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São Paulo, home to around 20 million, is experiencing its lowest rainfall since 1930, and new water-saving measures have been introduced in an attempt to manage the escalating catastrophe.

If it doesn’t rain in Sao Paulo, Brazil in the next 45 days, the system that provides half the city’s drinking water will run dry.

Sao Paulo is South America’s largest city, and is currently experiencing its worst drought in 50 years. So far, the drought has hurt corn and cotton crops, driven up prices of sugar and orange juice, interrupted production of beer and paper, and left cattle and goats to starve.

But as the drought has dragged on, the executive secretary of non-profit water association Consorcio PCJ told Bloomberg News on Tuesday that Sao Paulo’s largest water system — the Cantareira — is currently at less than a quarter of capacity. Though the Cantareira is supposed to supply water to approximately 10 million people in Sao Paulo, which has a population of 20 million, its levels are the lowest its been in decades, according to a report in the Global Post.

If it doesn’t rain before late March, all of the system’s water will be dried up. But if it doesn’t rain before Feb. 15, Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin said the city will have to begin rationing its supplies — something that hasn’t happened since 2003. January was the hottest month on record in the city, Reuters reported, and meteorologists expect little rain in the next week.

Services including schools and hospitals are having to adapt to the country’s newfound water struggles, with The Telegraph reporting that doctors have even been forced to cut short dialyses treatment for kidney patients.

The Cândido Fontoura children’s hospital has refuted claims that it went without water earlier this month, but biologist Analice Dora expressed fear: “Everyone is worried. Hospitals are the one place that can’t lack water.”

Though there has been a recent uptick in rainfall in the region, it hasn’t been enough to boost supply in a country nominally the most water-rich in the world.

Current reserves stand at just 10 per cent – known as the “dead volume” – and the government has warned that it could get worse in the coming months.

Professor Decio Semensatto from the Federal University of São Paulo has likened the current water situation to a “semi-desert”.

With the water crisis likely to last for years, Semensatto sees the testing of solutions as “training for the next few years, which will be worse”.

He holds water utility Sabesp responsible; it has known for years that drought-like conditions would soon arrive, but took few preventative steps.

The current crisis has reached a point that actual water rationing may be necessary, with state governor Geraldo Alckmin last month admitting it was already happening.

Brazil is not used to such scarcity, but São Paulo is fast getting used to way things have to be run; there are incentives to use less water, fines for those who use too much and the possible installation of more water-efficient taps.

Sabesp will see if such steps can make the difference before it decides whether to formally introduce wider water rationing – it refuses to rule it out.

These sacred luxury consumer temples (where the water tanks are always full), lowered their doors before the the march that brought together 15 thousand men, women and children – a significant part dressing in MTST (Workers Homeless Movement)’s t-shirts – in addition to other left wing organizations protesting on Thursday (26/02) against the water crisis in São Paulo.

It was the first major public protest on the issue and involved people like the seamstress Maria Francisca da Conceição, 69, who walked, wearing her flip-flops, the 6300 meters that separate Largo da Batata, in Pinheiros neighborhood, and the Bandeirantes Palace in Morumbi, where is the official residence of the governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB) is located.Maria Francisca has been a resident of an MTST occupation in Numa Pompilius, in the extreme east of the city of São Paulo, since early 2014, when she joined the homeless movement. A São Paulo native, she says she has always been afraid to end up under water, drowning (Sao Paulo is known for the heavy rains that often result in floods that stop the entire metropolis). She never imagined that she would go through the rigors of a drought.

Francisca has no water tank. When Sabesp (Sao Paulo’s water management company) turns off the supply, as it has occurred every day between 1pm and 7 am recently, she is completely without water. The unified protest was designed to hold the the government of São Paulo and Sabesp responsible for the crisis, and to ask for measures to reduce the impact of the crisis on the poorest population (which has been the most affected by the water rationing, despite official denials). Activists also demand transparency and increasing access to information about the real situation of the reservoirs, and oppose to the state proposal of increasing water supply fares (scheduled to come into effect in April), that is considered a perverse measure, that privileges the biggest and wealthier water consumers, while leaving the poor unassisted.

“I pay … but I shouldn’t… Because water is not a commodity” was one of the slogans yelled by the marching crowd, which also included a water truck as a “parade float”, carefully escorted by heavily armed military police officers. “That’s what will happen with the deepening crisis. Police will “guard” the water for those who can pay for it, while we die of thirst. We are here to show that we will not accept it”, said protester Reginaldo Silva, a resident of the MTST occupation People’s Cup (An occupation started at the onset of the Soccer World Cup in Sao Paulo in 2014.

“Dude, and look at these houses here, all these barons in them… In just one of them, we could fit an entire occupation. And it seems all empty!” Homeless workers coming from the edges of the city and the cities in the outskirts of the metropolitan region discredited the ostentatious mansions of Morumbi, surrounding the Bandeirantes Palace.

Dozens of selfies were taken in front of the mansions by protesters, it was their souvenir. “Looks at how these people live!” said protesters amused by the luxury around them.The arrival of the march at Bandeirantes Palace, after two hours of walking, and many hours of preparation, coincided with tired bodies slumping in search of rest on the hot pavements.

Meanwhile, a negotiating committee was being received by the chief of staff of Governor Alckmin’s office, Edson Aparecido. At the end of 90 minutes of conversation, the eight homeless protesters came out with the government’s commitment to supply 500 liters water tanks to families in need, to be listed based on MTST records.

The movement asked to be included in the Crisis Committee, with other representative bodies and this request was granted. Finally, a meeting with Paul Massato, metropolitan director of Sabesp, has been scheduled for next week in order to discuss and implement a comprehensive distribution plan for water tanks and the construction of artesian wells, in addition to plan the logistics for sending water trucks to the most deprived regions.

The contracts that favor large consumers of Sabesp should also be analyzed at the meeting with Massato.

Happy to have completed the march without violent incidents, protesters were instructed by MTST leader, Guilherme Boulos, the to move into the busses that would take them back to MTST occupations. The act came to an end to the music “Cearense Supplication” by Luiz Gonzaga (Ceara is a state in the northeast that has been hit by extreme droughts in the previous decades).

“Oh! God forgive this poor guy

Who prayed on his knees a bit

Asking for rain to fall endlessly (…)

Sorry I ask all the time to get the winter

Sorry I ask to end the hell

That always burned my Ceará”

It seems the southeast has turned into its worst nightmare, and we could well rename the song to “São Paulo Supplication”…

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

The dinner plate-sized mushroom encircles its host tree like a bloated tumor. I’m about to snap a photo of the beast when something flickers in the corner of my eye. Faint, smoky wisps give off the impression of smoldering coals. At this very instant, the fungus is releasing billions of microscopic spores.

I feel as though I’m witnessing one of nature’s secret acts, something an urbanite like me was only supposed to see on National Geographic. With a lush green canopy overhead, the hum of insects and warbles of tropical birds filling my ears, the moment would be Avatar­-worthy, save one jarring detail: The air reeks of petroleum.

That’s because I’m standing over a patch of blackened, crude-soaked ground. I’m here in the Sucumbíos province of northeast Ecuador with Donald Moncayo, a community organizer with the Amazon Defense Coalition. This spot, Moncayo says, holds a special significance. It’s the first in a series of nearly a thousand toxic waste pits that litter this remote part of the Ecuadorian Amazon, festering like open sores under the fierce equatorial sun.

“All the pools are in direct contact with the water and the soil,” said Moncayo, who has been taking visitors on his so-called ‘toxic tours’ since the early 2000s. “There are no membranes, no barriers, nothing. All of this was intentional.”

These toxic waste pools-locals call them ‘piscinas’-are the legacy of Texaco’s twenty six-year stint extracting oil from Sucumbíos. (Texaco has since become a subsidiary of Chevron.) The spills have been poisoning the soil, water, vegetation and people of the region for over twenty years.

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Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

Not ten meters away, one of the most amazing mushrooms I’d ever laid eyes on-and, after years as a microbial ecologist, I’ve seen my fair share-is breathing new life into the forest. To me there’s something serendipitous about this, because I’ve traveled to Sucumbíos to meet a group of scientists and activists who hold the radical notion that fungi are the key to empowering the victims of a horrific environmental disaster to clean up their land.

“Oil companies don’t teach people the solutions to their problems, because that would be an admission of their own wrongdoing.” Lexie Gropper, the program coordinator for the Sucumbíos Alliance of Bioremediation and Sustainability (ABSS), told me. “They prefer people who lack the power to make a change.”

But Gropper believes that change is coming. In less than a year, the exuberant, Spanish-speaking 24-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia has rolled together enough local and international resources to lay the groundwork for an organization dedicated to improving the health of humans and the soiled Amazonian environment through fungi. A collaboration between the US-nonprofit the Amazon Mycorenewal Project, and the Instituto Superior Tecnológico Crecermas (ISTEC), Sucumbíos’s only higher education institute, ABSS aspires, over the coming years, to transform a humble agricultural university into Ecuador’s primary hub for mushroom cultivation, distribution, and education.

The project’s aim? Nothing short of cleaning up the one of the world’s largest oil disasters -using giant, petroleum-gobbling fungi.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

There are an estimated 1.5 to 5 million species of fungi: Yeasts and molds along with mushroom-producing macrofungi. It’s a clan of bizarre creatures that spend most of their lives unseen, sweating out a plethora of digestive enzymes that decompose the dead and recycle elements for the living. Some fungi use threadlike mycelia to worm their way into the soil’s smallest cracks and crevices, unlocking nutrients which they trade plants for carbon. When crusading mycologist Paul Stamets waxes poetic about fungi, he calls them “the neurological network of nature,” for their ability to knit together the lives of plants, animals, and the Earth itself. He’s right.

When it comes to mopping up our nastiest environmental messes, fungi may be one of the best hopes we’ve got. Certain species, including the oyster mushroom, produce enzymes that break down the tough, aromatic hydrocarbons found in petroleum, in addition to soaking up heavy metals like mercury. Deep in the Amazon, scientists uncovered a fungus that eats polyurethane plastic. Stamets, meanwhile, is involved in an effort to clean up the nuclear wasteland around Japan’s Fukushima reactor using radiation-loving mushrooms. And these are just the highlights; most experts will agree that we’ve barely scratched the surface of Kingdom Fungi’s potential.

“At this point, there’s simply no concept of how many fungal remediators are out there,” said Tradd Cotter, whose South Carolina-based company, Mushroom Mountain, is positioned to become the world’s largest hub for mycoremediation-the process of using fungi to clean up the environment. “All fungi can exude extracellular metabolites.” (Those are the enzymes, antibiotics, and other biological factors that actually do the remediation.) “When you consider 1.5 million fungi on the planet, all you can say is there are an unlimited number of possibilities.”

And there few places on Earth that match Sucumbíos’s desperate need for environmental remediation. According to Amazon Watch, from 1964 to 1990, the oil company Texaco (now Chevron) drilled 350 petroleum wells across a massive swath of previously untouched wilderness, all the while dumping some 18 billion gallons of toxic formation waters (a byproduct of oil extraction) directly into rivers and streams that the region’s tens of thousands of indigenous Ecuadorians depended on for drinking, cooking, bathing, and fishing. When Texaco left in 1992, it poured the rest of its waste-crude and toxic sludge-into the unlined death pits I found myself wading through.

Credit: Lexie Gropper

If people outside of South America know anything about northeastern Ecuador’s politics, it’s likely of the multibillion-dollar class action lawsuit that ensued after Chevron proclaimed it would not compensate the local victims exposed to the toxic blight, and would instead ” fight until hell freezes over.”

For over two decades, the oil giant has done just that, spending billions of dollars on thousands of lawyers to deny and delay legal proceedings. When I contacted Chevron for comment, a company spokesperson denied the existence of the toxic waste pits, claiming they were part of a “decade long disinformation campaign in support of judicial fraud in Ecuador by plaintiff’s lawyers trying to extort money from Chevron.”

This stance speaks to Chevron’s recent counteroffensive in the legal battle, the basis of which is to paint the plaintiffs-30,000 homesteading farmers and tribespeople-as a group of scheming mafiosos.

“Chevron’s strategy has been total-scorched-Earth,” Kevin Koenig of Amazon Watch told me. “They subpoena people, they drag them into court, they scare the living shit out of them. And they have all the time and money in the world.”

The same cannot be said for the thousands of men, women and children who, every day, are forced to drink water fit for a hazardous waste facility. These include the family of Marlene Cabrera, who lives next to an oil well outside the sprawling oil-boomtown of Lago Agrio. When we visited, Cabrera recalled how she never used to salt her food, because the river water she cooked with was brackish from toxic waste. Her sixteen-year-old son has been ill with a rare disease, which doctors believe is related to oil contamination, since he was nine. She has seen several family members, with no history of drinking or smoking to excess, die young of cancer. Countless families throughout the province echo her story.

As the beleaguered legal battle moves into its twenty-second year, indigenous communities, aided by a handful of dedicated international groups, have begun taking matters into their own hands. The most prominent example is ClearWater, an organization whose mission is right in its name. In 2011, co-founder Mitch Anderson organized a team comprised of men and women from the region’s five indigenous tribes. Thanks to a major grant from Trudie Styler’s Rainforest Fund and other celebrity contributions, ClearWater has furnished over a thousand indigenous families with sophisticated rainwater catchment systems that remove bacteria while soaking up heavy metals and petroleum hydrocarbons.

“ClearWater is about provisioning the basic necessities of life to the people who have called these forests home for thousands of years,” Anderson said when I called him from Quito.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

Gropper, who assumed the project coordinator role for the Amazon Mycorenewal Project in early 2014, tells me how ClearWater’s grassroots, community-oriented vision has been a source of inspiration. Founded in 2007 by an international cohort of bioremediators, mycologists and environmental scientists, the Amazon Mycorenewal Project has, over the years, generated excitement by demonstrating the potential for fungi to detoxify the putrid soils and rivers of Sucumbíos. But until very recently, the organization lacked the local infrastructure needed to conduct long-term studies and create a lasting impact.

“As international volunteers, we come and we leave,” said Gropper. “We like to tell locals how they can fix their problems, without really thinking about their needs. But until we’ve shown that we can make this work for the people of Sucumbíos, we haven’t accomplished anything.”

Through its integration with ISTEC, Gropper believes the Amazon Mycorenewal Project is now positioned to build permanent ties with the local communities.

“Our alliance with an Ecuadorian agriculture institute provides so many opportunities to grow,” Gropper said. “It’s everything the Amazon Mycorenewal Project ever dreamed of.”

For its part, ISTEC has made it clear that their new, fungally-minded partners are a priority. The university has furnished the fledgling organization with on-campus housing, in addition to five laboratories to be used for soil and water testing, microbiology, mushroom cultivation, and eventually, large-scale spawn production. When I visited, international volunteers were hard at work converting the empty labs into sophisticated research facilities. They’re also teaching themselves mushroom cultivation techniques and conducting the first pilot studies that, eventually, will lead to a library of petrophilic fungi-those with a knack for growing on toxic waste.

When Norwegian volunteer Gudny Flatabø arranged a series of Petri dishes on the lab bench, several were an inky black, instead of the usual tawny hue. Mycelia-the branching, filamentous part of fungi that colonize vast surfaces-gobbled the contaminated agar, unperturbed by the toxicity of their food. Over time fungi that tolerate the spectrum of toxins found in petroleum waste-benzene, toluene, chromium and mercury, to name but a few-can be bred to handle higher and higher concentrations.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

“You need to do this basic science first, prove that it works, prove why it works,” Cotter, who is also overseeing mycoremediation projects in Haiti and the Alberta tar sands, in addition to advising the Ecuadorian initiative, told me.

According to Cotter, there are a hundred things to test and tweak before a fungal remediator is ready for prime time, including physical properties like its tensile strength and ecological properties, including how the fungus interacts with and shapes the native microbial community.There’s also the matter of finding local remediators-fungi that grow naturally near the disaster site. Once their sterile cultivation facilities are ready, Gropper plans to isolate native fungi that already thrive in local contaminated sites.

“We want to figure out what the best local remediators are and what are the best conditions to grow them,” said Gropper. “Then we can scale up production, and create a spawn distribution system that’s sustainable long after volunteers are gone.”

Large-scale fungal remediation is a long-term goal, and Gropper is cognizant that locals will need strong incentives to buy in. She is hopeful that, through cultivation workshops and classes, her organization will get Ecuadorians excited about the myriad possibilities mushrooms offer.

“I think nutritional and medicinal aspects of mushrooms are what’s really going to get people interested,” Gropper told me.

The nutritious turkey tail mushroom, for instance, helps our immune system fight off cancer. The reishi mushroom, which grows naturally in Sucumbíos, has well-documented antibacterial properties.

“They’ve lived with the contamination for over forty years,” Gropper continued. “They’re not happy about it, but they’re used to it.”

That fact was sadly clear by the end of my toxic tour. In addition to visiting gaping waste pools and drilling sites, Moncayo brought us to see a “remediated” pit. Chevron claims that Texaco conducted a successful remediation of 162 pits in the mid-1990’s. Others call this cleanup a sham. It only took a few inches of digging in the blistering jungle heat for Moncayo, wearing white surgical gloves, to unearth a fistful of tar-colored mud. He dropped a chunk of the stuff in a water bottle, shook it up, and we looked on as oily crude floated to the surface, gleaming blue and orange in the sunlight.

Not far off, a cacao tree was laden with nearly-ripe pods. Moncayo pointed to it. “Cacao grown here, grown across contaminated sites, is taken to markets in Lago,” he said. “It’s mixed with cacao from all over Ecuador. It’s exported to the United States, Canada, Europe-everywhere.”

Also close by, two local men were laboring to dig a new well under the searing mid-afternoon sun. The well, Moncayo said, would probably be used for drinking water.

Credit: Amazon Mycorenewal Project

As I stood, dizzy from dehydration and petroleum fumes, next to the last toxic sludge pool of the day, Moncayo told me how everything I’d seen was but a drop in the bucket. “When we talk about thirty thousand people affected, we’re only talking about those right next door to a drill site,” he said. “When we consider those indirectly affected, we’re talking about the entire population of Brazil. That’s where this water goes.”

It’s an almost inconceivably vast problem. But the people I found living here haven’t given up on this land. Gropper, for one, sees mushroom cultivation taking off all over Sucumbíos and beyond, providing the Amazon and its people with a host of benefits. Just maybe, a myco-topia isn’t so crazy, after all.

“Justice isn’t something that the government has in its pocket or Chevron has in its bank account,” Anderson said. “It’s something that communities build.”

Koenig agrees. “What’s amazing about the grassroots efforts we’re now seeing is that they’re turning people who have always been victims into a force and a solution.”

The fungi, for their part, aren’t going anywhere. They’ll continue to creep and grow, dancing in and out of sight, threading hungry mycelia into the fetid soil. Earth’s decomposers will remain here, long after people have decided whether or not to forsake the poisoned land. Perhaps, with their help, we won’t have to.

Credit: Nicola Peel and Danny Neuman ​

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” A Documentary About China’s Smog Is Going Viral, And It’s Not Being Censored“

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CREDIT: YouTube.com/screenshot

Over the weekend in China, 175 million people – more than the entire population of Bangladesh – watched a newly released in-depth and well-produced documentary about the country’s debilitation smog problem. Produced by former Chinese news anchor and environmental reporter, Chai Jing, the 104-minute “Under the Dome” has caught the Chinese public at a moment of intense focus on the wide-ranging impacts of air pollution from coal-fired power plants and vehicle emissions.

In a country known for spiking any media that paints the government in a bad light, the documentary has not been firewalled. China’s new environment minister, Chen Jining, even praised it on Sunday, saying it reflected “growing public concern over environmental protection and threats to human health.” He also compared it to the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is often credited with inciting the environmental movement in the U.S., especially when it comes to the use of pesticides.

While some are also comparing the lecture-style film, which is replete with charts and visual aids, to Al Gore’s 2006 “An Inconvenient Truth,” Chai’s original motivation for making the self-sponsored film was deeply personal. She used to pay little attention to the smog engulfing her home city of Beijing, but that was before she found out she was pregnant in 2013. Shortly thereafter, she discovered in a sonogram that her child had a benign tumor.

“I’d never felt afraid of pollution before, and never wore a mask no matter where,” Chai, 39, says in the video. “But when you carry a life in you, what she breathes, eats and drinks are all your responsibility, and then you feel the fear.”

Chai told the People’s Daily that she reconciled herself to the fact that her daughter, who survived after surgery, would be a major part of the video. “If I had not had this kind of emotional impetus, I would have found it very difficult to spend such a long time completing this,” she said.

Chai herself is obviously the standout subject of the film, and there have been some criticisms. Chai and her husband have enough money to give birth in the U.S, causing some to posit hypocrisy. There has also been pushback against the suggestion that pollution was the cause of her child’s tumor.

Tumor-causing or not in this specific instance, the degree of environmental pollution in China requires few additional stark reminders. China has 1.35 billion residents, and some 600 million of them are being affected by the pollution according to “Under the Dome.” A recent analysis by the Health Effects Institute estimated that the country’s smog was responsible for some 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010 alone.

According to the World Health Organization, in 2012 around seven million people died from exposure to air pollution, with outdoor air pollution (ambient air pollution) responsible for just over half of these deaths. A majority of these outdoor air pollution-related deaths occurred in South Asia and East Asia. Especially hazardous is PM 2.5, a form of particulate matter air pollution that is 2.5 micrometers in diameter or less, about 1/30th the diameter of a human hair. When inhaled these tiny particles can pass through the respiratory tract all the way into the lungs. On top of asthma, studies have linked extended exposure to PM 2.5 to heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, lupus, and other ailments.

Last year, the northeastern Chinese capital city of Harbin saw its PM 2.5 index reach 1,000 – far above the 300 which is considered hazardous and the WHO-recommended daily level of no more than 20. One study found that this severe pollution has slashed an average of five-and-a-half years from the life expectancy in northern China as toxic air has led to higher rates of stroke, heart disease, and cancer.

Chai’s film cuts from TED Talk-inspired scenes before a studio audience to interviews and visits to sites in China and also abroad. In a particularly harrowing scene, a doctor removes a filthy and blackened lymph node from a female cancer patient in her 50s – the woman had never been a smoker.

The film doesn’t let government officials off the hook, either, and there are sections criticizing the lax approach to regulation enforcement. For example, when it comes to vehicle emissions standards enforcement, Chai finds that trucks sporting the claim they meet the “China IV” emissions standards actually fall far short. She then determines that no cars have been recalled since emissions standards were passed in 2004 enforcing the regulations.

One of China’s most prominent environmentalists, Ma Jun, told the Guardian that this $160,000 documentary has become “one of the most important pieces of public awareness of all time by the Chinese media.”

“It is powerful because it is motivated by a personal story and has got the feelings that people can relate to. It also hold [sic] to the standards of investigative journalism, it is properly vetted on the scientific and technology side, it is a powerful combination,” said Ma.

As China pivots away from dirty energy sources, the country stands to gain both locally as well to contribute to the global effort to mitigate greenhouse gases. With the Paris climate summit approaching at the end of the year, where leaders hope to reach a new GHG-cutting accord, China and the U.S. made a powerful joint pledge last October during Obama’s visit to the Chinese capital. In the pledge, the U.S. committed to cut its emissions 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025 and China agreed to get 20 percent of its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2030 and to peak greenhouse gas emissions that same year.

“Under the Dome” is currently being translated to English on YouTube via crowd-sourcing. It can be viewed here.

Buddhists believe in karma, the cycle of rebirth… and building some truly epic temples.

The magnitude of these temples exemplifies the enhanced spirituality Buddhists feel for the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (or Buddha, as he’s more commonly known).

Buddha, meaning “the awakened one,” lived from 566 to 480 B.C. He was the son of a warrior king in India, and at first, he lived a pampered life. Yet, with age, he began to crave a deeper understanding of life’s true meaning.

His quest for an answer led him to meditate under a tree for an extreme amount of time-seven weeks-until he understood how to achieve salvation. Buddha then became a monk and his disciples began building temples that acted as physical metaphors for Buddhism.

For instance, temples built on the edge of Himalayan cliffs represent a heightened sense of faith. Cave temples have holes carved into the ceiling, which emit heavenly lights and a sense of spiritual serenity. One Buddhist temple even allows wild tigers to roam free, emphasizing their compassion for all living things.

To see these beautiful Buddhist symbols of spirituality, check out our below gallery and make sure to SHARE these soul-stirring images with anyone you feel is truly heavenly.

What do you think?

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” Texas Bill Bans Sustainability Program Based On A Fringe Conspiracy Theory“

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CREDIT: shutterstock

Two Texas lawmakers have proposed a pair of bills that would prevent the state from funding programs which attempt to implement the ideas of Agenda 21, a non-binding and voluntary United Nations plan for sustainable development signed by the United States and 178 other governments in 1992.

According to the Texas Tribune, the bills proposed by Republican state lawmakers Rep. Molly White and Sen. Bob Hall would prohibit funds from states, counties, and public universities from going to organizations “accredited by the United Nations to implement a policy that originated in the Agenda 21 plan.” The Agenda 21 plan – signed by President George H. W. Bush – includes recommendations to conserve public lands, rein in air pollution, build more sustainable cities, combat poverty, and strengthen the voices of women, indigenous groups, and farmers.

Because all those recommendations come in the form of a voluntary and non-binding resolution, they might seem pretty harmless. But according to a growing group of mostly conservative and Tea Party-affiliated people across the country, Agenda 21 is just the opposite. To this growing group, Agenda 21 represents a ” dangerous threat to American sovereignty” dictated by the United Nations – an attempt to get Americans to lock away usable land that could be developed and compact people into cramped cities. This idea was popularized by Glenn Beck, who wrote a book about the plan in 2012.

Beck’s idea that Agenda 21 is a far-reaching conspiracy for a “one-world order” under the United Nations seems to be catching on. The second result when you search the term on Google is “Agenda 21 conspiracy.” Littered in the results are articles claiming the U.N. is attempting to ” seize” the United States by rounding up rural populations and sticking them in “beehive-like” apartments in big cities. One website calls it a plan to “control all land, all water, all minerals, all plants, all animals, all construction, all means of production, all energy, all education, all information, and all human beings in the world.” The Daily Beast has a very comprehensive look at the conspiracy-ridden opposition to Agenda 21 here.

In Texas, one of the groups that is consulting with the U.N. is the nonprofit Save the Children, which the Tribune says “consults regularly with the U.N. and promotes the health of children.” Promoting the health of children is part of the Agenda 21 program, so the Tribune noted that it’s unclear if the state or its universities will be able to give any funding to the organization. When asked by the Tribune whether the state could fund Save the Children, White said “[t]hey can use federal funds to operate.”

The Tribune also noted that the bill is unclear as to whether the state, cities, or public universities would be allowed to give grants to nonprofits for programs that “strengthen the role of business and industry” or protect freshwater resources, since both of those things are recommended Agenda 21. The lawmakers did not return the Tribune’s requests for comment on those matters.

Either way, if the bill goes through, it wouldn’t be the first time a state has advanced legislation to stop Agenda 21. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), at least three states have considered laws to halt the voluntary and non-binding U.N. program. Nationally, the idea even more mainstream among Republicans. In 2012, the Republican National Committee adopted a resolution deeming Agenda 21 to be a plan of “extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control” which would be “accomplished by socialist/communist redistribution of wealth.”

This is the rising sentiment among farmers of the US as a confluence of factors urges them to become pro-organic. From falling GMO grain prices to a rising tide of public distrust of genetically modified ingredients, failing GMO traits, higher GMO seed prices, and the premium prices that people willingly pay for quality food over toxic junk, the conventional farmer is changing his tune when it comes to Big Ag practices.

Even if profit is the cornerstone on which this change is based, it is still telling. After all, experts project over $35 billion in sales for organic, non-GMO foods in 2015, and as GMO corn, soy and other GM grain prices rise, along with the costs to grow them (associated with more pesticide and herbicide use to control super weeds, for example) farmers are looking past the GMO propaganda which promised higher yields and more cash for farmers who grew their poison crops.

This phenomenon is explained clearly in ” The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science” (full text available for download here) published in The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food.

Gilbert Hostetler, president of Illinois-based Prairie Hybrids commented:

“Our non-GMO seed sales are significantly higher than last year.”

Mac Ehrhardt, president of Minnesota-based Albert Lea Seed reports that he is selling more conventional (he describes conventional corn as non-GMO) corn seed by the end of November than he did all of last year. He says that farmers are turning to non-GMO to cut costs and to earn more money for their non-GMO yields.

Ehrhardt says:

“There is a continued increased demand for non-GMO.”

His observations are corroborated by Wayne Hoener, vice president of sales for eMerge, an Iowa-based seed company, as well as Tim Daley, an agronomist at Stonebridge, Ltd., an Iowa-based buyer of non-GMO soybeans who are also seeing a marked demand for non-GMO seed by farmers.

Daley says:

“Some companies have seen a 50 percent increase in sales of non GMO seed, and some have said they’ve sold more non-GMO seed this year than in the last five.”

Oddly, Morrie Bryant, senior marketing manager at Pioneer Hi-Bred, which sells non-GMO corn and soybean seeds but sells more GMO seeds says he doesn’t see a big difference.

“On (non-GMO) corn, we’ve got a slight increase on sales over last year,” he says. “Non-GMO has emerged as the new niche. It’s about 4-5 percent of total corn production.”

If consumer demand for organic is any indication, farmers would be smart to step up their organic seed purchasing, and ditch Monsanto, Dow and Syngenta seeds completely. Related: Monsanto Earnings Fall 34% as Farmers Reject GMO Crops

Non-GMO Economics

Farmers find non-GMO seed appealing this year for several reasons, but mostly economics. Grain prices are low with corn selling at about $4 per bushel and soybeans aren’t goin g for much higher at around $10. Conversely, a premium is being shelled out for non-GMO corn and soybeans.

“(Non-GMO) seed costs less, and there are premiums for non-GMO corn and soybeans in some areas,” Daley says.“Some farmers don’t want to pay technology fees (for GMO seeds) and non-GMO gives them a marketing opportunity,” Bryant says.

Failing GMO Crops

Other farmers are considering the switch because they are tired of super-weeds. One corn breeder who preferred to remain anonymous for a recent interview stated:

“The insect and herbicide traits are losing effectiveness with increased resistant rootworm and weed species. Growers are tired of paying for input costs that are reduced in efficacy and funding additional forms of crop protection.”

Iowa State University weed specialist Bob Hartzler seconds that sentiment in an interview with Iowa Farmer Today.

“You have people questioning the value of the Roundup gene. How many are doing it (making the switch) because of that concern, I don’t know.”

Non-GMO Outperform GMO Seeds

Non-GMO seeds are also producing more competitive yields.

“The yield performance of non-GMO hybrids is similar to or greater than traited (GMO) hybrids,” says the corn breeder.

Is this why mega company, General Mills, purchased organic food company Annie’s Homegrown for nearly $1 billion. And other large food corporations are looking to swallow up smaller organic food companies?

“There is continual and accelerating growth in organic,” he says. “There has been more conversion to organic by farmers recently than I’ve ever seen.”

In today’s society, we all need money to survive. That’s just the way it is! But many people never question how the financial system works, considering money is what currently “makes the world go ’round.” You may be shocked to find that you, your family, and everyone you know, have been duped into a slave system.

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