Tag Archives: environment
Protect Sustainable Agriculture from Budget Cuts
[First published in Worcester Telegram] Many of us in Western Massachusetts are fortunate to live in an agricultural bubble, surrounded by farms offering organic strawberries, broccoli and, well … too much kale. But as Representative McGovern knows, this isn’t reality for the rest of the country. Most food grown in the U.S. doesn’t come from Community […]
Fireworks “fun” facts or not so?
[Cover image source: Dave on Flickr] Who doesn’t love fireworks? (Aside from our dog, our kids when they were little, and apparently birds – although no surprise there really). It’s also likely that those who are responsible for ensuring water quality have mixed feelings when the sparks start flying. I don’t want to be the kill-joy, but […]
Lyme vaccine: a glimmer of hope?
When the neighborhood chit chat inevitably ends up talking ticks, Lyme, and pesticides – you know there’s a problem. A big problem. A 300,000 cases of Lyme a year kind of problem. Which may not seem like a lot, until you look at a map and realize most of these are here in the Northeast […]
A side of fries, hold the fungicide?
[Featured image: http://agriculture.by/blog/photo/igrushki-iz-kartoshki ] By sometime next fall, your side of fries might contain potatoes engineered to resist late blight: the fungus-like disease (caused by Phytophthora infestans) that can cause a once-healthy field to rot in the ground. But rather than turning up our noses at a genetically modified organism, we may want to consider the benefits of blight […]
Chlorpyrifos: Mr. Pruitt, the science has been reviewed
Dear Mr. Pruitt, I hope you can help me out here. I’ve been having trouble explaining your recent decision in favor of the pesticide chlorpyrifos while dismissing years of work by EPA scientists to my environmental toxicology students. This is a chemical that interferes with the normal processes of the brain causing both acute toxicity – […]
Dear Scott Pruitt: Is this Atrazine’s DDT moment?
Dear Mr. Pruitt, I imagine there must be some angst these days about Atrazine. With the 2016 EPA reevaluation concluding that the herbicide isn’t as safe as we all once thought, I am sure growers and consumers are anxious about which way the agency will swing: to ban or not to ban. Admittedly, back in […]
Dear Mr. Pruitt: On this we can agree (I think.)
Dear Mr. Pruitt, With Trump’s proposed budget, looks like you could use some support. We disagree about climate change so I won’t go there, but you have said that cleanup of contaminated sites was a priority, and it looks like hundreds of millions of dollars for haz-waste cleanup could be axed. So, since I’ve been […]
