Search

Our food should be nourishing and safe to eat. But more than 10,000 chemicals, some of which are potentially toxic, are allowed in cereal, snacks, meat and many other types of food sold in the U.S.

Despite a 1991 lawsuit settlement in which the State of California promised to ensure blood testing and treatment for lower-income children threatened by lead poisoning, since 1992 the state has failed to identify or provide care for an estimated 200,000 lead-poisoned children ages 1 to 5. About 212,000 one-to-five-year-olds in California had harmful blood lead levels between 1992 and 1998, but

The government tried to put the best possible face on the two announcements it issued about organic farming in March, 2000. First, USDA released a long-awaited proposal to define uniform, national standards for organically grown food to replace a patchwork of several dozen state and private definitions and labels. And then the department reported that the area of U.S. farmland devoted to organic

The first analysis of Freedom to Farm payments in Iowa shows that the program provided the vast majority of recipients with financially meaningless amounts of aid, often just a few hundred dollars per farm, just as a major economic crisis was tightening its grip on the farm belt. At the same time, a handful of Iowa's largest farming operations came away with hundreds of thousands of dollars in

Section 18 of the Federal Insecticide Fungicide and Rodenticide Act allows the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to grant "emergency" and "crisis" exemptions from pesticide health and safety standards for farmers facing sudden and potentially catastrophic pest infestations. By definition, granting these exemptions is a hurried procedure, accompanied by less than a full scientific study of

In the five years before electricity deregulation, California utilities cut funding in half for programs that save energy, save customers money, and help save the environment. According to an analysis of federal data by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the wasted energy would supply a year's worth of power to more than 600,000 homes, and would have cost California consumers almost $450

Two years after a federal investigation found California's clean air enforcement programs inadequate to stop big polluters, an Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis shows that many of the state's largest industrial facilities continue to break the law and pay fines too small to deter repeat offenses.

Two years of independent scientific monitoring by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) detected an array of toxic pesticides drifting into the air Californians breathe -- the tip of a 100-million-pound iceberg of hazardous chemicals emitted statewide each year as a result of pesticide use.

For decades, U.S. and foreign pesticide manufacturers have been feeding their products to rats, rabbits, mice, and guinea pigs in thousands of controlled laboratory studies, all designed to satisfy government regulatory requirements for chemicals that kill weeds, insects, rodents and other pests. Studies on lab animals are still routinely conducted for pesticides today. But in recent years, in a

EWG's analysis of campaign gifts and air pollution data concludes that too many politicians in the House of Representatives side with their contributors and against their constituents on air pollution, even in U.S. metropolitan areas where air pollution prematurely ends thousands of lives each year.