Weve long marveled at the amazing holding power of tendrils like those of cucumbers, but scientists have been unsure about what makes them twist. This very cool video employs time-lapse techniques and mechanical models to show us how. From NPRs Science Friday.
Just click that little play button. The video format is Quicktime, so doesnt look like the Youtube videos were used to.
As we reported in January, Scotts Miracle entered a guilty plea for knowingly selling bird food theyd poisoned with a pesticide (to prolong its shelf life) and was slapped with a $4.5 million fine. Too low! some critics cried. Well, turns out its $12.5 mil, with more legal action on its way via angry customers bringing a class action against the company.
From an EPA press release, this is how the fines stack up:
- a $4 million fine and perform community service for eleven criminal violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act This is the largest criminal penalty under FIFRA to date.
- In a separate civil agreement with the EPA Scotts agreed to pay more than $6 million in penalties and spend $2 million on environmental projects to resolves additional civil pesticide violations. The violations include distributing or selling unregistered, canceled, or misbranded pesticides, including products with inadequate warnings or cautions. This is the largest civil settlement under FIFRA to date.
- Scotts will contribute $500,000 to organizations that protect bird habitat, including $100,000 each to the Ohio Audubons Important Bird Area Program, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Urban Forestry Program, the Columbus Metro-Parks Bird Habitat Enhancement Program, the Cornell University Ornithology Laboratory, and The Nature Conservancy of Ohio to support the protection of bird populations and habitats through conservation, research, and education.
The EPA adds:
As the worlds largest marketer of residential use pesticides, Scotts has a special obligation to make certain that it observes the laws governing the sale and use of its products. For having failed to do so, Scotts has been sentenced to pay the largest fine in the history of FIFRA enforcement, said Ignacia S. Moreno, assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice. The Department of Justice will continue to work with EPA to assure that pesticides applied in homes and on lawns and food are sold and used in compliance with the laws intended to assure their safety.
Class Action group seeking more members
According to the Safe Lawns blog, At least a dozen, perhaps more civil lawsuits are in the works against Scotts Miracle Gro as a result of its February 2012 admission that it knowingly tainted bird seed with pesticides that are toxic to birds and otherwise misled pesticide regulators in the sales and labeling of more than 100 products. A class-action lawsuit is being readied and lawyers are aggressively seeking consumers who purchased an estimated 73 million tainted bags of Scotts birdseed between November of 2005 and March of 2008.
Id so love to see that header a reality, by GWA members challenging the Scotts chief environmental officer when he speaks to them next month at their big meeting in Tucson. You know, when he reassures garden writers of Scotts commitment to sustainability, blah-blah-blah, like Scotts reassure its captive audience of garden writers every year over the breakfast they pay for.
This is your chance, writers. From the GWA flyer:
Shutterstock image
As you know, we carry a bunch of feeds from other sites that might be of interest to you all. TheScienceDailyposts are the most frequent, and I usually cant keep up with them. Their headline about organic food having little evidence of health benefitsdid grab my attention however. The Stanford study that prompted it got a lot of coverage elsewhere; an NPR report prompted a flood of angry responses, and a New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen praising it got a stinging retort from Donna DeViney of Soilent Greens in which she calls him an elitist halfwit among many other things.
The response to Stanfords study from almost everyone I know has been the samea big, ringing, so what. Gardeners dont grow produce without chemicals because they think it has more vitamins. As DeViney states:
Spraying Roundup is easy. Mulching and hoeing in the hot Texas sun on this little patch of organic acreage is way freaking harder. But we find it worth the extra work to not develop tumors, disease, genetic defects, or the sense that were above it all, out here in the actual dirtYou know, where food comes from.
And, of course, taste is never mentioned in the study. Homegrown producewhich is generally organicjust tastes better, as do the vegetables from our area organic farms. I never thought organic food being good for you had anything to do with nutrition; I thought the label was more about what the food didnt have, in terms of pesticides and other chemicals.
Studies like these dont weigh very much when put in the scale against common sense. I get that there has to be research, but each individual study only tells part of the story. Unfortunately, when a small (and somewhat irrelevant) piece of the puzzle receives such widespread distributionand then gets distorted further in pieces like the Timesyou have to wonder if the research has any benefit whatever.
Trademark image from Shutterstock
Does anyone remember when we posted about the You Can Grow That! campaign started by garden writer C.L. Fornari? Her perfectly nice, well-intentioned idea was to start a social media campaign to encourage non-gardeners to garden, or to encourage all of us to grow new or different plants, orwell, there are a lot of different ways the phrase could be interpreted, but you get the idea. A slogan that garden writers, nursery and hort industry people, and others could use to promote gardening.
Thats all good, right?
So she came up with the idea, got feedback, registered the domain, sent out press releases, and generally encouraged people to use it. Bloggers were doing You Can Grow That! posts once a month, and so on.
She got lots of publicity for it, including this December 8, 2011 article in Garden Center magazine.
Then guess what happened? The very next day, on December 9, 2011, Scotts applied for a trademark application for the phrase You Can Gro That.
Get it? Gro? Like that blue stuff they make?
Yeah.
Here is their trademark application. And by March, they had put their trademark to use by taking out an ad in Costcos magazine.
All of this was unknown to C.L., who did not get around to trying to trademark her idea until July. Im surprised she got around to it at allafter all, theres no money involved. It was just a nice idea aimed at getting people to join together in a spirit of gardening goodness to encourage more people to join in.
Once she realized what had happened, there wasnt much she could do. As she explained in a blog post yesterday, she talked to a lawyer and the advice was to give it up. Scotts will out-lawyer her all day long. No use fighting it.
So she gave it up. Gave up the whole idea of a website (shed bought the URL), the campaign, whatever.
Because its more important that Scotts have another slogan (that C.L. thought of) to help sell blue chemicals, and Scotts has the money and the lawyers, so thats where it ends.
Except it doesnt have to. Scotts could decide to stop being so shitty. They could, right now, reach out to the very people they should care the most aboutcommitted, impassioned, enthusiastic gardeners who talk of little else all damn day (and I should know, because I follow these people on Facebook and good lord, it is all they talk about.) They could find someone down there at the chemical plant who is still in touch with some tiny scrap of humanity deep within their soul, and they could hand that person a piece of paper and and ask them to write a letter.
Here is what that letter needs to say. This is the only thing it should say,
Dear Ms. Fornari,
I work here at the Scotts chemical plant, and let me tell you, this is a BIG organization. REALLY big. I mean, Im just here in the Blue Division, where we spray the blue stuff on the chemicals because we heard that ladies like pretty colors, and even in the Blue Division I dont know the names of half the people I see every day. We long ago gave up on having individual birthday celebrations, and now we just have a big blue sheet case delivered once a month, along with a printout of everybody who has a birthday this month. Thats how big we are.
(blue factory via Shutterstock)
But I digress. The reason Im writing is because I just found out that one of our lawyers, a nice enough guy, really, except that sometimes he just tries too hardanyway, this young man (its always the men who do these things, isnt it?)this young man read about your catchy slogan in one of the industry publications he is required under the terms of his contract of employment to read every day (and you thought spraying the blue on the chemicals was a crappy job! He has to readwell, never mind) anyway, the point is that this ambitious young man read about your slogan and got all fired up and filled out a trademark application THAT VERY DAY, and next thing you know, its the new slogan for our blue stuff.
But now it has come to our attention, here in the Blue Division and elsewhere in the company, that this was never our slogan to begin with! It was yours! That young lawyer saw and opportunity and he took it. And thats where I come in.
You see, I am the co-chair of a new program at Scotts called We Dont Have To Be Quite So Shitty All The Time. I am tasked with coming up with new, innovative, exciting ways for us to be just a little less shitty once in a while. And when one of my spies in the legal division (we have to have a LOT of spies in Legal, as you can imagine) alerted me to this situation, I knew it was time to put WDHTBQSSATT into action. Its been several months since we last came up with a way to be less shitty, so we are really overdue at this point.
So. As of right now, we are withdrawing our trademark for You Can Gro That and askingno, imploring, beseeching, beggingyou to take it up again (with the missing W, of course) and do as you like with it. Run a social media campaign to get more people gardeninghonestly, that benefits us too, and I don t know why that young man in Legal didnt think of thator dont. Its not up to us to decide.
It is only up to us to, once in a while, be a little less shitty. Now that Ive done my duty for the day, I need to get back to my station. Those chemicals arent going to turn blue by themselves!
Yours truly,
Louise Baker
Department of WDHTBQSSATT
Like all of you, I havent read the Republican platform and wont read the Democratic one, either, but some journalists DO, and one newspaper helpfully listed what they consider the 10 oddest items in the Republican Platform. And darned if number 4 isnt right on topic for us gardeners:
End our dependence on foreign fertilizer?Our dependence on foreign imports of fertilizer could threatenour food supply, and we support the development ofdomestic production of fertilizer.
Phosphate Mine
The story went on to offer a link to, this analysis of Americas potential fertilizer woes, which is titled Forget Oil, Worry about Phosphorus. Seems that the worlds agriculture depends on a mineral that is declining in production and is controlled by a cartel of companies.
Indeed there are lots of alarming reports about peak phosphorus but at least we buy it mainly from domestic sources, and the U.S. actually exports about half its phosphorus production for now. Our domestic reserves are expected to be gone in 15 to 30 years, after which well have to get it from places like Morocco and China, which together have 60 percent of the worlds reserves.
But wait; the problem isnt just phosphorus; the other major nutrients are also of concern. The U.S. imports more than half its nitrogen (mainly from Trinidad, Tobago, Canada and Russia) and 86% of its potassium (mainly from Canada and Russia). And according to Grist, the real problem IS nitrogen, for which were increasingly dependent on other nations.
So, finding more domestic sources of these nutrients is a priority, but another tack is to use less of them andwaste less of them, especially the ones that run off into our waterways and pollute them.
Stepping back, experts outside the fertilizer industry point to the generally unsustainable nature of our industrial food production system that relies so heavily on these diminishing supplies of fossil fuel and mined fertilizer. Well, yeah.
Sadly, it didnt take much googling for me to realize this is all far too complex for me, a psych major turned gardenblogger, but I was still curious about the politics of this. Reading the response of the Fertilizer Institute raised more questions than answers because they say domestic production is on the upswing; not to worry.
But a popular political blog offers some context for inclusion of fertilizer in a major party platform, and it makes sense in that crazy way that things make sense only in politics.
So whats really behind this? Nitrogen based fertilizer is made from ammonia which is made from natural gas. From the late 90s until a couple of years ago the rising price of natural gas made it cheaper to import nitrogen fertilizer from places with little or no environmental regulation than to produce it domestically and much of the US based production shut down. Trinidad is the biggest producer of imported fertilizer and has very little environmental regulation. Producing fertilizer is a very dirty and polluting enterprise. Since natural gas prices have fallen in the US, some shuttered domestic plants are slated for reactivation and the owners dont want the EPA regulating their dirty business. One of the big fertilizer producers is Koch Fertilizer, which also owns production capacity in Trinidad.
But readers, what do YOU think? Anyone want to speak up for good old compost?
Photo credit: Greater Yellowstone Coalition
In just 80 seconds it manages to be bold, provocative, and ballsy, to quote Paul Tukey on the Safe Lawns blog. He reports that this ad was the talk of Chicago at the recent Independent Garden Center Show there. I just bet!
(And yes, it closely resembles a famous ad by Macintosh.)
