Reuters didn’t get the specifics on the EPA’s restrictions, but reports that it will involve “a weed resistance management plan” for glyphosate, similar to the one that’s already in place for the aforementioned new herbicide. That one includes “weed monitoring, farmer education and remediation plans,” along with strict requirements for reporting resistance to both the EPA and “relevant stakeholders.” The details will be finalized next week after a call with a committee of the Weed Science Society of America.
That the EPA is taking steps to address glyphosate resistance is undoubtedly significant, although the agency’s actions likely won’t go as far as some might hope. To break the cycle of herbicide resistance, as well as to address the chemicals’ threats to the environment and human health, many call for a drastic reduction in herbicide use — a solution that would require overhauling agriculture as it’s currently practiced. A combination of tactics known as “integrated crop management,” which includes the use of crop rotation and cover crops could, according to a policy brief from the Union of Concerned Scientists, could reduce herbicide use “by more than 90 percent — while maintaining or increasing yields and net farmer profits.”
The EPA’s plan, after all, fails to address what has been the most alarming critique of glyphosate: the World Health Organization’s finding, published last week, that the herbicide “probably” causes cancer. Monsanto couldn’t disagree more, and is pushing the WHO to retract its report. But the EPA, which currently takes the position that “there is inadequate evidence to state whether or not glyphosate has the potential to cause cancer from a lifetime exposure in drinking water,” has said it will take the WHO’s findings into consideration as part of its risk assessment, expected to be released later this year.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, the kind of corporate activism taking place in the food world was happening everywhere. Not long afterwards, I stumbled across “The Center for Consumer Freedom,” an Orwellian-sounding front group operated by a PR pro, Richard Berman. Working on a host of various issues, Berman’s m.o. is always the same—form seemingly independent (and always very academic-sounding) groups that can then go out and do the dirty work that big companies can’t do for themselves. In the last ten years, Berman has attacked the Humane Society for Big Ag, he’s smeared Mothers Against Drunk Driving for the alcohol industry, and today he’s bringing his unique skill set to the arena of climate change.
In a recent piece for the Guardian, journalists exposed that over the last year, Berman (also known by the moniker “Dr. Evil”) has “secretly routed funding for at least 16 studies and launched at least five front groups attacking Environmental Protection Agency rules cutting carbon dioxide from power plants.” The criticisms launched by these kinds of front groups are typically dirty and dishonest, but Berman spends little time worrying about such concerns. In a secretly recorded speech to oil and gas industry executives this past June, Berman told his potential funders, “you can either win ugly, or lose pretty.”
Sadly, Berman isn’t alone. Against the backdrop of an ever-warming planet, a small but effective group of professionals has kept the “debate” about climate change raging, decades after the science became clear. What guys like Berman recognize is that as long as the media is still debating whether or not climate change is real, we’ll never move on to the debate we ought to be having: What can we do to lessen the dangers of climate change before it’s too late? Like good lawyers, they know that manufacturing even the slightest shred of doubt can be enough to keep the media deliberating, and to keep us from reaching a verdict that something serious needs to be done.
The media often plays into the hands of guys like Berman and it’s easy to see why: fairness, and a desire to hear both sides, stands at very the core of the journalistic ethic. For 50 years, Big Tobacco — one of Berman’s first clients — was allowed to play point/counterpoint with mainstream scientists. But no person today would grant equal time to the Surgeon General and a Tobacco Lobbyist in a debate about the dangers of smoking. As a society, we’ve accepted reality and moved on.
Today, with climate change, the same can’t be said. We’re still allowing the same old debate to continue on cable news, in newspapers, in Op-ed pages. And our news outlets still cover the issue in terms one opinion versus another, not as fact vs. fiction. This needs to change. Until our coverage reflects the reality of the science and the consequences of our inaction, we won’t step up to the profound challenges before us.
In social psychology we often say that if you find that most people behave in the same way, then the explanation for their behavior has very little to do with the kind of people they are. It has to do with the circumstances in which they find themselves. For example, most students in class raise their hands and wait quietly to be called on before speaking. It’s not that they are all timid or overly polite types of people. It’s that the classroom setting is sufficiently powerful that without really thinking about it, nearly everyone ends up following the same unwritten rules. When we think about people who regain weight after dieting, it’s a similar principle. It’s not that they have a weak will or lack discipline, or that they didn’t want it enough, or didn’t care. It’s about the circumstances in which they find themselves, and the automatic behavior that is provoked by those settings. In other words: if you have trouble keeping weight off, it is not a character flaw.
When it comes to keeping weight off, a combination of circumstances conspires against you. Each one on its own makes it difficult, but put them together and you are no longer in a fair fight. One circumstance that makes things hard is our environment of near-constant temptation. Two others are biology and psychology. I realize it may seem odd to you that I am calling these things “circumstances,” but, like a classroom setting and the behavior it produces, we need to acknowledge the context in which you regain weight.
To an important extent, weight regain after a diet is your body’s evolved response to starvation. When you are dieting, it may feel as though you are about to starve to death, but you know that you can open the fridge at any time and find more to eat, if you really wanted to. Your body doesn’t know this, however, and you have no way to tell it that you just want slimmer hips or a flatter stomach. All your body knows is that not enough calories are coming in, so it kicks into survival mode. From an evolutionary perspective, the bodies that were best able to survive in times of scarcity (and then pass their genes on to future generations) were those that could use energy efficiently in order to get by on tiny amounts of food. Another quality that would have helped you survive was psychological: a single-minded pursuit of more fuel—and once you located it, the overwhelming urge to eat lots of every type of food you found.
Together, these biological and psychological forces make regaining lost weight all too easy. Let’s take a closer look at the biological ones first, because they set the stage for everything else.