Tag Archives: Herbicides

Agreement turns I-35 into pollinator haven | Finance & Commerce

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GR:  It is definitely time to get serious about pollinator protection.  Unfortunately, this agreement is not binding and it does not mention mowing or herbicides, the principal roadside vegetation management tools of departments of transportation.  If I-35 roadsides start to become wild and rough, it will be a sign that the effort to aid pollinators is sincere.  Fingers crossed!

DES MOINES, Iowa — Soon, passengers zipping along Interstate 35 will see a lusher refuge and more food for bees and butterflies in the hopes of helping the insects boost their declining populations, six states and the Federal Highway Administration announced Thursday.

That 1,500-mile stretch of road from northern Minnesota to southern Texas is a flyway for monarch butterflies that migrate between Mexico and Canada, and is surrounded by acres of public land that can serve as friendly territory for the bees and butterflies that pollinate the plants that produce much of the nation’s food, such as fruits and vegetables.

But the monarch butterfly has lost population in recent years, which researchers say is due in part to shrinking stands of milkweed, on which butterflies feed and lay eggs. And last year, beekeepers reported losing about 40 percent of honey bee colonies in part due to pesticide use, habitat loss and parasites.

The agreement signed Thursday by officials from Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas and the federal government is meant to improve the habitat and develop a branding campaign to informally name the interstate the Monarch Highway.  Source: Agreement turns I-35 into pollinator haven | Finance & Commerce

GMOs: Facts About Genetically Modified Food

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A GMO is an organism that has had its DNA altered or modified in some way through genetic engineering.  From: www.livescience.com

GR:  Let’s be clear:  The great danger from GMO crops is the resistance to herbicides that allows increases in herbicice use.  Solid, repeatable research has shown the destructive effects of herbicides on bees, butterflies, other polinators, and the amphibians, birds, and bats that eat them.

West Coast US Cities Sue Monsanto over Toxic Chemicals

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Last week, Seattle, Washington became the latest addition to the list of cities filing lawsuits against multinational corporation Monsanto, joining San Diego, San Jose, Oakland and Berkeley in California, along with Spokane, Washington. These efforts, led by San Diego-based law firm Gomez Trial Attorneys, aim to extract tens of millions of dollars from the agrochemical company for knowingly promoting the severely hazardous line of polychlorinated biphenyls, more commonly known as PCBs.  www.globalresearch.ca

GR:  Hooray!!  It’s about time.  It always strikes me as a disgrace that our government regulators can’t do their jobs and we have to use other resources to resolve problems.  Monsanto and the other major chemical companies have no concern for the damage they do to all animals including humans.  Please share this news, and add updates to the comments.  Thank you.  Garry

Where Have All the Goldfinches Gone?

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Lesser Goldfinches (Spinus psaltria) Decline

1-B0000254These fussy little birds have been common around my Lesser Goldfinchhouse for years.  I feed them thistle seeds, let Barnyard Grass (usually considered a weed) grow in patches, and I plant lots of native sunflowers. Through summer the finches switch between pecking thistle-seeds and nibbling sunflower leaves, and later they add Barnyard Grass and sunflower seeds. Dozens of birds were always present most of the year, but they have almost disappeared over the past two years.

Photo above:  (December, 2004) I fed goldfinches with this thistle seed feeder (on the left) for several years, but it was so hard to clean I switched to a bag made by my friend Sheila.

In winter the five-pound bag of thistle seeds would last three days.

In winter the birds would empty a five-pound bag of thistle seeds in three days (March, 2007)

Last year (2014), birds visited the thistle bag, but they never emptied it. They pecked only a few sunflower leaves.  No birds came during fall and winter.  This year (2015), I saw goldfinches on the thistle bag only once, and they pecked no leaves.

The Arizona Game and Fish Department ranks Lesser Goldfinches as “common, widespread, and abundant.”  However, this might be changing.  The birds prefer disturbed weedy areas, but the deluge of herbicides sprayed on pastures, crops, yards, and roadsides has wiped out much of this habitat.  Like Monarch Butterflies, the Goldfinches may turn out to be unintended victims of Monsanto’s war on nature.

The editor of my hometown newsletter agreed to run a short note asking if anyone else had noticed a Lesser Goldfinch decline.  The town staff must have considered the note inappropriate.  They removed it, leaving an empty space in its place.

I washed the thistle-seed bag and filled it with fresh seeds. I hope the Goldfinches return and fill the empty spaces on my feeders and sunflowers.

If you have noticed changes in your goldfinch population, please add a comment.

World Animal Day Was October 4 | Here are Six Ways to Keep Supporting Animals

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#Animals, #Extinction

Wishing to increase awareness of endangered species, concerned ecologists declared World Animal Day in 1931.  A catastrophic world-wide extinction has taken place since then.

Please help stop the immoral and irresponsible destruction of nature.  Here are a few links to things you can do for animals this Sunday.

  1. Sign some petitions.
  2. Retweet a few animal tweets
  3. Tell someone that 52% Earth’s wildlife has died since 1970.  (We learned this near the end of 2014 when we saw the report from a survey of more than 10,000 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish.)
  4. Promote elimination of pesticides and restoration of damaged natural habitats.  If you have a yard, you can act directly:
    1. Stop using herbicides and insecticides.
    2. Plant animal-friendly native plants (fall is the best time for shrubs and trees)
  5. Switch to clean nonpolluting energy.
  6. Advocate for reducing the human population.

Record-Breaking Wildfires, Greenland Melting and Earth’s Hottest Month Ever

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Humans have some advantages over other animal species, but like the animals, we can’t control our urge to reproduce and our desire for the security of material wealth. Sentient but not sapient, sensitive but not wise, our advantages have let us to eliminate competition, disease, and danger. Thus, nothing can stop our booming population and our world-destroying “environmental footprint.”  (ACD = anthropogenic climate disruption)

Exposing the Big Game's avatarExposing the Big Game

The following article from Truthout.org covers all that I was going to go over in Part 2 of Global Warming: the Future is Now, so here’s this instead:

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Dahr Jamail | The World on Fire:

The US is now officially in the worst wildfire season in its history, as almost 7.5 million acres across the country have burned up since spring.

Articles about ACD’s impacts are now being published in more mainstream outlets, carrying titles that include verbiage like “the point of no return,” and it is high time for that, given what we are witnessing.

A recently published study by the UK-US Taskforce on Extreme Weather and Global Food System Reliance revealed that “major shocks” to worldwide food production will become at least three times more likely within the next 25 years due to increasingly extreme weather events generated by ACD. One of the coauthors of the report…

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Extinction Resources: Information, Opinion, Ideas, & Questions

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Extinction Information Resources

PassengerPigeon

Passenger Pigeon

Stopping human-caused extinction of Earth’s plant and animal species is the greatest challenge of our time. This post provides access to the latest articles on extinction. The first item (Ceballos et al. 2015) is the latest detailed report on what we know and how we acquired the information.

 Ceballos, Gerardo, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle, and Todd M. Palmer. 19 June 2015. Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction. Science Advances Vol. 1, no. 5 (e1400253, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1400253). Corresponding author. E-mail: gceballo@ecologia.unam.mx.

More than a thousand recent articles are linked to my blog (https://garryrogers.com/blog):

Causes of Extinction

My blog covers the things that people do to cause extinctions and reduce biodiversity. These deeds of ours are woven into individual and our collective habits and beliefs. Stopping them will alter our society and our culture. It will be difficult. Our population must be reduced, our food choices must change, and our resource harvest must decline. Nothing less will succeed. Search the blog using the following terms for recent reports:  Burning, Coal, Construction, Deforestation, Desertification, Energy, Farming, Fishing, Fracking, Grazing, Hunting, Invasive Species, Logging, Mining, Oil, Pesticides, Pet Trade, Pollution, Population, Roads, and Soil.

Climate change will become the major cause of extinction.  Here’s its search link on my blog:  Climate Change.

For more reading, my Internet newsletters include a wider variety of articles than my blog.

Monsanto’s Roundup system threatens extinction of monarch butterflies – report

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Monsanto’s Roundup Ready system – a potent herbicide combined with genetically-modified seeds that can withstand it – has decimated the monarch butterfly’s only source of food in the Midwest, putting it on the edge of extinction, according to a new study.  Source: rt.com

GR:  Evidence indicates that Monsanto is the principal cause of declining bees and butterflies.  The article includes an interesting diagram showing the personnel overlap between Monsanto and the U. S. Government.

Using Nature’s Mycorrhizal Tool-Kit to compete with Weeds vs killing them with Glyphosate

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There are also some other important points to consider regarding farm cost savings and higher production yields with mycorrhizae. The University of Wisconsin made a study of the effects of Mycorrhizal Applications Inc’s product called MycoApply on potato yields, profit and another extremely interesting thing about the application of phosphorus in the field. It was found that where conventional grown potatoes needed 120 lbs of phosphorus added per acre, under the mycorhizal applications to the potato fields, only 30 lbs was needed. Hence less phosphorus and more efficient mycorrhizal nutrient competition and uptake means less fertilizers. There was also an added bonus of more yield of potatoes per acre and profit by the usage of mycorrhizae into the soils. So drought tolerance, superior nutrient uptake which negated tons of fertilizers on industrial site, 200% increase in water hydration which made plants drought resistant and the added plus of less weeds or stunted weeds which could not compete. So it was win win all way round.   Source: creating-a-new-earth.blogspot.se

GR:  Herbicides are destroying important portions of our ecosystems.  Let’s ban them.  Plants bred for resistance to herbicides encourage their use.  Let’s ban them too.