Dear Mrs. Clinton,
I plan to vote for you. I am confident you will be the next president of the United States.
Your opponent, Donald Trump, is not fit to be president. He is wasting his time thinking he can bamboozle millions of Americans with gimmicks of playboy memories fuelled by hubris and deceit. He is proud for not paying taxes, a shameless and irresponsible habit.
I do support your social and political proposals for alleviating poverty and lessening the gross inequity of wealth and income in this country. I worry, however, about the future of our society in the midst of ceaseless destruction of the natural world. The fact is our health, prosperity, and survival depend on a healthy natural world.
Global warming is a product of thoughtless and dangerous human dependence on fossil fuels. A warming planet is already responsible for devastations all over the world. As long as the petroleum, coal, and natural gas industries are being subsidized and unregulated, it's only a matter of time before the current sporadic natural disasters become frequent and catastrophic.
In addition to the outright threat of climate change, there's the decades-old but invisible destabilizing impact of industrialized agriculture and food. More than any other single threat and, to some degrees, similar to the threat of nuclear bombs, the pesticides of the farmers represent a daily risk to all life, including human life. They have been contaminating the food and possibly drinking water of most Americans.
Pesticides are deleterious petrochemicals related to nerve poisons of WWII.
I learned about the toxicity of pesticides and industrialized farming during my 25-year career with the US Environmental Protection Agency. I also discovered the EPA is nothing but an industry subsidiary protecting the legal and financial interests of the chemical and agribusiness industries.
I am not exaggerating. I documented the hazards of pesticides and the politicization of EPA in my 2014 book, "Poison Spring: The Secret History of Pollution and the EPA" (Bloomsbury Press). The facts supporting my story came from EPA documents.
I recommend the first thing you do in the White House is to revamp both the US Department of Agriculture and the EPA, reconstituting them to serve all of us by serving small family farmers and rural America. No more water or financial subsidies to large producers. No more toxic pesticides. No more the genetic alteration of crops or GMOs. No more lobbyists surrounding USDA and EPA. No more animal factories polluting the environment and warming the Earth.
Industrialized agriculture, run on petroleum, emits a substantial amount of all global warming gases.
The connection of industrialized farming to global warming alone makes it imperative that it be radically transformed to small-scale family farming. The land of small non-industrialized farms sequesters carbon dioxide.
In addition, consider the epidemics of cancer and neurological diseases afflicting America. Pesticides are the big elephant behind these waves of debilitating illnesses, especially mental impairment in children. Consider also that pesticides are decimating wildlife for several decades. They are a powerful factor in the current sixth mass extinction.
Second and equally serious, the rapid loss of crop genetic diversity is primarily the result of the industrialization of agriculture. Cary Fowler, an American agronomist who inspired the building of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway near the North Pole, and author of the 2016 book, "Seeds on Ice," equates the effects of the continuing loss of crop diversity to the potential effects of nuclear war and global warming.
This means America has to return to family farming that served the country well for two centuries. This means the land grant universities must also return to their original mission of inventing and supporting agroecological farming science and technologies for the benefic and prosperity of family farmers and rural America.
Instead of hard petrochemicals, farmers will use biological, cultural, and mechanical means of pest control. Integrating animals and crops will do much to diminish most synthetic fertilizers. Organic farmers have been raising food without synthetic pesticides, synthetic fertilizers or the genetic engineering of crops.
These reforms promise an easier transition to renewable energy and taming of the beast of climate change.
Rural America will also benefit immensely. Millions of small family farmers are likely to replace the current undemocratic plantation economy of a few crops, gigantic machinery, slaughterhouses, animal farms, and fertilizer and pesticide plants.