The Minamata Pietà

Minamata is a small Japanese fishing town living in the shadow of the chemical factory of the Chisso Corporation. When the factory began dumping large amounts of mercury in the bay in 1956 thousands of people began to develop symptoms of mercury poisoning. Almost all the towns cats went insane, throwing themselves into the ocean. Birds fell out of the sky. Panic gripped the city. In time, thousands of people would die from the poisoning.

An aide mops the brow of Chisso's president Shimada, after he performed the Japanese ritual of shame and apology: touching his forehead to the ground, at the close of a grueling day in court.

Eugene Smith's portrait of Minamata is an impassioned tale of environmental destruction, corporate neglect, and social responsibility. Together with his half-Japanese wife Aileen, he chronicled the fight against the industrial state, the direct action protests, the court cases, the stories of the afflicted families. Smith's achievement is remarkable as he was not a detached observer but an active participant in the story, his role both heroic and tragic. Measured by its social impact, his photobook, Minamata, is one of the most important pictorial documents in history.

William Eugene Smith took this photo, and together with the help of his wife and Ishikawa Takeshi, a local photographer, many other photos were taken of the effects of long term environmental industrial mercury poisoning on the local population.

Here, on the Japanese Island of Kyushu, we see an image of an outwardly healthy mother bathing her fetal-poisoned 16 year old daughter, Tomoko Uemura, grotesquely deformed, physically crippled and blind since birth due to environmental industrial mercury poisoning in the local Minamata, Japan, water supply.

This may well be the first environmental pollution photojournalism. Note also the invariable comparison to Michelangelo Buonarroti 's Pietà.

William Eugene Smith, who was severely beaten by goons hired by the offending chemical company, also received the Robert Capa Gold Medal for "photography requiring exceptional courage and enterprise."

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In the Footsteps of Gandhi

Let the seed be exhaustless, let it never get exhausted, let it bring forth seed next year. ~ Indian peasant prayer

An ant carrying a wild lettuce seed, a source of food for them that Monsanto seeks to destroy through use of its herbicides.

While Mahatma Gandhi is best remembered for his campaign to end British colonialism a half-century ago, the greater part of his life's work was devoted to renewing India's vitality and regenerating its culture from the ground up. He was a tireless champion of what he called swadeshi, or local self-sufficiency.

One of the most prominent of Gandhi's intellectual heirs is Vandana Shiva, a physicist and philosopher of science by training who has developed a considerable reputation as a champion of sustainability, self-determination, women's rights, and environmental justice. She has written more than a dozen books, including Monocultures of the Mind, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, and Biopiracy. She is also well-known in India for her grassroots efforts to preserve forests, organize women's networks, and protect local biodiversity.

Vandana Shiva is the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the 1998 Alfonso Comin award and the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. David Brower, the late environmentalist, once said that Shiva would be his choice for world president, if there were such a thing.

Interview with Vandana Shiva

The Gift of Food

In the words of the sacred texts of India, "The giver of food is the giver of life," and indeed of everything else, says Vandana Shiva.

One of my favourite images in India is the kolam, a design which a woman makes in front of her house. In the days of Pongal, which is the rice harvest festival in South India, I have seen women get up before dawn to make the most beautiful art work outside their houses, and it is always made with rice. The real reason is to feed the ants, but it is also a beautiful art form that has gone on from mother to daughter, and at festival time everyone tries to make the best kolam as their offering. Thus, feeding the ants and works of art are integrated.

The indica rice variety's homeland is a tribal area called Chattisgarh in India. It must be about fifteen years ago that I first went there. The people there weave beautiful designs of paddy, which they then hang outside their houses. I thought that this must be related to a particular festival, and I asked, "What festival is it for?" They said, "No, no, this is for the season when the birds cannot get rice grain in the fields." They were putting rice out for other species, in very beautiful offerings of art work.

Each time I see a supermarket, I see how every community and ecosystem's capacity to meet its food needs is being undermined, so that a few people in the world can experience food 'surpluses'.

But these are pseudo-surpluses leading to 820 million malnourished people, while many others eat too much and get ill or obese.

We are now working on technologies, based on genetic engineering, which accelerate this violence towards other beings. On my recent trip to Punjab, it suddenly hit me that they no longer have pollinators. Those technologically obsessed people are manipulating crops to put genes from the Bt toxin (the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis) into plants, so that the plant releases toxins at every moment and in every cell: in its leaves, its roots, its pollen. These toxins are being eaten by ladybirds and butterflies which then die.

We do not see the web of life that we are rupturing. We can only see the interconnections if we are sensitive to them. And when we are aware of them we immediately recognise what we owe to other beings: to the pollinators, to the farmers who have produced the food, and to the people who have nourished us when we could not nourish ourselves.

Grain giant Cargill controls seventy per cent of the food traded in the world; and they fix the prices. They sell the inputs, they tell the farmer what to grow, they buy cheaply from the farmer, then they sell it at high cost to consumers. In the process they poison every bit of the food chain. Instead of giving, they are thinking of how they can take out that last bit, from ecosystems, other species, the poor, the Third World.

"Our seeds are smart; we have found new technologies that prevent the bees from usurping the pollen."

Instead, Cargill says that the bees usurp the pollen - because Cargill have defined every piece of pollen as their property. And in a similar way, Monsanto said: "Through the use of Roundup we are preventing weeds from stealing the sunshine." The entire planet is energised by the life-giving force of the sun, and now Monsanto has basically said that it is Monsanto and the farmers in contract with Monsanto that, alone on the planet, have the right to sunshine - the rest of it is theft.

So what we are getting is a world which is absolutely the opposite to the 'giving of food'. Instead, it is the taking of food from the food chain and the web of life. Instead of gift we have profit and greed as the highest organising principle.

Resurgence

Resistance is Fertile

Most people don't realize that genetically engineered foods have quietly slipped into much of the North American food supply.



The Future of Food, a chilling documentary created by Deborah Koons Garcia, uses archival footage and interviews with farmers and agriculture experts to argue that GMO foods are jeopardizing our food safety.

At first, Garcia thought about doing a film on pesticides. But her research led her to the genetic revolution of agriculture. Biotech breakthroughs allowed the gene-splicing of plants from different species or even plants and animals to create crops that resist disease or can withstand pesticides, even the "terminator" gene that kills off crop seeds after one season.

"It became clear that GMOs are really a much bigger issue." That is, corporate control of the food system and the patenting of life.

She sets her stage with nostalgic, black-and-white shots of traditional farming, before the "green revolution" of fertilizers, chemical pest-killers and mono-cropping grew out of World War II weapons research. Agriculture became industry, and then recombinant DNA technology upped the ante in the 1990s. Chemical companies like Monsanto created Roundup Ready canola, and Bt corn with a spliced-in gene that makes its own insecticide. The chemical companies succeeded in first patenting their own GMO seeds, and then slapped patents on a huge number of crop seeds, patenting life forms for the first time without a vote of the people or Congress.

Garcia tells the David-versus-Goliath story of Saskatchewan grain farmer Percy Schmeiser. He's one of hundreds of grain farmers sued by Monsanto after the company's Roundup Ready canola drifted into his field. He fought the suit where many other farmers settled, but lost, and must pay Monsanto to plant his next crop from his own seed.

Ultimately, the film is a call to action -- for people to think more about the consequences of their food choices and to use their consumer power to push for labeling and regulation. Labeling might just drive GMO foods off the market, as it has in Europe.

"Someone needed to make this film, because if this technology isn't challenged and if this corporatization of our whole food system isn't stopped, at some point it will be too late."

There are seven parts to this film. Watch them all.

The Future of Food

Dinner at Beaver Cleaver's

The pet food recall brought home to some of us the changes in animal nutrition that have taken place since the mid-20^th century. Rover’s and Fluffy’s table scraps were replaced by scientifically-formulated slop and kibble that aimed to provide optimum, all-life-stages nutrition.

We know that this is a highly profitable way of reusing the waste from the human food industry. Ground up and rendered bits that are not fit for human consumption, including 4-D and euthanized animals, can be reformulated into big bucks chow. Kind of like enriching potato chips with vitamins and preservatives, only a lot worse.

Read Ann Martin’s “Food Pets Die For” to find out why Rover and Fluffy are running up such big vet bills.

Food Pets Die For

Anyway, to the topic at hand, it is no surprise that the agro-food chain presents us humans with more choices to become fat and sick too. Or not.

Here’s a vintage photo from Life Magazine of what the American poster family ate in the 1950's.

"In this remarkable picture of plenty, Steve Czekalinski, his wife Stephanie and his sons, Stephen and Henry, are surrounded by the food they will have eaten this year - 2 ½ tons of it. The photograph, made for the Du Pont company's magazine Better Living, is based on statistics on the American diet supplied by the Department of Agriculture."

The story is here:

Dinner in the 1950s

When Harold Evans was writing his history of the hundred years from 1889 to 1989, The American Century, he sifted through something like thirty thousand photographs, paintings, and cartoons, and chose the Czekalinski family picture.

"I am drawn to Alex Henderson’s carefully posed 1951 descriptive photograph of the Du Pont worker Steve Czekalinski with his wife and two boys. They are framed amid a cornucopia of good food, the 669 bottles of milk, 578 pounds of meat, 131 dozen fresh eggs, 440 pounds of fresh fruit, the coffee, cereal, flour, and so on that the typical American family enjoyed in the booming mid-fifties. It’s a materialistic and commercial image, and some will object to that, but the pursuit of plenty has been an American preoccupation—and the business of America is business, is it not? I admit I hesitated long before nominating the Czekalinski, but it also has something of the American character—it is an honest, unpretentious boast—and it suggests the central story of America in the twentieth century. Here is a man of Polish descent standing proudly and happily with his family, enjoying a prosperity never before known in the history of the world. A photograph that hints at a fulfillment of the American dream is not a bad way of marking the end of the millennium."

Image of the Century

More recently, CNN ran a pictorial comparison of what people around the world eat in a week and what they spend on their groceries.

Family Dinners Around the World

An interesting study of choices, particularly for those affluent enough to have so many.

The Deliverance of Dancing Bears

After a lifetime of brutal treatment, including walking on burning embers, Bulgaria's last three dancing bears will get to rest their paws at a mountain sanctuary, in an apparent end to the centuries-old performance tradition in the Balkans. Activists today purchased the freedom of Mima, 8, Misho, 19, and Svetla, 17.

Bulgaria is believed to have been the last country in the Balkans where dancing bears still performed, even though the practice was outlawed in 1993, when there were 20 to 30 such bears in the country.

The three bears will join another 20 brown bears on Mount Rila at a 12-hectare sanctuary for former dancing bears about 180 kilometres south of Sofia.

"Our aim is to make their life more bearable in their remaining years," Ioana Tomescu of the Austria-based Four Paws Foundation, which created the sanctuary, told The Associated Press.

Throughout the Balkans, families, mostly among the Roma community, have long earned a living through performing bears. But the techniques to train them led the practice to be banned, and animal rights activists have moved to find the bears new homes.

Because dancing bears are illegal, authorities could simply have taken Mima, Misho and Svetla away from their owners in the eastern village of Getsovo.

Instead, the Four Paws Foundation decided to pay for their freedom by giving their owners small grants to set up new businesses. It did not reveal how much was paid. In return, the owners signed declarations pledging never to take up the bear dancing business again.

The Deliverance of Dancing Bears,
by Elizabeth Stanley

ASPCA Henry Bergh Children's Book Awards and 1995 Australian Picture Book of the Year winner, this thought-provoking story presents the plight of the dancing bears of Turkey and Greece. The author tells the story of a captive bear whose dreams of freedom sustain her, even while being forced to perform in a Turkish marketplace by a cruel and angry keeper. During the quiet hours when she is confined to her cage, the bear imagines a different life in which she is free to wander through mountain streams and sleep lazily with her cubs. It is a kind-hearted peasant who liberates the bear and who reminds all of those watching of an important moral lesson about dignity and life.

Stanley saw her first "dancing bear" in 1979 in Athens and decided then to write a book to challenge the assumption that men could cruelly use wild animals to make money. In 1992 she took her written text to Turkey to take photos and to make sketches for the artwork. In the same year The World Society for the Protection of Animals effected the release and the return to the wild of all chained bears in Turkey. Today there are no dancing bears in Greece or Turkey. Today, it is the last Bulgarian dancing bears who have been freed.

But a recent WSPA report has revealed that the trade in dancing bears is still alive and well in India.

A Fine Wee Fankle

Into the Glaswegian staidness of our psychiatry centre,
seminar room adoring with trainees,
came Ronnie (my namesake) Laing
of apostolic hairline and oracular eyes,
the slight man who recast schizophrenia
from a chasm to a plateau
where its sufferers looked down with a terrible status.
Author of The Divided Self,
his own Scottish childhood barren and cold,
his topic that day was "Birth Trauma"
begun in a defensive brogue:
'There'rr those who accyooz me of bein' an anti-psycheye-iatrist,
But in feck, nuthin' coold be ferrther from th'trooth.'

Beside him sat Dr. Gordon, late of the U.K.,
whose coal-miner build had burrowed
to full professorship and could crush
Laing with a single blow,
whose beefy arm
only ten minutes into the talk
as the great man began uncontrollably to sob,
and the rest of us froze in silence,
reached out to comfort.
"There, there, now. It'll be alright."
Master of "inner self versus outer",
Laing shook off the hug,
and invoking the patron saint of peaceful birth Fréderik Leboyer,
soldiered on, almost an hour.
'What d'they groo on th'stony soil o' Scotland?'
--the old joke--'They groo men!"
Yet here was one such man
from across the stormy Atlantic
showing us that greatness can unravel
like three-ply tissue,
to honour an illness
people would rather dismiss
and delivering us
from illusions of invincible fame
with his own full-throated cry.

Ron Charach, "R.D. Laing"
from "Dungenessque"

Society for Langian Studies

Unnatural Selection

O Devayani, you thought they would never die.
You bought a bag of tomatoes in October,
and ate most of them
half ripe, as they always are,
from the grocery store.

But -- having momentarily lost
the taste for tomatoes --
you set two aside to ripen.
Week after week they remained
on top of the refrigerator,
not quite ripe,
yellowish-red, their skins firm,
their flesh smooth.
They didn't ripen and they didn't rot.
Months went by,
they remained the same as the day

you put them atop the refrigerator.
You laughed with your friends about them,
you speculated on the horrors
of genetically altered foodstuffs.
You thought of the half dozen you had eaten.
Would they stay in your stomach

month after month,
unchanged, forever, like the two tomatoes
on top of the fridge?
You read an article that said irradiating
vegetables
keeps them in a state of not quite ripe.
It didn't say forever, but...
Irradiated food. One month,
two months
three months
four months

five months --
possibly in the sixth month,
first one and then the other tomato
began to rot.
They soon began to smell abominably.
Is this food?
Two tomatoes,

two immortal tomatoes.
O Devayani,
do you wonder
that you fear the sustenance
of this society:
fear, anxiety, permanence, insurance,
the desire to forego change
and death?
O Devayani,
a wise woman would fear to eat
anything at all.

Two Tomatoes, by Jan Haag

FlavrSavr tomatoes, thanks to Monsanto and friends. StarLink corn too. But their best shot was the Terminator.

Corporate multinationals like Monsanto could change the way farmers around the world have operated for millennia. Bent on controlling the food chain, their "technology protection system" rendered seeds sterile. It would protect their intellectual property - mostly herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. Farmers would be forced to buy their seed at every planting.

So much for the myth that commercial biotechnology's aim is to Solve World Hunger.

Dinner at the New Gene Cafe

Seeds of Deception

NDP tables a ban on Terminator seeds and technology

In related news, NDP agriculture critic Alex Atamanenko introduced a bill on May 31 banning "terminator technology" and committing Canada to sustaining farmers and the farming industry.

According to Jack Layton, "For generations, the world's farmers have harvested seeds from their crops to replant for the next season. Yet this practice, which is crucial to farmers both here in Canada and in developing countries, is being threatened by multi-national corporations who seek to control the world's food supply. We must not let this happen in Canada."

Details of the campaign to support Bill C-448 and transparent GMO labelling at the following links:

• It’s time to put Canadian farmers first


• Canadians demand Harper support ban on terminator seeds


• Alex Atamanenko's site and Bill C-448


• Genetically modified food: No more secrets

The Pet Food Recall That Wouldn't Die

Melamine, cyanuric acid, aminopterin, amilorine, amiloride, and now acetaminophen. What is this stuff doing in pet food anyway, and what else have they simply not reported yet?

According to Pet Connection, the FDA is investigating imported Chinese wheat gluten, corn gluten, corn meal, soy protein, rice bran and rice protein concentrate, in both the human- and pet-food systems. These products are widely used in human food production, in breads, pastas, "meat"-substitutes, pizza, baby formula, protein drinks and bars and more. The tainted pet food has also been fed to hogs, poultry and farmed fish.

The first recall had more than 60 million containers of cuts and gravy style food that turned out to have wheat gluten tainted with melamine, which is used in the manufacture of plastic countertops, cleaning agents, glue and fertilizer. The products were all made by Menu Foods under almost 100 different brand names at all price points. Subsequent recalls have included dry foods, and foods containing rice protein concentrate and corn gluten. At time of this writing, companies continue to pull products.

The Veterinary Information Network’s extrapolation indicates that pet deaths are in the range of 2,000 to 7,000, affected pets in the tens of thousands, with veterinary costs in the range of $2 million to $20 million.

To find out what foods have been recalled, what to do if your pet is sick, and how to prevent trouble, check out Itchmo's pet food recall portal by clicking the big blue Pet Food Recall button on the Blogroll on the right-hand sidebar.

Alternative pet foods are emerging as the primary beneficiaries of the recent pet food recall crisis, and could enjoy double-digit growth rates over the next two years, according to a new study by market research firm Packaged Facts. Packaged Facts estimates there will be a brand shift in the market worth $1.3 billion to $4.3 billion in pet food sales. The report identifies the main beneficiaries in this brand-switching trend as "high-quality pet foods chosen as alternatives to traditional brands".

Packaged Facts study

Ed Bartram's Precambrian Series

"The Thirty Thousand Island archipelago, stretching along the northeastern shore of Georgian Bay, is the source of my inspiration as a printmaker and painter. This bay of Lake Huron is so large it could be considered the sixth Great Lake," says Canadian artist, Ed Bartram.

"Along this island-studded coast, glaciers have scraped away the earthen mantle, revealing the ancient Precambrian landscape. This rock, older than life itself, provides a record of the primordial processes of creation. I have been most influenced by the banded metamorphic gneiss. A great upheaval seems to have occurred, causing the rusty, pink rocks of the southern archipelago to merge wiht the black and grey rock of the more northerly coast, creating intricate striated patterns. These rocks have been liquified by the great forces within the earth, causing various layers to intrude upwards or to fold and tilt at odd angles. Other layers have shifted and cracked along fault lines, creating dynamic abstract structures. These formations in turn have been smoothed and kept free of more recent deposits by the continual polishing and cleaning action of waves."

Art in Killarney Park

Don McKay wins Griffin Poetry Prize

Don McKay is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Strike/Slip for which he won the Griffin Poetry Prize on June 6. He has won two Governor General's Awards for Poetry and has been shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, most recently for Camber: Selected Poems, which was a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. McKay is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country.

But close up it is more likely to be the commotion of stress lines swirling within each slab that clutches at the heart—each stone a pent rage, an agon. None of the uniform grey of limestone, that prehistoric version of ready-mix concrete, in which each laid-down layer adds to the accumulated weight that homogenizes its predecessors. Think instead of Münch’s The Scream with its contour lines of terror; then subtract the face. Or you could turn on the weather channel to observe those irresponsible isobars scrawling across the planet. Imagine our ancestors tracing these surfaces, whorled fingertip to gnarled rock, reading the earth-energy they had levered into the air. They had locked the fury into the fugue and car crash into the high-school prom. They engineered this dangerous dance. Better stop here. Better spend some time.

-- Strike/Slip 39

“McKay doesn’t write about natural science so much as through it, using its terms and principles to explore the science of human nature. A poem about a hike through ‘the broken prose of the bush roads’ gradually, gracefully metamorphoses into a meditation on desire. . . . These exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins.”

-- New York Times Book Review

Rachel Carson's Centenary

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and nature writer whose landmark book, Silent Spring, is often credited with having launched the global environmental movement. Silent Spring had an immense effect in the United States, where it spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy.



Scientists such as American Cyanamid’s Robert White-Stevens (who wrote “If man were to follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”), chemical companies, and other critics attacked the data and interpretation in the book. 


Some went further to attack Carson’s scientific credentials because her speciality was marine biology and zoology, not the field of biochemistry.


Former Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson reportedly concluded she was “probably a Communist.”

Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the Earth are never alone or weary of life. — Rachel Carson