chemfreegarden

A good week………adapted to showers and got a lot done in the gardens. The garden needs sun.

Lantana slash most days. 2 hours is strengthening my arms and legs. Care footing due to the rain. Transplanting red and pencil cedars. Clumps of their seed has germinated.

The photo below is the linking of two regeneration zones. The trees in the back ground are regrowth following lantana slash and mulch 20 years ago.

In the foreground the lantana enveloping an entire tree. But beneath when I slashed the lantana a very healthy rosewood. As the slashed lantana withers the rose wood has had a perfect nursery.

Important.

http://www.panna.org/blog/study-finds-glyphosate-pregnant-women?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=groundtruth&utm_campaign=gt-04-06&link_id=3&can_id=2059f0582f91adb53c7ab1eb8e944644&email_referrer=email_331100&email_subject=glyphosate-and-pregnancy-making-history-in-hawaii-fire-scott-Pruitt

Happy Birthday to Dean.

Byron Shire Chemical Free Landcare next fortnightly working bee will be on Saturday, the 7th of April, from 9 am to 1 pm, at Brunswick Heads Crown Land Reserve site. Meet at the end of South Beach Road fire track gate, not far from the Surf Club. Please wear boots, long sleeve shirt and long pants, a hat, gloves and bring water, rain coat and some morning tea. Tools and first aid kit will be provided.
The task will be to remove Bitou bush primary work, South of the horse access track. Enter the fire trial gate, walk along (300 m) it until you get to the second gate. Turn left and you will see us on the right side, towards the beach.

My self, Akash Waddell and Ellen White came to the working in New Brighton, on Friday the 23rd of March. We collected 10 km plus of Glory lily pods and target every single plant on the whole site. We will be back there on the Tuesday, 8 of May, from 1 pm until 6 pm. We are looking forward to meet more locals interested in help on this project.

byronshirechemicalfreelandcare.org

BSCFL is a project of Mullum Seed

Mullumbimby Sustainability Education and Enterprise Development Incorporated

Nadia de Souza Pietramale

Project Coordinator

0478 272 300

Worked on follow up on our 2017 regeneration site. Mainly weeding along side the emerging variety of rain forest trees. We are getting a lot more thorough in our original slash, pull and mulch with the lantana.

And its rapid break down is impressive.

In-between the tangle of the dried lantana, pencil cedars from the visible parent trees, are sprouting. Native tamarinds, sandpaper figs, white and red cedars, blue figs, a variety of ferns along with the vines which we control.

Lantana front line.

Thank you so much for taking the time to stand up for our forests. We are one step closer to ending industrial logging in public native forests!

After receiving hundreds of letters, shadow minister for agriculture, Joel Fitzgibbon, and shadow minister for environment and water, Tony Burke took a step forward and made the following positive statement:

“Labor takes evidence-based science seriously, as we do the benefits and jobs that a sustainable forestry industry brings. That is why Labor will always support proper, independent and full scientific assessments of RFA outcomes as part of the agreed framework. This includes all relevant science, including climate science and impacts on threatened species.”

We still have a long way to go, but we are heading in the right direction! Labor’s position could have implications for the rollover of nine RFAs due to expire in NSW, WA and Vic over the next three years.

Further reading: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/29/labor-vows-full-scientific-assessment-of-logging-agreements

The Effects of Glyphosate on Your Body

Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, is the most heavily used agricultural chemical of all time. It’s a mind-boggling amount of usage for one agricultural chemical and it was only a matter of time before the wide‐reaching environmental and public health implications became apparent.
Monsanto advertised Roundup as biodegradable and environmentally friendly, even going so far as to claim it left the soil clean until they were found guilty of false advertising. Now it’s showing up in people at alarming levels with unknown effects on human health.
Researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine tested urine levels of glyphosate and its metabolite aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) among 100 people living in Southern California over a period of 23 years from 1993 to 2016. Genetically engineered (GE) crops were introduced in the US in 1994.
Glyphosate is used in large quantities on GE glyphosate-tolerant and its use has increased nearly fifteen‐fold since 1996. Glyphosate is also a popular tool for desiccating (or accelerating the drying out) of crops like wheat and oats, with the UCSD researchers noting in JAMA that Roundup is applied as a desiccant to most small non-genetically modified grains. As a result, Glyphosate is found in GE crops and non-GE grains crops at harvest.
At the start of the study, Paul Mills (Professor of family medicine and public health at the University of California San Diego) stated that very few of the participants had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine but by 2016 this figure had increased to seventy percent. Overall, the prevalence of human exposure to glyphosate increased by 500 percent during the study period whist actual levels of the chemical, in ug/ml, increased by a shocking 1,208 percent.
It’s unknown what this means for human health but in 2017 separate research revealed that daily exposure to ultra‐low levels of glyphosate for two years led to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in rats. Mills stated that the glyphosate levels revealed by their JAMA study were 100‐fold greater than those detected in the rat study.
In response to the featured study, Monsanto was quick to say that the amounts reported do not raise health concerns and the fact that the chemical is detected in urine is just one way our bodies get rid of nonessential substances. Speaking to GM Watch, Michael Antoniou of King’s College London, had another take on the matter:
“This is the first study to longitudinally track urine levels of glyphosate over a period before and after the introduction of GM glyphosate-tolerant crops. It is yet another example illustrating that the majority of present-day Americans have readily detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine, ranging from 0.3 parts per billion, as in this study, to ten times higher – 3 or more parts per billion – detected by others.
These results are worrying because there is increasing evidence to show that exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides below regulatory safety limits can be harmful.”
Concerns over glyphosate’s toxicity have been mounting since the International Agency for Research on Cancer›s (IARC) 2015 determination that glyphosate is a probable carcinogen. As of July 2017, California›s Environmental Protection Agency›s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment also listed glyphosate as a chemical known to cause cancer under Proposition 65, which requires consumer products with potential cancer‐causing ingredients to bear warning labels.
Meanwhile, in the EU, European Commission leaders met in March 2016 to vote on whether to renew a fifteen‐year license for glyphosate, which was set to expire in June of that year. The decision was tabled amid mounting opposition as more than 180,000 Europeans signed a petition calling for glyphosate to be banned outright. Ultimately, more than 2 million signatures were collected against relicensing the chemical.
The European Parliament voted in favour of phasing out glyphosate over the next five years and immediately banned it for household use. As EcoWatch reported, Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity noted:
“This wasn’t just a vote against glyphosate. This was a vote supporting independent science and a vote against an industry that has manipulated, coerced and otherwise soiled independent decision-making in Europe and the rest of the world.”

FRom the East London Garden Society.

Meeting held in Mullumbimby with Tamara Smith, our State Green MP,  which was followed by a valley tour with her PA where poisoned sites were photographed.

Learnt later Tamara Smith, following our meeting, attended a koala tree planting in Bangalow where she saw the entire planting area had been sprayed with Round-up ?

To be confirmed.

Telstra sprayed site on Wilson Creek Road.

Another heavily sprayed lantana site a year ago, now already grown back which will probarly be sprayed again.

https://greens.org.au/charter

https://www.theguardian.com/voluntary-sector-network/gallery/2018/mar/28/people-volunteering-defend-nature-local-communities

The Independent Online

New figures on global emissions show that efforts to tackle climate change are not sufficient, according to the International Energy Agency Getty Images
Carbon emissions reached a historic high in 2017 according to a new report by a major intergovernmental organisation.
Figures released by the International Energy Agency show higher energy demands and a slowing of energy efficiency improvements were responsible for the emissions up tick.
After three years of flat lining, carbon dioxide levels around the world increased in 2017 by 1.4 per cent to 32.5 gigatonnes.
The increase stands in stark contrast to the demands of the Paris climate agreement, which calls for drastic cuts in global emissions if the world is to meet its ambitious targets.
Under the 2015 agreement, nations agreed to limit the increase in global temperatures to no more than 2C above pre-industrial times.

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/carbon-emissions-record-high-2017-energy-demand-greenhouse-gas-a8269336.html

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/mar/23/heat-tolerant-durum-wheat-crazy-idea-food-insecurity

Monsanto merger . . . or bust?
The Bayer-Monsanto merger has hit a roadblock in the U.S. The agribusiness giants have been waiting for the Department of Justice (DoJ) to approve the business coupling, but last week the department’s antitrust division revealed worries that the merger could hurt competition, and they don’t think Bayer’s proposed plan to sell off some businesses before the deal is finalized goes far enough.