Mitchel Cohen - The Fight Against Monsanto’s Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides

Evidence of cataclysmic climate change and environmental collapse are all around us, wherever you look: the raging fires and recurring storms, poisoned water and filthy air, droughts and floods of Biblical proportion, climbing rates of extinction, stressed-out birds and fading bees, frazzled fish and misshapen frogs. It takes some bizarre combination of self-interest, privilege, cynicism, ideology, corruption, dogma, or chutzpah for supine politicians to lie passively on their backs denying the facts in favor of cloud-cuckoo-land fantasies and the interests of the filthy extractors and the billionaire barbarians from ExxonMobil, Monsanto, and Chevron. Seriously engaging the environmental catastrophe, which this important collection edited by Mitchel Cohen does brilliantly, and taking the necessary steps to solve it, will mean Ill spit it out overthrowing capitalism. This is the real choice in front of us: the end of capitalism or the end of the habitable earth, saving the system of corporate finance capital or saving the system that gives us life. Which will it be?

Bill Ayers , author of Demand the Impossible!

Pesticides not only wreak havoc with our health, they accelerate global warming by destroying carbon-fixing soil ecosystems. They are the linchpin of the chemicalized capitalist agriculture that must be pulled out if we are to make the transition to organic agroecologies that draw carbon out of the atmosphere and into the biosphere in restored soil ecosystems. Read this collection to arm yourself with knowledge for the fight to ban pesticides and build a sustainable and climate-friendly agriculture.

Howie Hawkins , three-time Green Party candidate for Governor of New York

In this age of corporate greed and its effects on the environment, this book provides a valuable critique of corporate environmental destruction as well as suggestions for a way out of this global destruction.

Irene Javors , author of Culture Notes: Essays on Sane Living and advocate for optimal living www.ijavorsoptimalliving.com

This book reveals the triumph of the collective scholarship, humanity, and humor over the hubris of the mammoth pesticide-chemical industry aligned with insensitive bureaucrats.

Joel R Kupferman, Esq. , New York Environmental Law & Justice Project, co-Chair of National Lawyers Guild - Environmental Justice Committee, and co-counsel to the No Spray Coalition in its victorious lawsuit against New York Citys spraying of toxic pesticides.

Our poor planet is being attacked on so many sides by so many issues that it has become increasingly difficult to give any one of them the attention they deserve. This is especially true of the spread of pesticides, to which most of its victims are blind until its too late. Mitchel Cohen has brought together a collection of powerful essays on this subjectincluding several excellent ones by himthat has just the right combination of the most important facts, scholarly analysis, outrage (not to be neglected), and other solutions to the problems that pesticides are supposed to address The Fight Against Monsantos Round up: The Politics of Pesticides makes a major breakthrough in this life and death discussion. Highly Recommended!

Bertell Ollman , Professor of Politics, New York University, author of Alienation: Marxs Concept of Man in Capitalist Society , Dialectical Investigations, and Dance of the Dialectic

If you care about the planet, what you eat, your health and our whole, fragile ecosystem, then this book is for you. Its jam-packed with up-to-date information about pesticides, politics, protest. and the monster known as Monsanto. All of the contributors write with style, savvy, and with a sense of humor, too. Each author carves out his or her own part of the big picture. Together theyve created a book thats greater than its individual parts, and that will help organizers and activists who want a planet thats free of poisons and lies.

Jonah Raskin is the author of 16 books, including The Mythology of Imperialism , plus biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman.

This is a superb collection of essays on pesticides by a superb collection of independent experts. Importantly, theyre not only highly knowledgeable about how pesticides kill but fully understand the politics and economics of the pesticide push over the many years. They are fully aware, too, of the safe, green alternatives - in harmony with nature - to these deadly poisons. Moreover, the work is edited and many of the essays written by a brilliant Green and social activist, Mitchel Cohen. I have known Mitch for more than 50 yearsstarting with my covering him as a reporter when at Stony Brook University he led student protests against the Vietnam War and other outrages. Carefully done and comprehensive, this book is in the great tradition of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring . It is an essential learning and teaching tool.

Karl Grossman , professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, author of The Poison Conspiracy , and host of Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman.

Ive known Mitchel Cohen, the editor of this remarkable volume, for over 30 years. Mitchel is brilliant, a dedicated activist, and deeply involved in opposing the mass use of pesticides since 1999 and the politics that promote it at the expense of human health and the environment. In The Fight Against Monsantos Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides , Mitchel informs and guides us.

Elizabeth Liberty is a poet, feminist writer, and former Executive Director of the European branch of International P.E.N.

In an era when Monsanto seeks to poison the earth with its pesticide Roundup, Mitchel Cohen has done his own round up, assembling an amazing array of scientists, journalists, and activists to strategically fight back with the truth. Theres no better place to learn about and join that fight than with The Fight Against Monsantos Roundup: The Politics of Pesticides .

The movement against the routinized use of poisons in agriculture has taken on global proportions. This book examines how activists around the world are now fighting back against Monsanto, the manufacturer of the best-selling, cancer-causing pesticide glyphosate, better known as Roundup. The new book, edited by longtime Green activist Mitchel Cohen, explores not only the scientific dangers of glyphosate, but the nitty-gritty of the grassroots movements organizing to ban it.

The books contributing scientists and activists detail how corporations such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow and DuPont scuttle attempts to regulate the pesticides they manufacture. Moreover, in an age where banned pesticides are simply replaced with newer and more deadly ones, the book also explores the best strategy to win the struggle for healthy foods and a clean environment.

Jack Shalom , an educator in the New York City public school system for over 25 years, has worked with Brooklynites Against Apartheid, Brooklyn For Peace, and the New Sanctuary Coalition, and produces segments for WBAI radio in New York City.

Mitchel Cohen, author, poet and activist is a force of nature. For decades he has tilted against the purveyors of poison who profit from the conversion of our complex, diverse, and interdependent biosphere into sterile, unsustainable monoculture. In his new book, Cohen, and the dozen or so other authors who round out this anthology, share insights as to how we got into the mess were in, and wise guidance as to how we might challenge the poison-laden paradigm Monsanto and company are foisting upon us.

Mark Haim is Director of Mid-Missouri Peaceworks and has been active around peace, justice, sustainability and climate concerns for many decades.