Occupy Our Homes: From the Streets to Foreclosed Homes, OWS Finds a New Frontier

By Sarah Seltzer
Today, Occupy Wall Street and Occupy movements around the country will "go out of the streets and into the homes" of the 99 percent to draw attention to the economic, social, and racial injustice of the foreclosure crisis.

Through vacant home reoccupations, eviction resistance actions, and foreclosure auction disruptions from Brooklyn to Atlanta to Minneapolis and beyond, activists will highlight the families and individuals who live with the threat of eviction ever looming or those who have already lost their homes but are barred from ones that sit empty, owned by banks.

"We want people to pick sides - are you going to side with a bank sitting on an empty house when there's record family homelessness in NYC? Or will you side with a homeless family that is really desperate for a better environment for their kids to grow up in?" says VOCAL-NY organizer Sean Barry, one of many activists involved in the New York City action, which will begin at 1 p.m. at the intersection of Pennsylvania and Livonia in East New York, Brooklyn.

Indeed, the optics are perfect for OWS: not only will the actions highlight the plight of America's families, but they will also point to the indifference and callousness of the 1 percent - the bankers and financiers who speculated on subprime mortgages, turned the other way knowing that many mortgages were being signed - or robosigned - to individuals who could never pay.


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Organic Farming Just as Productive as Conventional, and Better at Building Soil, Rodale Finds

By Tom Philpott

For related articles and more information, please visit OCA's All About Organics page, and our Farm Issues page.

Organic agriculture is a fine luxury for the rich, but it could never feed the world as global population moves to 9 billion.

That's what a lot of powerful people -- including the editors of The Economist -- insist. But the truth could well be the opposite: It might be chemical-intensive agriculture that's the frivolous luxury, and organic that offers us the right technologies in a resource-constrained, ever-warmer near future.

That's the conclusion I draw from the latest data of the Pennsylvania-based Rodale Institute's Farming Systems Trial (FST), which Rodale calls "America's longest running, side-by-side comparison of conventional and organic agriculture." Now, Rodale promotes organic ag, so industrial-minded critics will be tempted to dismiss its data. But that would be wrong -- its test plots have an excellent reputation in the ag research community, and the Institute often collaborates with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service.

Housed on Rodale's 330 acre farm, the FST compares three systems for growing corn and soy, the first two organic and the third conventional: 1) one based on rotating feed crops with perennial forage crops for cows, and fertilizing with manure; 2) another based on rotating grains with cover crops, with fertility coming from nitrogen-fixing legumes; and 3) a system reliant on synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

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Plenty Of Foods Harbor BPA, Study Finds

Some communities have banned the sale of plastic baby bottles and sippy cups manufactured using bisphenol A, a hormone-mimicking chemical. In a few grocery stores, cashiers have already begun donning gloves to avoid handling thermal receipt paper out of fear its BPA-based surface coating may rub off on the fingers. But how's a family to avoid exposure to this contaminant when it taints the food supply?

It's a question many people may start asking in response to data posted online November 1 in Environmental Science & Technology by a team of university and government scientists. Indeed, the last author on the paper is Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

In recent years, she's teamed up with toxicologist Arnold Schecter of the University of Texas School of Public Health on market-basket analyses of foods for various potentially toxic pollutants. Like Birnbaum, Schecter initially gained renown for studying dioxins. Now, both have moved into the BPA arena.

In their team's new paper, the Texas contingent locally purchased three samples of each of 31 types of canned or plastic-packaged foods. Another four examples of fresh meat and eight different types of pet food were also collected. All were analyzed for BPA - and 60 percent of the different food products hosted measurable quantities. Ironically, pet food contained less of the pollutant than did most of the items destined for human consumption.

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Independent Testing Finds Toxic Contaminants In San Francisco's Sludge "Compost"

By John Stauber, John Mayer, Dr. Michael Hansen
PR Newswire, August 8, 2010
Straight to the Source

WASHINGTON -- After 14 years of work, unceasing attacks from critics, and a $50 million investment without a penny of profit, a small New England biotech company stands on the doorstep of history - seemingly poised to join agriculture's "green revolution" as a game-changer in feeding the world.

Or not.

With global population pressing against food supplies and vast areas of the  ocean already swept clean of fish, tiny AquaBounty Technologies of Waltham, Mass., has developed a variety of salmon that reaches market weight in half the time of other salmon.

What's more, AquaBounty not only promises to slash the ready-for-market time - and production costs -- on a hugely popular, nutritious fish that currently commands near-record prices, it plans to avoid the pollution, disease and other problems associated with today's salt-water fish farms by having its salmon raised inland.

But there's a catch: AquaBounty's salmon is genetically engineered. Indeed, it aspires to be the nation's first genetically-modified food animal of any kind.

That means the Food and Drug Administration must approve it. It also means the company and its salmon must withstand vociferous opposition from environmental and other advocacy groups, win over skeptical producers and -- possibly most difficult of all - overcome potential consumer resistance to genetic tinkering with food.   


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