THE PERILS OF POISONING

Re: Roundup works -- but too well? by David Adams, Aug. 6.

This is reminiscent of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962)! Like many
scientists of integrity since then, notably Sandra Steingraber, author of
Living Downstream: A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the
Environment (1997), Carson warned us of the enduring hazards of chemical
assaults on the natural world. Carson documented that DDT used in the
United States had poisoned animals and ecosystems as far away as the poles.

Now comes Roundup, which in overconcentrated doses kills Colombian drug
crops as well as thousands of creatures, endangers human lives and spreads
out via rivers into the vast Amazon basin. (Ironically, most of the
targeted crops feed U.S. cocaine and heroin addictions.)

The United Nations Commission on Human Rights concluded in Nairobi this
past May that living in a pollution-free world is a basic human right. The
manufacturers of Roundup state on their product's label that "It is a
violation of federal law to use this product in any manner inconsistent
with its labeling." So why does the United States violate both its own laws
and international environmental-human rights principles in Colombia?

Further, we have the gall to blame the peasants whose homes and fragile
ecosystems we are destroying as "spreading a sinister campaign of
disinformation." Rumors suggest that we are depopulating those areas so
that we can take larger "crops" like oil, for example. Who's disinforming whom?

In this vastly interconnected world, we as American citizens must
ceaselessly demand that our government and the free press tell us the
truth. We cannot spread poisons, especially among neighbors, without them
filtering back into our own food, into our own psyches and souls.

Nancy Corson Carter, St. Petersburg