Exposes the problems surrounding the international marketing of pesticides banned in the United States, describing growing incidences of pesticide poisoning in farm workers and through the exportation of contaminated foods

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

Schapiro, Mark

Weir, David

Self-Help

FOOD FIRST BOOKS *

Authorized Departure paperback

Biographies & Memoirs

lulu.com

Seeds of Resistance is a wake-up call. With vivid and memorable stories, Mark Schapiro tells us how seeds are at the frontlines of our epic battle for healthy food.” —Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard Sun. Soil. Water. Seed. These are the primordial ingredients for the most essential activity of all on earth: growing food. All of these elements are being changed dramatically under the pressures of corporate consolidation of the food chain, which has been accelerating just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. In the midst of this global crisis, the fate of our food has slipped into a handful of the world’s largest companies. Seeds of Resistance will bring home what this corporate stranglehold is doing to our daily diet, from the explosion of genetically modified foods to the rapid disappearance of plant varieties to the elimination of independent farmers who have long been the bedrock of our food supply. Seeds of Resistance will touch many nerves for readers, including concerns about climate change, chronic drought in essential farm states like California, the proliferation of GMOs, government interference (or purposeful ignorance), and the alarming domination of the seed market and our very life cycle by global giants like Monsanto. But not all is bleak when it comes to the future of our food supply. Seeds of Resistance will also present hopeful stories about farmers, consumer groups, and government agencies around the world that are resisting the tightening corporate squeeze on our food chain. “The latest science suggests that plants, including those of our major food crops, are engaged in a continuous interplay of responses with the environment in which they’re planted. That environment is changing; climatic disruptions are accelerating. The number of seed companies is declining, and the spectrum of seeds shrinking. The group of people involved in fighting for their seeds, and a more just and healthy food system, is expanding. Old assumptions of how we grow food are falling. New paradigms are emerging. It’s a time of profound vitality and volatility in the seed realm, with high stakes for all of us who care about our health, the planet’s health, and the food we eat. As powerful forces circle round the ground-zero ingredient of our food, one thing is becoming clear: a seed is never just a seed. Seeds are the canaries on our climate disrupted planet. They’re emitting strong signals. Let’s read them.”

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

Business & Money

Economics

Hot Books

"Seeds of Resistance is a wake-up call. With vivid and memorable stories, Mark Schapiro tells us how seeds are at the frontlines of our epic battle for healthy food.” —Alice Waters, founder of Chez Panisse and the Edible Schoolyard\nThree-quarters of the seed varieties on Earth in 1900 were driven to extinction by 2015. In Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on Our Climate-Ravaged Planet, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro takes us to the frontlines of the struggle over the seeds that remain—a struggle with some of the world’s biggest agri-chemical companies that will determine the long-term security of our food supply.\nHis investigation unravels the stories of seed survival strategies and why it matters that more than half of all commercially traded seeds are under the control of three multinational agri-chemical companies—producing chemical dependent uniform seeds just as climate change is profoundly altering the conditions for growing food. And he dives deep into the growing movement in the United States and around the world to defy these trends, and assert autonomy over locally evolved seeds that are, by contrast, showing high levels of resilience to the onrushing impacts of climate change. He probes into the implications for our health and for the Earth’s ecological health, of patented seeds, and the companies that have turned them, and the chemicals they require to survive, into one of the world’s most valuable commodities.\nSchapiro, also a lecturer at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, applies his investigative and storytelling skills to this riveting narrative, from the environmentally stressed fields of the American Midwest and California’s Central Valley to the unexpected centers of climate-resilient seed diversity in the arid, war-torn fields of Syria and Iraq, the mountains of southern Mexico and Latin America, and the lands of indigenous food cultivators in the American Southwest and Northwest. There, Native American communities are seeing increasing interest in their ability to grow food in shifting conditions over thousands of years.\nNewly updated and available for the first time in paperback, Seeds of Resistance gives new meaning to the term ‘farm to table’ by unearthing the largely hidden backstory to the first ingredient in that journey, the seed.

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on Our Climate-Ravaged Planet

From tainted pet food to toxic toys, Americans can thank the successful lobbying efforts of the U.S. chemical industry for the secret ingredients in everyday products that have been linked to rising rates of infertility, endocrine system disruptions, neurological disorders, and cancer. While the U.S. Congress stalls in the face of these dangers, the European Union has chosen to act. Strict consumer-safety regulations have forced multinationals to manufacture safer products for European consumers, while lower U.S. standards allow them to continue selling unsafe products to Americans. Schapiro's exposé shows that short of strong government action, the United States will lose not only its ability to protect citizens from environmental hazards but also, as economic priorities shift, whatever claim it has to commercial supremacy. Increasingly, products on American shelves are equated with serious health hazards, hazards that the European Union is legislating out of existence in its powerful trading bloc, a lead that even China is beginning to follow. Schapiro illustrates how the blowback from weak regulation at home carries a steep economic, as well as environmental, price. In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power, investigative journalist Mark Schapiro takes the reader to the front lines of global corporate and political power, where tectonic battles are being waged that will determine the physical and economic health of our children and ourselves.

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power

Chelsea Green Publishing

In Carbon Shock, veteran journalist Mark Schapiro takes readers on a journey into a world where the same chaotic forces reshaping our natural world are also transforming the economy, playing havoc with corporate calculations, shifting economic and political power, and upending our understanding of the real risks, costs, and possibilities of what lies ahead. In this ever-changing world, carbon―the stand-in for all greenhouse gases―rules, and disrupts, and calls upon us to seek new ways to reduce it while factoring it into nearly every long-term financial plan we have. But how? From the jungles of the Amazon to the farms in California’s Central Valley, from ‘greening’ cities like Pittsburgh to rising powerhouses like China, from the oil-splattered beaches of Spain to carbon-trading desks in London, Schapiro deftly explores the key axis points of change. For almost two decades, global climate talks have focused on how to make polluters pay for the carbon they emit. It remains an unfolding financial mystery: What are the costs? Who will pay for them? Who do you pay? How do you pay? And what are the potential impacts? The answers to these questions, and more, are crucial to understanding, if not shaping, the coming decade. Carbon Shock evokes a world in which the parameters of our understanding are shifting―on a scale even more monumental than how the digital revolution transformed financial decision-making―toward a slow but steady acknowledgement of the costs and consequences of climate change. It also offers a critical new perspective as global leaders gear up for the next round of climate talks in 2015.

Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

Scientists have devised a new term to explain the turmoil caused by climate change: the end of stationarity. It means that our baselines for rainfall, water flow, temperature, and extreme weather are no longer relevant―that making predictions based on past experience is no longer possible. But climate change has upended baselines in the financial world, too, disrupting the global economy in ways that are just becoming clear, leaving us unable to assess risk, and causing us to fundamentally re-think economic priorities and existing business models. At the heart of that financial unrest is the role of carbon, and as the world moves toward making more and more polluters pay to emit it, a financial mystery unfolds: What are the costs? Who has the responsibility to pay for them? Who do you pay? How do you pay? And how will those costs ripple through the economy? These are the questions veteran journalist Mark Schapiro attempts to answer as he illuminates the struggle to pinpoint carbon's true costs and allocate them fairly--all while bumping up against the vagaries of the free market, the lobbying power of corporations, the political maneuverings of countries, and the tolerance of everyday consumers buying a cup of coffee, a tank of gas, or an airplane ticket. Along the way, Schapiro tracks the cost of carbon through the drought-ridden farmland of California, the jungles of Brazil, the world's greatest manufacturing center in China, the carbon-trading center of Europe, and the high-tech crime world that carbon markets have inspired. He even tracks the cost of carbon through the skies themselves, where efforts to put a price tag on the carbon left by airplanes in the no-man's land of the atmosphere created what amounted to a quiet but powerful global trade war. The End of Stationarity deftly depicts the wild, new carbon economy, and shows us how nations, emerging and developed, teeter on its brink. Originally published in hardcover as Carbon Shock, the book is updated throughout and includes a new afterword, based on the Paris climate talks.

The End of Stationarity: Searching for the New Normal in the Age of Carbon Shock

Winner of the 2008 NAUTILUS SILVER AWARD in the category of Ecology/Environment/Sustainability and Conscious Media/Journalism
New evidence seems to arrive daily--from stories about tainted pet food to toxic toys--of the dangerous consequences that lax environmental policies are having on the consumer products that we, and our children, use every day thanks to lobbying efforts by the U.S. chemical industry. Meanwhile, the European Union is forcing these global corporate giants to chart a new path that, by requiring safe products, is revamping how businesses can create safe products and make money. In Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power investigative journalist Mark Schapiro takes the reader inside the corridors of global power where tectonic battles are occurring that will impact the health of ourselves and the planet. Schapiro's expos© shows how laws adopted by the European Union--where stricter consumer-safety standards are in place--have forced multinationals into manufacturing safer products. And, short of such strong government action the United States will lose its claim of economic and environmental supremacy. Increasingly, products developed and sold in the United States are equated with serious health hazards, and many of those products are soon to be banned from Europe and other parts of the world. Schapiro's revelations in this thought-provoking work will change the way American consumers think about everyday products--from plastic softeners that can contribute to sexual malformations to lipstick additives that are potential toxins to the brain, liver, kidneys, and immune system. And it will stir them into forcing our government to take the lead of others, including the European Union, China, and countries in Central and South America. Exposed is a revealing and fascinating look at global markets, everyday products, and the toxic chemicals that bind them. It will shock, inform, and warn American businesses and government leaders about the risks of being left behind in the international marketplace. Schapiro's book shines a light on Europe's evolving search for higher standards that places Brussels, not Washington, at the center of global market innovation.

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schapiro, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Schapiro, Mark

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schapiro, Mark. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Circle of Poison: Pesticides and People in a Hungry World

Authorized Departure paperback

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply

Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on Our Climate-Ravaged Planet

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power

Carbon Shock: A Tale of Risk and Calculus on the Front Lines of the Disrupted Global Economy

The End of Stationarity: Searching for the New Normal in the Age of Carbon Shock

Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products and What's at Stake for American Power