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Garden As If Your Life Depended On It, Because It Does

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Alternet - Ellen LaConte Mar 30'11 There are at least five reasons why more of us should take up the spade, make some compost, and start gardening with a vengeance. Details here. Canadian organic garden

Farmers and Seed Distributors Sue Monsanto

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CBAN - Parkside, SK- March 30, 2011  Over 60 family farmers,  seed businesses and organic agricultural  organizations in Canada and the US, have  filed a lawsuit against Monsanto Company  over genetically modified (GM) seed. Details here. A field of alfalfa in Idaho

BP Spill's Impact Could be Much Worse Than Expected

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Margaret Munro,  Ottawa Citizen Mar 30 VANCOUVER — The death toll from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill goes far beyond the animal corpses washing ashore, says a report that warns that whale and dolphin deaths may be 50 times higher than believed. Read more:  This explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil platform sparked the nightmare. PUBLISHER'S NOTE: Some time back, I posted this article with some trepidation. Was it over the top? You decide! l.p.

Russian Boreal Forest Being Driven North, Diminishing

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Joshua S Hill - PlanetSave Mar 29-11 Russia’s boreal forest, the largest continuous expanse in the world, is undergoing a large-scale shift in vegetation types as a direct result of the warming climate. Details here.

Time for Plan B: Our Civilization Is on the Edge of a Systemic Breakdown

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AlterNet/by Scott Thill - Mar 29'11 Lester Brown (l.) talks about whether our civilization can survive the mounting global stresses of rising pollution, starvation,  food prices, water shortages and failed states. Details here.

Canada's Main Climate Skeptic Continues to Mislead

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Dear Editor, I am disappointed that a largely discredited individual like Tim Ball (r.) was afforded close to a full page in the March 15th Roblin Review ("People need to understand plants need C02"),  in which to air his negative views about climate change. The book, "Climate Cover Up - the crusade to deny global warming," describes Ball this way. "There are few 'skeptical scientists' with as little experience and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor, Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist, per se, Dr. Ball quit his position at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science." Dr. Ball is actually being sued by a Canadian climate scientist, Andrew Weaver, for libel. Dr. Weaver is a leading author with the Nobel-prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A

"Planet in Peril" Challenges Conservative Think-Tank on Food Regulation

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by Larry Powell I'd like to correct several statements in a recent article by Cam Dahl of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy that are either misleading, inaccurate, or both. In it, he insisted that Canada's current system of food regulation is "efficient, science-based and safe." Sadly, history tells us something quite different. Almost five years ago, a bright, dedicated young graduate student at the University of Manitoba, Jennifer Magoon, (above)  found statistically significant links between the amount of farm pesticides used in certain regions of this province and the incidence of several health problems in infants. These included severe birth disorders including spina bifida, Down syndrome, cleft palate, lower birth weights, respiratory distress and jaundice. There were eye disorders, too, including retinal degeneration and cataracts. Magoon's findings were based on health records of tens of thousands of people living in rural Manitoba. Her res