through greek eyes

Truthout recently published my thoughts on honeybees and the threats of industrial agriculture.

Here’s an excerpt:

Honeybees have been in terrible straits. A little history explains this tragedy. For millennia, honeybees lived in symbiotic relationship with societies all over the world.

The Greeks loved them. In the eighth century BCE, the epic poet Hesiod considered them gifts of the gods to just farmers. And in the fourth century of our era, the Greek mathematician Pappos admired their hexagonal cells, crediting them with “geometrical forethought.”

However, industrialized agriculture is not friendly to honeybees. In 1974, the US Environmental Protection Agency licensed the nerve gas parathion trapped into nylon bubbles the size of pollen particles. What makes this microencapsulated formulation more dangerous to bees than the technical material is the very technology of the “time release” microcapsule.

This acutely toxic insecticide, born of chemical warfare, would be on the surface of the flower for several days. The foraging bee, if alive after its visit to the beautiful white flowers of almonds, for example, laden with invisible spheres of asphyxiating gas, would be bringing back to its home pollen and nectar mixed with parathion.

photo by Martin LaBar

After working for EPA for 25 years, here’s a glimpse of what I saw:

The EPA came into being in December 1970. President Richard Nixon created this new agency because of the massive failure of the government to protect nature and humans from the unkind touch of toxic chemicals and radiation. But Nixon’s first priority was fighting the war in Vietnam, not environmental protection. So the EPA was put together in a hurry from the failed pieces of larger government organizations, especially the pesticides office of the discredited U.S. Department of Agriculture, which made agribusiness and its lubricants, pesticides, possible.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer just published an opinion piece I wrote on EPA’s flaws and future.

It references the agency’s corporate-captured regulatory approach and  my experience trying to get the pesticide toxaphene banned in the 1980s {that’s the chemical structure above} as well as alternative approaches to safeguarding health and the environment.

It should not take whistle-blowing or congressional intervention to eliminate toxic substances, especially those causing cancer. EPA should adopt a pollution prevention approach that focuses on phasing out carcinogens and polluting technologies.

An early opportunity for the agency in this field is to phase out dry cleaning that uses perchloroethylene, a toxic solvent. California has already adopted a phase-out of perc, citing nontoxic alternative technologies such as commercial wet cleaning.

Mandates to eliminate pollution rather than limit emissions can save lives. This approach can also help transform moribund industries through the application of green chemistry and closed-loop manufacturing. In the case of farming, sustainable agriculture would give us wholesome food while revitalizing rural America.

My son mark helped write the piece.

I have a short commentary piece on this summer’s Greek fires in the Chicago Tribune.

“… The August burning of Greece revealed the deplorable, unacceptable and dangerous situation into which the country has fallen.
Greece is a tourist nation, almost entirely devoted to serving foreigners for a few months a year; however, the country is bereft of self-sufficiency and sustainable infrastructure for the protection of nature, including forests, agriculture and agrarian life. Greek government’s corrupt policies make it possible for gangsters, usually associated with builders and bankers, to burn national forests or parklands, which, in time, the government privatizes for apartment buildings. No Greek law exists that criminalizes such behavior.

A woman from Sparta said to me her family lost all its olive trees. What young person, she asked, would stay or return to farming when it takes about 10 years for the new olive tree to bear fruit”

download it here at the top of the opinion page

(NASA satellite image showing plumes of smoke)

Welcome to through greek eyes, a collection of views and writings by Evaggelos Vallianatos….