Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The glyphosate spin campaign
FERN and The Nation
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared that glyphosate — the most widely used pesticide in the world and the main ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup — is a probable human carcinogen. More than 200 people sued Monsanto in a federal case now centered in California, claiming Roundup caused them to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a common cancer of the blood. More than 1,000 people have filed similar suits in other states. But as Rene Ebersole reveals in “Mass Exposure,” produced by FERN and The Nation, Monsanto has spent years “manipulating the science around glyphosate’s health impacts — in essence, … following the playbook written by Big Tobacco.” Ebersole shows the cozy relationship between Monsanto’s higher ups and the EPA, which is currently reviewing the chemical. As she explains, glyphosate isn’t just a problem for farmers and farmworkers. It’s so commonly used that one study found glyphosate residue in 90 percent of samples taken from pregnant women in the Midwest.
Legalization could ruin the Napa Valley of pot
FERN and Grist
For more than 40 years, the Emerald Triangle — “a densely forested region of labyrinthine back roads, secret valleys, and perennial creeks in Northern California” — has been a great place to grow an illegal but highly desired product: marijuana. But this area is now coming under massive pressure with the state’s legalization of recreational weed, reports Stett Holbrook in FERN’s story, “The high price of cheap weed,” published with Grist. As bigger growers move in, small-scale operations will likely be edged out unless they can successfully brand themselves as boutique producers, the pot-world equivalent of a fine wine or a farm-to-table dinner, that would allow them to charge higher prices. If that marketing scheme fails, Fred Krissman, a Humboldt State University anthropologist who conducts field studies of cannabis growers in the region, predicts “massive increases in unemployment, poverty, child hunger — a disaster.”
The coming Bananapocalypse
The Washington Post
“An insidious fungus known as fusarium wilt has wiped out tens of thousands of acres of Cavendish plantations in Australia and Southeast Asia over the past decade,” writes Paul Tullis. The fungus has already established itself in Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America, the source of almost every banana eaten in the U.S., is almost certainly next. Researchers in Australia are desperately trying to halt the pathogen, by planting thousands of Cavendish banana trees that carry genes from a wild relative that is immune to the disease. The Cavendish variety makes up 99 percent of bananas sold in stores because it’s both sweet and sturdy enough to transport. And yet, if the Australian experiment flops, we might be looking at a future in which bananas all but disappear from grocery stores.
What is a ‘species’?
Wired
When scientists rediscovered the long lost Lord Howe Island stick insect — a six-inch creature with a sizable abdomen and spiny legs — they weren’t sure what they were looking at. The arthropod was thought to be extinct, wiped out by an invasion of rats on its native Lord Howe Island off the coast of Australia. And while the mating pair discovered on Ball’s Island,12 miles away, looked a lot like the Lord Howe version, it had more spines and a chunkier body. So was it the same? Or a different species altogether? It turns out that just defining “species” is way more difficult than you’d think, with at least 53 different concepts of the word used in scientific literature. Increasingly, scientists are relying on DNA to decide. That was the case with the Lord Howe Island stick insect, as DNA from museum specimens proved that the recent captures were indeed the real McCoy—er, Lord Howe.
Another hurricane victim: honeybees
Vice
Hurricane Maria’s violent winds not only wiped out 80 percent of Puerto Rico’s crops, but it denuded the island’s trees, leaving domesticated honeybees scrounging trash piles and empty soda cans for something to eat. Even if farmers can manage to replant their pineapple and coffee fields this year, they might see a far lower yield without honeybees around to pollinate. The wind can do some of the work, as can other pollinator species like wasps, but honeybees are the best candidates for the job. Puerto Ricans have started using Facebook to urge people to leave sugar out for the bees.
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