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...