By Rady Ananda

Home to two coal power plants, a fertilizer plant, and a large oil refinery, the city of Bathinda in Punjab, India is making people sick.  Forty percent of the population (nearly 90,000 people) suffers from respiratory ailments. The area also suffers from a host of other diseases including cancer, at a rate triple that of other areas, which has been linked to agrochemicals.

Doctors are urging people to use medicinal inhalers, which is culturally stigmatized. Rather than demanding strict environmental controls, doctors have asked authorities to fund an education campaign to dispel the stigma associated with inhaler use.

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By Rady Ananda

Billing itself as the "world's fair" of the heirloom industry, the National Heirloom Exposition will be held at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds in Santa Rosa, California from Sept. 13-15, 2011.

Supported by firms "passionate about heirlooms and pure foods," the three-day event will feature over 250 vendors, plus speakers, workshops, films, tours, and, of course, FOOD - the all natural, organic, pure kind that farmers and gardeners have reared or raised for ages.

Over 60 speakers, including Dr. Vandana Shiva, Alice Waters and Jeffrey Smith, will offer ongoing training, workshops and presentations.

“We want a world of biodiversity, of safe seed and food, of seed sovereignty and food sovereignty,” Dr. Shiva told Susan Audrey. “That is why I will be coming to the National Heirloom Exposition, because it is defending our future.”

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By Rady Ananda

Imagine our declining pollinators – bees, moths, butterflies and bats – coming upon thousands of acres of toxic trees, genetically engineered so that every cell in the tree exudes pesticide, from crown to root. Imagine a world without pollinators. Without seed dispersers. Without soil microbes.

It would be a silent forest, a killing forest, an alien forest. No wonder Vandana Shiva scoffs at the moniker, biotechnology. “This is not a life technology. It’s a death science.”

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