Vanity Fair's Green Issue

I usually think of Vanity Fair as being a Mom-magazine that middle-aged women read on airplanes, or whatever. However, yesterday when I was standing in line at the supermarket waiting to have my Milkyway rung up, I saw that Vanity Fair had published a "green issue." I checked it out online today - and recommend that you all do as well. First of all, for some reason it shocked me - but the issue is written from an clear environmentalist perspective. The first article is about Russian exploration of warming Arctic areas. Apparently the Russians went all colonialist and planted a flag at the bottom of the ocean under the Arctic ice floes. Other countries which also border on the Arctic got a little upset - not because of emotional attachment to the area, but because of the vast amount of oil reserves thought to be buried under there. Hmmm, I admit myself to be a skeptic of some environmentalism, but it seems very dangerous to me that so much fuss is being raised over new oil reserves when a little thing called Climate Change is happening. Dropping oil prices do not strike me as being truly advantageous in the long run.

The second article I read made my blood run cold. It is about Monsanto - the HUGE agriculture company that sells Round-Up and genetically modified seeds which are immune to the herbicide. This is the dual product that has given Monsanto so many profits - they made Round-Up - a product which kills weeds, and concurrently created crop species which are genetically modified to be resistent to Round-Up. As Vanity Fair points out, they then forever changed the face of farming by not allowing farmers to re-use seeds from year to year. Farmers must buy the seeds each new year from Monsanto, and if they don't, Monstanto will viciously go after them for breaking patent laws. Apparently, it has gotten so bad in the MidWest that people refer to Monsanto as having secret police - Vanity Fair reports of people being threatened by the corporation, and being tricked into releasing private records. Incidentally, Monsanto used to be a chemical corporation which is responsible for some of the largest toxic dumps in the US. Ughhhh, it just gives me the chills.