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Glyphosate use has gone up sharply worldwide since the introduction of glyphosate-tolerant GM crops. Herbicide use per acre has doubled in the US within the past five years compared with the first five years of commercial GM crops cultivation, the increase almost entirely due to glyphosate herbicides. Glyphosate has contaminated land, water, air, and our food supply. Damning evidence of its serious harm to health and the environment has been piling up, but the maximum permitted levels are set to rise by 100-150 times in the European Union with further hikes of already unacceptably high levels in the US if Monsanto gets its way.

CHENSHENG LU hardly cuts the profile of a provocateur. He dresses business casual and wears silver-rimmed glasses. He lives in Wellesley. He gardens. He has two children, one in high school, another in college. He occupies a tidy office in the Landmark Center, as an associate professor in the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Environmental Health. And yet the mention of Lu’s name in certain quarters elicits palpable discomfort: Oh, him. Lu, who is 49 and goes by Alex, grew up a city kid in Taipei, the youngest of three siblings. He rode his bike to the baseball field, sometimes to the comic-book store. He knew little about agriculture, little about nature. Then he came to the United States for graduate school, first to Rutgers University and then to the University of Washington, where he got his PhD in environmental health. In the Pacific Northwest, Lu found his calling: tracking pesticide exposure in food, homes, and workplaces. The prevalence of these chemicals, he grew convinced, was a critical and understudied aspect of public health.

The use of pesticides and other farming practices are causing a dramatic decline in the population of what was once one of the state's most populous bird species: the tricolored blackbird (Agelaius tricolor). A recent estimate has pegged the population of the small, dark and swift-moving birds at 260,000. That's down from 400,000 birds counted in 2008, according to an Audubon California survey. "We are, absolutely, concerned about the species because we've had a 33 percent decline in their numbers between 2008 and 2011," said Keiller Kyle, conservation project director for Audubon California.

Sorption-desorption processes govern the movement of all chemicals including pesticides in soils. The present investigation was undertaken to study the sorption-desorption of imidacloprid, using a batch method, on soils of five different location of India. Sorption data were fitted to Freundlich isotherm. The log K value was the highest for loam type soil (1.830) and the lowest for clay type soil (1.661). The value of 1/n was the maximum for silt loam soil (0.909) but minimum for loam soil (0.723). Simple correlation analysis indicated that among soil properties only electrical conductivity showed a higher but marginally non-significant negative correlation with log K (r = -0.826) indicating that higher concentration of solutes solutes are conducive to low sorption capacity of soil. The desorption data conformed to two surfaces Freundlich desorption isotherm. The values of 1/n1' corresponding to easily desorbed fraction of imidacloprid showed significant negative correlation with soil pH (r = -0.886, significant at p ≤0.05) but significant positive correlation with clay content (r = 0.980, significant at p ≤0.01). The desorption index for easily desorbed fraction of imidacloprid (n1’/n) also had significant negative correlation with soil pH (r = 0.953, significant at p ≤0.05). From cumulative desorption data, it appeared that bioavailability of imidacloprid would be lower in neutral soil than acidic or alkaline soils.

Effects of two series of imidacloprid pulses on caged amphipods (Gammarus roeseli) and their shredder efficiency for litter decomposition were studied for 70 days as part of a comprehensive stream mesocosm experiment. The duration of each imidacloprid pulse of 12 µg L−1 was 12 h. About 250 mL cages with an initial stock of 10 adult gammarids together with different conditioned litter substrates were used. Beside alder leaves (Alnus glutinosa), straw (× Triticosecale) was also used in different trials and tested for its suitability to serve as litter substrate. Results from tracer and microprobe measurements approved the suitability of the test system under low-flow condition of 10 cm s−1 in the surrounding stream water.

On 15 June, a landscaping company in Wilsonville, Oregon, decided to spray some lime trees with insecticide. The trees were in a parking lot, and had some aphids on them, so there was a risk that some cars might get little drops of sticky honeydew on them. Faced with such a dire threat to the future of humanity, it was only natural and reasonable that the company should blitz the trees with Dinotefuran, a type of neonicotinoid insecticide. On 22 June, Saturday morning shoppers reported the car park to be blanketed in dead bumblebees; about 50,000 at the latest count. The trees were flowering, and bees love lime nectar. The dose of pesticide they received from the nectar was clearly enough to kill many of them almost instantly, for they fell dead beneath the trees, the biggest recorded bumblebee poisoning event in history. Perhaps many more staggered off to die elsewhere.

People in 18 countries across Europe have been found to have traces of the weed killer glyphosate in their urine, show the results of tests commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe and released today [1]. The findings raise concerns about increasing levels of exposure to glyphosate-based weed killers, commonly used by farmers, public authorities and gardeners across Europe. The use of glyphosate is predicted to rise further if more genetically modified (GM) crops are grown in Europe. Despite its widespread use, there is currently little monitoring of glyphosate in food, water or the wider environment. This is the first time monitoring has been carried out across Europe for the presence of the weed killer in human bodies.

Fifty years ago the scientist Rachel Carson issued a warning, in her epic book Silent Spring, about the dangers of pesticides to birds, insect life, wildlife, the soil, the environment and human health. If we continued to spray a rain of poison indiscriminately over our farms, our wildlife and our environment, she warned, we will end up with a poisoned world in which birds no longer sing. Rachel Carson is considered to be the founder of the environment movement. She drew attention, for the first time, to the fact that pesticides can degrade the soil, contaminate waterways, kill harmless and beneficial insects and wildlife, and disrupt our eco-systems. She was the first person, too, to warn of the dangers of systemic pesticides that permeate all the tissues of a plant and make them poisonous. The world of systemic insecticides, she warned, is a weird world surpassing the imaginings of the brothers Grimm—it is a world where the enchanted forest of the fairly tales becomes a poisonous forest in which an insect that chews a leaf or sucks the sap of a plant is doomed.’

The world’s birds are literally the canaries in the coal mine and their ongoing decline should serve as a warning signal of a global environment in peril, says an international report on the state of the world’s birds. Globally, one in eight species — 1,313 — are considered at threat of extinction, said the report by U.K.-based BirdLife International. Of these, 200 are considered on the brink. Nature is a crucial part of Earth’s life support system, said Leon Bennun, the group’s director of science, policy and information, and the numbers don’t bode well. “Birds are a great window into nature. They’re a wonderful indicator of the wider environment,” Bennun said. “Our assessment, unfortunately, shows us that birds are in decline, an indicator that nature itself is not in good shape.”

Most studies that have shown negative sublethal effects of the pesticide imidacloprid on honeybees concern behavioral effects; only a few concern physiological effects. Therefore, we investigated sublethal effects of imidacloprid on the development of the hypopharyngeal glands (HPGs) and respiratory rhythm in honeybees fed under laboratory conditions. We introduced newly emerged honeybees into wooden mesh-sided cages and provided sugar solution and pollen pastry ad libitum. Imidacloprid was administered in the food: 2 μg/kg in the sugar solution and 3 μg/kg in the pollen pastry. The acini, the lobes of the HPGs of imidacloprid-treated honeybees, were 14.5 % smaller in diameter in 9-day-old honeybees and 16.3 % smaller in 14-day-old honeybees than in the same-aged untreated honeybees; the difference was significant for both age groups. Imidacloprid also significantly affected the bursting pattern of abdominal ventilation movements (AVM) by causing a 59.4 % increase in the inter-burst interval and a 56.99 % decrease in the mean duration of AVM bursts. At the same time, the quantity of food consumed (sugar solution and pollen pastry) per honeybee per day was the same for both treated and untreated honeybees.