Editor’s note: This commentary is by John Klar, a Vermont grass-fed beef and sheep farmer, and an attorney and pastor who lives in Irasburg.
[I]n recent years I have planted hundreds of organic squash plants in huge mounds of organic composted manures from my cows. I have noticed that yields are very low in both summer and winter varieties, and that I almost never see any honeybees. Perhaps the hundreds of acres of GMO corn surrounding me, sprayed with herbicides and pesticides, is part of the problem, but we really don’t know. What troubles me is that by the time we do know, it may be too late.
I remember in my youth when the bees were so plentiful in the Vermont clover that we kids had to be careful not to get stung. Now many orchards keep hives not for honey but for pollination. And while colony collapse disorder has subsided, “… beekeepers all over the United States are still reporting troubling colony losses – as high as 45 percent annually.”. The European Union has banned neonicotinoids, which have been implicated in compromising bee immune systems, brain function and other harmful impacts (National Geographic, “The Plight of the Honeybee,” May 10, 2013), but this toxin has not been banned in profit-dominated America, despite colony losses that sometimes reach 90 percent. A particular culprit is the neurotoxin and insecticide imidacloprid.
Bees have lost habitat, as well. When herbicides and industrial farming practices eliminate wild bee food, bees must work harder for less. The reduction of wild milkweed is destroying monarch butterflies; the loss of wild mustard and other bee forage is likely hurting honeybees.
Neonicotinoids, derived from tobacco, remind me of Big Tobacco’s fierce effort to mislead the public for decades about the health risks of smoking even as tobacco companies devised ways to make their products ever more addictive. The drive for corporate profit has a long history of obfuscating truth or skewing research: Can we afford to destroy our honeybees, and what effects do these toxins have on humans? As corporations strive to control the levers of government regulation, we can expect that at least some of the chemicals that increase profits will compromise human health, and that regulatory agencies in the United States will be slow to prove these consequences. Especially when hundreds of new chemicals are created and released into our soil, water and air — and bees and children — each year.
As corporations strive to control the levers of government regulation, we can expect that at least some of the chemicals that increase profits will compromise human health, and that regulatory agencies in the United States will be slow to prove these consequences.
Those who seek to eat locally and organically seek not just to consume foods that are healthy, but to select foods that have not been created at the expense of common environmental sense. Foods shipped from California or Arizona, or Chile or Brazil, may be fine in themselves, but what of the fossil fuels expended in their transport to our grocery store shelves? And what of genetic engineering designed, as in the case of recent varieties of apple being tested in Midwestern markets, solely to extend shelf life? — we know very well that fresh is healthier.
If we only select food based on what is “cheapest,” we cheapen our children’s health and the health of their future. The readiness of agribusiness to elevate profit over human and ecological health is well-established: so why would we consumers join them in valuing what is financially cheap without taking the time to investigate what we are ingesting. Crap in, crap out. Chemotherapy is very expensive, no matter how much it costs.
And so I am disturbed by the readiness of lazy thinkers to choose deliberately to dismiss complaints about industrial food, as if we can manipulate the costs of food the way we use economies of scale to reduce the cost of a car, or a laptop — we don’t imbibe cars. The complexity of modern chemicals, modern transport and modern genetic tampering mean that we consumers must invest the time to examine what we are being fed, including the lines we are being fed by very wealthy and calculating manufacturers that prioritize selling us their goods at any health cost. It is not just the Chinese who sell us tainted food.
There are many who dismiss the die-off of bees, or the risks of corn genetically modified to contain an anthrax relative (Bt toxin), or crops that are “resistant” to Round-up (meaning that they absorb it without dying, so they can make it to our tables, and on into our children’s bodies). But I liken such dismissals to those who dismiss the Holocaust, or to those in America who refused to aid Jews in World War II. Many also can deny that we are warming the globe by human activity, even as we spew the poisons from fossil fuels into our air at increasing rates — if we are not warming the globe, we are most certainly poisoning it, when we burn 85 million barrels of oil daily.
I have known many people who denied that cigarettes caused cancer, who then died of lung cancer. Let us not be Holocaust deniers — of humans, or of honeybees.
