Earth Day facts and goals for the future
Earth Day, an annual event officially designated on April 22nd, was started in 1970 by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson. This day in history was created in protest to the unbridled corporate and consumer activities that were contributing to excessive environmental pollution. Of special concern to Senator Nelson were the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California.
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World’s oceans turning acidic at an unprecedented rate
A new study in the journal Science reports that today’s ocean acidification rate may be unprecedented compared with the last four major extinctions in the Earth’s 300-million year geologic record.
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Genetically modified corn losing resistance to major pest
Bt corn, one of the nation’s most widely produced crops, is thought to be losing its natural resistance to the western corn rootworm, a pest that feeds on the roots of corn and could potentially wreak economic havoc if it continues to spread.
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EarthTalk: What became of the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act?; and Mississippi River floods and organic farms
Dear EarthTalk: Can you explain the 2010 Safe Cosmetics Act? What does it purport to do and has it been signed into law?
– Megan Wilson, Austin, TX
The Safe Cosmetics Act was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives in July 2010 by Democrats Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin. But it never got past committee reviews and thus never came up for a vote.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has only limited
say in what cosmetics manufacturers can and cannot
put into their products. And the cosmetics industry
has essentially been regulating itself for some three
decades. But critics argue that self-regulation isn’t
appropriate for an industry trading in potentially
carcinogenic products.
Photo credit: Jupiter Images, Thinkstock
The proposed bill aimed to ensure that all personal care products for sale in the U.S. would be free of harmful ingredients and that all ingredients would be fully disclosed. The bill would’ve given the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) the authority to prohibit the use of certain ingredients, including carcinogens and reproductive and developmental toxins, to recall products that fail to meet safety standards, and to require product labels to name each ingredient.
The FDA has only limited say in what cosmetics manufacturers can and cannot put into their products. And the cosmetics industry has essentially been regulating itself for some three decades, and would like to keep it that way. In response to failed efforts in the 1970s to force the FDA to regulate cosmetics more like drugs—with required pre-market safety assessments—the industry decided to take matters into its own hands, creating the Cosmetics Industry Review Panel to judge the safety of various ingredients.
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The next agricultural revolution may be sparked by fungi
The use of fungi on crops may help to greatly increase food production for the growing needs of the planet without the need for massive amounts of fertilizers.
Mycorrhizal fungi, a type of fungus that can live in symbiosis with plant roots, help plants grow larger by acquiring the essential nutrient phosphate, a key component of fertilizers, for the plant.
“The United Nations conservatively estimates that by the year 2050 the global human population is expected to reach over 9 billion. Feeding such a population represents an unprecedented challenge since this goes greatly beyond current global food production capacity,” says Ian Sanders of the University of Lusanne, Switzerland.
Sanders spoke at the 111th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in New Orleans yesterday and told the audience that phosphate levels in the soil are rapidly being depleted and that in most tropical soils, plants have enormous difficulty in obtaining phosphate.
Increasing demand for the nutrient is driving up prices and farmers are having to spend a huge amount of money on phosphate fertilizer. Some countries are now stockpiling phosphate to feed their populations in the future, according to Sanders.
Recent biotechnological breakthroughs now allow scientists to produce massive quantities of the fungus that can be suspended in high concentrations in a gel for easy transportation.
Sanders and his colleagues are currently testing the effectiveness of this gel on crops in the country of Colombia where they have discovered that with the gel they can produce the same yield of potato crop with less than half the amount of phosphate fertilizers.
“While our applied research is focused on Colombia it could be applied in many other tropical regions of the world,” says Sanders.
One-third of world’s food lost or wasted
Approximately 1.3 billion tons – or about one-third – of all the world’s food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted, according to a new report compiled by The Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology (SIK) for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Important facts about global food waste from the report include:
- Food waste is a much bigger problem in industrialized countries, where a significant amount of food is thrown away by households and retailers, usually still fit for consumption.
- In developing countries, food waste is attributed to financial, managerial and technical limitations in harvesting techniques, storage and cooling facilities in difficult climatic conditions, infrastructure, packaging and marketing systems.
- Fruits and vegetables have the highest rates of wastage.
To reduce food loss, the report recommends improving harvesting techniques and post-harvest logistics; re-thinking quality standards that over-emphasize appearance; and changing consumers’ attitudes to buy only within their means, instead of falling prey to the popular “2-for-1″ marketing promotions. Specifically, consumers fail to properly plan their food purchases and tend to discard food because it wasn’t consumed before the expiration date.
U.S. corn belt experiencing rapidly depleting topsoil
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) reports that Iowa farms are rapidly losing topsoil, up to 12 times faster than government estimates. Their report is based on data accumulated by Iowa State University (ISU), whose methods provide an unprecedented degree of precision in monitoring soil erosion.
EWG provided additional data in their report based on aerial surveys they conducted over the affected regions, along with information gathered from interviews with Corn Belt experts, that indicate soil erosion and polluted runoff are likely far worse than even the disturbing ISU numbers suggest.
“What is happening on Iowa farm fields is shocking but goes largely unnoticed,” said Craig Cox, who manages EWG’s agriculture programs from its Ames, Iowa office. Cox is the lead author of Losing Ground.
“We’ve grown complacent thinking we have the soil erosion problem under control, but instead it looks as if we are losing ground in our decades-old fight against this most fundamental and damaging problem in agriculture,” Cox said.
See the full report here: “Losing Ground” by Environmental Working Group