BAMBAŞKA BİR TABİP

Bir gün mubarek bir zat bir akıl hastahânesinin önünden geçerken bir tabîbin havanda ilaç dövdüğünü görmüş.
“Çok günâhkârım, benim hastalığım için de ilacınız var mı?” diye tabîbe sormuş:
Hastahânenin tabîbi daha cevab vermeden, konuşmaları dinleyen bir akıl hastası pencereden Bâyezid-i Bistâmî Hazretleri’ne doğru şöyle seslenmiş:
“Ey kardeş, tövbe köküyle istiğfâr yaprağını karıştır.
Kalb havanında kuvvetli îmân tokmağıyla döv.
İnsaf eleğinden geçir, göz yaşıyla yoğur.
Aşk fırınında pişir ve sabah akşam bol bol ye.
Göreceksin, inşâallah hastalığından eser kalmayacak!”
Bâyezid-i Bistâmî Hazretleri’nin gözleri dolmuş ve şöyle demiş:
“Yâ Rabbî! Şu dünya hastahânesinde ne tabîbler var!..”

Güzelliğin On Par’etmez – Aşık Veysel Şatırlıoğlu

Güzelliğin on par’etmez
Bu bendeki aşk olmasa
Eğlenecek yer bulaman
Gönlümdeki köşk olmasa

Tabirin sığmaz kaleme
Derdin dermandır yareme
İsmin yayılmaz aleme
Aşıklarda meşk olmasa

Kim okurdu kim yazardı
Bu düğümü kim çözerdi
Koyun kurt ile gezerdi
Fikir başka başk’olmasa

Güzel yüzün görülmezdi
Bu aşk bende dirilmezdi
Güle kıymet verilmezdi
Aşık ve maşuk olmasa

Senden aldım bu feryadı
Bu imiş dünyanın tadı
Anılmazdı Veysel adı
O sana aşık olmasa

Consumers want soap that’s safe

This time around, market pressure is beating regulators to the punch. It turns out consumers don’t want a chemical in our soap that disrupts hormones and messes with our immune systems, thyroid function and (for the males among us) sperm production.

Especially when studies show that washing up with plain old soap and water prevents disease just as well.

This final round of concern flared up a few years back when the Centers for Disease Control measured traces of triclosan in the bodies of 3 out of 4 Americans over age five. With such widespread exposure, public health officials started taking another look at possible effects, and found “valid concerns about the effect of repetitive daily human exposure to these antiseptic ingredients.”

Studies show that washing with plain old soap & water prevents disease just as well.

This got politicians into the act. Last year, Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) asked FDA to get back to work on those regulations they started nearly 40 years ago. He also called for banning triclosan in products that touch food, hand soaps, and things marketed to children.

Then public interest lawyers at Natural Resource Defense Council filed a lawsuit last year as well, also pressing FDA to finish the job on triclosan.

Decisive action to protect public health! 40 years later…

EPA did their own review this past spring, and outraged consumers around the country (including thousands of PAN supporters) weighed in with concerns about triclosan.

In addition to the health effects mentioned above, commenters highlighted evidence that such widespread use of the pesticide undermines the effectiveness of antibiotics, as bacteria morph to develop resistance.

So four decades after identifying its potential danger, and after some companies have already begun to pull the pesticide themselves, it looks like regulators might actually put the official brakes on triclosan. Look for FDA action on the pesticide sometime in the coming months.

Better late than never I guess, though wouldn’t it have been nice if they finished the job 40 years ago? That way most of us — including our kids — wouldn’t be carrying this hormone-disrupting pesticide around in our bodies every day.

Engineering food for whom?

Warning! Nina Federoff — former “Science and Technology Advisor” to the U.S. State Department and well-known genetic engineering apologist — is back on her soapbox. In an Op Ed published in the New York Timeslast week, Federoff strings together one blazing falsehood after another, extolling the virtues of a technology that much of the rest of the world has rightly rejected. What is behind her evangelical commitment to this particular technology? Let’s take a look.

Conflict of interest?

Thanks to Tom Philpott, we know that for the 5-year period before she joined the State Department, Federoff served on the scientific advisory board at Evogene. This Israeli agriculture-biotech firm works closely with Monsanto, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Bayer CropScience, Syngenta and others. She also served on the board of Sigma-Aldrich, a transnational corporation that provides services and products — including transgenic animals — to agricultural biotech companies. And she herself was one of the early patent-holders on transgenic technologies, back in the 1980s.

Federoff was one of the early patent-holders on transgenic technologies, back in the 1980s.

These solid corporate credentials proved just the ticket into the G.W. Bush Administration’s State Department; tapped initially by Condoleeza Rice, she was kept on by Hillary Clinton. During the same period (2007-2010), Federoff also served as the Science and Technical Advisor to the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. USAID works with Monsanto and other partners to develop and commercialize GE crops, advancing U.S. trade interests in opening new markets abroad for these products.

Feeding the world? Or feeding U.S. geopolitical interests?

Corporate connections aside, it is entirely possible that Federoff truly believes in the technologies and products associated with high external input, industrial agriculture as the panacea for the world’s woes. Unfortunately, many (though certainly not all) molecular biologists and geneticists have a disciplinary habit of thinking in such narrow, reductionist terms that they miss a lot of historical and political context.

For instance, often missed in such myopic preoccupations with what’s on the other end of a microscopic gaze is the cold hard fact that the Green Revolution’s origins in 1940s Mexico were not really about feeding the world; Mexico was a food exporter at the time. Rather, the aims included stabilizing restive rural populations in our neighbor to the south, and making friends with a government that at the time was selling supplies to the World War II Axis powers and confiscating oil fields held by Standard Oil (a funding source for for the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the key architects of the Green Revolution).

The dark underbelly of the Green Revolution — how it was driven largely by the political, economic and trade agendas of the U.S., then taken up by key partners including the World Bank and international research centers, is brilliantly dissected by historian Nick Cullather in his new book, The Hungry World, recently reviewed by Tom Philpott in Mother Jones. (Note to self: send copy to Federoff.)

Today, the geo-political agenda behind the first Green Revolution, combined with a blind preference for silver-bullet solutions to complex global problems, has led to what Sussex University researcher Sally Brooks calls a “lock in” of genetics-led strategies that fail to meet the diverse needs of people on the ground. And hence, we are forced to read too many ill-informed commercials for corporate technologies — like the one by Federoff — published by news outlets that one would hope might know better.

“Sorry, my dogma ate my homework”

As the kids say now, Federoff gets a FAIL for her latest rant. She provides no empirical evidence to back up her sweeping claims, and blithely ignores the abundance of reports from U.N. agencies and independent scientific studies that have — over the past several years — consistently concluded that GE technologies are unlikely to reduce either hunger or poverty, but do pose a serious threat to food and livelihood security.

For the empirically inclined, here’s a quick roundup of the evidence:

• Meeting the climate, water, energy and food challenges of the 21^st century requires investing in agroecology; in contrast, GE technologies are unlikely to get us where we need to go (concludes the UN-led IAASTD).
• GE crops neither increase yield nor provide nutritional benefits. They have led to a massive increase in herbicide use and epidemic of herbicide-resistant superweeds;
• GE won’t feed the world (see Anna Lappé’s Civil Eats rebuttal of Federoff and her Foreign Policy dispatch of the ardent GE-proponent, Robert Paarlberg);
• Agroecological farming can double food production, save our soil, protect biodiversity and help farmers adapt to climate change; and
• Organic farming and reliance on traditional seed systems is the best option for achieving food security in Mexico, Gaza and across Africa; oh, and it’s more energy efficient too.

This is not the first time that the New York Times has completely missed the mark in identifying the causes of world hunger — which makes it awfully difficult to identify the solutions.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman

Are We Ready for Compostable Packaging?

NPR’s Marketplace did a great piece recently on compostable packaging.
The industry is booming.  Growing at about 19% each year, it’s reached $130 million globally.
But does it do us any good?  Evidently not, unless you have an industrial composter.  Throw most “compostable” packaging in the trash, and it acts like trash.  It won’t compost but will instead sit in a landfill for decades to come.  Throw it in your compost heap at home and it won’t compost either, unless you’re using the high heat typical of industrial composters.
Compostable, yes. Composted? Probably not.

And yet even industrial composters aren’t easy to find.  So what’s the point?
NPR seemed somewhat skeptical of compostable packaging, but I take its growth as a good sign.  There are two steps to getting us to compost more of our waste: making our waste compostable and providing a means to compost it.  We’re clearly already well on the way to tackling the first part.  Once we’ve done this, it will make a lot more sense for someone to invest the resources necessary to take the second step.  Probably, we need some sort of new collection or repository system, and who’s ever going to create one of those in a world where no packaging is compostable to begin with?
So, for now, NPR does have a point that we should be circumspect in priding ourselves on our latest purchase of a compostable fork.  That fork will probably just sit in a landfill anyway.  But it may well be the predecessor of billions of disposable forks that will one day compost back into something far finer than landfill–rich, hearty soil.  And that can’t happen until someone first markets a compostable fork.