 different countries
around the world.
KW: Could you just give me a quick definition of permaculture?
RF: Well, the word itself means permanent culture, and it's really a holistic
or interdisciplinary or metadisciplinary approach to how we sustain our environment.
It looks at how human beings can provide their needs while treading lightly
on the earth, how we can do it by still respecting the life around us and the
life-supporting systems on this planet, and, as such, it's got to embrace all
aspects of our society and how we meet our needs. Food, of course, is a primary
need. You don't live long without food, and then when we look at the history
of food production, we find that traditionally, agriculture has been one of
the most destructive enterprises. It has desertified [and] salinated more land,
destroyed more forests, and polluted more landscapes than any other human enterprise.
There are estimates that 70 percent of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere are
actually caused through food production, because it's not just the farmer growing
the food, it's all the inputs
into that. It's all those big corporations. It's all the energy used for making
these soluble fertilizers that are killing the soil microflora and breaking
down the structure of carbon in the soil. Allen Young's book, "Priority
One," says that if we increased the organic matter in soil by 1.6 percent
in all our cropping lands, we would sequester all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.
KW: We've been hearing a lot about global warming, the drying of Australia and
losing the irrigation water from the major river system in the country - the
Murray-Darling. Who's going to feed Australia in the future? How will you put
bread on the table?
RF: In most bioregions, it actually takes very little land to produce grain
to feed people. Probably 90 percent of the grain that's grown in Australia is
for international trade. And it's only a small amount that we actually need
locally, so if those precious resources are put into providing our need - if
we focus on import replacement instead of international marketing - you know,
exporting rice to Thailand and importing rice back ...
KW: Economic theory calls that comparative advantage. It's actually kind of
nuts isn't it?
RF: Yes it is. Trucking coals to Newcastle and back again, just to generate
a profit. We have to stop and look at self-reliance on the national as well
as the local level. It's got to work all the way through, and there's just got
to be a huge contraction. There's got to be very large areas that are allowed
to go back to some kind of very, very hardy vegetation, and some of these areas
that have been growing annual grains will be much better off going into, say,
bush-food production. Acacia tree, what we call wattle, produces high yields
of a good quality grain that can be used for bread. It can be roasted as a coffee
substitute. It is things like this that can cope with that low rainfall. We
also won't need all that fossil fuel for plowing, and harvesters and so on.
We've just got to design different types of harvesting systems to harvest the
seeds of things like this.
KW: Are those ideas coming up, bubbling up to the top of government at this
time?
RF: Not yet. But I think things like this are going to trigger that shift to
where we start to look at native crops and things that can cope with no irrigation
and look very carefully at what irrigation we do use and how we use the resources
that we do have. There's going to be a shift on all levels of society.
KW: There just is. There's no way around it.
RF: Yes. Exactly.
KW: I want to ask you one more question, but I think ...
(A man walks up to us here)
Man: We've got a calf
in the garden. Anyway, answer the question, and then....
RF: In the garden? In the actual vegetable garden?
Man: No.
RF: Oh, okay.
KW: Do you need to go?
RF: That's alright.
KW: The neighbor's cow ...
RF: He probably came through from the eco-village land. There's a gate that's
on the corner down there. One of these guys should know where it is. Anyway,
it'll still be there in five minutes. Last question.
KW: The perils of being on a farm - calves on the loose! Well, I wanted to ask
you about biochar, the Amazonian black earth, and what kind of potential you
think that has. Do you think it has a great potential here in this part of the
country for revitalizing soils? You were talking earlier about getting carbon
back into soils, and I see a lot of interest in this idea.
RF: I think it's a multi-pronged approach that we need to take, and no one system
is going to be the ultimate solution, because every system we use will have
a cost in terms of where we're getting resources. So, I think it's a matter
of looking strategically at the individual soil types and production systems.
What is actually wrong with the soil? What does it need? For some soils and
some situations, things like black soil ... charcoal ... may be the answer.
For other situations, it may be a matter of just getting the beneficial organisms
back with the right kind of bacteria-based or fungal-based compost teas. In
other situations, biodynamic preparations may be the best tool. In many ways,
I really like these, sort of, homeopathic approaches, because they don't require
huge resources to revitalize the land.
KW: So, you like the compost teas and things like that?
RF: Yes, and the results are pretty amazing.
KW: So when you bring the health back to the soil, does that automatically start
the process of incorporating carbon into it then?
RF: Yes. Once you've got the soil biota working, you are healing the land and
the organic matter in the soil can hold together and not break apart. And, of
course, that needs to be combined with cover crops and returning crop residues
and so on back to the soil and building up the organic matter. You don't just
put compost tea on and ...
KW: Walk away ...
RF: Right. It's got to be a fully strategic approach. Every farm needs a redesign,
because you have to integrate the tree crops in with it, and the wildlife areas
need to be restored. You have the windbreaks and the hedgerows and so on that
need to be restored. There are the water-management systems like swales and
ponds that need to be put in. It's got to be a multi-pronged approach. It's
not just some new additive you put into the soil and business as usual. What
I think is important is that, when these things are done, that they are done
very carefully, in terms of where is the charcoal going to come from, because
there is a great potential to be very irresponsible about getting the sources
of timber to turn into charcoal.
KW: Well, in a lot of cases, they're using ag-waste, like rice hulls and things
like that. It's not all timber.
RF: Yeah, but, even looking at the ag-wastes, on every resource we've got to
look at what is the best way to use this, and how can we maximize everything
that we get out of each resource along the process. So, in the process of actually
turning a crop residue or something or other into charcoal, is there some other
product that we can harness from this, or is there a byproduct that can become
an input for something else, and we've got to get away from these linear systems.
KW: Right.
RF: Because that's when we screw up, every time. It's when we only think in
linear systems and we miss all of the opportunities along the way. See, when
we maximize every resource, we look at every byproduct, every waste is a new
resource for something else, so that everything is recycled within the system.
It is only through a very radical slowdown of entropy that we can design systems
that are going to be sustainable.
KW: It seems like exciting work. Don't you feel now is the time where you're
finally being called upon to share all this wonderful knowledge and experience
you've been accumulating?
RF: Yes.
KW: Well, congratulations for all you've done, and for seeing the fruits of
your work.
RF: Yep, and more to come.
Kelpie Wilson is Truthout's environment editor. Trained as a mechanical engineer, she embarked on a career as a forest protection activist, then returned to engineering as a technical writer for the solar power industry.
Plastics matter, too! From the chairman:
Indirectly, plastics are
also involved in global warming. They do not decompose, so 10,000 years from
now, they will still be polluting the planet.
" One shop in north London has already placed itself on the front line
of the plastic bag revolution.
As well as banishing non-biodegradable carriers from behind the till, it has
taken away almost all of its packaging, leaving shoppers to bring in their own
jars, pots and bags to be filled with their day's groceries."
http://environment.independent.co.uk/green_living/article3157780.ece
" The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and
weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever
travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs
some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel,
in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii. "
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2007/10/19/SS6JS8RH0.DTL&type=politics
"Ireland imposed a modest plastic bag tax in 2002, which has reduced their
use by 90 per cent."
http://comment.independent.co.uk/leading_articles/article3157760.ece
If only a part of it is true about the lineup of corporate structures in different economic sectors, the road for sustainability is hard indeed. Note, Republican/Libertarian candidate Ron Paul said nearly the same as in this article on Bill Moyer's Journal. Swipe and paste the internal links to learn more. Gary Ossewaarde
From Rani Fedson:
Affecting the very basis
of sustainability.
++++++
Reviewing F. William Engdahl's
"Seeds of Destruction"
By Stephen Lendman
02 January, 2008
Countercurrents.org
Part I
Bill Engdahl is a leading researcher, economist and analyst of the New World
Order who's written on issues of energy, politics and economics for over 30
years. He contributes regularly to publications like Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun,
Foresight magazine, Grant's Investor.com, European Banker and Business Banker
International. He's also a frequent speaker at geopolitical, economic and energy
related international conferences and is a distinguished Research Associate
of the Centre for Research on Globalization where he's a regular contributor.
Engdahl also wrote two important books - "A Century of War: Anglo-American
Oil Politics and the New World Order" in 2004. It's an essential history
of geopolitics and the importance of oil. Engdahl explains that America's post-WW
II dominance rests on two pillars and one commodity - unchallengeable military
power and the dollar as the world's reserve currency combined with the quest
to control global oil and other energy resources.
Engdahl's newest book is just out from the Centre for Research on Globalization.
It's a sequel to his first one called "Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden
Agenda of Genetic Manipulation" and subject of this review. It's the diabolical
story of how Washington and four Anglo-American agribusiness giants plan world
domination by patenting life forms to gain worldwide control of our food supply
and why that prospect is chilling. The book's compelling contents are reviewed
below in-depth so readers will know the type future Henry Kissinger had in mind
in 1970 when he said: "Control oil and you control nations; control food
and you control the people."
Remember also, this cabal is one of many interconnected ones with fearsome power
and ruthless intent to use it - Big Banks controlling the Federal Reserve and
our money, Big Oil our world energy resources, Big Media our information, Big
Pharma our health, Big Technology our state-of-the-art everything and watching
us, Big Defense our wars, Big Pentagon waging them, and other corporate predators
exploiting our lives for profit. Engdahl's book focuses brilliantly on one of
them. To fully cover its vital contents, this review will be in three parts
for more detail and to make it easily digestible.
Part I of "Seeds of Destruction"
In 2003, Jeffrey Smith's "Seeds of Deception" was published. It exposed
the dangers of untested and unregulated genetically engineered foods most people
eat every day with no knowledge of the potential health risks. Efforts to inform
the public have been quashed, reliable science has been buried, and consider
what happened to two distinguished scientists.
One was Ignatio Chapela, a microbial ecologist at the University of California,
Berkeley. In September, 2001, he was invited to a carefully staged meeting with
Fernando Ortiz Monasterio, Mexico's Director of the Commission of Biosafety
in Mexico City. The experience left Chapela shaken and angry as he explained.
Monasterio attacked him for over an hour. "First he trashed me. He let
me know how damaging to the country and how problematic my information was to
be."
Chapela referred to what he and a UC Berkeley graduate student, David Quist,
discovered in 2000 about genetically engineered contamination of Mexican corn
in violation of a government ban on these crops in 1998. Corn is sacred in Mexico,
the country is home to hundreds of indigenous varieties that crossbreed naturally,
and GM contamination is permanent and unthinkable - but it happened by design.
Chapela and Quist tested corn varieties in more than a dozen state of Oaxaca
communities and discovered 6% of the plants contaminated with GM corn. Oaxaca
is in the country's far South so Chapela knew if contamination spread there,
it was widespread throughout Mexico. It's unavoidable because NAFTA allows imported
US corn with 30% of it at the time genetically modified. Now it's heading for
nearly double that amount, and if not contained, it soon could be all of it.
The prestigious journal Nature agreed to publish Chapela's findings, Monasterio
wanted them quashed, but Chapela refused to comply. As a result, he was intimidated
not to do it and threatened with being held responsible for all damages to Mexican
agriculture and its economy.
He went ahead, nonetheless, and when his article appeared in the publication
on November 29, 2001 the smear campaign against him began and intensified. It
was later learned that Monsanto was behind it, and the Washington-based Bivings
Group PR firm was hired to discredit his findings and get them retracted.
It worked because the campaign didn't focus on Chapela's contamination discovery,
but on a second research conclusion even more serious. He learned the contaminated
GM corn had as many as eight fragments of the CaMV promoter that creates an
unstable "hotspot." It can cause plant genes to fragment, scatter
throughout the plant's genome, and, if proved conclusively, would wreck efforts
to introduce GM crops in the country. Without further evidence, there was still
room for doubt if the second finding was valid, however, and the anti-Chapela
campaign hammered him on it.
Because of the pressure, Nature took an unprecedented action in its 133 year
history. It upheld Chapela's central finding but retracted the other one. That
was all it took, and the major media pounced on it. They denounced Chapela's
incompetence and tried to discredit everything he learned including his verified
findings. They weren't reported, his vilification was highlighted, and Monsanto
and the Mexican government scored a big victory.
Ironically, on April 18, 2002, two weeks after Nature's partial retraction,
the Mexican government announced there was massive genetic contamination of
traditional corn varieties in Oaxaca and the neighboring state of Puebla. It
was horrifying as up to 95% of tested crops were genetically polluted and "at
a speed never before predicted." The news made headlines in Europe and
Mexico. It was ignored in the US and Canada.
The fallout for Chapela was UC Berkeley denied him tenure in 2003 because of
his article and for criticizing university ties to the biotech industry. He
then filed suit in April, 2004 asking remuneration for lost wages, earnings
and benefits, compensatory damages for humiliation, mental anguish, emotional
distress and coverage of attorney fees and costs for his action. He won in May,
2005 but not in court when the university reversed its decision, granted him
tenure and agreed to include retroactive pay back to 2003. The damage, however,
was done and is an example of what's at stake when anyone dares challenge a
powerful company like Monsanto.
The other man attacked was the world's leading lectins and plant genetic modification
expert, UK-based Arpad Pusztai. He was vilified and fired from his research
position at Scotland's Rowett Research Institute for publishing industry-unfriendly
data he was commissioned to produce on the safety of GMO foods.
His Rowett Research study was the first ever independent one conducted on them
anywhere. He undertook it believing in their promise but became alarmed by his
findings. The Clinton and Blair governments were determined to suppress them
because Washington was spending billions promoting GMO crops and a future biotech
revolution. It wasn't about to let even the world's foremost expert in the field
derail the effort. His results were startling and consider the implications
for humans eating genetically engineered foods.
Rats fed GMO potatoes had smaller livers, hearts, testicles and brains, damaged
immune systems, and showed structural changes in their white blood cells making
them more vulnerable to infection and disease compared to other rats fed non-GMO
potatoes. It got worse. Thymus and spleen damage showed up; enlarged tissues,
including the pancreas and intestines; and there were cases of liver atrophy
as well as significant proliferation of stomach and intestines cells that could
be a sign of greater future risk of cancer. Equally alarming - this all happened
after 10 days of testing, and the changes persisted after 110 days that's the
human equivalent of 10 years.
GM foods today saturate our diet. Over 80% of all supermarket processed foods
contain them. Others include grains like rice, corn and wheat; legumes like
soybeans and soy products; vegetable oils; soft drinks; salad dressings; vegetables
and fruits; dairy products including eggs; meat and other animal products; and
even infant formula plus a vast array of hidden additives and ingredients in
processed foods (like in tomato sauce, ice cream and peanut butter). They're
unrevealed to consumers because labeling is prohibited yet the more of them
we eat, the greater the potential threat to our health.
Today, we're all lab rats in an uncontrolled, unregulated mass human experiment
the results of which are unknown. The risks from it are beyond measure, it will
take many years to learn them, and when they're finally revealed it will be
too late to reverse the damage if it's proved GM products harm human health
as independent experts strongly believe. Once GM seeds are introduced to an
area, the genie is out of the bottle for keeps.
Despite the enormous risks, however, Washington and growing numbers of governments
around the world in parts of Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa now allow
these products to be grown in their soil or imported. They're produced and sold
to consumers because agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Dow AgriSciences
and Cargill have enormous clout to demand it and a potent partner supporting
them - the US government and its agencies, including the Departments of Agriculture
and State, FDA, EPA and even the defense establishment. World Trade Organization
(WTO) Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) patent rules
also back them along with industry-friendly WTO rulings like the February 7,
2006 one.
It favored a US challenge against European GMO regulatory policies in spite
of strong consumer sentiment against these foods and ingredients on the continent.
It also violated the Biosafety Protocol that should let nations regulate these
products in the public interest, but it doesn't because WTO trade rules sabotaged
it. Nonetheless, anti-GMO activism persists, consumers still have a say, and
there are hundreds of GMO-free zones around the world, including in the US.
That and more is needed to take on the agribusiness giants that so far have
everything going their way.
In "Seeds of Deception," Jeffrey Smith did a masterful job explaining
the dangers of GM foods and ingredients. Engdahl explains them as well but goes
much further brilliantly in his blockbuster book on this topic. It's the story
of a powerful family and a "small socio-political American elite (that)
seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival" - future
life through the food we eat. The book's introduction says it "reads (like)
a crime story." It's also a nightmare but one that's very real and threatening.
This review covers the book in-depth because of its importance. It's an extraordinary
work that "reveals a diabolical World of profit-driven political intrigue
(and) government corruption and coercion" that's part of a decades-long
global scheme for total world dominance. The book deserves vast exposure and
must be read in full for the whole disturbing story. It's hoped the material
below will encourage readers to do it in their own self-interest and to marshal
mass consumer actions to place food safety above corporate profits.
Engdahl's book supplies the ammunition to do it and is also a sequel to his
earlier one on war, oil politics and The New World Order and follows naturally
from it. It covers the roots of the strategy to control "global food security"
that goes back to the 1930s and the plans of a handful of American families
to preserve their wealth and power. But it centers on one in particular that
above the others "came to symbolize the hubris and arrogance of the emerging
American century" that blossomed post-WW II. Its patriarch began in oil
and then dominated it in his powerful Oil Trust. It was only the beginning as
the family expanded into "education of youth, medicine and psychology,"
US foreign policy, and "the very science of life itself, biology, and its
applications" in plants and agriculture.
The family's name is Rockefeller. The patriarch was John D., and four powerful
later-generation brothers followed him - David, Nelson, Laurance, and John D.
III. Engdahl says the GMO story covers "the evolution of power in the hands
of an elite (led by this family), determined (above all) to bring the entire
world under their sway." They and other elites already control most of
it, including the nation's energy, the US Federal Reserve, and other key world
central banks. Today, three brothers are gone, David alone remains, and he's
still a force at age 92 although he no longer runs the family bank, JP Morgan
Chase. He's active in family enterprises, however, including the Rockefeller
Foundation to be discussed in Part II of this review.
F. William Engdahl is the author of Seeds of Destruction, the Hidden Agenda
of Genetic Manipulation just released by Global Research. He is also the author
of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Pluto
Press Ltd.. To contact him by e-mail: info@engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Steve Lendman
News and Information Hour on TheMicroEffect.com Mondays at noon US Central time.
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