I know a number of people who love the environment.

If you called them tree-huggers they’d smile at the compliment. So would I. They may recycle. They may drive a Prius, Honda Hybrid, Leaf, bicycle-built-for-two or something powered by hamsters and rubber bands. They don’t smoke, they use nontoxic paint and they wouldn’t dare throw a burger wrapper out the car window.

But the amazing thing is that these same individuals don’t embrace organics and biodynamics in their own kitchens or when they go out to eat. There’s a disconnect and we need to get to the bottom of it.

If you’ve heard of organic farming, you most likely don’t need a lecture in how organic foods are much better for you than conventional, sprayed, irradiated, neutered, altered, depleted alternatives grown on factory farms. Right?

There’s more to the organic issue than just the food itself.

Consider the interplay and interconnection between organic farming and the impact on the planet. If you care about environmentalism, fish full of dioxins and mercury, oil spills and dead zones in the ocean, eating organic isn’t only about your personal health.

Oh, the humanity!

Toxic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers are killing us and our planet. I covered a lot of this material in my book, Evil Genius in the Garden of Eden, and the issue’s only getting worse.

Only one example of many: In a paper called “Plowing New Ground,” Terry F. Young, Ph.D writes, “In California’s Central Valley alone, over 500 river miles are polluted by farm runoff and irrigation drainage adversely impacts nearly all of the wetland acreage.”

Then there’s the water issue.

“Water pollution from industrial farms not only damages the environment and kills wildlife, but it can also sicken and kill people. And since these farms exercise little restraint when it comes to water usage, they tend to waste large quantities of water, even when neighboring communities are experiencing water shortages.  Because small, sustainable farms are more integrated with their surrounding communities, they pay closer attention to the ways that they use water and how their practices affect local water supplies,” reports the nonprofit organization GRACE.

Watch yourself, watch your planet.

If you are not eating a diet of pure food you are part of the problem, funding the very pollution, waste and abuse that you stand against. I hate to say this, but is there a better way? Millions of wonderful, nice, productive, fun-loving, happy and sensitive people don’t eat organic; but they should!

I’ll leave you with this one piece of bad news that hardly anybody has heard about.

“By polluting the nation’s waterways, a single factory farm has the ability to negatively affect whole regions, as was the case when manure spilled from a ruptured tank on a 3,000-head dairy farm in upstate New York in August 2005. Three million gallons of cow manure poured into the Black River, polluting an area one-fourth the size of the Exxon Valdez spill… The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation cited the farm for numerous environmental and permit violations, and estimated that this spill killed around 200,000 to 250,000 fish.”

Source: http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/waterpollution/

Now, is this the kind of thing any self-respecting environmentalist would care to be associated with?

Okay, one more piece of organic food for thought…

We live in one of the most religious nations on earth. Now there’s a huge debate wherein the religious among us claim that you can’t have morality without a belief in a Supreme Being. The irony is that, with all this talk about morality, we have the most immoral nation on earth.We tolerate the wholesale destruction of our food supply, environment and fellow beings in exchange for the ephemeral reward of money. How moral is that?
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For the last 20 years, Dr. Vic Shayne has been involved in nutritional research, both personally and professionally. He’s written several books on the importance of foods and how their nutrients differ from isolates found in vitamin pills. Health is not something we can take for granted.

Visit his website to learn more.