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Least Terns are small seabirds that nest on the beach, typically in large colonies. These coastal birds depend on expanses of clean, healthy habitats to raise their families, and are increasingly...

 

Backbone Intern Giacomo Moody's Story Map for We the People is now LIVE!.

The Story Map traces the journey of this Iconic image, from its 2007 debut at Seattle Center to its current deployments in pro-democracy protests around the country. Check out Giacomo's great work and the amazing fruits of our collective labors.

Learn more about joining us in DC or pitching in to support our team going to Washington, DC to mark the 250th Birthday of this country. We'll once again take the streets in a defiant and beautiful expression of common cause and our shared commitment to fulfilling mission of creating a more just, sustainable, and democratic nation, and a future we can be proud to hand our children.

Check out the We the People Story Map at BackboneCampaign.org/WeThePeople.

 

 

For Immediate Release:

May 29, 2026

Contact:
Ashley Castaneda, ashley@restorethedelta.org

STOCKTON, CA — Today, Restore the Delta released a new report detailing one of the many local solutions outlined in the recently unveiled Water Renaissance Plan: expanding rice farming in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as a strategy to combat land subsidence and support a more sustainable regional economy.

Supported by BEAM Circular, which sponsored the critical research for the region, the report documents that Delta rice acreage has increased fivefold over the past eight years and lays out the environmental and economic benefits of rice cultivation as a strategic defense against subsidence.

“Without major levee investment in the next 25 years, over $10 billion in infrastructure faces severe flood risk,” said Morgen Snyder, Director of Policy and Programs for Restore the Delta. “Flooded rice cultivation restores the anaerobic conditions that slow and may stop peat oxidation that has already caused some Delta islands to sink as much as 25 feet. Pairing Delta levee investment with rice farming and wetland restoration benefits ecosystem health, as well as driving new economic opportunities for the region.”

The report maps current residue management practices and emerging bioproduct pathways, while identifying a major economic gap in which nearly all milling value from Delta-grown rice currently leaves the region for Sacramento County. To address this, the report’s central recommendation calls for the development of a regional grain mill that would:

• Consolidate agricultural residue streams
• Reduce transportation emissions
• Support local bioproduct innovation
• Create new jobs tied to the local agricultural economy

Rice hulls already contribute to electricity generation in the Sacramento Valley, and the report argues that a local processing economy could make rice farming more financially viable for Delta landowners.

The report arrives shortly after the release of the Water Renaissance Plan, a statewide framework that shifts California away from expensive and unreliable imported water systems toward local, sustainable solutions that provide long-term water reliability at an affordable cost.

This latest research builds directly on that vision. By documenting the Delta’s expanding rice industry, available feedstock supply, infrastructure gaps, and emerging bioproduct opportunities, the report strengthens the economic case for the Water Renaissance Plan’s broader approach to water and land management, one that depends on maintaining healthy peat soils, protecting levees, and supporting resilient local agriculture. 

“This is about more than rice,” said Barbara Barrigan-Parrilla, Executive Director of Restore the Delta. “It’s about creating a durable economic model that helps protect California’s water infrastructure, supports local communities, and keeps the Delta landscape functioning for generations to come.” 

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Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 59 Adam Levin May 29, 2026

Two major battles over pesticide policy are unfolding at the federal level, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. 

The dispute: Can states protect their citizens from pesticide harms beyond what federal law requires, or will that authority be stripped away? These are the urgent questions that a pending Supreme Court case and a fight over the farm bill could play major roles in answering.

The chemical at the center of all of this? Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and the keystone product of the Bayer-Monsanto corporation. Critics of the controversial weedkiller link it to a number of health harms through exposure. 

To help unravel the legal docket, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook is joined by Chuck Benbrook, Ph.D. He has worked on pesticide issues in roles during the Carter administration, for Congress and with the National Academy of Sciences, and has served as an expert witness in many of the cases he and Cook discuss. 

Benbrook is urging the Supreme Court to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short.

Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.

RoundUp Ad Voice: Weeding again, hey Bob?

Bob: Huh? 

RoundUp Ad Voice: Why not do it once? Do it right? 

Bob: Why is your head in the ground? 

RoundUp Ad Voice: I'm gonna watch Roundup kill these roots. 

Bob: Hey, this is Spike's area. 

RoundUp Ad Voice: Bob… Roundup can be used where kids and pets will play and breaks down into natural materials. Since Roundup kills the root, what's not coming back, Bob?

Bob: The weed. 

RoundUp Ad Voice: You betcha. Bob, come on down and take a peek.

Bob: Can I squirt one? 

RoundUp Ad Voice: Sure, Bob.

Ken Cook: Hello there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. And this is an episode that's happening during glyphosate week, which is the end of April, beginning of May. It's glyphosate week for two reasons. There are two major battles that unfolded this week around this weed killer made by Bayer. One major battle took place in the Supreme Court. 

And that's what we'll focus on with my guest today Dr. Charles Benbrook, who is a long time student, an expert in the field of pesticide policy, and has also been, uh, very deeply involved in some of the court cases that the Supreme Court is considering a measure to overturn. And we'll get into that. It's, um, it's, it's really directly relevant to a lot of what we've been talking about with respect to how decisions are made on pesticide policy and toxics policy generally, and how the Trump administration has time and again, taken the side of pesticide and chemical companies.

And this is, no, this is no exception. But the other thing that happened just this morning, and I'm talking about April 30th, took place in the House of Representatives. There was a move by the House Agriculture Committee in their Farm Bill. They put a provision in that would've blocked liability for Bayer and other pesticide companies in state court, and would also have taken away some of the ability of states just basically to protect their citizens beyond what EPA does.

You may have heard of this flood of litigation against Bayer, formerly known as Monsanto, with respect to this weed killer glyphosate — trade name is Roundup — the flood of litigation because thousands and thousands of people have gone to court and claimed that glyphosate contributed to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a kind of blood cancer that many people have come down with.

It's a, not an epidemic, but it's a, a serious disease that's growing in this country, and glyphosate has been fingered as one of the likely causes. So the House of Representatives weighed in on behalf, at least the House Agriculture Committee weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and put this in their Farm Bill — brought it to the house floor. 

We'll probably have another session on this topic too — brought it to the house floor — and it was challenged. First by Democrats, Chellie Pingree and Jim McGovern. Then challenged by Chellie Pingree and Thomas Massey, a Republican of Kentucky. And then, most notably challenged by Republican Congresswoman Luna from Florida.

And she stood up to the Trump administration, to the House Agriculture Committee, to Big Ag, to MAGA, to basically the powers that be in chemical agriculture and said, no, I am not going to vote and allow a measure in the Farm Bill to block liability for people who want to go to court, who believe that Roundup this chemical has caused their cancer or other harms.

So she stood up, an amendment. She got lots of grief from Republican leadership, lots of grief from the Republican dominated agriculture committee that voted overwhelmingly to put this amendment into the Farm Bill — against overwhelming opposition from Democrats on the agriculture committee. She went to the floor, and she got 73 Republicans to vote along with hundreds of Democrats to strip this language out of the bill.

And the final vote was overwhelming, a landslide, that stripped this Bayer, Trump administration, big Ag provision out of the Farm Bill, so that liability would not be blocked against people who were seeking justice in the courts. So it's an extremely important week in pesticide policy, an extremely important week with respect to the politics around MAHA, which we've been talking about quite a bit. 

The fundamental question was, can states protect their residents from pesticide harms beyond what federal law might require, or the federal agency in charge EPA dictates, or will that authority be stripped away? And at least we know now from the vote in the House of Representatives this morning, that will not happen as part of the Farm Bill.

So the chemical, again at the center of all of this is called glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide roundup and other herbicides. And the stakes really couldn't be higher because human lives are at risk. They have been at risk, and human lives have been lost. So before we get into the episode, I wanna give some context on two things.

What does preemption mean and what is happening at the Supreme Court? Preemption is a legal doctrine that says, when federal law and state law conflict, federal law wins. In the pesticide context, the question is, if the EPA approves a pesticide and sets the language on its warning label, can a state court still hold a company liable for failing to warn consumers about health risks like cancer — risks that aren't mentioned on that federal label?

And EPA is very good about not mentioning on their label when pesticides might be linked to cancer. Instead, preferring, which is exactly what the pesticide makers prefer, that they make adjustments to how the pesticide might be handled or changes to instructions to farm workers or farmers put on gloves, change the time when you apply it, don't do it when it's too windy. 

Soft changes like that rather than just coming right out and saying, “Hey, this stuff is carcinogenic.” Now, Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in a very controversial acquisition some years ago, they argue the answer is no. Since the EPA approved roundup and didn't require a cancer warning, Bayer says, the states have no business second guessing that through lawsuits or allowing litigation that second guesses that. 

This is the preemption argument, federal regulatory approval essentially shields them from state liability. The case before the Supreme Court involves a plaintiff named John Darnell, one of thousands of people who claim Roundup's active ingredient glyphosate caused their non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The Supreme Court asked the Trump administration to weigh in.

It sided with Bayer. It said, sure, we'll weigh in — their message, EPA approved the label — case closed no matter who got sick. A large group of state attorneys general, including some Republicans from red states, disagreed saying states have always had the right to hold companies accountable through their courts, regardless of what a federal label might say.

At the same time, as I mentioned, Congress was debating attaching a preemption provision to the Farm Bill and that was defeated, today. Glad to announce that. To walk us through all of this. I'm joined by Dr. Chuck Benbrook, a longtime colleague and one of the foremost experts on pesticide policy in the country, and specifically one of the foremost experts on glyphosate.

Chuck has worked on these issues from the halls of Congress to the Carter administration to the National Academy of Sciences, and he served as, as an expert witness in many of the cases, like the ones we're discussing today. 

Dr. Benbrook recently submitted a formal scientific and legal argument known as an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to preserve the right of states to hold pesticide companies accountable when federal regulators fall short, and boy, do they fall short time and again. There's arguably no better person on the planet to walk us through how we got here, what's really at stake, and why the next few weeks could determine the future of pesticide accountability in this country for a very long time.

Not just glyphosate, not just this one pesticide, but the basic ability for people to hold these pesticide companies accountable. Chuck, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me. 

Chuck Benbrook: Well, looking forward to it, uh, Ken. But first, uh, thanks for, uh, inviting me onto the podcast. It's a great honor, and I, I think I would be remiss not to share with your listeners, um, the, the day I first met you, I was, uh, working in the new executive office building for the Council on Environmental Quality in the Carter administration.

And you were a stringer for the Journal of Soil Water Conservation. 

Ken Cook: That's correct.

Chuck Benbrook: Uh, a, a young reporter trying to scrape out a living at, uh, 25 bucks a piece, uh, for, uh, an article. And, uh, you called me up and said, I understand you're involved in this Resources Conservation Act implementation, that that was an issue for you and the journal.

And I said, yes, said, well, can I come talk to you? I said, sure. So you set at an appointment and you came into the building and back then they called you upstairs and you came down. And so I came down to meet my, uh, my soon to become very good friend Ken Cook, and greeted this guy in Birkenstocks without socks, white shorts, and a white t-shirt. I'll never forget it. 

Ken Cook: Right. That was, that was a, a official journalistic garb for me back then. And, uh, it, it, uh, it served me well. I got a lot of scoops in that as I was writing that column for a decade or so, I can't remember. Max Schnat, the great editor of that journal, yeah, you can let me have my way. But yeah, I remember, I remember that very well. 

Chuck Benbrook: It's been a, a, a wonderful friendship and a, and a wonderful journey in a lot of ways, and, you know, it's kind of a journey that feels like maybe things are turning around a little bit, 

Ken Cook: Fingers crossed. 

Chuck Benbrook: But where did all of this, uh, tension about glyphosate come from?

Well, a couple things that, that, that stand out. A, as you know, and most of your listeners know, glyphosate is a broad spectrum herbicide, and pretty much anything that is green and growing, if you spray it on it, it kills it. So, before the advent of genetically engineered crops that, that were genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate being sprayed on them, farmers could only use glyphosate before their crop came up, or they, they sprayed it on their crop. They'd kill the weeds and the crop, or it could be used at after the harvest to kind of clean things up and get a field ready for the next year. So the, the agricultural market for Roundup herbicides, which came on the market in ‘74, was quite limited by the very way that the product worked. 

Until 1996, the year that the first genetically engineered, so-called Roundup ready crop came on the market, which was Roundup ready soybeans and roundup ready cotton. These new technologies which require genetically engineering the seed to express a gene that allowed the soybean plant and the cotton plant to go ahead, spray Roundup on me, “I, I'm, I'll be just fine.”

Ken Cook: “We love it. We love it.” Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: “We love it.” Yeah. Yeah, 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: That technology, it worked very well. And it came along at a time when farmers were super frustrated and pissed off about all the problems that they were having with weed control. The products on the market at the time, they were having to spray three or four different ones to control different weeds.

There were lots of bad interactions between the herbicides. They were spending more and more money. A lot of the herbicides were persistent in that they carried over, and if the farmers didn't watch it, they'd spray the herbicide and control the weeds in the soybean year of the rotation, but they'd end up screwing up the corn that was planted the next year.

So there were, there was a lot of problems with weed management. It wasn't working well. It was complicated. And the costs were going up. So when this Roundup ready system came along, which couldn't be easier, you just couldn't screw it up, it was such an easy system to do well because you pay the extra money for the seeds that had the trait, and then you plant your Roundup ready soybeans, and then when the weeds come up, you just spray Roundup and it kills all the weeds.

Ken Cook: Yeah. And well into the growing season, if you needed to it, the, the, the corn could be this high, the soybeans and, and you could take care of the weeds. It, it helped farmers a lot. I, one, farmers used to tell me all the time that they couldn't have made their operations bigger, which they wanted to do to generate more revenue, they couldn't have done that if Roundup ready technology had not come along and made that vital planting operation so much faster and simpler. 

Chuck Benbrook: So starting in 1996, as this, uh, GMO crop revolution unfolded like, you know, a tsunami over American agriculture. It changed EWG, it changed what I was working on.

Ken Cook: Totally. 

Chuck Benbrook: I got sucked from working on pesticides to working on genetically engineered crops. The foundations moved all their money, as you remember. 

Ken Cook: Yep, yep. 

Chuck Benbrook: And the sales of, of Roundup just took off like a, a rocket from 1996 until about 2005 or six, Roundup moved closer and closer to the most heavily applied pesticide in the country.

But around 2005, 2006, it passed atrazine and became number one. 

Ken Cook: Another prominent weed killer. Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Another corn herbicide, but had some major growth still in it. And it peaked about 2015 and at that point there was about three pounds of glyphosate applied in US agriculture for every, every pound of atrazine.

So not only had it become number one, but it passed it threefold. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: It was by far the most heavily applied pesticide ever in history in the world. Around 2015, there was enough glyphosate applied in the United States to spray three quarters of a pound of the active ingredient on every cropland acre in the country.

And globally it was about two thirds of a pound. So you just wrap your mind around it. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. I don't think I've ever, maybe I've shared this story with you. I, I talked to an editor from a, an agricultural trade publication around the 2005, 6, 8 period there, and, um, asked how things were going. And this person said, well, it's, it's pretty tough because we're losing advertisers.

And I said, well, why are you losing advertisers? And she said, well, we used to have all these pesticide companies, weed killer companies buying ads in our magazine. And that kept us afloat. But once Roundup came along and it was so universally used relative to anything else, the ad flow stopped from the other companies 'cause they just kind of gave up. So even, it even affected journalistic coverage of agriculture and the ability to do that. Incredible. 

Chuck Benbrook: Of course. So I started my work in the pesticide world in 1981 when I took the job as the staff director of the DORFA subcommittee. And at that point, there were 23 pesticide companies that had Washington reps that came and lobbied young staffers like me.

23 of them. And now there's four left. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: So the, the concentration in the industry is a huge issue. So the use of glyphosate just took off like a rocket starting in 1996. But not only did the agricultural use go up, but there was continued growth in the lawn and garden, forestry, government arena, industrial arena, because Monsanto recognized that there were lots of other markets where they could sell Roundup, and in particular the home and lawn and garden markets, so people that would buy it at Walmart or Lowe's or Home Depot and spray weeds in their, you know, their driveway or in around the yard or…

Ken Cook: Yeah, playgrounds.

Chuck Benbrook: Or plant a garden. So you gotta kill the grass before you till the soil, so you spray Roundup. So Monsanto aggressively went after those markets with great success and had they had specially formulated versions of lawn and garden Roundup.

As the diversity of uses of Roundup expanded incrementally, but over 20 years, there were so many different ways that people were handling the product, spraying the product, and so many different ways that people were being exposed to the product. 

Ken Cook: I have to remind you here, I was invited by one of the pesticide trade associations to address their annual conference, uh, because in their, by the early to mid 1990s, EWG was very much on their radar as a, a problem in pesticide policy.

And I reminded the audience of a Monsanto commercial at the time where someone dressed as if ready to go to the airport, and that was the plot line of the commercial, a TV commercial, leaned out the window of the taxi cab, and sprayed Roundup on his driveway and sidewalk to kill the weeds, and then just brought the Roundup bottle back into the cab and off they went.

And that's just how safe and easy it was. I don't know if we could ever find that ad, but they pushed it very hard and they brought modern marketing to bear. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. All throughout this period of when Roundup use was going up, glyphosate use was going up so much, the percentage of the total glyphosate sales represented by Ag versus the non-Ag market stayed roughly the same around 10%.

The Ag went up fast and the non-Ag stayed 10%, but it grew because the other was growing. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: In the last 20 years, Monsanto has made almost as much profit from the 10% of glyphosate they've sold into the lawn and garden market as the 90% that they've sold to agriculture. So what does that tell you? Well, they're obviously marking up the glyphosate much more.

It's a lot of packaging, a lot of promotion. And you know, somebody goes into Home Depot to buy a, a, you know, a gallon of ready to use glyphosate. They're not that concerned if it costs 19 bucks or 22 bucks, they know it's gonna last for quite a while and they want to control their weeds. So Monsanto was, has always been able to profit, uh, much more significantly from the lawn and garden market, but yet they never did any focused research on the exposure patterns and risks that were unique to that market.

Ken Cook: That gets us to Dwayne Lee Johnson, I think, doesn't it? 

Chuck Benbrook: It absolutely does. So there's two major things that happened that brought glyphosate into the middle of this massive increase in the use and diversification of the ways that it was being used, and the ways that we were all exposed to it, including this crazy idea to start spraying it on a wheat crop two weeks before harvest.

RoundUp Ad: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: The so-called pre-harvest use — that you and EWG are finally, I think, going to have some success in ending. Thank God. That's half of it. Then the other half is that in March of 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is part of the World Health Organization issued a very unexpected classification of glyphosate and glyphosate based herbicides, which would include Roundup as a probable human carcinogen.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: This came out of the blue. People, including me, were shocked 'cause we had followed the toxicity data and the EPAs human health risk assessments on glyphosate and, and, you know, glyphosate looked a, about as safe as any herbicide that had ever been registered and now all of a sudden IARC is saying it's a probable human carcinogen.

That's what triggered the interest among tort lawyers out there, and IARC said that the evidence was strongest linking Roundup to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. So people that had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and had been using Roundup for 20 years, they said, “Hey, geez, I wonder if the Roundup contributed to my non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”

And so they talked to a lawyer, do I have a case? And indeed they did. And Dwayne Lee Johnson, the groundskeeper for the Bonita school district just a little north of where you live, Ken. 

Ken Cook: Yeah, that's right.

Chuck Benbrook: I believe it was either six or seven school campuses that he was responsible for controlling weeds and other pest control activities.

So he probably spent more time spraying Roundup than almost any other specific task in his job. And in his years of doing that, he had two very serious exposure episodes where he really got dosed. That's why his non-Hodgkin's lymphoma came on in only four years after the exposures. Usually non-Hodgkin's lymphoma has a longer latency period, but those were the two events.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer, carefully going through the data and explaining why in their judgment and based on their classification system, the evidence now supports the fact that glyphosate state-based herbicides probably cause cancer. Yeah. Well that, that's what triggered the initiation of the litigation.

Ken Cook: That was a case that was brought in state court right here in the state of California. The ruling came down in in his favor. And for most of these cases where it was in favor of the plaintiff, the initial amounts, the penalties or the settlements that were announced have been reduced by, over the course of appeals and reviews and so forth.

But it was very substantial. And on top of that, um, it, it was pretty clear that there would be many more such cases, and that has turned out to be in fact what happened. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, so the, the Roundup non-Hodgkin's lymphoma litigation ha, you know, has dwarfed any past pesticide litigation in the history of the US by multiple orders of magnitude.

And in fact, Ken, I think the only mass tort litigation that's involved more overall settlements would be asbestos. I mean, it's, 

Ken Cook: Yeah, probably, yeah, 

Chuck Benbrook: There's been about a 110,000 cases that either, the vast majority of course, have settled there. There's only been like 32 trials, in 11 years. It takes a lot to get through all of the hurdles to actually have a trial.

And Bayer Monsanto has not wanted to go to trial, because that's when they're vulnerable to, what's called a punitive damage award. So Lee Johnson, who, he had pretty strong evidence that his massive exposures to to Roundup caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma. 

And he had actually called the one 800 number on the bottle to talk to Monsanto physicians went after he'd been diagnosed and he asked them, is it safe for me to go back and continue to spray Roundup even though I've been diagnosed with non Hodgkin's lymphoma? And guess what they said? 

Ken Cook: Yeah, no problem Lee.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, your use of Roundup had nothing to do with your cancer, when they knew that it probably did.

The jury was so convinced that Monsanto's behavior was unacceptable, 

Ken Cook: And that resulted in punitive damages on top of, uh, other damages 

Chuck Benbrook: $250 million for one man. 

Ken Cook: So you were part of that legal team as an expert witness, that, that helped Johnson's legal team succeed in that case. And another person who was part of that legal team is our current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and he shared in the proceeds of the settlement, the share that went to the lawyers. Don't know how they divided it up, it's not been made public, but this was a case that he was integrally involved in. 

And at, if you look back at the time, he made some very strong statements as he's mostly continued to make ever since about the importance of dealing with the threat that Roundup poses to human health, not just Mr. Johnson's, God bless him, but lots of other people. And he recruited people as well to bring similar cases as I understand it, uh, in other venues. 

Chuck Benbrook: Let's also remember what else was going on at this time.

Bayer really wanted to buy Monsanto, either wanted to merge or acquire Monsanto, and that was actually coming to fruition in early 2018. The Lee Johnson trial started, I believe in March and concluded in May. Yeah. And the acquisition, the $63 billion check that Bayer wrote to buy Monsanto occurred right before that trial started, and at the time when Bayer wrote that $63 billion check to buy Monsanto and all of its liability, there were already 4,500 cases had been filed. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: So Bayer knew that it was going to be a significant body of litigation. I think it's, it's fair to predict that the Monsanto folks told the Bayer people, oh, this is just BS litigation. The science isn't there. We're gonna, we'll win the first few cases and it'll all go away.

I mean, there's no way that Bayer would've gone through with the acquisition. 

Ken Cook: You wouldn't think

Chuck Benbrook: Unless they did believe that, 

Ken Cook: You know, you, you wouldn't think, and back in around, right. At that time, I had some, some folks I was talking to with Bayer, based in Europe. And if you leave out the Monsanto conversations, Bayer was beginning to take much more seriously developing low risk, organic compliant, even pesticides of all kinds of different kinds. 

They had an investment in a facility here in California to do it that I was proud to, to view. And the thought that a major player like Bayer would be weighing in, in a way that would be beneficial because of less toxic, maybe less immediately effective, as is often the case, but less toxic weed killers and other pesticides.

And I remember saying to them, when I heard that they might be buying Monsanto, I said, look, I don't know all the financial considerations or the market considerations, but what I will tell you is what I mostly know about Monsanto beyond what I know about, uh, what's happened with, with Roundup, is what they did with PCBs.

'Cause I have a member of my board from Aniston, Alabama, and we worked with him in the years before when Monsanto knew and lied about, hid from their community in Aniston what PCBs were doing to the community of Aniston, particularly a, a poor community that wasn't entirely African American, but, but largely African American.

And my current board member, David Baker, was the guy who pushed back against Monsanto, led the charge in the community, brought Johnny Cochran to town, had thousands of people lined up and got a huge settlement, the largest settlement at that time, based on fundamentally civil rights law, that they had violated the civil rights of that community.

And they, I think they came in with about a $700 million settlement for the community against Monsanto on PCBs. And I just said, look, if it's in the DNA of a company to not let you know. And this was always in the backdrop for the two of us, I think too with, with uh, GMO crops, right? This was not the kind of company that was gonna step up.

Now most of them don't. But we felt, I felt, in particular, knowing the PCB history, knowing how much money was at stake in, in Roundup, I just didn't trust the company, and I said that to these folks I knew at, at Bayer. But it was higher ups making the decisions. I think it was a bad call, but we'll see how the courts decide.

Chuck Benbrook: It's probably worth sharing, Bayer did not buy Monsanto for Roundup. They bought Monsanto for the intellectual property methods to genetically engineer seeds, and plus of course, they got all of Monsanto seeds. Monsanto, by the time Bayer bought them, had control of much of the base genetics for corn and soybeans in the United States.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: That was the real reason that drove Bayer to want to acquire Monsanto, because Monsanto was making a lot of money off of the licensing of the genetic engineering traits to all other seed companies. And when a company has intellectual property like that, that they license to other companies, it's a perpetual cash machine.

Ken Cook: Yeah. It's like owning the operating system for American agriculture in a significant way. Right? And look what that's done for Microsoft and Apple and others who stepped in, right? 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Yeah. So that's what Bayer was, was after and, um, so the, the Johnson case happened and about six months later, the Hardeman case.

Ken Cook: Yes. 

Chuck Benbrook: And the Hardeman case was very important because it was the first trial in the federal multi-district litigation. The MDL litigation run by a, a, a very hard-nosed judge named Vince Chhabria.

Ken Cook: Here in San Francisco, the Ninth Circuit, right 

Chuck Benbrook: here in San Francisco, and Chhabria to the benefit of Bear and, and Monsanto, bifurcated the trial into two parts. The plaintiff's Hardeman had to get through the first part to get to the second part of the trial. 

The first part was just the general causation. Was there adequate science evidence linking exposure to Roundup and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma to meet the standard of, it's more likely than not that Hardeman's exposure to Roundup contributed to his disease — contributed in a significant way?

Ken Cook: But where was Hardeman from? 

Chuck Benbrook: He was from California. I don't remember where in California. He had used Roundup for 20 or 30 years 

Ken Cook: On his property. 

Chuck Benbrook: He wasn't a groundskeeper. He wasn't a farmer. He had been in good health. And the trial on the first part, on the general causation was.

Ken Cook: Yeah 

Chuck Benbrook: That was Monsanto's and Bayer’s best shot at containing the litigation and the lawyers knew it, both sides, especially because the judge had seemed to be very open to many of the Bayer Monsanto attorney and expert arguments. Judge Chhabria was skeptical about the science. 

Ken Cook: I was fully expecting the trial to end at that first juncture. 

Chuck Benbrook: In that first phase of the Hardeman trial, the jury brought back a yes, we believe that Roundup contributed to his non Hodgkins lymphoma.

So phase two was liability and Monsanto's bad behavior, and how big should the compensatory damage award should be, how big should the punitive damage award be? And then just a few months after Hardeman, the Pilliod case. And the Pilliod case was what really blew it wide open. Alva and Alberta Pilliod, and after he retired from the Navy in good health, they would buy five acres of kind of rundown urban, suburban property in Northern California, clean it up. 

They were birders, so they would take, each one would take their Roundup sprayer in the evening and walk through the properties and use the Roundup to make trails so they could go and watch the wildlife and the birds.

And, and it's hot, and it's hot in Northern California in the, in the spring and summer. And so they would wear flip flops or sneakers without socks. Shorts and t-shirts, because they'd been told it was safe. And because a lot of the spray solution would land on their lower legs and on their hands, they never got sick.

They didn't get a rash. Monsanto had told 'em it's safe and they knew they had it on them and they never got sick and they never had a rash. So they, they figured their lived experience was aligned with what Monsanto was saying. But Doc, there's a problem — when a chemical damages your DNA, you don't feel it.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: You, you don't get a rash. 

Ken Cook: They were from Livermore, so they were out in the heat of the day. And if you've been to Livermore, you know how hot it gets over there, but yeah. And it, it got into their skin. And so what happened next? 

Chuck Benbrook: Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a married couple, they got exactly the same type, the major type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma within like six months of each other.

So they got the same disease. 

Ken Cook: Oh. 

Chuck Benbrook: And the lawyer that presented the case, Brent Wisner, someone that you've met. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: He did a masterful job at the tail end of the case in presenting to the jury a way for them — if they so choose to impose punitive damages, how might they figure out the number? A million, 10 million?

And he brought to their attention multiple times during the trial, an email sent by medical doctor to the rest of the management team, the senior people in, involved in preserving their markets for Roundup. And this email chain was speculating about the impact of the IARC classification as a probable human carcinogen.

Ken Cook: Big problem for Monsanto. Big problem. 

Chuck Benbrook: For big, big problem. And whether the IARC report would change the EPAs mind. So that they said no, the EPA position was, it was not likely to cause cancer. They, they were concerned about the IARC decision pushing EPA to at least go to possible carcinogen or maybe to a probable carcinogen, which is what the classification decision that IARC made.

So this, this medical officer wrote an email to the brass speculating about whether the, the IARC classification would change EPA, and he entitled it, the billion dollar question. 

Ken Cook: There you go. 

Chuck Benbrook: And Brent, in the end of his closing statement, the end of the closing statement, this is right before basically the case goes to the jury, he brought that that email back to the attention of the jury in a way that some of the jurors said, hmm, billion, billion, that, that's okay.

Well guess what the jury awarded? A billion dollars to both Alva and Alberta. So it's a $2 billion punitive damage award. One of the largest, punitive damage awards in history for two people. 

Ken Cook: For anything. Yeah, for anything. It's this internal document, right? This secret stuff. Right. What they knew and when they knew it.

Profound impact, right? You could line up all the animal studies and all the rest of the evidence critically important to take that into account, but there's something about corporate malfeasance doing things dishonestly, that really rubbed a juror wrong. 

Chuck Benbrook: So there were two other smoking gun, very impactful emails in all of these early trials.

The second one was an email by Donna Farmer sent to colleagues in Australia who were dealing with a major news program, investigative program, doing a story about this Roundup cause cancer. And they were getting advice from the brass in St. Louis about what they should say to the, the reporter. They had drafted a statement saying, oh, Roundup doesn't cause cancer, blah, blah, blah.

And she sends them an email saying, we can't say Roundup doesn't cause cancer, 'cause we haven't done the studies required to make that statement. Right in an email. Well, so the jury sees that email about five times. 

Ken Cook: Yes, I remember that very well.

Chuck Benbrook: During the trial. And then my personal favorite, number three, 

Ken Cook: I think I know which one this is, but go for it.

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. You, you know what's coming. It was written by a senior scientist working for Monsanto Europe that had been involved with the very successful reregistration process in Europe, where the European regulators had basically told Monsanto Europe that they're gonna ban Roundup with polyethoxylated tallow amine POEA surfactants, because it was genotoxic, it was clearly damaging DNA.

Ken Cook: The surfactants are the things they add to the formulation to aid right in its efficacy on the leaf of the plant, right? 

Chuck Benbrook: Correct. But it also speeds up the movement of the glyphosate through skin. And it also speeds up the glyphosate moving through a hematopoietic stem cell wall because the glyphosate's gotta get inside the cell to come into contact with the DNA to trigger the mutation that starts that cell on the path to non Hodgkin's lymphoma or leukemia or multiple myeloma, which are things that your buddy Benbrook learned through 11 years working on this litigation. 

So this guy that helped Monsanto do this seamless transition where they voluntarily took all of the Roundup off the market that they were selling in Europe that was formulated with the POEA surfactants and replaced it with Roundup, formulated with another surfactant, coronary ammonia surfactants.

And it worked fine. They didn't lose any market. There was no big public concern. And so Dr. Richard Garnett, the guy that did this, was involved in a debate with the, again, the brass in St. Louis, the senior people who were trying to figure out what to do next. 'cause they were dealing with reregistration in the U.S.

Ken Cook: Yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: They were dealing with concerns in Mexico that wanted to end use of Roundup. Garnett and others put on the table, well, why don't we make the same change worldwide that we made to make Roundup safer in Europe? 

Ken Cook: Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you? 

Chuck Benbrook: Why wouldn't you? And, and so in the course of this long email change with, you know, the senior people, the key people that were the decision makers that 

Ken Cook: Was never meant to be public. 

Chuck Benbrook: That was never meant to be public.

This guy puts in a line, why should we keep making a hazardous pesticide when we know how to make a safer one. In the email!

Ken Cook: I remember

Chuck Benbrook: And, and so again, the jury saw that like five times over the weeks of the trial. I mean, what could be a clear admission that they understood that there were risks to the old Roundup? The Roundup that's still being sold to American farmers, by the way. 

Ken Cook: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Again, that, you know, when will anyone learn if they haven't learned it already, that the coverup is worse than the crime. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And that's when the advertising started all over the country. I mean, how many ads did all of us, you know, on the radio, on the TV billboards, if you used a lot of Roundup?

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Mm-hmm. Call this number. Then of course the number of cases filed, you know, ballooned from several thousand to a hundred thousand, and now I think the total is, it's pushing 180,000 total. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: There's still new cases coming in. It's one of the things that, you know, we ought to talk about a little bit is that there's absolutely no change in how Bayer Monsanto has dealt with Roundup other than for the lawn and garden market.

They took the relatively low tox, active ingredient, glyphosate out of it, and put in three or four different herbicides, including most of them, that are much more toxic than glyphosate, which is just, it's such a irresponsible action by this company, and they say, oh, we did it because we have to curtail the liability risk.

Well. You know, there's gonna be a lot of people that are harmed by this new Roundup because it's still called Roundup. People don't know that there's four other pesticides in it and they think, well, I used to get it all over me and it never made me sick. Well, you get this stuff all over you, you are gonna get, you are gonna get sick. Other than that, they've done nothing. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. And they could have, as they said themselves. So let's talk through the case that proceeded that your Amicus Brief filed on behalf of Heartland Health and Research Alliance, HHRA. The Trump administration came in in the Ninth Circuit and said, yes, we want the Supreme Court to hear it, and yes, FIFRA preempts, the federal law preempts the states, being able to have any kind of parallel warning that should be made known to anyone who uses the product. 

So that case just kind of dies out because the, the Biden administration comes along and says, no, we, we think FIFRA preemption here is not appropriate.

So Hardeman gets their settlement and then Mr. Darnell comes along. And at this point we have the Department of Justice under Biden is still saying, no, we, we don't, we don't think the Supreme Court should intervene. We don't think you should look at this case because it's settled. Preemption doesn't prevent these kinds of plaintiff's cases from coming forward.

But the new Supreme Court, as of the summer of 2025. Ask the incoming, the new Trump administration, been in office, not even a year, asks them, what should we do? Should we, should we take another look? Because maybe things have changed with the new administration. And sure enough, then that's when the Trump administration for the second time in the case, it's going to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration says the same thing in effect that it said before, yeah, these cases should be thrown out because FIFRA protects the companies. 

Chuck Benbrook: I learned from a very reliable source that this issue of preemption and the tension within the MAHA world came up several months ago in a, a cabinet meeting that Trump was at, and he said, what's this about?

And somebody that knew a little bit about it said, oh, it's this preemption thing. And Trump said, we shouldn't agree with that. We don't want to give a free pass to chemical companies. He said that, and at the time wasn't expected, but the view was, well, it looks like the White House wasn't gonna, wasn't gonna weigh in on, on behalf of Bayer and Syngenta in this policy fight, but clearly other voices changed his mind.

Ken Cook: Yeah. And my colleague also, Brian Bienkowski for The New Lede works with Carey Gillam. He just won the North American Agricultural Journalists top award for news because of his study using the Freedom of Information Act to unearth just how many times Bayer Monsanto lobbyists met with the administration to argue for them to come back and come back, come home and stand for the companies and not for the, the victims of this exposure.

Chuck Benbrook: Oh my God. The, the degree to which Bayer and former Bayer people and people whose professional careers and livelihood has been dependent on Bayer and the other pesticide companies. I've never seen anything like it from the Secretary of Agriculture, Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, this major fundraiser, Brandon, somebody, the Florida guy.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: They all have deep ties into Bayer. This is how large corporations engage with government. 

Ken Cook: That's how they get their way. 

Chuck Benbrook: They establish long-term relationships with people of influence that they don't know exactly, I mean, who would've guessed that Brooke Rollins would be Secretary of Agriculture in 2026?

Ken Cook: No one in agriculture I guess, did. 

Chuck Benbrook: No, nobody in agriculture. And you know, I think, you know, Brooke, Brooke, Brooke is doing a fine job on some issues. But, uh, she certainly is paying attention to her, her friends and colleagues in the Bayer world and the degree of influence that Bayer has now on this administration, I, I've never seen anything like it. 

Ken Cook: It's shocking and, uh, you know, of course Lee Zeldin responded pretty favorably when the, uh, Attorney General, early in the administration came to him and said, here's our petition to you at EPA to, to intervene on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto and stand up for, for preemption of state law.

I think all of us were blown away by the executive order that invoked national security as yet another layer of defense. Look, let's think about the layers here. First of all, there's the proceedings in federal court where the solicitor general, the top trial lawyer for the Justice Department weighed in on behalf of Bayer and Monsanto.

Then you have this executive order that, hey, it's a matter of national defense that we keep, keep this stuff being produced. And then finally, we haven't yet heard what the administration will say, but I don't think it'll be a surprise — there's an effort in Congress to rewrite the law in favor of Bayer and Monsanto and lots of other pesticide companies to choke off any kind of state-based claims of harm and avenues for accountability.

So that's, that's really pretty impressive. Uh, we probably won't get to the prospect that a bad decision at the court or the passage of this bad amendment in the Farm Bill, the implications it will have for other pesticide litigation and other venues for holding pesticide companies accountable. But it's significant, right? 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. You asked about the Durnell case. Yeah, 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Uh, 

Chuck Benbrook: John Durnell was a very typical urban user of Roundup. Bought it at, you know, local Lowe's or Home Depot, sprayed it around his yard again for several years. And was exposed to enough of it that the amount of damage to the DNA in these hematopoietic stem cells in his bone marrow, it, it created enough mutated, uh, cells that are incredibly elaborate and redundant immune systems just couldn't keep up.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And sometimes a cancer will get ahead of the immune system when the immune system's fighting a urinary tract infection or an ear infection, or upper respiratory infection. Or sometimes people are put on immunosuppressive drugs 'cause they're having an a, an organ transplant. If there's some cancer cells in that person's body, they're gonna go wild.

So there, there's, there, cancer is such a complicated disease and there's essentially never or hardly ever one thing that causes a case of cancer. It's a series of things that unfold over at least a few years. Timing has a lot to do with it. John Darnell's case, uh, which I was involved with, I did an expert report and was deposed as, as part of the case — I didn't testify at trial. Uh, it, it reached a judgment. I think he was awarded 1.25 million, which was definitely on the low side. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Monsanto didn't pick the Durnell case because of the, the large award. There were other reasons that they felt it would be a good vehicle to get these, these issues back in, in front of the Supreme Court.

So when, Bayer Monsanto literally engineered the conflict between the appeals courts. They paid people to do the appeals and, and rewarded either plaintiffs or attorneys for an outcome in those appeals that set up the request for the Supreme Court to take the case. 

Ken Cook: Set up by a split between two districts.

Chuck Benbrook: Three.

Ken Cook: The third. Three, okay. All right. I know it's the one in Philadelphia, obviously the one in California, and then where was the third one? 

Chuck Benbrook: Uh, it's in the southeast. 

Ken Cook: Okay. The Supreme Court's looking at it and saying, “Hey, we're getting conflicting readings right from the courts right below us. So that's an invitation for us to step in.” 

Chuck Benbrook: Right. But one of the reasons this is so controversial within the legal community is that Bayer Monsanto paid for lawyers to create the conflict in a way that's been exposed. 

Ken Cook: How did they go about it? How did they do it? 

Chuck Benbrook: What it boiled down to is that they promised both the attorneys and the person that was the plaintiff in the litigation that they would receive financial compensation, even if they settled their case.

Ken Cook: Wow. 

Chuck Benbrook: So once the Supreme Court decided to take the case, I said to myself, I've been dealing with preemption since 1981, when I served as the staff director of the DOA subcommittee. And the number one issue that the industry wanted changes on in 1981, in George Brown subcommittee was preemption. And why?

Because the state of California, Florida, Massachusetts, and New York were starting to impose further restrictions, mostly on insecticide use because they didn't want farm workers to be poisoned in the field. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. These were parallel to what was required on the label, right? Not 

Chuck Benbrook: Correct. 

Ken Cook: Not additional to or substitutes to. They were just parallel, like you have to do this too under state law. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, let's use wine grapes. A lot of insecticides are used in in wine grapes. And the company gets a federal label that it, it says how much can be applied, how many times, what kind of sprayer? What sort of PPE the applicator has to wear. 

Ken Cook: Personal protective equipment, yeah.

Chuck Benbrook: But doesn't say much about a farm worker, maybe in the next field over, or a, a farm worker that's going into pr... 

Ken Cook: It gets on them. It spray, it drifts onto them, or whatever. A family. It could be anybody. 

Chuck Benbrook: And the federal label doesn't have any warnings about if you are working in and around a treated field, make sure that you don't get, get exposed. 'Cause this, this stuff will kill you. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Federal labels were being approved that did not address in any way, shape or form many of the ways that farm workers were getting inadvertently, accidentally, exposed in places like California where you'd have a heavily sprayed grape field next to a strawberry field, next to a cauliflower field.

And you know, they're close enough together that some of the pesticides drift and people were getting badly injured, some people were being killed. So the states were requiring on state labels additional restrictions on when and where a field could be applied. And for example, the state of California wanted to put a sign on the corner of the field — this has been sprayed, stay out of the field for at least 24 hours.

And they wanted the signs to be in Spanish. What a radical idea. 

Ken Cook: Of course. 

Chuck Benbrook: Right. And this is what the pesticide industry at the national level, they didn't want states to be free to address these very localized and often really dangerous, high risk exposure scenarios. So they came to our subcommittee and and said, we want to cut back the role of states in pesticide labeling.

And states can't require anything more on their label than what the federal EPA did. And if a farm worker is injured and heaven forbid killed, they can't go into a state court and sue the company because they got sprayed from this application on the grapes and were exposed to enough to kill them. They couldn't bring litigation because the application was, complied with, what was on the federal label.

So what California was doing, they were adding additional requirements, including mandatory warnings. And so now the industry says, the argument behind the current effort, is that a farmer or a farm worker, or someone that is exposed to a pesticide in a state and is harmed. Either harmed economically, the pesticide killed their crop, killed their apple trees, damaged the paint on their Maserati, which was happening from some aerial applications in California, remember?

Ken Cook: Yeah, I do remember that. 

Chuck Benbrook: You know, people were being harmed from legal, labeled uses of pesticides and, and because of state law, they would go into court and say the, you know, there was a failure to warn. But the pesticide companies want now the federal court system and the Supreme Court to say to the state court, you can't recognize a failure to warn claim unless the warning was on the federal label. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And of course, pesticide companies, they're responsible for writing the labels and they resist. 

Ken Cook: They don't wanna do it. 

Chuck Benbrook: They don't want to. 

Ken Cook: It'll hurt sales. It'll hurt sales. 

Chuck Benbrook: It'll hurt sales. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. You have a phrase in your brief industry backed by the Trump administration, I'm gonna say it again, backed by the administration that includes Bobby Kennedy. What they're basically saying is, we wanna make sure that this preemption exists, not just for the things we warn about on the label, but for anything we didn't think of.

Chuck Benbrook: Or didn't understand. 

Ken Cook: Didn't understand. No science. But the, the states are producing the science, Heartland Health and Research Alliance produced vital information. New science that wasn't originally considered in the registration of the pesticide you write about in the brief, but there we are. 

Chuck Benbrook: Let me just briefly describe part of the HHRA amicus brief that, I think's gonna catch the attention of the Supreme Court. 

Ken Cook: Fingers crossed. 

Chuck Benbrook: At the core of it, the pesticide industry, Bayer Monsanto wanna take states out of the pesticide regulatory business 

Ken Cook: Out of the game. Totally.

Chuck Benbrook: Out of the game. What's going on right now involving another major Monsanto herbicide called Dicamba. Dicamba is one of the herbicides that Monsanto has developed a way to genetically alter soybeans and cotton plants so that not only can you spray glyphosate over the top of the crop, but you can also spray Dicamba.

And Dicamba is very helpful in dealing with some of the difficult to control broadleaf weeds that are really plaguing corn and soybean farmers around the country now. 

Ken Cook: And that because Roundup no longer works, right, 

Chuck Benbrook: Because it was used too heavily and irresponsibly. Yeah, because Monsanto fought putting any kind of resistance management provisions on the label because they were afraid that it might curtail their sales.

'Cause Monsanto is all about maximizing the sale and profits from its products and anything that gets in the way of that, what they call they, they want to preserve the ‘freedom to operate.’ The freedom to get labels and then to prevent any limitations being put on the existing labels. 

Ken Cook: Freedom to operate. I can see the bald eagles and the American flag — unless the pesticide has killed the bald eagles. Of course, I can see the bald eagles in the American flag in the background. Freedom. Freedom to operate. 

Chuck Benbrook: Dicamba has been a hugely controversial development, these Dicamba tolerant crops, because Dicamba is very volatile.

So farmers would spray Dicamba and kill the broadleaf weeds in the soybean field. But then the Dicamba, it volatilizes and goes up in the air, and then it moves with the, the, the wind and wherever it next rains or, or a little dew, it's gonna come back down to earth. Well, guess what? There's a lot of plants and trees and shrubs that when that Dicamba comes back down to earth, it's gonna harm it, if not kill it.

So all over the Midwest, there's been, this movement of Dicamba and, and another phenoxy herbicide, two four D, which is also very volatile. So the, the, the herbicides, they don't stay on the field where they sprayed, funny thing, especially in hot and hum weather, they volatilize go up in the air and move.

And so this has just created havoc in these Midwestern and southeastern states where there's a lot of genetically engineered soybeans and cotton grown and a lot of Dicamba being applied. So what have the states done? The states all now do supplemental labels. And what's in the supplemental labels? They have things like, you can't apply Dicamba after June 15th north of, of Highway five or in X County.

So all of the states now are doing supplemental labels for the Dicamba product. That's registered for over the top use in association with a genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. And these labels have some combination of geographic restrictions where they can be sprayed and what the cutoff date is — because this volatilization problem, it gets worse as it gets hotter. 

So the farther into the summer, the worse the problem is. From the first year it was used when they could use it, Christ, they could apply it in August and they were having huge problems. Now most of the states don't allow it much after the third week in June.

And basically the farther south you go, the earlier that date is. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: So now there are three companies, Bayer Monsanto, Syngenta, and BASF, that have EPA approved Dicamba labels for applications on genetically engineered soybeans and cotton. These products are now approved in 34 states. So do the math. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: 34 times three.

So now states are reviewing and approving a hundred supplemental labels. A hundred supplemental labels. These are labels that the states have to do, have to apply, they have to enforce, and there's all kinds of crazy ass implications that nobody thought of. You know, somebody's farming in Missouri along the Iowa border, and they go and they buy some Dicamba in Iowa and it's got the label for Iowa and they bring it to Missouri, who's at fault.

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It's 

Chuck Benbrook: unimaginable. 

Ken Cook: One of the dynamics here, and you brought it to my attention as these cases were unfolding in this instance, this is a farmer versus farmer thing, right? This is where the plaintiffs were the farmers who were complaining that the drift of this dicamba into their fields that weren't dicamba resistant was costing them a lot of money, a lot of damage, and, and, uh, very upsetting.

Much as they care about their neighbors, they want their neighbors to be able to do what they want to do, like they want to do with their own land. But this stuff doesn't stay on your land. It doesn't stay on your crops. It moves. 

Chuck Benbrook: Just think of the hypocrisy here where Bayer Monsanto, for its Roundup product is saying, we gotta cut the role of states out, because we don't like the fact that sometimes we get hauled into court, maybe have to compensate somebody that's been harmed by our product. 

But it, but for our Dicamba product, oh, we like it that the states are doing like a almost a hundred supplemental labels this year to allow farmers to spray Dicamba on genetically engineered soybean and cotton, 

Ken Cook: And then it falls on the farmers, if they haven't obeyed the label, it falls on them. Not on Monsanto. Is that right? 

Chuck Benbrook: Well, that, yes, that, that is exactly correct. Now, if Monsanto has written a inaccurate or ineffective or ambiguous label, they also can become part of litigation. But the, the thing that, that just boils my blood about this, Ken, is the current Supreme Court precedents and direction to state courts about when somebody, that, that is defending a Monsanto or a Syngenta in state court. 

Somebody has Parkinson's disease, somebody has non Hodgkin's lymphoma and has brought suit, and that person is seeking compensation from the company, the instructions to the judge on how to deal with a motion — to throw out the failure to warn cause of action. The basis of the litigation.

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Throw it out. You can't do it. That foundation, that interpretation of the FIFRA law was put in place in 2005 as a result of a bunch of cantankerous Texas peanut farmers. 

Ken Cook: Yes. 

Chuck Benbrook: These peanut farmers had bought a brand new Dow AgroSciences herbicide diclosulam. The trade name was Strongarm.

Strongarm, right? 

Ken Cook: They always have the great trade names. Machete and whatever. Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: But there was one issue with Strongarm. Maybe more than one, but one issue that Dow knew about was that in soils, high pH soils, it didn't break down as fast as it normally did, and it was pretty persistent. So if, if a peanut farmer used it in the peanuts, it would work great, it would control the weeds. But then the farmer plants a cotton crop after the peanuts, the next year. 

And holy shit, the, the Strongarm herbicide is still active and damages the subsequent crop. Well, that's what happened to this group of, of, I think there was seven or eight plaintiffs led by, the lead plaintiff was a, a guy named a farmer named Bates, and all they asked for was their losses to be covered. Which is the, you know, the amount of money that they paid to plant the subsequent crop and this, this kind of thing with, you know, carry over herbicide damage. Yeah. It, it was happening regularly all over the country.

And most of the time if it was a custom applicator, they would have insurance and the insurance would more than cover it. And sometimes the companies would kick in some of the money if it was a, a larger, broader adverse impact. But for some reason Dow decided that by God we're gonna fight this and try to get rid of this failure to warn cause of action.

And so Dow takes on this group of seven Texas peanut farmers takes on big Dow AgroSciences 

Ken Cook: All the way to the Supreme Court. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. And wins. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And wins. And so now American farmers read the, the propaganda put out by the Modern Ag Alliance and other front groups that are being financed mostly by Bayer Monsanto and Syngenta — that are the two multinational pesticide companies facing billions of dollars of costs from litigation over, in the case of Syngenta, Paraquat Parkinson's disease, and in the case of Bayer Monsanto, Roundup and Non Hodge's lymphoma. 

They are desperate, desperate to find a way to limit their liability exposure. And let, let me at this point, make one other point that is really important. Why is the pesticide industry so determined to try to get this change in law put in place?

And there's really a very obvious answer. Science is catching up with the ability to link exposure to a given pesticide to damage to DNA or some marker of the evolution of a chronic disease, which then clearly increases the risk of some bad thing happening. Science is catching up on all of the instances where the pesticide industry covered up knowledge and evidence of harm and convinced regulators to say, yeah, it's okay.

We'll label that. That pesticide can be in broccoli. This pesticide can be in carrots. This pesticide can be sprayed all over rangeland in the West. And EPA made those decisions, because the companies had successfully kept the regulators from understanding what the companies already understood about how the pesticide can damage human health. 

And the companies know that there are going to be more of these successful efforts by the pesticide industry to keep products on the market, for decades, in some cases, after the company knew it was causing significantly heightened risk of, in the case of Paraquat and Parkinson's disease, the predecessor companies to Syngenta, remember back in the day when we called them Novartis?

Ken Cook: Okay, I do remember. Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, we're going back, but in 1980s, Novartis sponsored cutting edge quality research on what Paraquat was doing in the human brain. And guess what they found? It was triggering damage to dopamine neurons. Completely consistent, and fundamentally part of the progression of damaged neurons to Parkinson's disease — in the eighties!

Ken Cook: Yeah. And another shout out to Carrie Gillum because she published something called the Paraquat Papers. They're on the The New Lede website right now. They were published by The Guardian as well, that again, once you lift this corporate veil and see what they knew and when they knew it, what they were talking about in memos and emails and other communications, they fricking knew.

And they have an obligation under law to let the government know and they didn't. And we know why they didn't. For all the reasons you just described, it's the beginning of the end for them. 

Chuck Benbrook: And Ken, let, let me make really clear, 'cause I'm sure some farmers that do worry about access to Roundup are listening to this.

Monsanto knew that Roundup herbicides were damaging the DNA in stem cells in all of our bone marrow. They knew that by the early two thousands. They didn't have any tools to quantify exactly how big the increase in risk of non Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, leukemia, the blood cancers.Very important cancers.

They didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle put together like we do now, today. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: But they knew enough to say, let's put a warning on it. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: You know, if you're using this product a lot and use it over several years, take extra precautions to avoid exposures. They should have put a requirement for for on the label when you are handling and applying this product, wear gloves. I mean, how simple is that?

Ken Cook: How about a long sleeve shirt? How about long — no flip flops, right? 

Chuck Benbrook: No flip flops. The Roundup non Hodgkin’s lymphoma litigation is unfortunately stuffed with incredible stories. There was a woman in Florida, she loved her backyard garden, especially her rose bushes.

She had an area in her backyard with her rose bushes. 

Ken Cook: My mom and Aunt Ruth did too. I think you saw it one time too. 

Chuck Benbrook: God bless them. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. 

Chuck Benbrook: Been a long time since they left a stock. 

Ken Cook: That's right. That's right. 

Chuck Benbrook: So this woman, she used bark mulch under her roses, very proud of her roses. And then she had her lawn and she hated it when her lawn started to creep out into her bark mulch, which, yeah, don't we all tend to do.

Ken Cook: Don't we all? Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: So she devised a creative solution. She would have her little Roundup canister that she bought at Home Depot and the little electric sprayer on with shorts on and bare feet. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And she would put her foot on top of the edge of the grass, on top of the edge of the grass and then spray the bark mulch with her foot catching the, the spray.

And she did that for several years. And guess what? She got non Hodgkin’s lymphoma. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: I mean, people do kind of crazy things, but 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: When a, when a company tells people that their product is non-toxic, it's, it's all natural ingredients, biodegradable. 

Ken Cook: You can spray out the window of a cab as you're on your way to the airport.

Chuck Benbrook: Right? Yeah. Right. And remember the ads for DDT with the kids in suburban areas?  

Ken Cook: Yes, off course. 

Chuck Benbrook: Of course. Walking behind the spray truck 'cause it looks like it's snowing. In an urban area. 

Ken Cook: I did it in my suburban St. Louis neighborhood. Of course I did. 

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah.

Ken Cook: Of course I did. 

Chuck Benbrook: We all did. So what, what does DDT and Roundup glyphosate have in common? They have an extraordinarily high LD 50. 

Ken Cook: The LD 50 is the amount that will kill half the animals in an experiment. 

Chuck Benbrook: Exactly. LD stands for lethal dose. Dash 50 is 50% of the animals. So this is the 

Ken Cook: Died during the study

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. Right, right. 

Ken Cook: It's not like this is, we wait around for them to get cancer. They're fricking dead.

Chuck Benbrook: Right 

Ken Cook: In the cage. 

Chuck Benbrook: Right, right. And so, you know, the, the, the LD 50 for glyphosate is like 4,000 parts per million. I mean, it's really high. Just the same as with DDT. I mean, you can stick your arm into a barrel of Roundup and pull your arm out and you're not gonna get sick. You're not gonna have symptoms, you're not gonna get a rash.

If you stick your little one finger just a little bit into that much Paraquat, you're gonna die. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: Or any of the high risk, uh, organophosphate or carbonate insecticide. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. It varies. Well, you've been very generous with your time, so I just want to ask you one more question and, and you know, again, we're, this is gonna stay with us for a while, depending, especially depending on where, where the Supreme Court goes down, depending on what happens with the Farm Bill next week and what, we don't have time to talk about that particular scenario, but you and I have been through dozens of Farm Bills it feels like.

But what do you think is at stake now? So politically, there are all kinds of questions now in the world of MAHA because they feel betrayed, and rightly so. They shouldn't have been surprised, but because they don't know all the history that we know, uh, they just assume when Trump said he was gonna do something about pesticides, and it sounds like you've, you've heard he was surprised at the preemption position the government took, uh, in the end too. 

So there's that political element where we gotta get people to wake up to what's really going on. But then there's, there's the real possibility that if this decision goes the wrong way, and we've had some doozies on the environment from this court, right — that we could, we could really be in trouble. 

We could really lose one of our few remaining avenues, other than buying organic food. But certainly for a lot of people being exposed outside the dietary exposure route, we, we could really be in trouble when it comes to protecting human health and the environment and all kinds of critters from pesticides. 

But, but what, what's your sort of closing thought on all of this, Chuck? You, I mean, you, you and I go back decades, but you've been, you know, a, a, a leader on pesticide policy and regulation and obviously deeply involved as an expert in this litigation now also for decades. What comes to your mind that, that makes you most concerned if this goes sideways?

Chuck Benbrook: Really important, uh, question Ken and I, I, I think the answer is that right now, the, the only meaningful accountability and concern about coming forward and getting high risk pesticides registered for uses that are gonna result in a lot of, uh, human exposure is the, the risk of litigation. If that risk is taken away, then, right now, the, the pesticide industry has a very cozy relationship with the Office of Pesticide Programs.

Ken Cook: Longstanding very long, unfortunately, uncomfortably longstanding. I think, I don't wanna put words in your mouth, but, you know. 

Chuck Benbrook: OPP started to go downhill by the late eighties, uh, and from basically the late eighties on, the ability of pesticide registrants to get their way with the Office of Pesticide Programs has steadily increased to, to the point now where they're, they're not really that concerned about getting their, their products on the market, and they're certainly not concerned about EPA taking a high risk product off the market.

I mean, look what happened just two weeks ago. Syngenta bailed on Paraquat before the EPA took it off the market. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And what, why did Syngenta bail on it? Because they know they're gonna keep getting sued. It, it's, it's been banned in China, which owns Syngenta. You know, it's, it's just, uh, the, the lax approach of the US EPA and the Office of Pesticide programs about well documented, clearly hazardous uses of pesticides.

It, it's, it's, a travesty. And I think that farmers are starting to figure it out — because they look in their neighborhood cancer, this family, two cases of cancer, this family, three cases in this family. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: They can see that people are getting sick. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. 

Chuck Benbrook: And unfortunately we have big problems with how we grow food in this country, and then what we do with the food between when it leaves the farm and people eat it.

The concerns over ultra processed food are real. The health of the American public is a national disgrace right now. 

Ken Cook: Yeah, for sure. 

Chuck Benbrook: I think the public is about had it with it. And I think that the day is going to come, you know, in, in the next five or 10 years where there's going to be substantial changes in some of the laws and policies that govern agriculture and, and, and food safety and food quality.

We could have the most nutritious, delicious, diverse food supply in this country if we wanted to, but no. What do we have? We produce a lot of ethanol. We export a lot of food and we feed a lot of corn and soybeans to, to livestock and create unhealthy fats that keep us unhealthy. Our food and fiber system is seriously broken, and the, the, the time is, is, has come to fix it.

Ken Cook: Well, between your lips and God's ears, brother Chuck, I'm gonna end there and, and thank you for, uh, explaining all of this to me and to my, uh, audience and, and also for your decades of devotion, uh, intellectually and, um, devotion that comes from, from the heart. I know that firsthand, we'll come back when we find out how some of these deci, big decisions have come down.

The most momentous decisions really since the 1990, mid 1990s, Food Quality Protection Act and the National Academy, most momentous moment. 

Chuck Benbrook: I, I knew you were gonna say that at some point. 

Ken Cook: Yeah. We haven't agree. Had a moment like this and, um…

Chuck Benbrook: Yeah. 

Ken Cook: We'll stick with it. Uh, Chuck Benbrook, thank you for joining and giving me another great episode.

Chuck Benbrook: Thank you. 

Ken Cook: Thank you to Dr. Chuck Benbrook for joining me today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head on over to ewg.org or check out the ewg Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup.

Now, if this episode resonated with you, and I hope it did, and you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extremely remarkable Beth Rowe at Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby.

Thank you Moby, and thank you again out there for listening.

Areas of Focus Chemical Policy Glyphosate Pesticides May 29, 2026

We the People featured at NW Folklife Festival this weekend!

Two copies will be at Seattle Center this weekend at the NW Folklife Festival, one at the Mural Amphitheater Stage, near the Space Needle and another in the International Fountain Pavilion, with pens for signing. Use this chance to add your signature in time for it to be taken to DC this July 4th!

Over the last 19 years, Backbone's giant We the People banner has served as an icon of people power and our aspirations to fulfill the shared mission of creating a more perfect union. Adding two more Preamble sections has allowed it to appear in even more cities in the past year, collecting signatures and grabbing the attention of the press and public as a symbol of resistance and resilience.

In early May, we held our first-ever Northwest Transmission Summit in Boise, Idaho. Stakeholders from around the region, including Tribal, environmental, and community leaders, nonprofits, developers, policymakers, and energy and transmission experts gathered at the Boise Centre for two days to learn, share perspectives, and take action to build our prosperous future.  

Thank you so much to Renewable Northwest who partnered on the planning of the summit and co-sponsored the event. Thank you to our sponsors:

Thank you to our speakers, to the Boise Centre for hosting, to everyone who attended, and to our community partners who helped us spread the word about the event.  

We are so grateful for the diverse perspectives, insights, and deep engagement everyone brought to this summit. We recorded all of the panel discussions and have linked them below in case you missed the conference or want to dive in again.  

What We Learned

At the end of day two, our Senior Policy Associate and event host Ben Otto wrapped up the summit with an incredible summary of the themes and key takeaways that emerged throughout the event. Attendees also asked questions and shared what stuck with them.  

We didn’t solve every problem, but we made great progress on some challenges, reflected on innovative solutions, and came up with more questions to stimulate lots of future conversations and actions. Stay tuned for a future blog on our learnings from the summit and our next steps.   

Summit Highlights

We opened and closed the conference with a few polls of the audience to gauge everyone’s interest, understanding of, and commitment to work on transmission issues. It was incredible to see the results on day two: participants’ understanding of transmission issues and how to engage in the region had markedly increased.  

Our shared understanding of the primary barriers to building transmission also transformed after two days of discussion at the summit.  

We were inspired by attendees’ key takeaways:  

We look forward to building on the momentum from the summit and will share more transmission-related programming soon. We also welcome you to join us at our fall conference on October 15 at the University of Washington HUB in Seattle—check back here soon for registration information. 

Keep in touch with us: email nwec@nwenergy.org or sign up for our newsletter.  

Panel Discussions

Panel 1 

The Grid We Share: History and Perspectives on Regional Transmission 

Panelists:  

• Jillan Hanson, Climate and Renewable Energy Program Manager, The Nature Conservancy in Idaho 

• Brant Johnson, Senior Vice President of Development, Grid United 

• Jamie Hearn, Climate and Community Planning Lead, Front and Centered 

• Donald Williams, Founder/Principal/CEO, From the Light Consulting 

• Mike McArthur, Renewable Northwest  

Moderator: Stephanie Lenhart, Associate Professor, Boise State University 

Panel 2 

Looking Ahead: Opportunities to Expand the Transmission System 

Panelists:  

• Casey Baker, Senior Program Manager, GridLab 

• Hamody Hindi, Manager of Transmission Planning, Bonneville Power Administration 

• Kyle Unruh, Director, Montana & Idaho, Renewable Northwest 

• Curtis Westhoff, System Consulting Engineer, Idaho Power Planning Department 

Moderator:  

• Shanna Brownstein, Head of Utility Partnerships, GridCARE 

Panel 3 

Issues and Solutions Part 1: Community and Environmental Impacts and Siting Processes 

Panelists:  

• Shannon Stewart, VP of Environmental Compliance & Strategy, Invenergy 

• John Robison, Public Lands & Wildlife Director, Idaho Conservation League 

• Reuben Martinez, Energy Program Manager, Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians (ATNI) 

• Jeff Hough, Bannock County Board of Commissioners 

Moderator:  

• Aaron Menenberg, Idaho Policy Manager, Renewable Northwest 

Panel 4 

Issues and Solutions Part 2: Regional Planning and Coordination 

Panelists:  

• Rich Glick, Principal, GQS New Energy Strategies 

• Caitilin Liotiris, Principal, Energy Strategies 

• Donald Williams, Founder/Principal/CEO, From the Light Consulting 

Moderator: 

• George Lynch, Deputy Director, Western Interstate Energy Board 

Panel 5 

Issues and Solutions Part 3: How Costs and Benefits are Determined and Allocated at the State Level 

Panelists:  

• John Hammond, Idaho Public Utilities Commission 

• Les Perkins, Oregon Public Utility Commission 

• Brian Rybarik, Chair, Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission 

Moderator:  

• Megan Decker, Staircase Advisory 

Panel 6 

Issues and Solutions Part 4: Workforce and Construction 

Panelists:  

• Jake Pollack, Senior Director, Strategy & Impact, Strategic Energy Innovation 

• Erich Orth, Bonneville Power Administration 

• Jason Hudson, Government Affairs Director, IBEW 77 

Moderator:  

• Kate French, Senior Policy Manager, Power Sector, BlueGreen Alliance 

The post 2026 Northwest Transmission Summit Digest first appeared on NW Energy Coalition.

Registered nurses at HCA Florida Fort Walton-Destin Hospital in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., will hold an informational picket on Tuesday, June 2, to highlight their patient safety concerns, including short-staffing and management’s failure to address workplace violence.

This first edition of CELDF's State of Rights of Nature Report represents yet another important contribution from CELDF to those studying, documenting, or actively working for rights of nature.

The post CELDF Publication – State of Rights of Nature Report appeared first on CELDF - Community Rights Pioneers - Protecting Nature and Communities.

As the crisis facing Great Salt Lake continues to garner ongoing local and national attention and concern, National Audubon Society welcomes the growing array of committed organizations and...

From the rainforests of Hawaii to the Rocky Mountains, animals are feeling the effects of climate change.

A proposed management change for the Maroon Bells Scenic Area, located in the White River National Forest outside Aspen, Colorado, is putting public access to the popular hiking destination in jeopardy, particularly for less affluent visitors.

Earlier this month, after the U.S. Forest Service stated that it can no longer afford to manage the area, Pitkin County applied for a special use permit to take over operations beginning in the 2027 season. Managing heavy visitation has always been a challenge at the Maroon Bells, and the area currently relies on shuttles, timed-entry, and limited parking reservations to keep crowds from overwhelming the landscape. The Pitkin County Open Space and Trails director told county commissioners the county’s general fund will not subsidize Maroon Bells operations, and that it will increase fees to cover costs.

The Forest Service currently oversees these operations at a nearly $300,000 annual deficit, though as Center for Western Priorities Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein writes in a new Westwise blog post about the issue, “Accepting the premise that national public lands must operate in the black is accepting an argument that would justify privatizing nearly every park, forest, and wilderness area in the country.”

The Maroon Bells situation is in part a result of underfunding by Congress, a problem that has been building for years and has accelerated under the Trump administration. Both the Trump administration and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have made it clear they intend to manage public lands like assets on a balance sheet, and offloading management costs to local governments is a consequence of that approach. The result is a pay-to-play system where access to public lands becomes more expensive. Hiking the Maroon Bells is already a costly endeavor that requires visitors to pay for parking in Aspen and for the shuttle ride to the trailhead.

Quick hits The hollow man in the arena

RE:PUBLIC

Comments from national park ‘snitch signs’ have been released. They’re wild

SFGATE

The Maroon Bells belong to everyone. Why are we treating them like a business?

Westwise

The Trump administration is spending $5 million to coat D.C. horse statues in gold

NOTUS

Grazing away wildfire risk? Congress considers cattle grazing for wildfire suppression

Montana Free Press

California is getting three new state parks, and they’re not where you’d think

National Geographic

Wildlife advocates sue to stop killing of predators inside designated wilderness areas

E&E News

Research suggests being in nature improves body image

Outside

Quote of the day

This is part of a Trump administration strategy to defund land management agencies in order to increase dysfunction, and then to present privatization as the solution. The Maroon Bells are well known and visible enough to draw scrutiny and generate outrage, but lesser-known areas won’t be so lucky.”

—CWP Creative Content and Policy Manager Lilly Bock-Brownstein, Westwise

Picture This

@u.s.forestservice

A brilliant red sunset paints the landscape on the Tongass National Forest, Alaska. Plan your adventure today!

(Forest Service photo by Adam DiPietro.)

Featured image: Maroon Bells Shuttle at the Maroon Lake parking area. Source: Pitkin County.

The post Higher fees could make visiting Colorado’s Maroon Bells unaffordable appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

Transcript of EWG podcast 'Ken Cook Is Having Another Episode' – Episode 58 Adam Levin May 29, 2026

This Earth Day, we’re not celebrating progress; we’re sounding the alarm. In today’s episode, EWG co-Founder and President Ken Cook sits down with Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney, co-authors of a landmark article in the New England Journal of Medicine that breaks down how the Trump administration’s sweeping environmental rollbacks are threatening the health of every American.

Landrigan is no stranger to these fights. As a young Centers for Disease Control and Prevention doctor in the 1970s, his groundbreaking research on lead poisoning in children helped drive lead out of gasoline and paint. This victory reduced childhood lead poisoning by 95% and raised the IQ of an entire generation.

Gaffney, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Harvard Medical School, has spent his career fighting to protect his patients’ lungs – and now the very protections that keep those lungs healthy are being dismantled one regulation at a time.

Together, the doctors share with Cook all the vital rules that the administration is undoing, who will suffer most, and what it will cost the public in health harms and lives lost – from weakened air quality standards and gutted climate policy, to the quiet destruction of the scientific institutions that keep Americans safe.

Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.

Ken: Hi there. I'm Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. On the eve of Earth Day, I'm really thrilled to be joined today by Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney to discuss their recently published article in the New England Journal of Medicine titled “The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, a Grave Threat to America's Health,” that published on March 25th, 2026.

Dr. Philip Landrigan is a pediatrician and a legendary public health physician who directs the global observatory on planetary health at Boston College. A prominent figure in environmental health and guest on this show, Dr. Landrigan spent 15 years at the CDC and is internationally recognized for his decades of research on the health effects of toxic chemicals, pesticides, and pollution, particularly on children.

And it's always worth mentioning because it is so important: in 1976 alongside the late, wonderful, great Dr. Herb Needleman, another longtime friend of EWG, Dr. Landrigan led the US government to mandate the removal of lead from gasoline and paint. That action reduced childhood lead poisoning dramatically in the United States by 95% — that's legendary. 

My other guest today is Dr. Adam Gaffney, who's an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, a pulmonary and critical care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance, a health policy researcher, and a writer and commentator on issues of medicine and policy. His research focuses on national healthcare reform, healthcare equity, and disparities in lung health.

The article was also co-authored by Dr. David Himmelstein, Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, and researcher Sancia Sehdev. This team collectively brings decades of expertise in public health, health equity, and environmental medicine. Now on Earth Day, we like to think we'd be celebrating the progress made in protecting our air, water, and the health of future generations.

Instead, this episode finds us at a deeply troubling moment, one where the very protections that Earth Day was created to champion are being systematically rolled back. Rather than marking another year of progress, Dr. Landrigan, Dr. Gaffney, and their colleagues have felt compelled to sound the alarm, documenting in painstaking detail what is being lost and what it will cost us in human health and lives.

This is not the Earth Day any of us hoped to celebrate this year, but it is one that demands our full attention. Dr. Landrigan and Dr. Gaffney, congratulations to both of you on this paper. One of my frustrations, and I think as public health doctors, it probably is one of your frustrations too, is that the public often doesn't understand the connection of the environment to their health. And so the first step is to get people to recognize that. 

But clean air, clean water, pesticide policy, all manner of issues involving climate change, all of these can have very distinctly important, indeed, profound impacts on human health — that are unfortunately tragically being eroded severely in this administration. So let me just start off and ask both of you, what made you take this article on this research project? 

Dr. Landrigan: Well, Ken, firstly, let me say how nice it is to be here. It's really great to be to be with you again. I think we go back to the early 1990s when we were working together on pesticides in their hazards to children's health. 

Ken: Yeah. I was in high school at the time, if you'll remember. I was. 

Dr. Landrigan: You were possibly middle school. 

Ken: Otherwise the math would be bad for me right now I think.

Dr. Landrigan: Exactly. But why did, why did we take this on?

Well, this, this is actually the second time we've taken this on. We actually did a similar exercise during the first Trump administration and we tabulated the rollbacks. And we published a paper in The Lancet, which is the world's most widely read medical journal, published outta London, and we calculated that environmental and occupational health rollbacks during Trump one were responsible for, in the neighborhood of 20,000 unnecessary premature deaths per year in the United States.

Most of those deaths were due to increased levels of air pollution. And a smaller but still significant number were due to rollbacks of occupational health and safety safeguards. The administration talks about these rollbacks as freeing industry from the shackles of regulation and about driving a dagger into the heart of the climate change religion.

What they don't talk about is that those common sense safeguards that they're rolling back actually protect people's health. They save lives and, and speaking as a pediatrician, they especially protect the health of children. We reckoned, Adam and I reckoned, that we needed to shine a light on what was going on.

Dr. Gaffney: You know, for me clinically, I'm a pulmonary and critical care physician, so the lungs are near and dear to what I do each day, and so many of these policies will do harm to, not only the lungs of the patients I treat or adults, but of children whose lungs are still developing and may never achieve the health that they could have had had they not been exposed to, uh, unnecessary levels of pollutants — like soot pollution and so forth. 

So it's near and dear to my clinical work. I would also add that sort of, as you said, Ken, it's very easy for a lot of these policies to be implemented with relatively little public knowledge because they’re so complex, because there's so many, because it's a death by a thousand cuts sort of approach.

Whereby even if you do care about the environment, even if you are worried about the cleanliness of our air and water, you might not realize what is happening. You may not realize that polluters are going to be allowed to put more mercury into the air, to put more pollutants in the water, to release more air pollution into the environment.

So that's part of why I wanted to collaborate on this is to actually systematically outline what is happening in the potential risks for Americans. 

Ken: And you've, you've really put your finger on something important here. I like to think I keep up as a professional paid environmentalist, but I can't. With all of the changes that are taking place just at EPA, then if you were to add in changes at the Department of Interior, even the Department of Defense, uh, certainly the energy department, all of these changes that have been made in the name of, um, you know, cutting regulation.

What does, uh, Zelin, the EPA administrator, he, his little micro brand is, um, the Great American comeback. That's how he advertises all of his regulatory cuts. But for sure, just keeping up with them is, is difficult. And that was, I think that's part of the plan. 

We had an author on David Graham from The Atlantic who wrote a book about Project 2025, and one of the most important elements that was embedded in that, not just the document, but the strategy was to go fast, go quickly, do a lot of things at once so no one can focus for very long on any one impact. And I'm gonna get a little nerdy here, maybe for some listeners, but I encourage everyone to read this article.

It's, it's open source, it's available. Right. There's no paywall. You can get it and read it, and it's written for, you know, a concerned layman. It's not, you don't have to be a scientist to understand the impact of this very thoroughly documented piece, but the, you know, just the, the title Selected Health Effects of Trump Administration, Environmental Policy, Actions and Proposals, and you go through air pollution regulation, power plant regulation, climate change, motor vehicle pollution, water pollution, occupational health.

We've talked to, uh, I've talked to a number of people about different aspects of this, but you've put it all together when you stand back and look at the scope of it. And the, the speed, I mean, we're, we're really just over a year in, right? As public health professionals and, and, and clinicians, what do you make of the overall assault, I think is the only term that can be put, it's, is it, is it literally breathtaking for you as it has been for me? 

Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. It's, it's, it's massive, Ken. It's, it's massive. And what we'll do next, the next phase of our work, which is just now getting underway. Is that we will actually do our best to tabulate the toll of disease and death that results from these rollbacks.

So for example, we'll look at how much air pollution increases in each of the 50 states over the next couple of years. 

Ken: Yeah. 

Dr. Landrigan: And we know very well from previous research that we and others have conducted, that each increment in air pollution causes more heart attacks, more strokes, more lung cancers, more deaths from chronic obstructive lung disease in adults, in kids, more still births, more premature births, more children with asthma.

We'll tabulate those impacts. There's no way in the world we can ever do a full accounting, but we'll do our best to count how much disease and death is due to, to these rollbacks. And you know, one of my mentors, decades ago when I was working at CDC, told me that statistics are people with the tears wiped off.

And in our articles, we won't be able to tell the stories of individual people. We'll leave that to folks like you Ken, but we can certainly present the, the statistics and thereby enable Americans to understand the, the magnitude of what's going on. 

Ken: Yeah. Adam, is there, is there any proposals or actions across these issue areas that really stood out for you as a public health expert and then also as a clinician where you, where you thought, oh wow, this is just gonna make my public health and my clinical jobs much, much harder?

Dr. Gaffney: Well, it is hard to say one, and I'll, and I'll add this to that discussion, which is that, the problem is even larger than what that table shows. In another paper that Phil and I and many other colleagues published recently, we look at additional policies that are gonna harm the lung health of Americans.

So even beyond environmental and occupational policies, we're looking at 10 million people losing health coverage as a result of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Right? We're looking at cuts and NIH funding. We're looking at cutbacks in research. We're looking at anti-immigrant actions that are going to have impacts on health and healthcare delivery.

So just to take a step back, this is actually part and parcel of a larger agenda for sure, that will for sure all be injurious to health. I think, you know, in terms of these specific policies, it is hard to pick it out. I mean, it's one, one year ago, Zelin, you know, had this press release where he declared the biggest deregulatory action in US history, quote unquote, and there were 31 different actions. 

And some of the ones that we sort of described in this paper that I think I'll just highlight — one, rolling back the heightened standards for particulate matter 2.5 pollution, PM 2.5 pollution that the Biden administration in advance. Building on a huge body of science and knowledge that this pollution is harmful, it causes heart attacks, it causes strokes, it causes lung disease. 

To go back into the past and undercut those protections to me is just mind bogglingly shortsighted. I also think the destruction of the endangerment finding, which is the policy that effectively allows the federal government to regulate climate pollution, uh, is going to have very harmful long-term effects.

We're basically taking away our own ability to do anything about climate change. So I could, I could kind of go on and on, but those two, I think, are worth highlighting at the outside of the discussion. 

Ken: Yeah. No, I, I agree with you on those and it is hard to pick. I had, uh, Joe Goffman on, uh, the podcast a while back, who's one of the premier experts on Clean Air Act Policy and climate change policy ran the EPA programs, uh, under, uh, the Biden administration. And I said to him at the time, and you know, for me the Clean Air Act is the queen of environmental laws. That's the one that's really worked. And Phil and I have worked on pesticides and lots of other issues where we wish it worked as well as the Clean Air Act worked.

And I, I asked him if he didn't think, you know, the Clean Air Act and regulations around it really became kind of a, a bullseye, uh, for, you know, let's just be candid when, when Republicans take over and, uh, there's the kind of push there has been. And, uh, we have plenty of Republicans that support environmental protection, I don't mean that. 

But there's an ideology here that really does seem to focus on what ends up in our lungs because they go after Clean Air Act regulations like the PM 2.5 standard, right? They wanna push those back. And Joe went into some detail about just the many ways they're trying to do that. And there are two elements here, and you touch on both of them in this paper.

One is a little easier to understand than the other. One is, I think one is the deregulatory steps are pretty easy to at least understand what they're doing. They're taking a specific regulation and they're gonna try and undo it — the endangerment finding or what they're doing on how our plant regulation, what have. 

The, the more insidious and maybe the scarier element for me is the dysregulation that they're pursuing by reducing staff, reducing funding, getting rid of scientists. They don't have scientific debates in this administration, they just fire the scientists that disagree with 'em or sideline them or push them out. Talk a little bit about this long-term erosion of capability and capacity and how damaging that is going to be and hard to repair. 

We might be able to reinstate a regulation and we might even defeat some of these efforts in court. The Trump administration's, you know, up against lots of litigation from folks in my community who are trying to stop these rules that they can, you know, I think in many cases are considered, you know, borderline if not illegal, and so they'll lose in court.

But the dysregulatory stuff — the long-term damage to these agencies and the staffs and the funding for extramural research funding that goes outside agencies to support academic institutions and children's health centers and so forth. That's really hard to tally up, hard to explain to people, but say, because you're both involved in it, say a little bit about how that hits.

Dr. Gaffney: Well, Ken, I think you are right, and the reality is, is that it's easier to destroy than to create. Institutions need to be built up over time, and it's very hard to put the net back together again. So, for example, the Office of Research and Development, the EPA’s internal research agency, which has been credited with all sorts of advances over time in terms of pushing forward our understanding of pollution, but also how to control it and how to regulate it.

That's, you know, being taken apart by the administration. And how does that get put back together again? I think you're seeing the same thing with research science at, say, the NIH. Congress rejected the administration's calls for cuts to NIH funding. But what happens to the know-how when people leave, when projects get defunded, when research gets interrupted when the clinical trials don't get completed. 

That's harder to put back together again. I'll add one other thing though. I agree with you that there's the deregulation that's sort of easy to understand. It's sort of seen as pro-business say. Another thing that I truly can't understand is the assault on clean energy, which isn't even pushing business forward in America. It's really just favoring one specific sector and undercutting our ability to power America in a safe way, uh, for years to come. 

Ken: I agree. And some of those forms of clean energy are also the cheapest forms of energy in terms of providing electricity now, and I'm really glad that I have solar panels on my roof and an EV out in the parking pad because, um, I'm not, uh, getting the direct hit from, uh the increase in gas prices we're experiencing now and the pollution that goes with it. But, you know, we have, we were inventing a new energy economy at the end of the Biden administration. 

We were really just getting started and that's all been thrown in reverse and that's going to have big impacts on air pollution, our lungs, obviously on contamination of the environment with mercury from coal burning power plants, oil spills, all the rest. 

Dr. Landrigan: And, and Ken, just think about the economics of it. I mean, this morning as I was coming into work, I passed a gas station. Gas was at $4 a gallon, 3.99 a gallon. At the same time, the cost of solar energy have come down by more than 90%.

Ken: Yeah. 

Dr. Landrigan: The cost of wind energy has come down by 75 to 80%. The cost of battery storage have come down by 95%. We're turning our back on clean energy that is also affordable energy in favor of yesterday's energy source, which is oil and gas and coal.

Ken: Yeah. And turning the, all the advantage over to other countries, certainly China, uh, that's pushing ahead.

I mean, there's a global buildout on solar in particular that is mind blowing right now, both at the utility scale and rooftop and we're, we put the brakes on it, in fact, threw it into reverse. It's very discouraging because that will have. A great many environmental impacts down the road. 

Dr. Gaffney: It's not only about taking away the subsidies that went towards battery production or electric vehicle purchasing, it's a direct attempt to undercut those sectors, you know, even on their own terms.

So for instance, the Trump administration, I don't know whether it stands now, tried to block a nearly complete wind farm, you know, in Rhode Island from being completed. That's just an example of using the power of the government to go after one sector of energy production. Meanwhile, they actually mandated that some fossil fuel power plants stay open even when the grid operators had already said, these are obsolete. That's a very stunning development. 

Ken: Again, I think the, the, the boldness has always defeated my imagination when it comes to the Trump administration. Just things like the rep, last report I saw, I think it's, we might have the same wind energy proposal in mind, they were going to pay the company a billion dollars not to build the, 

Dr. Landrigan: That's a different one. The one the, the one that Adam is mentioning is in Rhode Island. The one where they paid the billion dollars to the French investor was on Long Island, New York. 

Ken: Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much dumber it gets, but that's right up there.

Unbelievable. So there's a really useful appendix, uh, with any number of tables that help people understand in detail. Where these proposals have landed. And one of the areas is occupational health, which I know is near and dear to you, Phil and I had a NIOSH scientist on, uh, on the program fairly early on in, uh, the last year, and she was third generation NIOSH scientist.

It's, NIOSH is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. It's part of the Centers for Disease Control — and that agency early on, they've, they've made some rectifications, but mostly they just clubbed it in the early weeks and months of the Trump administration. Laid off a bunch of scientists, she told me that it was so bad that in some cases scientists had to kind of go into their labs and euthanize the animals, uh, in the experiments they were doing because they weren't gonna be allowed in to, to feed them.

The experiments were supposed to just stop, uh, but the animals were there in their cages. But we don't spend very much money as it is on occupational health and the, and the returns are enormous to protect our workforce. Say a little bit about what you learned when you looked at what, what is going on with respect to investment and in understanding occupational safety and health?

Dr. Landrigan: Sure. No, it's a, it's, it's such a big thing. Uh, I worked at NIOSH for, for six years. I was, I was a medical epidemiologist there, and when I was at NIOSH, what we used to do, which, we would go out to factories, where our work sites were, where problems were reported. We would investigate the problem, we'd figure out what was going on, and then we would work with the employee, we would work with the employees, we would work with the union if there was a union.

And collaboratively come up with solutions that protected the workers' health, saved lives, and generally made the businesses more profitable because they weren't having to pay large sums of money for workers' compensation or face liability suits.

It was basically a, a partnership for health rather than splitting people apart and, and fermenting divisiveness. So, and when people have done economic analysis on occupational safety and health, the, the returns are anywhere from six to one, to 10 to one, to 12 to one. For every dollar that's invested in protecting workers' health and safety, that's a six, 10, $12 return in the form of lower healthcare costs and increased productivity. 

Ken: And I think I had, until I interviewed the scientist, I didn't realize just really how modest our investment at NIOSH is. She, she said there were like maybe 800 total employees at NIOSH. 

Dr. Landrigan: There are many, many more game wardens across the United States protecting deer in the forest than there are occupational safety and health inspectors.

Ken: Yeah, well talk about priorities. Um, but yeah, I was startled. And so even with that modest investment that was savagely reduced, at least in the early days, 

Dr. Landrigan: Something like the initial cut was in the neighborhood of 90% of the staff. 

Ken: Yeah. Yeah. Say a little bit if you can, um, about what you're hearing. I don't want you to betray any confidences. 

Actually I do, if you would, if it's, if it's interesting, please do betray them. But, um, what's your sense of what's happening at NIH and at CDC? I know you, you both have dozens and dozens of connections there. What's the mood of the people I talk to are, uh, you know, they're sticking by their guns in many cases, if they can, and they're trying to do the best they can under the circumstances, but it's grim, right?

Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. Well, you know, I was including my six years at NIOSH. I was a total of 15 years at CDC. 

Ken: Yeah. 

Dr. Landrigan: And I must tell you, the CDC workforce are among the most dedicated, selfless people in America. They will drop what they're doing on a moment's notice to fly to West Africa to deal with the Ebola outbreak.

They'll stop whatever research they're doing to go to Utah or Alaska or North Carolina or Maine to deal with an outbreak of rabies or measles. Often at great physical hazard to themselves. 

Dr. Gaffney: Yeah. 

Dr. Landrigan: What they're doing is, I think that those people are dedicated to the mission. Many of your doctors, others, or nurses, epidemiologists, public health scientists, they deeply believe in the mission.

They're just going to do their best to, to hang on and, and ride this crisis through. I'm sure that day to day it's not easy, but you know, they, they have a sense of fulfilling a noble mission and they're gonna stick with it. 

Ken: That's been my total experience with the, the CDC scientists and professionals that I've dealt with over the past 40 or 50 years.

It's just, um, if, if there was one agency that I really held in high regard, maybe because they're fundamentally not regulatory, but they're, you know, they're, you get the straight science from them. At least that's been my experience. It's just, uh, heartbreaking to see, see that under assault. Uh, same with just generally the, you know, the NIH. I mean, my goodness, and I know the big funding cuts were rejected, true enough, but, uh, there was, there's still been enormous, enormous damage done. 

And, and the morale, the hit to morale, you know, you know that we were on the right track, for example, to take on a specific issue and then to find that stymied or, you know, distractions brought in, like, working on lesser topics like Ivermectin or whatever it might be.

Dr. Landrigan: You know, for decades, American science has been the envy of the world. Nobody else in the world, not in Europe, not in China, not in India, nowhere has done science as well as we do, and, and the reason we do it is several fold. Firstly, the funding has been generous. Secondly, it operates on a meritocracy and everything is peer reviewed.

Only the best of the best science gets funded. It's not a buddy system, it's not a crony system, it's not corrupt, it's transparent. And, um, if you wanna succeed in the system, you have to be good and you have to make contributions and, and you have to be about helping other people. And it's because American science has been so good that scientists have come here to American universities, to American think tanks from, from countries around the world.

Sadly, we're now squandering that advantage and, and we're seeing really good scientists, especially the younger ones who have not yet established their careers taking jobs in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, in China, in India. And what we're seeing is a brain drain from the United States. That is not good. Not good at all. 

Dr. Gaffney: And I would just add very briefly, this is not just about funding cuts, which are devastating. There's this broader politicization and pseudoscience. 

Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. 

Dr. Gaffney: RFK junior anti-vaccine rhetoric. The embrace of pseudoscientific theories, as you said around ivermectin and chem trails. I could go on and on.

It's almost embarrassing to even talk about, and there was even a shooting at the CDC this year. Right? And so I can only imagine that that sort of environment is very demoralizing. 

Ken: Totally. One aspect of politicizing that you consider in this brief paper is the fact that many of these environmental harms are visited most harshly on disadvantaged communities, low income communities, communities of color, and of course, that was sort of the first filter that was put in that we should stop research, regulatory enforcement, anything that related to diversity, equity, and inclusion or however they define that. 

And I've learned so much of this from from Phil. We've focused on kids 'cause they're especially vulnerable. And we really have only begun to just catch up on the necessary focus on communities that are really benighted by pollution much more than than the rest of us.

And they tend to be low income communities, uh, fewer resources, fewer medical resources, harder to manage healthcare costs, and tremendous insults from air, water, occupational pollution, neighborhood pollution. Can you say a little bit about how that stood out in your analysis? That the impact of, uh, politicizing around DEI and how that might have affected environmental policy?

Dr. Gaffney: Sure. I think on the one hand, as you said, many of these policies are going to strike hardest against communities that are already suffering from poor health, lack of investment, discrimination and so forth. So you take something like the deregulation of mercury standards for power plants. Yeah, well, who lives close to power plants — and disproportionately — lower income people.

You know, I think that makes this easier in a sense for them to do, right? Because they view these communities as, as not their constituents in many ways. On the other hand, many policies that they're pursuing will in fact, harm what they view as their constituents. So if you take something like the rollback or the lack of enforcement, lack of implementation of these silica standards that were meant to protect minors from deadly dust that they encounter in their workplace. 

And that's a disease that I might see — silicosis is a potentially fatal lung disease — those communities are disproportionately in red states. Similarly, if you look at the cutbacks to Medicaid, the public insurance program for low-income Americans, uh, yes, it will certainly take healthcare away from many, uh, working class folks in blue states who may be disproportionately black or Hispanic.

On the other hand, it will be devastating to rural areas, and to rural white areas that have a lot of low income folks who, who rely on this as their primary healthcare. So they're really, these policies really are going to be harmful for working class lower income groups across sort of demographic categories.

Ken: Yeah.

Dr. Landrigan: Ken, it's also worth saying something about the disproportionate impacts on infants and children, and I, I speak here as a pediatrician. This administration came to power talking about their commitment to the right to life, and yet by allowing increased levels of pollution, specifically mercury pollution, which damages the brains of infants in the womb. Fine particulate air pollution PM 2.5 air pollution, which damages the brains, the hearts, the lungs, and other organs of infants in the wound.

They're actually belying their own words — if they really wanna protect children before they're born, the last thing this administration should be doing is rolling back environmental standards that protect children before they're born. 

Ken: I couldn't agree more. There's been so much made dur, during the election and then during the transition of the Trump administration's interest relating to what you just said, Phil, to Make America Healthy Again. 

And while I think the ideologues, uh, have, are locked into their position, there are a lot of rank and file a lot of, you know, everyday Americans who, it sounds good to them and it sounds, why wouldn't it sound good to make America healthy?

Uh, whether you think again is appropriate or not is another matter. But there were so many big promises that were made and in many ways, the Make America Healthy Again, agenda didn't include a lot of the issues that you address in this paper. People are upset about food additives. My organization works on food additives.

We take a backseat to no one in trying to do something about that, but, but to think that, if we make any progress on that, it's okay to make the cutbacks in clean air regulation or vehicular regulation or any of the other environmental policy assaults. What, what do you tell someone who, who believes in or adheres to just the general principles of making America healthy again. 

Polling is showing us now that even people who believe in that don't think the Trump administration has done a very good job, but, but how do you get someone to expand their horizon and think about some of these other issues — let's say someone who's focused on vaccines and they feel like the vaccines are harmful.

It doesn't happen to be my position, far from it. But if that's their focus and they're not gonna move from that, it's one thing. But for many people I think they're uncertain and they just don't know about the other dimensions of environmental health that really should be part of any agenda properly called make America healthy.

How do you talk to folks like that? You probably, you probably come across them all the time. 

Dr. Gaffney: So I think that actually when it comes to these policies, it's an easy case to make. I'm going to mention healthcare first, but from the healthcare perspective, the policies of cutting back on Medicaid, uh, cutting back the Affordable Care Act are actually already unpopular even with Republican voters.

Dr. Landrigan: Yeah. 

Dr. Gaffney: When it comes to clean air and water, actually these rollbacks are unpopular. And I think the main barrier you have is what we already talked about, which is the complexity of the issues and the getting lost in the details. I think when it comes to the MAHA agenda, they did raise some important issues.

As you've mentioned, the food supply needs to be improved. There are problems with metabolic health. These aren't made up concerns. But what they've done time and time again is a very superficial attempt to talk about these issues — not taking on powerful corporations, not really going after those who are purveying harms.

You know, making these sort of voluntary agreements, getting Shake Shack to put beef tallow in their fries or whatever it is. These kinds of very performative stuff that's kind of made for the media, but then behind the scenes, what's really happening and that's what we have to talk about and that's what we came in.

What's actually happening in the realm of policy, putting aside this sort of media show. And it's the kinds of policies that we've outlined in this article. It's the rollback of pollution, of, of measures to protect our air. It's the rollback of protections against mercury in our water. It's rollback of protections that are keeping miners from getting deathly ill.

So I think we need to move the conversation away from the sort of catchy media issues to the real policies. 

Ken: So you're saying wrestling a, a, a Twinkie, is, uh, great for Instagram, but not so great, uh, if you're really concerned about making America healthy. It's, you know, it's an Instagram post, and we don't make policy by Instagram post.

Would that we could, um, that's all I'd be doing, but, uh, turns out you have to actually get in there. Debate powerful industries, bring evidence forward, fight through for regulations. Phil and I have done this dozens and dozens of times over the year. It's never easy. And it's really, it's really not just something you can do from a podium. You have to dig in. 

Dr. Landrigan: You know, glyphosate is a case in point. So glyphosate, Roundup, is the world's most widely used herbicide. 11 years ago, in 2015, the World Health Organization did a very careful independent review and came to the conclusion that glyphosate, marketed as Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. 

When this administration, when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. first came into power, one of the chemicals that they talked about controlling was glyphosate, and they mentioned it in the first edition of the MAHA Report. But curiously, glyphosate was absent from the second version of the MAHA report. Most recently, just a couple of weeks ago, president Trump issued an executive order saying that glyphosate was a national security matter, that we needed it for the safety and the security of the United States of America — which is the first I'd heard that despite many years in both the US Public Health Service and the US Navy.

So I think that MAHA people are very sincere. What MAHA people are all about is protecting their kids, protecting their families. I don't agree with everything that they stand for, but I certainly respect their sincerity. My plea to the folks in MAHA is look at the issues one by one. 

Look at food safety. Look at glyphosate, look at vaccines. Look at clean air, look at clean water. Each of those is an important issue in its own right, and they've all gotta be properly balanced. If America's children are gonna be protected. 

Dr. Gaffney: One thing I'd add to that list, which I think says a lot about the priorities of the administration is tobacco policy, right?

Is there one thing that we can all agree on is an absolute poison than cigarettes? Talking about making America healthy. They completely defunded the office, the CDC um, office that works on tobacco control. They're not pursuing it seems a nicotine reduction rule that would help get people to stop smoking.

I think the priorities become pretty clear there. 

Ken: Yeah, I agree. Well, thank both of you very much for coming on and talking about this amazing article. It's called The Dismantling of Environmental Protections, A Grave Threat to America's Health. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

We're gonna encourage everyone to take a look at it. It's very readable, it's very brief, and it's a devastating assessment of what's happening now. And I know you've got more work to come, we'll have you come back on and talk about it. Thank you so much for your commitment to, to public health and human health.

We count on champions like you to tell us what the score is. 

Dr. Landrigan: And to you, for yours, Ken.

Dr. Gaffney: Thank you, Ken

Ken: Thank you to Dr. Phil Landrigan and Dr. Adam Gaffney for joining me today. And thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links To take a deeper dive into today's discussion.

Make sure to follow our show on Instagram @KenCooksPodcast. And if you're interested in learning more about ewg, head over to ewg.org. Check out the EWG Instagram account @EnvironmentalWorkingGroup. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along.

The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Rowe and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is by Moby, and thanks again for listening.

Areas of Focus Federal & State Energy Policy Chemical Policy May 29, 2026

African countries are increasingly looking to renewable energy to meet growing power demand.

Read more on E360 →

For 60 years, Double Kwik has provided Eastern Kentucky with gas, essentials, and homecooking, like their infamous pizza rolls. As a convenience store brand, it might not be the first place people think of when they picture community leadership, but today they serve as an unlikely hero in many ways.

The company was started by Don Childers in 1966 with a handful of fuel trucks delivering to remote coal camps and job sites. By 1972, Don and his wife, Peggy, opened one of the area’s first self-service gas stations. Over time, they built a company that now serves 40 communities across the region with fuel, a selection of food including basic groceries and household goods, and in-store kitchens cooking up favorite dishes.

Having grown up around the business, Missy Matthews, daughter to Don and Peggy, is the President of the company which today employs around 850 people. Missy is a person many in the community turn to for her creative leadership and problem-solving.

A Building Reimagined for Public Health

After a bold move by Missy and Double Kwik’s leadership, Double Kwik headquarters now shares space with the Letcher County Health Department in Whitesburg, and has transformed a once underutilized building into an amazing asset, lifting a burden off the taxpayers of Letcher County.

Originally constructed by the county in 2008 to house the Health Department and additional providers, the facility was never fully occupied. It quickly became a financial burden on the county, particularly after the 2022 flood introduced a new host of economic challenges to overcome.

Though they had originally planned their headquarters for Jenkins, after the flood, Missy knew they needed to find as many ways to support the area as possible. They decided to buy the building from the county, and lease the first floor back to the health department, allowing the county to save the taxpayer dollars and reduced lease costs for the health department.

“Now, we bring anywhere from 45 to 80 people into downtown on any given day,” Missy said. “They’re walking to get lunch or coffee, supporting fellow local businesses.”

Finding Ways to Save

After purchasing the building, they renovated the second and third floors to include office space, a training kitchen and training spaces. At the same time, they looked for ways to combat rising energy costs.

“We pay an enormous amount of energy bills as a company—it’s one of our biggest expenses. Finding ways to manage that has always been important,” Charles ‘Junior’ Matthews, the company’s Chief Financial Officer, said.

After consulting with other local business owners with solar, including Kentucky Mist Moonshine, solar became “almost a no-brainer.” With facilitation by the Mountain Association’s Energy Team, they received a USDA Rural Energy for America Program grant, covering half the costs of the installation. The system now brings $18,660 in annual savings to the company.

Junior said the system has proven seamless and that they love to pull up their solar tracking app to see the savings rolling in on sunny days.

Commitment to Eastern Kentucky

Looking ahead, the company is exploring additional solar and savings opportunities, continuing its efforts to reduce costs and increase resilience. For each dollar they save, they can put more investments into our region and quality jobs they create.

Staff Going Out on a Clean-up

Double Kwik has a strong history of supporting local students through scholarships, hosting teacher appreciation events, sponsoring community initiatives, and finding new ways to bring joy to their communities – like Elf on the Shelf pop-ups and their Pizza Rollsie mascot. In her role as tourism director, Missy has gotten the company involved in new initiatives, like community cleanups. Nine years ago, she began signing up for the toughest seven-miles of road between the turn off to Bad Branch and Pine Mountain Grill where their team collects nearly 300 bags of trash each year.

“We’ve always believed our responsibility goes beyond our stores. We know that if our communities are strong, we’re strong,” Missy said.

Whether through its stores, its headquarters, or its community efforts, they show up for our communities. From its start with a few fuel trucks in 1966 to a company helping sustain public health and community infrastructure, Double Kwik has become an essential part of the fabric of Eastern Kentucky.

The post Pizza Rolls & Public Health: How Double Kwik Created a Solar-Powered Hub for Community Care appeared first on Mountain Association.

In April 2026, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais gutted a core protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — the provision barring racial gerrymandering designed to dilutes the voting power of Black communities. The Trump administration called it a victory. For communities on the frontlines of pollution, climate change, and environmental injustice, it is one most deliberate act of erasure and as Dr. Beverly Wright of Deep South Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ) says, it is a “theft of our movement’s inheritance”.

This ruling did not arrive alone. It is part of a coordinated, multi-front strategy to remove impacted communities — particularly Black communities — from the rooms where decisions get made. Through the courts, through Executive Orders seizing control of elections, through the SAVE Act’s documentation barriers that would block more than 21 million Americans from voting, through a Department of Justice that has sued all 50 states to build a national voter surveillance database, and through the threat of criminal prosecution against election officials and civic organizations.

This administration’s goal is not election integrity. The goal is the permanent political marginalization of Black communities, Indigenous communities and communities of color.

The pattern is unmistakable when you see it whole. The Supreme Court’s ruling applies not just to Congressional districts, but also to state legislative districts and maps for county and municipal elections — determining who gets to serve on a school board, a city council, or in the judiciary. 

Meanwhile, the administration has turned the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department into an agency that violates the very definition of civil rights, redirecting it toward suppressing voting rather than protecting voting rights. 

At the same time, another assault on voting rights is being advanced through Congress. If signed into law, the SAVE Act would require every American to produce a passport or certified birth certificate, in person, at an election office just to register to vote, eliminating online registration, mail registration, and most voter registration drives. For Black communities, this lands on a foundation of deliberate historical denial: many older Black Americans were never issued birth certificates by governments that refused to recognize their full humanity. 

For Indigenous communities, the SAVE Act’s promise that Tribal IDs will suffice is a fiction, ignoring the fact that virtually no Tribal ID includes place of birth, another barrier buried in the bill’s text. And even with documents in hand, the nearest election office can be a hundred miles away across reservation land, or in Alaska, accessible only by plane. 

These are not bureaucratic inconveniences; they are systemic barriers deeply rooted in this country’s history of racial segregation. They reflect the architecture of laws written around people who were never meant to be politically represented and applied to communities still fighting to be counted.

The same communities facing barriers to their rights to vote are bearing the greatest burden of air pollution, toxic contamination, extreme heat, and climate disasters. And the fact that these communities are overwhelmingly Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income, and this is not a coincidence. It is the predictable result of political exclusion and the enduring legacy of segregation. 

When communities cannot elect representatives who share their priorities, when their votes are diluted through racial gerrymandering, the outcome is a petrochemical plant permitted next to an elementary school, a neighborhood left without clean water, or a community absorbing the full cost of an energy system it had no power to refuse. 

A political system that makes voting harder perpetuates the very conditions that make environmental justice necessary.

This is also why the assault extends beyond the ballot. The same administration that is dismantling voting rights protections is also terrorizing immigrant communities — deportation threats, surveillance, and the weaponization of documentation status as a tool of political control. 

What this administration is attacking, in every instance, is the fundamental democratic principle that the people most affected have a rightful voice in decision-making. 

That principle does not begin and end at the voting booth. It lives in every planning meeting, every regulatory comment period, every public hearing, every coalition room where communities are fighting for their lives and their land. Undocumented neighbors, visa holders, green card holders, people who live and work and raise children in the same fenceline communities, who breathe the same air and drink the same water, carry knowledge and moral authority that no policy process can afford to exclude. 

Voting is an essential mechanism through which communities exercise the most direct form of political power available to our communities, and its protection is non-negotiable. The fight for voting rights and the fight for full community participation are intrinsically linked because they are being waged against us by the same forces, for the same purpose: to ensure that the communities with the most at stake in our climate and environmental future have the least say in shaping it.

 Our communities continue to show up, no matter the barriers put in our way: voters and non-voters, citizens and non-citizens, people who cast ballots, people who testify, and people who organize. No matter the injustices we face, environmental justice leaders know that our solidarity is unstoppable and our resolve to fight for true representation will never be broken by any court or politician.

Byron Ramos Gudiel is Executive Director of the Center for Earth, Energy & Democracy (CEED).

Sources:

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/save-act-and-election-power-grab

https://www.vote.org/save-act/

https://narf.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/narf-save-act-native-voters.pdf

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/environmental-justice-requires-a-healthy-democracy

https://www.aclu.org/trump-on-voting-rights

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/how-gerrymandering-tilts-2024-race-house

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/we-arent-paying-enough-attention-to-what-the-scotus-vra-decision-means-for-state-legislatures

https://abcnews.com/Politics/congressional-black-caucus-lose-seats-amid-redistricting-fight/story?id=132965013

LCV – https://www.lcv.org/media-center/lcv-statement-on-scotus-decision-in-louisiana-v-callais/

Not NRDC Action Fund: https://www.nrdcactionfund.org/news/scotus-voting-rights-act-decision-hurts-our-democracy-and-the-court-itself/

Sierra Club: https://www.sierraclub.org/press-releases/2026/04/sierra-club-statement-supreme-court-ruling-gut-voting-rights-act

CAP: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-supreme-courts-callais-decisions-undermine-the-voting-rights-act-and-sow-election-chaos/

WE ACT: https://weact.org/updates/in-response-to-regressive-voting-rights-act-supreme-court-decision-we-act-committed-to-fighting-for-our-democracy/

The post How the Gutting of the Voting Rights Act Deepens Environmental Injustice appeared first on CEED.

“In a lot of the partnerships that have been established around some of these technologies, it's really the tech companies that are taking on a lot of the risk,” Priya Barua, CEBA's senior director of utility partnerships and innovation, told Utility Dive.

At our recent annual Conference, Bioneers brought together two ground breaking figures in the struggle for an equitable and healthy food system. One working on the global architectures of that system and the other a hands on farmer and educator exemplifying how solidarity can empower dispossessed communities to reclaim their food sovereignty. Raj Patel is one of the world’s experts on sustainable food system, and a tireless activist against neocolonial and extractive agriculture, Leah Penniman is the visionary founder of Soul Fire Farms and the author of Farming While Black. The conversation was moderated by Naomi Starkman founder and former Editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, the award winning nonprofit newsroom focused on the US food system. The following is an edited excerpt of that conversation.

NAOMI: We are living in a time of multiple crises. How do we understand what the polycrisis means for us?

RAJ: The idea of polycrisis is that it appears that there’s a whole bunch of very bad things happening at the same time: the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarianism, the pandemic disease, catastrophic weather events, and a range of things that are a series of unfortunate events. That is, I think, a misunderstanding of the structural forces that are driving all of these events. 

Capitalism has always managed to patch up problems by extracting in new places, and finding new frontiers to open up. You see this process even happening now, where Elon Musk, for example, has a new frontier in low Earth orbit. He’s created a new space that’s monetized and is now his zone to be able to extract wealth from. He’s the king of low Earth orbit [with his company Space X], and he will be for a while. But there’s only so much deferring and fixing that can happen. 

Now, what we’re seeing is what happens when there’s no more cheapening of the world that can be done, and the climate crisis is not just bad, but getting worse. There was a terrifying paper in the Reviews of Geophysics two weeks ago that shows that the rate of climate change is going up; the world is not just heating, it’s heating up faster than we thought it was. 

On top of that, of course, we are seeing rising authoritarianism. The far right capturing our media, our means of attention. All of this is not an accident but precisely an outcome of a series of crises in capitalism that have been brewing for a while. 

When you hear polycrisis, sometimes you will hear a narrative that it’s just a really bad time, but it’s going to get better. But unfortunately you need a clear-eyed structural analysis to understand that, in fact, movements on the frontlines that are taking on the crisis understand this to be the outcome of decades, even centuries of capitalist accumulation. If you understand that, then you can understand why the imagination of what needs to come next is so radical, and in which lots of post-capitalist experiments are happening. 

One of the things that you need if you’re going to imagine a better world is a rocket fuel of joy. That’s why protests like the No Kings marches matter, even though at times they get criticized for not having a focused political agenda, while white supremacist organizations are undermining the state.

 But a protest, when it’s done right, is how we meet and intersect and listen to one another by meeting people who are not necessarily in our normal circle. I have to declare a preference here. I met my wife on a protest.

NAOMI: This might be the moment for Leah to talk about strategic optimism.

LEAH: I would like to bring Wendell Berry into the conversation. One of my favorite poems is the “Mad Farmer Liberation Front Manifesto.” Please read it if you have not, there are many quotable lines.  The one that is relevant to this conversation is “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”

At Soul Fire Farm, the way we situate our work as Afro-Indigenous regenerative agriculturalists is by feeding the community and training farmers. We’re builders. We’re building these institutions that inhabit the values we wish to see in the new world. But that can’t be the only strategy. 

I like the image of butterfly with each of its four wings representing aspects of transformative social justice: build, resist, reform, and heal with kinship at its center. Resist includes protests and civil disobedience. Reform is getting involved in the electoral politics and public education, and then heal. So we build, resist, reform, and heal with kincentricity at its center which fuels of our love, our connection, our Ubuntu, “I am because you are.” That helps us to envision a post-capitalist society.

I agree with Raj about the insanity of the growth imperative of a three percent compound growth on a finite planet is literally insane, and it is colonial, it is white supremacist, it is dualist, and the only way that we’re going to survive on this planet is in reciprocity with all the other beings that live here.

NAOMI: My daughter is now 23, but when she was 19 or so, we had the talk, and it’s not the talk you’re thinking. It was the climate catastrophe talk. If any parents have had to try to convince their child it’s worth going on with their hopes and dreams in this catastrophe, it’s a really hard. It’s much harder than the birds and the bees talk. 

 My daughter, bless her heart, was challenging me about optimism. What we decided together is something that we call strategic optimism.

 If you decide to be a pessimist, then the rational behavior would be some sort of hedonistic nihilism. You would be like let me accumulate as much as I can in the near term, bump everybody else; I’m just going to get mine because everything’s about to go up in flames. No long-term planning, no altruism, no generosity, no compassion. That’s sort of the logical extreme of this pessimistic, nihilistic viewpoint. 

If on the other hand you choose optimism as a practice – not as a feeling but as a practice – then your attitude is I’m going to get up today and I’m going to plant this crop, I’m going to feed my community, I’m going to sequester carbon in the soil, I’m going to look out for my neighbor. Maybe there is only an infinitesimal chance we will win. But in the meantime, today I can alleviate suffering for some beings in my immediate community, and tomorrow I can alleviate some more. And maybe, just maybe we can alleviate enough suffering that we’ll all survive together.

But if we don’t do that, there’s absolutely no hope. So we’ve decided in our family that this strategic optimism is our practice. It’s our discipline. The way that you get up and you take your vitamins, or you go on a run, or you brush your teeth. You get up and you decide to do whatever step it is on whatever wing of the butterfly you have access to help build that world that we want to see.

We talk about food justice. We talk about equity. We talk about sovereignty. We talk about accessibility. A lot of the practices at Soul Fire Farm are not only about those three, but are also about weaving in Black and Indigenous wisdom, and ancestral wisdom into the land, and teaching people to become their own sacred farmers on other lands.

LEAH: I love the term sacred farmer. I would like to bring the ancestors into the room. Fannie Lou Hamer organized the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. She was sick and tired of being sick and tired. She was radicalized as a sharecropper. She was only 6 years old when she noticed that the landowner was setting the scales incorrectly to undervalue the cotton harvest and not pay the Black laborers their fair due. That kept them indebted and in extreme poverty so they couldn’t leave the plantation. As a child her first act of civil disobedience was to fix the scales.

 Later in her life, when she was an organizer during the Civil Rights movement, she learned that  many sharecroppers were being kicked off their land for registering to vote, for joining a protest, signing a petition, or joining the NAACP. She would have organizing meetings in her house, and as a farmer, she canned food that she grew. Radical youth would ask, “Mama Hamer, why you wasting your time canning these peaches and stuff?” Her answer was, “Child, if you have 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, no one can push you around or tell you what to say or do.”

So she organized the Freedom Farm Cooperative, where 500 sharecroppers who had lost their land co-owned the land. They were doing all kinds of beautiful mutual aid. 

So Fannie Lou Hamer is our inspiration at Soul Fire Farm. To realize the idea that to free ourselves we must feed ourselves, we have to make sure that our agriculture is locally rooted, it’s regenerative, it’s tied to our heritage, and it’s in our hands. 

There were 16 million Black farmers in the early 1900s. Most of them were kicked off their land by white supremacists, literally pushed off their land and lynched. The U.S. Department of Agriculture selectively gave loans to white farmers, causing bankruptcy among Black farmers. TIAA – Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association – and other investment firms unscrupulously grab up Black owned land, which is vulnerable because a lot of Black farmers don’t have access to lawyers and  don’t leave wills.

So the rising generation of Black and Brown farmers is landless, they have no capital, and are just a few  generations away from the red clays of Georgia – with its traumatic association with the forced removal of Cherokee people and the slave labor of African descended people. We say the land was the scene of the crime, but the land was never the criminal. Now a beautiful rising generation of people who are the color of soil are ready to reclaim that right to belong to the earth, to have agency in the food system, and are recognizing that regenerative agriculture was invented by Indigenous and Black people.

Dr. George Washington Carver is literally the godfather of regenerative agriculture.  He worked with farmers when he was at Tuskegee University from 1890 to 1940 promoting cover crops, compost and crop rotation. Dr. Carver made sure that the soil health was the foundation of farming practices. He had a whole generation of Black farmers doing regenerative agriculture before Rodale came onto the scene in the 1940s.

We can look back to the Ovambo people of Namibia with their raised beds and the people of Liberia with their African dark earth, and the polycultures of Nigeria. That’s the kind of agriculture that we’re doing. We feed our community, no cost, door-step delivery. We train thousands of Black and Brown farmers in person on the farm through a 50-hour course, and then they go off and they do their sacred farming all across Turtle Island and, beyond.

The theory of change involves practices like sewing of seeds, of being trans-local, and locally adapted. Providing land-based mutual aid, in which the farm becomes a hub for feeding folks, for gathering, for organizing, a safe haven, a kind of aboveground railroad. The land becomes the scene of the revolution, just as it was in the Civil Rights movement. Black farmers were the ones who housed, fed and clothed and protected the freedom riders. If there were no Black farmers, there wouldn’t have been a Civil Rights movement. You think the Freedom Riders stayed at the Hyatt? No, they went to a Black farmer’s house. That’s where they hid. That’s how they stayed alive. As Malcolm X said, “Land is the basis of all revolution, all freedom, all justice.”  

NAOMI: Thank you for all of your work. I just have to ask, how your work has been impacted by the current administration. 

LEAH: It sucks. But we’re not stopping, I would say one of the more heartbreaking things, is that  we had a major legislative victory with the Inflation Reduction Act under the Biden administration. They actually folded in a provision for Black farmers that we had fought for for over a decade. Historically, the USDA had discriminated against Black farmers. There was a landmark Civil Rights settlement called Pigford v. Glickman in 1999 that offered a very small amount to each of the farmers who had lost their land, but it wasn’t nearly enough. We needed full debt forgiveness for these farmers. 

So we helped, along with farmers across the country, to introduce legislation, the Justice for Black Farmers Act, which was led by Senator Cory Booker. It was debated and I got to speak to Congress. It was crazy. They were actually listening to Black people. I could hardly believe what was happening. 

 A 5 billion dollar provision for the debt relief went into the Inflation Reduction Act, and was passed; payments were going out. And now they stopped.

The Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers Training grant is gone. All of the socially disadvantaged farmers programs are gone. People bought things based on contracts that were made, now the contracted money has evaporated. So it’s a shit show. It’s really, really rough. 

We’re doing our best to piece together mutual aid networks. Susu is a Caribbean lending society. We’re trying to put together a national susu to try to stop the bleeding, so we don’t lose any more land. But now all the funders are skittish. Their attitude is, Black people were cool in 2020, but they’re not cool anymore. Don’t you do any programs for white farmers? I’m like, are you kidding me? The white farmers receive over 90% of the USDA funds. We absolutely need to support Indigenous and Black folks in getting through these times, and to continue the work. 

NAOMI: Raj, when the government starts to clamp down, what are the models that you’ve seen that have been successful? Where can we look for inspiration in places perhaps in this country, historically, as Leah has been sharing with us, but also around the world?

RAJ: One of the places I have been very inspired by is Arkansas. I was just traveling through Arkansas for a book that I just finished that weaves together the history of all the things that have happened in Arkansas, ranging from Indigenous dispossession to the Elaine Race massacre [1919 massacre in which as many as several hundred Black tenant farmers, who were organizing against abuses were murdered], the site of the largest race massacre in U.S. history, to the rise of Walmart also in Arkansas. 

One of the movements that I particularly was taken by is the Southern Tenants Farmers Union. The origins of this are germane to us now because in 1928, the Mississippi flooded and grew to 60 to 100 miles wide, depending on where you were. It was a catastrophe. The cleanup was a billion dollars back then. It was a huge expense, but of course, Black farmers saw none of that money. In fact, it was that event that flipped Black farmers’ voting allegiance from Republican to Democrat. 

It was the failure of the federal response to a catastrophe that politicized people. It wasn’t the event, it wasn’t the flood. It was the government’s failure afterwards. This is important for our mobilizing in this moment, because in that moment, there was socialist organizing happening throughout the South, and the Southern Tenants Farmers Union was a site of social organizing where white and Black tenant farmers together organized despite the attempts of white supremacists to sew racial division. It turned out that white and Black tenant farmers had much more in common with each other than they did with the white bourgeoisie. 

That is a moment that we can learn from particularly as we see the betrayals of the white working class and the absence of any dividend of white supremacy for white working class people. This is a moment to be able to split what appears to be a fairly firm hegemonic block into its constituent parts and to recruit. It is something to think about because this is a moment in which government failure writ large is a recruiting ground for a genuine grounded working class transformation.  

But it depends on us using the language of recognition, mutuality, solidarity and socialism. It doesn’t happen because we’re just all going to get along and kumbaya our way out of this. You need a materialist analysis, otherwise people don’t see one another and recognize that we have much more in common than the white supremacists would have us believe.  

Elsewhere in the world, there are movements that have managed to lay foundations that are paying off right now. One of my favorites is in India in the state of Andhra Pradesh. There are descendants of organizations that started off as women’s literacy groups, and that have survived the scourge of Hindu supremacy. It’s not an accident that Narendra Modi and Donald Trump were best buds in his first term I’m thinking of an event in Texas called Howdy, Modi, which was the only event that Trump came to where he was not the star. Trump opened for Modi in a stadium in Houston, and then Trump buggered off and everyone cheered for Modi because there’s a whole phalanx of rightwing desis [Indian Americans], who are part of the South Asian diaspora who believe in Hindu supremacy. 

In India, Hindu supremacy is nasty and vile, and there have been people who have fought back against that, particularly in Andhra Pradesh where there is a system of farming that was originally coded as Hindu natural farming, but has been reclaimed as the world’s largest agroecological transition. More agroecological farmers have been spawned in Andhra Pradesh than anywhere else, where over two million farmers are currently agroecological farmers. And by 2035, six million farmers will be agroecological farmers.

India is hostage to fossil fuels, particularly through the Gulf of Hormuz, and hostage to fossil fuel based fertilizers  which are scarce and expensive due to the US/Iran war. One of the ways to avoid using fertilizer is to farm agroecologically. They’ve set up systems so that farmers wean themselves off fertilizer, so they don’t pay the high cost of fertilizer and can start making money.

It’s predominantly women and Adivasi [people indigenous to an area], and low-cost farmers. That has happened despite the scourge of Hindu supremacy because these movements have been robust and understood how to experiment and how to protect oneself against divisive racial rhetorics.

NAOMI: Raj, you’ve written about the difference between food security and food sovereignty Would you explain that.

RAJ: The idea of food security is a way of depoliticizing the word hunger, because it renders hunger into something that’s tractable for the state. Food security is when you have sufficient access to foods to be able to lead a healthy life. But you can be food secure in prison. The idea of food security says nothing about power.

The term food sovereignty was coined by La Via Campesina in the early ‘90s, and launched in 1995 at the World Food Summit in Rome. The idea of food sovereignty is about reclaiming power from the World Trade Organization and the World Bank. Food sovereignty is about a community’s right to be able to end hunger and define its own food policy.

What that means is that communities have to decide what food sovereignty is by studying and discussing it. La Via Campesina decided  that food sovereignty was dependent on an end to all forms of violence against women. The idea being that if this is about communities’ right to decide what food policy is, then everyone has to be equal, and the biggest obstacle to that, as identified by La Via Campesina, was patriarchy and that needs to be fought against.

Particularly now,  given the revelations about Cesar Chavez, that dialectic is sharp and vital to remember: food sovereignty is about a radical naming of inequality of power and a redressing of it.

NAOMI: Leah, the matriarchy is a big part of your practice. Would you talk about your work on farms in Haiti and Dominican Republic, and how that may relate to the  matriarchy and the patriarchy.

We don’t really have an agroecological movement in this country. We don’t have a politicized agricultural alternative community. It’s happening in smaller ways in which people are being trained how be farmers, as well as how to be the next generation of political leaders. 

LEAH: When we talk about deconstructing the patriarchy, our model is not one of franchising; the other farms I work on are not our farms. We intentionally have a de-growth framework. We are aiming towards our own irrelevance. We have no interest in pushing our survival on anybody. We are part of mycelial network. 

The farms in our network are all women-led, as is our farm. We only have two men on our staff of 22 (those poor guys). Altair Rodriguez runs an organic family farm in the Dominican Republic called La Finca Tierra Negra in the area that was the training ground for the militia against the Trujillo regime. Trujillo burned down the farm of Altair’s great grandfather and killed many family members. She revived the farm out of the ashes. It’s an agroecological farm growing coffee and 22 other crops. They are constantly producing fruits and medicines and work with Haitian migrants and Dominican women.

We have a sister farm amongst my homeland of Ayiti (Haiti) on the Western side of the island, outside of Léogâne, where one-third of the community was killed in an earthquake in 2010. We did so much grief work there. Out of the ashes of that earthquake, we planted thousands of fruit trees, moringa trees, and had woman-led seed exchanges. We helped reforest the hillsides that were denuded by the French as part of their extortion and punishment of our beautiful revolutionary island.

On the Caribbean island of Vieques is the Maroon Farm. In an effort led by  women, they cleaned the soil that the U.S. military destroyed. They are providing food security by feeding the entire island. We also work with farmers in Sierra Norte in Oaxaca, Mexico.

All of these farms are incredible. We spend our winters doing solidarity brigades. We raise money, we bring resources, we bring skilled people to do projects that they want to do, not ones that we pretend we know that they should do. We do consciousness raising. We do political education. We’re all members of La Via Campesina. We study together and we plan and strategize together. 

Something that I’ve noticed in the past ten years especially in the Caribbean, is people used to identify with colonial borders that have been imposed by the French, English and Spanish, but there has been a revival of Taíno and Arawak identity. At food sovereignty conferences by and for Taíno and Arawak Black women, the perspective has changed to “we’re one people; what is this BS they’ve been trying to convince us of? We have enough food. We have the best soil. There’s food all year round; let’s feed our people.” 

NAOMI: Raj, in this very strange post-neoliberal world that we are entering into, there might be some hope that there could be some transformation. Do you think in this time of seemingly endless uncertainty and confounding ways that there might be some potential for optimism?

RAJ: There’s nothing guaranteed. Often at this stage of the conversation, it turns to “if only we do this, this and this, everything’s going to be fine.” No, because that’s an unreasonable way of understanding the world. In Brazil, for instance, under the first Lula administration, there were some victories. For example, in the food system, there were certain laws about being able to get food, one example was the Popular restaurant initiative, supported by the government that offered very cheap healthy meals. Here in the U.S. now most food is eaten outside the home, and to have public restaurants is a way to have dignity for the working class.

Then under the Bolsonaro administration, that was ground into dirt. And most of the public restaurants now are roach motels. But now under the second Lula administration, they have a program for cozinhas solidárias, or solidarity kitchens. The government will pay people to open a licensed kitchen and make local food available to the public. There are still some public restaurants, but the zones in which organizing happens have moved into these spaces of social gathering in the solidarity kitchens. 

What does that have to do with hope? Well, this is precisely the dialectical process. We won something under the first Lula administration, then the fascists came and then destroyed it. Now we rebuild with something else. The engine for hope is always the social movements. One of the engines for getting rid of Bolsonaro was his abject failure in dealing with the massive floods that Brazil had experienced a couple of years back. Again, the failure of a government to be able to respond to the climate crisis is an engine for the kinds of radical care that our movements are in the business of providing.

What I see that as the fulcrum of hope is the recognition that movements are already providing care. And, there’s nothing inherently leftwing about that. If you followed what happened after the hurricane Helene that tore through North Carolina, there were neo-Nazis on horseback, providing aid and media and solidarity. The far right are doing it as well, and that’s the terrain on which we struggle, we need to recognize it. They get a move in this world as well. They get to redefine the terms of climate change. They get to have a say about how climate change needs to be met with yet more racist exclusion. Our recruiting has to be stronger. We have to organize better, and there’s no guarantee we’ll win, but there’s everything to fight for.

NAOMI:  The examples that Raj gave of the Popular restaurants and solidarity kitchens in Brazil makes me think of the concept of  food commons. Leah, how do food commons come into your work?

LEAH: What unifies nonviolent strategies is the idea of ubuntu – “I am because you are” – of kinship. It’s an indigenous concept of animism or non-duality, this idea that I am the mountain, the mountain is me; I’m not a defender of the river, I am the river. The pre-enclosure concept that you could own a person or the land, is absolute insanity. You mean to say we’re going to take Mother Earth and put some lines on her and this part is going to be mine, and I have the right to exclude everyone, even if they starve? Insanity.

The idea of the commons is a reclamation of our sanity to humble ourselves below our big siblings who are the hawks, and the rivers, and the sequoias. They were on the scene before us; we came later, and are younger and less wise. So we need to defer to those who have figured out how to live in relationship and harmony. They understand that if there’s some sugar, some photosynthate coming into the forest ecosystem, that it will be shared amongst kin and non-kin. If there is a pest coming in and there’s a warning that needs to be distributed, everyone’s going to get the warning, not just the people I like or the cute ones, but everybody’s going to get it. The air is to be shared, the water is to be shared. When we signed papers for our farm we immediately got to work figuring out how to put it in a cooperative, which is a Western legal approximation of an indigenous commons.

The land has veto power over the people in our cooperative.  We gave our pro bono student lawyers the challenge of giving the legal right for the land to have veto power. The local indigenous Mohican people need to have it too. We became the first cooperative in New York state to do a culture respect easement with Indigenous people, and also the first in New York state to do the Rights of Nature with our co-op.

So our little 80 acres is somewhat of a commons, but we want to spread this idea. Food is for everybody. Water’s for everybody. The land is for everybody.

The post Food Justice from the Local to the Global: A Conversation with Raj Patel and Leah Penniman appeared first on Bioneers.

Nearly twice as many Reform UK voters would back a solar farm in their area than support fracking, according to a new poll published today.

Gooseneck at Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road shale gas site, 5 August 2019. Photo: Ros Wills

The findings, for the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, are at odds with Reform’s national support for fracking.

The poll found that 43% of people who planned to vote Reform UK in this month’s local elections said they would back a solar farm as the best way to create energy locally.

This compared with 23% who said they would support fracking.

Among all voters, 60% said they would pick solar. Just 10% supported fracking.

Higher-volume fracking is currently prevented by a moratorium in England.

But Richard Tice, Reform UK’s energy spokesperson and deputy leader, has repeatedly called for a revival of fracking, particularly in Lincolnshire. He has also opposed renewable energy, including solar farms.

The party’s mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, has had talks with Egdon Resources, which wants to frack for shale gas in the Gainsborough Trough. Egdon is owned by the Texas-based oil and gas firm, Heyco Energy, which has used multi-stage hydraulic fracturing in the US Permian Basin.

Despite Reform UK’s national support for fracking, some of its local authorities have opposed the operation.

Lancashire’s Reform-led council said last year the countywas “not conducive” to fracking”. The Fylde region, near Blackpool, experienced experienced many small earthquakes caused by fracking by Cuadrilla at its Preston New Road site in 2018 and 2019.

Scarborough’s Reform-led town council unanimously opposed plans for lower-volume fracking in the North Yorkshire village of Burniston.

Alasdair Johnstone, of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said today:

“Reform’s pro-fracking, anti-solar stance appears not only at odds with broad public opinion, but also the opinion of their voters who would prefer a quiet solar farm over a noisy fracking pad in their area.

“That divergence is also playing out between the national level of the party and local councils some of which have said they don’t want fracking in their area.

“Public opposition aside, Reform would find it tough to emulate Trump’s pro-fracking push as British geology is very different to that in the US.

“Reform voters clearly back renewable energy which is helping to reduce the UK’s dependence on volatile gas markets and foreign imports.”

• Polling by More In Common was carried out from 21-27 April 2026 with 1,441 adults living in areas of England where there were local elections.

A Conservative-led council has urged the UK government to deliver its promise to ban fracking.

Photo: DrillOrDrop

East Riding of Yorkshire Council voted unanimously last month in favour of a motion opposing fracking in the county.

The motion focussed on plans for lower-volume fracking at Rathlin Energy’s West Newton-A oil and gas site in Holderness.

But it also included a resolution to write to the energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

In a letter sent this week, the council requested “progress and urgency for the legislation detailed in their [the Labour government’s] election manifesto to outlaw such high pressure and extreme procedures.”

The council also wrote to the oil and gas industry regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA). The letter said:

“the council wishes to place on record its view that proposals to authorise hydraulic fracturing or similar extreme extraction techniques beneath or near West Newton raise serious concerns.”

It added:

“This letter is intended to ensure that the Council’s opposition is clearly understood, formally recorded, and taken into account in the discharge of the NSTA’s statutory duties in relation to any proposals affecting the East Riding of Yorkshire.”

The letter urged the NSTA to carry out a “fully independent assessment of safety and risk” before granting consent for any form of high-pressure stimulation.

The assessment should be accompanied by “the publication and transparent scrutiny” of the hydraulic fracture plan (HFP), the council said. An HFP is a required document for any form of fracking in England. It is intended to describe how seismic events caused by fracking would be managed and minimised.

• The HFP for fracking plans at West Newton-A is part of a legal challenge brought by a local campaigner against the Environment Agency. More details here

'Kant versus Schmitt debate' misses Marx's understanding of destructive capitalism

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