Tag Archives: pesticide
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 […]
GMO: The Times, They Are Misleading
The New York Times article, Doubts About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops rightly argues that herbicide resistant GMOs haven’t reduced the use of chemicals on the farm. But by equating genetic modification with herbicide resistant plants, this article is misleading. Many of us agree there are problems with herbicide resistant plants, and that […]
The new outdoors: mosquitoes and ticks oh my
Cross-posted from Island Press With more and more cases of Zika virus being reported, some experts are calling for the use of DDT to combat the mosquitoes that transmit it. We asked Emily Monosson, author of Unnatural Selection and Evolution in a Toxic World to weigh in on the proposed use of pesticides, and what else we can do to […]
Unnatural Selection Reviewed in Publishers Weekly, National Nurse, LA Review of Books
Here are a few reviews of the new book, Unnatural Selection: Publishers Weekly: The power of evolution, toxicologist Monosson (Evolution in a Toxic World) demonstrates, is quite amazing: when strong selective pressure is coupled with short generation times, significant changes in populations can occur over very brief intervals…..more here National Nurse Magazine: This fascinating and thought-provoking book […]
Changing the world gene by gene
Here’s the skinny: evolution is happening all the time, all around us. Living things are like one roiling mass of DNA. OK, so that’s a little over the top. But DNA is far more dynamic than once believed, and our use of toxic chemicals — from antibiotics to pesticides — is making this abundantly clear. […]
