The Beef Trust, 1910. Courtesy Wikipedia. During my 25-year service with the US Environmental Protection Agency, I had the nagging suspicion there must have been a deleterious legacy, somewhere, that guided EPA.  Metaphysical assumptions I tried, but could not reconcile, the mission of the agency – protect human health and the environment – with its timid actions. Yes, agribusiness was powerful and exercised considerable influence on Capitol Hill, the White House and the EPA.  I simply could not explain the callous mindset of willfully approving the poisoning of the food and drinking water of the entire country. How could such a monstrous crime take place, I kept asking myself and others. It could not simply be a result of EPA irresponsibility under both Republican and Democratic administrations. And it could not happen because science certified farmers’ sprays innocent of all harm. On the contrary, studies funded by EPA and others have been connecting farmer...

Mississippi River has been draining about 47 percent of the country. The load of pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and other pollution is so heavy that large areas of the Gulf of Mexico are dead zones. Courtesy Wikipedia. The year 2018 is coming to an end with a deeply divided government and people. The Democrats won the House, promising to paralyze the remaining two years of the highly contested reign of Donald Trump. The government may  shut down  just before Christmas because Trump wants money for a wall to keep Mexicans and Latin Americans out of the USA.  The American schism Trump, a hotel and gulf-course businessman, has been spearheading the schism in America. It’s as if he welcomes confrontation and controversy. His connections with Russia, China, the immigrants, the media, North Korea, and his staff at the White House and the government are generating enormous  corruption  and  chaos . Trump caters to interest groups like the Evan...

Argostoli, capital of Cephalonia. This is where I went to high school. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos. I was born and grew up in a mountain village in the Greek island of Cephalonia. This island was part of the kingdom of Odysseus in late second millennium BCE. In modern times, Cephalonia and the rest of the Ionian islands have been the highway of Greece to Western Europe. The survival of ancient Greek thought and the link to the West explain why my grandmother Demetra was a pediatrician. My mother kept reminding me I had to go abroad to study medicine. German occupation of Greece But the country I remember from my teenage years in the 1950s was desperately poor. The Germans, like their Goth ancestors, had systematically looted and destroyed Greece. Their WWII occupation was full of atrocities and barbarisms. Early uneasiness Despite the hard times in post-WWII Greece, I received a good high school education. I loved Homer and the classics. I knew I was intimate...

Child Labor (Cranberry Bog) by Arthur Rothstein, 1939. Brooklyn Museum. Courtesy Wikipedia. Oligarchy is bad for children’s health All past civilizations protected children. It was self-evident that healthy children assured continuity, security and happiness.  However, machine-powered civilizations give the illusion corporations, oligarchies, and the government control everything. Children fade in this confused vision. The disproportional power of the few dehumanizes everything, including children.   Oligarchs control medicine, drugs, chemicals, farming and politics. If their products harm children, their lobbyists, scientists and politicians cover up the truth.   Delaney Clause  In the United States, this oligarchic control has flooded the country with thousands of chemicals, most of them untested and potentially harmful to life. This fact angered Democratic Congressman James Delaney from New York. He found it intolerable that A...

Monarch butterfly. Photo: Evaggelos Vallianatos. Occupy Health In May 2018, I met Susan Downs at an international conference at the University of Patras, Greece. She is a physician and a fearless documentary producer. Her motto is “Occupy Health.” The moment Downs realized I was the author of  Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA , she invited me for a brief taped interview. She also phoned her colleagues at the Silicon Valley Health Institute in Palo Alto, California, and the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, California, and convinced them to invite me for talks. They did.  On Thursday, November 15, 2018, I spoke at the  Silicon Valley Health Institute  and on Friday, November 16, 2018, I spoke at the Commonwealth Club . Stories from the past In both presentations I summarized my knowledge and experience. I worked on Capitol Hill for two years and for the US Environmental Protection Agency for twenty-five years. I su...

Husband and wife with their children in front of their house in rural Northeast Brazil. The wife is holding her little daughter born with a tiny brain possibly caused by the release of the genetically modified mosquitoes and the adding to drinking water of the teratogenic insecticide, pyriproxyfen. Courtesy of Future History Films. Agribusiness power The twentieth first century continues the toxic business as usual of the twentieth century. Agribusiness, part of the military-industrial-complex, is king. The new weapon is spraying the world with mostly badly tested chemical poisons. And the strategy is the control of the natural world and societies.  Few people know exactly what these chemical poisons do. Occasionally, they do kill insects and weeds. But they do much more, mostly harm. Scientists have revealed certain facts about those invisible effects. But agribusiness nullifies the significance of that knowledge. It does that by buying agricultural universities, the...