Join our network
Nanoparticles found in common food products
Independent testing has found potentially harmful nanoparticles in a range of food products.
What will be the future of food?
The global pandemic has exposed the flaws in our current highly concentrated, inequitable, industrial food system. At this moment, we stand at the crossroads with two starkly different, and fundamentally incompatible, visions for the future of food. One leads us to resilience, regeneration, and justice for communities, biodiversity, and our climate. The other entrenches current health, social and economic inequities, and worsens our climate and biodiversity crises. Friends of the Earth International recently organised two webinars for member...
read moreFeral cats aren’t the biggest threat to our native wildlife
A new study by the Northern Territory Government’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) suggests that feral cats aren’t as great a menace to the Top End’s native mammals as previously thought. The study comes as the Federal Government conducts an inquiry into the problem of feral and domestic cats in Australia and considers the use of dangerous gene drive technology to try to control their numbers. While it is politically expedient for the Federal Government to blame feral cats for our current extinction crisis –...
read more‘Miracle cows’ highlight risks of gene editing
They were the poster children of the gene editing revolution. In 2014, the US company Recombinetics announced they had developed gene edited hornless dairy cattle. They argued that the genetic modification was just a small genetic ‘tweak’ and that their cattle shouldn’t be subject to onerous safety assessments or regulation. Really this was just a way of speeding up natural breeding – or ‘precision breeding’ as they called it. Except this wasn’t actually true. Five years later, completely by chance, a...
read moreGeoengineering threatens Oceans
High-risk geoengineering projects are violating UN moratoria Members of a global coalition of 195 organisations in 45 countries are raising the alarm about the threat of geoengineering to delicate, life-sustaining ocean ecosystems worldwide. The Hands Off Mother Earth (HOME) Campaign is calling on civil society and government officials worldwide to vigorously oppose marine geoengineering experiments. A recent announcement of the first open-air test of solar geoengineering technology in Australia is one of several types of geoengineering that...
read moreWhat will the future of our food look like?
Last weekend, I attended an expert roundtable on food security hosted by the Commission for the Human Future. Everyone was in broad agreement that our current agricultural system is in crisis. Decades of intensive agriculture are eroding our soils, drawing down our aquifers and are a major contributor to our current biodiversity crisis. Inspiringly, we were also in broad agreement about the solutions. We rapidly need to transition to agroecological farming techniques, relocalise our food economies, and halt the use of toxic pesticides and...
read moreCrazytech
And that could destroy life on Earth.