I'm doing a quick hit and run diary with a link to this story since I did a search for a diary on it and didn't find anything. If there is a more substantial diary on this issue please let me know and I'll remove this one...

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Interesting story developing today that says a lot about the sad state of regulation under the Bush administration.

This morning, a lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco against the EPA to stop the continued use of a pesticide called endosulfan, which has already been banned by the European Union and 20 other countries, according to Kathryn Gilje, director of the Pesticide Action Network.

The suit, which was brought by a coalition of farm worker, public health and environmental groups demands that the EPA ban endosulfan, which is a DDT-like organochlorine. The groups charge that endosulfan is persistent in the environment and poisons humans and wildlife both in agricultural areas and in regions far from where it was applied.

"This dangerous and antiquated pesticide should have been off the market years ago," said Karl Tupper, a staff scientist with Pesticide Action Network. "The fact that EPA is still allowing the use of a chemical this harmful shows just how broken our regulatory system is."

Acute poisoning from endosulfan can cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, convulsions, and in extreme cases, unconsciousness and even death.

Seattle P-I

Sorry, not that kind of grass.

It’s the weekend.  And yard work awaits.  Probably like many homeowners, mowing the yard is a love-hate relationship I find myself trying to embrace at least once a week during the warm months.  My yard requires just basic care, really.  Lots of low maintenance foliage that looks really nice most of the time.  Some light weeding here and there.  Limited watering.  But still the mowing of too much turf.  A monoculture of cultivated lawn and impoverished ecosystem staring me in the face.

New episode tonight of The Celsias Show. As always, you're invited to listen and call in.

Tonight's show is all about asthma. Joining the show live are Mildred Thompson, PolicyLink Senior Director and Director of the PolicyLink Center for Health and Place, plus writer and creator of The Asthma Mom, Amy Aranuk.

From: "vidarbha today" <vidarbhatoday@gmail.com>
Date: May 12, 2008 3:08:16 PM EDT
Subject: Debt woes drive thousands of Indian farmers to suicide-SAM DOLNICK-The Associated Press reports

Monday, May 12, 2008

By SAM DOLNICK
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 11, 2008; 12:48 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

KOCHI, India -- On the last night of his life, the farmer walked into his dusty fields, choked down pesticide and waited to die.

He owed more than $1,000 to banks and moneylenders and he had told his wife that if the cotton harvest was bad this year, he would kill himself.

Pandurang Chindu Surpam left the near-barren fields he worked with his sons to share a last meal with his family. Hours later, he died. He was 45.

I was at a loss for what to write about in this week's issue, but I remembered that some use for the entertaining reaction of Diet Coke and Mentos was suggested by a reader, jlms qkw - a method of putting that entertaining reaction of Diet Coke and Mentos to useful work. So here, I will attempt to figure out a method of using it.

It's not as silly as you think. It relies on two things: one, the reaction itself, publicized in various places such as YouTube, and two, the fact that caffeine is an effective and environmentally friendly pesticide. (That's the way the coffee bush uses it, by the way.)

Congress passes its share of boondoggles, but there’s a real doozy on the docket April 18. If the nearly $300 billion Farm Bill passes in its current form, the American public will pay billions of dollars to large-scale farmers and food corporations for the following end results...

Yes, it seems like we're getting what Fox News thinks we deserve. Come General Election there may not be any snobby San Franciscans left for we're about to get pesticide bomb dropped on us.

But seriously. A company is set to do aerial spraying over the entire bay area this summer, starting in June, if we don't stop it.

A big vote (which might not have even happened if it weren't for citizen outcry) takes place tomorrow in the state assembly in Sacramento. If you can, please contact your supervisor/representative/assembly member and demand they vote to disallow the spraying.

At the least, sign the petition.

I just read a book that turned my understanding of the world on its head. I thought I was a good tree-hugger before. I thought I was an effective proponent of organics too. The truth is, I had NO idea what I was talking about in any sort of concrete way beyond a general idea that it's bad to dump poison on the earth and kill living things.

Then bara told me to read a book called Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web. For a solid week, I had my nose buried in this book and all I could talk about to anyone were bacteria, fungi, and nematodes. The contents of that book expose the DIRTIEST, FILTHIEST scandal of all in our society.

Why dirtiest? Well, for one thing, it's all about dirt. Or - to use a better word - soil. But bad puns aside, we would have a VERY different and MUCH healthier environment if the knowledge in this one little book were widely known. You'd see no dead zone the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, and that's just the start...

Senators and Congressmen, if you're lurking, please read this. James Inhofe, I mean you too!

Every time I'm about to finish my story on drought resistant wheat, I come across more horror stories, some of which you may have already heard. In any case this is worth repeating a thousand times: a report by GRAIN and Focus on the Global South has found that new legislation in Iraq has been carefully put in place by the US that prevents farmers from saving their seeds and effectively hands over the seed market to transnational corporations (the relevant passage is 51). This is a disastrous turn of events for Iraqi farmers, biodiversity and the country’s food security. While political sovereignty remains an illusion, food sovereignty for the Iraqi people has been made near impossible by these new regulations.

Welcome to the Monsanto World.

Cross-posted from http://www.politicook.org/

When I was in first grade we put a bean in a Styrofoam cup. The root went down and the leaves went up and it was almost like magic.
Now I think about non-target species, resistance and I wear Personal Protective Equipment. I sprayed an anole with orthene last week.  I promptly washed it off and hoped it survived my poison rain. It was easier when I didn't know how to use paraquat or any of the other chemicals that are in my arsenal.

For the past few weeks, the SF Bay Area news venues have erupted in talk about proposed aerial spraying of a pheromone product over large swaths of our urban communities in order to combat the spread of an agricultural pest, the light brown apple moth. I had never heard of this insect or known anything about previous sprayings in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties until after reading up on the subject. Now it's time to educate my internet brethren about the facts surrounding this issue and resultant controversy.

School children from both Colombia and neighboring Ecuador actually drew these pictures included in this diary. The United States government's primary strategy for combating the narcotics industry and the leftist FARC guerillas that control an area of Colombia the size of SWITERLAND involves aerial crop spraying with a deadly poison sold on the market as Roundup weedkiller. The spray not only kills coca plants, but any other, legal, crops in the vicinity. Sadly it also kills livestock and far worse it has also killed many children.

Hey Texas,

Let me begin be saying that Bill Clinton appointed Monsanto people to deal with food, agriculture, trade.  Let me follow by saying that Hillary's law firm in Arkansas represents Monsanto, she never said a word when Bill's Monsanto-heavy-FDA rammed rBGH through and wouldn't label it though cows were dying from it and threatened dairy farmers who did, and her main advisor and strategist, Mark Penn, works for Burson-Marsteller - Monsanto's PR firm.

In short, Hillary is "friends" with Monsanto.  She's coming to Texas to say she's Texas' friend.  Is she?

I'm going to do a lot of quoting, with gratitude to those who did so much work and hoping they'll forgive me for stringing things together, knowing time is short to get this out and help farmers.

Now, let's talk Texas ... and its farmers.  I take it that you people in Texas are fond of your farmers and I am betting you don't have a lick of an idea the kind of trouble those farmers are in from Monsanto.

(Time for a quick commercial announcement....) Believe the elections were "stolen/rigged?"? WORK A POLL! Worried about 80 year olds in charge of technological results of voting? BE A POLLWORKER. Now...Onto some last bites of 2007 Environmental News to USE...in 2008.

Environmental issues get unprecedented focus. Gone are the days when Al Gore was the lone political voice talking about global warming and alternative energy. Not only have Gore's fellow Democrats detailed positions on the issue, but Republicans have begun to find their voices as well. Des Moines Register

Some interesting environmental news has surfaced today, some covered by the mainstream media and some not.  Follow me below the fold for the details....