A poison, by most people's definition, is anything that will kill you within, say, a few hours. I grew up watching John Wayne and Clint Eastwood westerns where a well-placed rattlesnake would terrify. Or maybe a tarantula, the bite of which would kill you instantly. Or arsenic. These days the murder movies always seem to include anthrax, or ricin or sarin, or crime fiction's favorite, cyanide. All those poi ...

Those of us concerned about the approval of genetically modified alfalfa by the Obama administration have been existing in alternate states of gloom and anger in the past week. It's easy to feel like Monsanto and the rest of the chemical industry is flexing its prodigious financial muscle and, in the process, bankrupting every smidgen of the environmental movement's progress of the past half century. We'll ...

As was reported last Thursday, the United States Department of Agriculture ignored the advice of hundreds of thousands of farmers, scientists, elected officials and concerned citizens and approved genetically modified alfalfa for planting this spring. The only way to stop this now is to get President Obama involved with an executive order to stop the practice. A letter and a call to action can be found here ...

Several New Hampshire legislators have followed the lead of Maine and New Jersey in sponsoring a bill to protect children from toxic lawn and garden pesticides around schools. The bill, 495-FN, reads as follows: STATE OF NEW HAMPSHIRE In the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand Eleven AN ACT relative to the prevention of the use of pesticides on the grounds of child day care facilities, schools, and state parks. B ...

Earlier this week we reported on USDA research that further implicated synthetic nicotine pesticides in the widespread bee deaths that have been categorized as Colony Collapse Disorder. A report out of a major California university today reached the same conclusion: http://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/jan/28/another-pesticide-link-vanishing-honeybees/ ...

U.S. Lags Far Behind in Pesticide Protection Researchers Propose GMOs for 2,4-D Resistant Plants In May of this year 20 years will have passed since Hudson, Quebec, became the first community in North America to ban synthetic lawn and garden pesticides. With the passage of a bylaw banning certain lawn and garden pesticides in the town of Oak Bay, British Columbia, earlier this month, the total number of mun ...

I was contacted this weekend by a Missouri mother whose 22-year-old son is suffering with Stage 4 lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic. She said the doctors showed her a map of lymphoma distribution in the United States, which showed a heavy concentration of the disease in Minnesota, Iowa and Northern Missouri. Her son was immediately placed in a study group examining the links between pesticides and cancer. Unfortu ...

Barbara Rubin, AKA, "the Armchair Activist, (http://armchairactivist.us) sent this along to share with the SafeLawns Foundation: Why have we made so little progress in pesticide activism during the past decade? We know profits are at the heart of this but that has always been the case. An additional impediment is that we are also a people devoted to routines and customs, hesitant to explore new avenues of a ...

Back on Dec. 29, we sent out a call to join us in signing a petition asking the U.S. to join a growing worldwide ban on the pesticides responsible for causing colony collapse disorder in bees. On this site, more than 700,000 folks have signed on! http://acelebrationofwomen.org/?p=39410 ...

This article appeared Friday in the Scarborough Leader newspaper in Maine: http://blog.scarboroughleader.com/2010/12/10/pesticide-use-on-town-properties-in-question---dec-10-2010.aspx. One of the aspects of this that I find encouraging in this article is that the two landscape professionals quoted herein, Al Lappin Jr. and Jesse O'Brien, are two of my closest friends. We would go through the proverbial wall ...