On Farmer Suicides and the Half a Million Barrels of DDT Waste on the Ocean Floor

Warning: A graphic act of suicide is depicted in the image below.

While the photo may be disturbing or triggering, the continued suicides in farmers (especially those impacted by the Big Ag agendas of global elites and multinational corporations) is a real problem that needs to be faced and talked about.

To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; if you cannot tolerate this (natural) anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death. And yet, anger is only the beginning of change. — Jules Henry

Image from Flickr

Last night, I had trouble sleeping because I found myself thinking about an issue that angers me to no end. With so much focus on environmental issues in our media systems, we're more likely to witness discussions being reduced to the next heroic thing that Greta Thunberg said, what happened to the Just Stop Oil activists who threw soup at a famous painting, the next giant iceberg that breaks off from an ice shelf, or the next Republican politician that denies climate change is real. While discussions like this reveal some important aspects of what's going on, environmental issues seem to now play a part in the raging culture wars of our times where we argue over facts and competing narratives. However, culture wars do little to help solve the significant problems we face. They limit public dialogue and distract people from deeper corruptions.

My millennial friends and the young Gen Z's show up at climate change protests with good intentions, and repost infographics about how to recycle properly. However, most of them haven't begun to think systemically about the complex political and corporate forces shaping environmental destruction and the privatization of nature. Most of them have no idea who's behind neoliberal agendas of globalization wreaking environmental and political havoc all over the world, including the military-intelligence and shadow banking forces that help create wars and global economic instability.

Liberal rhetoric appropriately discusses how environmental challenges disproportionately impact communities of color in America, yet they disregard the working class communities and farmers in rural America, mostly white people, who face unprecedented levels of pollution and unpayable debt. At the same time, many who advocate for disadvantaged communities of color often look the other way when you talk about what Bill Gates is doing to the farmland and people in India and Africa. "Oh no, Bill Gates is a hero of our times," many of them say. Some of them take a more neutral approach. "Well, of course he's probably done some bad things. But every rich person has at one point."

When it comes to environmental issues, here's what I want to start talking about on a mass scale. Why is it that an estimated 200,000 farmers have taken their own lives in India over the past 13 years? Another article reveals that nearly 30 people in the farming sector die by suicide daily in India. Farmers around the world face brutal pressures that go beyond the inherent challenges of farming. Along with insurmountable debt, farmers are losing their land, livelihood, and life purpose. They're facing extreme health issues and high cancer rates from toxic pesticides and fertilizers, thanks to the "Green Revolution" pushed by the Rockefellers and now Bill Gates, who is now one of the largest landowners in the world. For the progressives angry about stolen lands, look at who's currently stealing land on a massive scale.

Where is the community conversation about the enormous control over global agriculture and food production by elites and multinational corporations who disguise themselves as philanthropists? Vandana Shiva, one of the most prominent activists of our times, does powerful work on educating people on the political dimensions of these vital environmental issues. Sadly, I've been in many climate activism spaces, specifically with people in my younger generation, where no one in the room knows her.

Shiva argues that the prevailing model of industrial agriculture, heavily reliant on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fossil fuels, and a seemingly limitless supply of cheap water, places an unacceptable burden on the Earth’s resources. She promotes, as most knowledgeable farmers do, more diversity in crops, greater care for the soil, and more support for people who work the land every day. Shiva has particular contempt for farmers who plant monocultures—vast fields of a single crop. “They are ruining the planet,” she told me. “They are destroying this beautiful world.” — Seeds of Doubt, New Yorker

Here's another environmental issue that should draw more attention than Greta Thunberg being detained for protesting the expansion of a coal mine. For 40 years starting from the 1940s, Los Angeles was the home of the nation's largest manufacturer of DDT, an incredibly poisonous pesticide. Recent historical records and research show that not only did the company dispose toxic waste through sewage pipes that ended up in the ocean, but as many as half a million of barrels of DDT waste are still underwater at the bottom of the ocean floor near the LA coast.

Thankfully, LA Times has been covering this issue extensively. Here's an excerpt from their excellent investigation:

Shipping logs show that every month in the years after World War II, thousands of barrels of acid sludge laced with this synthetic chemical were boated out to a site near Catalina and dumped into the deep ocean — so vast that, according to common wisdom at the time, it would dilute even the most dangerous poisons.

Regulators reported in the 1980s that the men in charge of getting rid of the DDT waste sometimes took shortcuts and just dumped it closer to shore. And when the barrels were too buoyant to sink on their own, one report said, the crews simply punctured them.

DDT is so stable it can take generations to break down. It doesn’t really dissolve in water but stores easily in fat. Compounding these problems is what scientists today call “biomagnification”: the toxin accumulating in the tissues of animals in greater and greater concentrations as it moves up the food chain.

The world today wrestles with microplastics, BPA, and PFAS. Yet the indestructible DDT remains to be an unsolved and largely forgotten problem, from high levels of DDT found in California condors to sea lions dying from a mysterious cancer directly linked to DDT, to shipments of fish being recalled, and to generations of women with DDT in their systems.

Many scientists and other environmental experts are calling on the EPA to do something about this. Yet why aren't we, the masses, taking this issue to the streets and social media, instead of cancelling the next "climate denier"? We need to be thinking in systemic and integrative ways to understand how we got to this environmental polycrisis, and the deep money powers that drive the destruction of our planet. Just as important as this is a vital media system willing to awaken a slumbering and distracted humanity.

What other environmental topics do you think need to be discussed on a larger scale?

In bringing this ranting blog post back to the level of humanity and heart, I will end this with a beautiful video of stories and voices of farmers from all over the world. I highly recommend watching it. It's deeply touching.