From exploiting the cow's physical body to manipulating its cells, a new…
Insecticides: A License to Kill
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The insect apocalypse is here. For decades, scientists have recorded plummeting insect numbers around the world. And when insects go, so do large swathes of complex ecosystems: bird populations decline, fish vanish, and humans feel the effects. It is the worst mass extinction event in millions of years.
Shot in Europe, Japan, and the United States, INSECTICIDES: A LICENSE TO KILL makes a powerful case that neonicotinoids are to blame for this dramatic ecological collapse, which began in the 1990s — around the time they hit the market. Hailed as agricultural miracles, these insecticidal neurotoxins are applied directly to crop seeds, allowing farmers to reduce spraying. But as plants grow, the chemicals are incorporated into every single one of their cells. They also kill beneficial pollinators like bees and butterflies, leech into surrounding waterways, and invade human bodies. They’ve even been found in the urine of newborns.
Multinational agrochemical companies spend millions to sow doubt about the harmfulness of neonicotinoids, but there are farmers, scientists, and activists resisting. We meet some of them in INSECTICIDES, including an entomologist and South Dakota farmer forced out of his USDA job for “asking the wrong questions”; a French beekeeper and anti-agrochemical lobbyist who recalls walking over the bodies of thousands of dead bees decimated by neonicotinoids; and an Italian agricultural engineer whose research over four decades shows no correlation between crop yields and pesticide use.
Without the cute and cuddly appeal of some species at risk, insects don’t enjoy a mass movement to save them. But, as INSECTICIDES makes clear, that doesn’t mean their disappearance is any less cause for alarm.
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Citation
Main credits
Aramaki, Miyuki Droz (film director)
Aramaki, Miyuki Droz (director of photography)
Lepetit, Sylvain (film director)
Lepetit, Sylvain (director of photography)
Séga, Sébastien (film director)
Séga, Sébastien (editor of moving image work)
Séga, Sébastien (director of photography)
Other credits
Editing, Sébastien Séga; cinematography, Sylvain Lepetit, Miyuki Droz Aramaki, Sébastien Séga; original music, Olivier Adelen.
Distributor subjects
Health; Agriculture; Science; Environment; FoodKeywords
; "Insecticides: A License to Kill"; Icarus Films; documentary; environment; politics; agriculture; health; food; science; insects; extinction; ; "Insecticides: A License to Kill"; Icarus Films; doc;
WEBVTT
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[birds chirping]
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[insects crawling]
[spray hissing]
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[fly buzzing]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[spray hissing]
[fly buzzing]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[dramatic violin music]
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is causing the buzzing to disappear from the planet.
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[crickets chirping]
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that the planet has ever experienced.
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We\'re losing species
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at a rate that Earth has never experienced before.
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This is worse than the dinosaurs dying off.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[insects crawling]
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[dramatic violin music continues]
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by a German study.
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In Western Europe, since 1990,
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75% of the invertebrate population mass has disappeared.
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In a cascade effect,
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it is all food chains that are now under threat.
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Rivers are being drained of their fish
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and the skies of their birds.
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To blame: a new class of super-powerful insecticides
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that appeared on the market in the 1990s: neonicotinoids.
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A chemical concentrate placed directly around the seeds.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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But none of them says they\'ll kill every insect
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that\'s out there including your butterflies and bees.
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[dramatic violin music continues]
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is well aware of the dangers,
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these neurotoxins are sold to farmers as a miracle solution.
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Agrochemical companies and their lobbies
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have taken hostage all systems
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of scientific and democratic control.
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In the name of profit,
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a few chemists and businessmen have appropriated
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the right of life and death over all living things.
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[dramatic violin music ends]
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[tractor mechanisms clattering]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[somber music]
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have invaded fields the world over.
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In the European Union, despite numerous bans,
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neonicotinoids are still being used:
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130 exemptions have been granted.
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In France, this is the case for sugar beet.
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They\'re all colorful and everything
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but they\'re highly, highly toxic.
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So neo neonicotinoids are systemic.
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Once they\'re applied, they move up into the plant
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and tend to every plant part.
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So they\'re in the leaves, in the stems, in the roots,
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and in the flower.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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and in particular on child development,
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were never studied prior to their approval for use.
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And yet these insecticides are made
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from a well-known neurotoxic agent,
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the one contained in tobacco.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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and used it as a natural pesticide
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but it\'s never been synthesized as a chemical treatment
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until the 1980s
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when the Japanese subsidiary of Bayer
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created a a stable form of this nicotine derivative.
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That\'s why it\'s called neonicotinoids.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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this former Bayer employee in Japan
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answers foreign journalists\' questions.
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He is the chemist who invented imidacloprid.
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This neonicotinoid was commercialized by Bayer
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and has been used in the Japanese rice paddies since 1993.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[somber music]
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[continues speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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neonicotinoids seemed to be the ideal insecticide.
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And soon, a dozen or so molecules
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with unpronounceable names, such as Clothianidin,
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Thiamethoxam, or Acetamiprid, see the light of day
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and are developed and put on the market
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by a handful of multinational corporations.
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immediately became a success for the agrichem industry.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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BASF, we create chemistry.
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Syngenta, Monsanto, which merged with Bayer, BASF.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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and we sell those crop protection products
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to farmers all over the world.
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Not because we\'re evil, but because deep down
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in our curious scientist minds
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we know that plants can get sick.
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are under cultivation,
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and the profits for the agrochemical industry are huge.
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From Japan,
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neonicotinoids spread to Europe in the mid-1990s,
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before conquering North America in the 2000s
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and then invading the rest of the world.
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From traditional crop farming
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to countless everyday products,
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such as garden rose treatments or flea collars,
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neonicotinoids now account for 30%
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of the global insecticide sales.
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on a global scale.
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You can find neonicotinoids a lot across the world
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used on a variety of fruits and vegetables,
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everything from grape seed to potatoes and beets,
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to again corn and soybean.
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[light music]
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to give neonicotinoids their appeal,
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namely their long-term effectiveness at very low doses,
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reveals itself, in fact,
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to constitute a threat to all the world\'s ecosystems.
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This Japanese lake,
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where a few fishermen still go out to fish for clams,
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used to be one of the country\'s most bountiful.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[continues speaking in foreign language]
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the local authorities commissioned a scientific study
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from the University of Tokyo.
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25 years after the smelt suddenly disappeared,
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Masumi Yamamuro and her research team
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were finally able to identify the culprit.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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That\'s how they get up into the plant parts.
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They love water, but if you apply them
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and their water is flowing past the plant,
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they also get into that.
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They love water, will attach to it,
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and so they\'re now found in most water bodies.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[dramatic music]
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scientific studies are reaching the same conclusion.
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This new class of insecticides
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is causing a brutal decline in biodiversity,
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even deep in the heart of the most protected areas.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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these scientists have been comparing the results
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of their collections year on year.
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In meadows, they have recorded a 67% drop
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in the number of collected insects in just 10 years.
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Their work is seen as an international point of reference.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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I could keep going, shows that insects are declining.
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They\'re declining in diversity,
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they\'re declining in abundance,
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which means there\'s less of them out there.
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When there\'s less of them out there,
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there\'s less of them to pollinate,
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there\'s less of them to be eaten by birds.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[dramatic orchestral music]
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eight times faster than that of mammals,
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is believed to be the sixth mass extinction in our history,
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and the fastest and most extensive of them all.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[dramatic music]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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somebody decided that to be a good farmer,
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you were supposed to farm simpler and bigger.
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[dramatic music]
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We started to grow what are called monocultures.
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problems started to emerge, right?
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Look at that.
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It\'s a desert.
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They\'ve killed it.
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There\'s nothing alive out there.
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If we can change this, we\'ll survive.
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I\'m trained as an entomologist.
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I study insects for most of my career
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and I run Blue Dasher Farm here in Eastern South Dakota.
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on his experimental farm,
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this scientist first takes us to his neighbor\'s field.
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This is what soils look like in the US.
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There\'s nothing, no life.
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See, it falls apart.
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When it\'s dry, this is dust, right?
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And the only way that you can grow crops in it
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is with chemotherapy, fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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that\'s all the same,
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you have an insect that shows up
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and it\'s got an incredible ready made nursery
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for all its young that expands
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over hundreds or thousands of acres.
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and we eliminate all of the life
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except for our one crop species,
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then we have to replace everything that life used to do.
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All of those functions, fertility, pest management,
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you know, competition from weeds, disease management,
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and we have to replace it with a jug
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because we\'re so smart, aren\'t we?
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We\'ve got this whole nature thing figured out,
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we can package it up and we could sell it.
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This is what we\'re fighting against.
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This is what we\'re trying to produce.
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All right, let\'s see what we\'ve got in here.
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That\'s a nice earthworm right there.
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That\'s a beauty.
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Look at that sucker.
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Get it on. There you are.
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These are really important.
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Most soil is actually insect poop, in fact.
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So we need to get insects in here.
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[sniffs soil]
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Oh, that is what soil used to smell like when I was a boy.
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And this is like clay.
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It\'s dead.
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There\'s no life.
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Do you see the difference?
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I mean how much complexity there is in this soil?
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Get back down in there, guy.
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You go back to work.
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[dramatic orchestral music]
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Here we go.
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runs the largest insect protection NGO in North America.
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because these little animals
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are doing an incredible service for us day in, day out.
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She\'s gonna go right out.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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invertebrates actually many of them are filter feeders
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that are cleaning the water.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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is provided by the dung beetle.
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This little beetle cleans our countrysides
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of animal excrement,
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which it rolls into a large ball that it feeds on
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and builds its burrows with,
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an immeasurably valuable task.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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and really many of us in this field believe
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that we need to think about agriculture differently.
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[birds chirping]
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one of the most productive
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agricultural regions in the world,
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for almost 40 years,
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a quirky agricultural engineer
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has been proposing a radically simple solution.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[quirky music]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[continues speaking in foreign language]
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Lorenzo Furlan has developed a system of traps
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to be buried in the earth before sowing,
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to assess the risk of pest insect outbreaks.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[continues speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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is they\'ve just allowed us to be thoughtless.
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They\'ve allowed us to not think
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about what pests might be out there.
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We\'ve got these chemicals, we\'ll just kill them.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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Just using it before you have a problem
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to solve a problem that might be out there.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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this agricultural engineer created a mutual fund
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that federates almost 50,000 hectares of agricultural land.
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This farm, as conventional as they come,
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was one of the first to follow Lorenzo Furlan\'s advice.
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For 35 years, on these 60 hectares of maize crop,
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no insecticides at all have been used.
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A significant saving for this farmer,
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since in the Po Valley the chemical treatment of crops
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costs close to 40 euros per hectare.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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Also based on this model,
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this farm has also been producing sugar beet
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for more than 20 years without using neonicotinoids.
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Why are farmers using them?
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The chemical industry put in every agricultural community
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a representative, a salesman.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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or they\'re crop consultants.
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And this is somebody that these people,
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the farming community grew up with and they trust.
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The more you use, the more you need.
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Who wins in an addiction scenario?
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It isn\'t the addict.
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Right now farmers are addicted.
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It\'s the guys who are pushing the drugs.
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[somber music]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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in the mid-1990s and were first used in sunflower fields,
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whose flowering plants bees adore.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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if they\'re hungry or not.
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I put just the smallest quantity,
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just a pinhead of neonicotinoid, clothianidin in this case.
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And then I embedded it in this small dot of honey.
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One part per billion is that amount
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that I just put in like a swimming pool kind of situation.
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That\'s the kind of volumes that we\'re talking about here.
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So generally with neonicotinoid poisoning
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what happens is the insect starts twitching violently.
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Their tongues are averted.
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Look at that.
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Pretty soon her legs will be so tight.
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All of the muscles in her body will be so tight
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she can\'t even move.
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All of the nerves in their body
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ends up firing simultaneously.
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And so really what they die of is exhaustion.
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the bee became the center of a scientific battle
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between the agrochemical industry
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and independent researchers.
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In France, the first studies demonstrating
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the toxicity of neonicotinoids on pollinators
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were conducted by Jean-Marc Bonmatin.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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the pesticides, this is the smoking gun.
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Others would say, well, no, you know,
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I mean it could have been all of these other things
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and maybe it was the varroa mite, you know,
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the varroa mite gets a lot of press.
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It started to invade the hives of the western honeybee
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in the middle of the last century.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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doesn\'t want to use science to support that agenda
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all they have to do is, you know,
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fund the science that says something else
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is killing the bees.
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What happens is that the whole,
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the scientific literature starts to shift
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and then you see this growing swelling body of literature
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that says, well, the varroa mite kills the bees like this,
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and a lack of flowers in the environment kills,
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and there\'s a new disease.
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It kills the bees like this,
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and suddenly it starts looking, man,
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there\'s just a little bit of information over here
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but there\'s a lot of information over here.
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Must be this stuff.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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405
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and they don\'t shut up when they\'re supposed to
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and they continue to work down this road.
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Well, in that case, you destroy that scientist publicly.
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You know, it all started, I\'d say,
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when we found that neonicotinoids
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weren\'t helping soybean producers.
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That they were killing predators
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and they weren\'t killing the soybean aphids.
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Got a job pretty well right out of graduate school
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at the USDA Agricultural Research Service.
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And I spent about 11 years there,
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everything was going right
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and I received an award in the White House for being named
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one of the top young scientists in the country.
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President Obama presented that to me,
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and then we started asking the wrong questions, I think.
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The harassment started in small ways,
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maybe getting some additional edits on presentations
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or on papers that never really happened before.
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And then it got more aggressive
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and they started to suspend me
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for routine or small violations,
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maybe paperwork wasn\'t done on time or something like this.
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And then they started to haul in my staff
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and say, anything John\'s done out of line lately?
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We\'d like to, you know.
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And so they started to interrogate people.
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I talked to dozens of scientists,
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many of them were fearful of speaking out
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and many of them said
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that they would not speak out publicly
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on the record for my story
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because they were afraid
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they would be pushed out of their position
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just as Jonathan Lundgren
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was pushed out of his position at the USDA.
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And so I really had to ask the question,
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what the hell am I doing here?
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And so I quit.
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[sheep bleating]
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All right, everybody.
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[sheep bleating]
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So they\'re gonna be coming up right along here.
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So here we go.
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in which he uses his scientific knowledge
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in the service of environmentally friendly agriculture.
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And to prove that it is possible
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to grow crops on a large scale,
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while at the same time regenerating the soil.
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[dramatic violin music]
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These pressures put on scientists
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are intended to slow down the progress of studies
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on the impact to biodiversity.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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463
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to approving pesticides and then it\'s a glacial approach
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to getting pesticides pulled once they\'re approved.
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of whether the chemical industry strategies
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are working is regulation.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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470
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enter the fray;
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their objective: block any and all attempts
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to ban their pesticides.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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They trotted out all sorts of experts
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had said cigarettes don\'t cause cancer.
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They delayed any thought on that by at least two decades
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by trotting out experts saying, we don\'t have the data.
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And we see the same thing with the pesticide industry.
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481
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There\'s a general message out there that organic foods
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are any healthier or healthier for you and better for you
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than whatever you get in the supermarket next door.
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And that\'s nonsense.
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If you go shopping in a Whole Foods,
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you\'ll see kind of why ACSH was founded.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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by a group of fairly high powered scientists.
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And they were unhappy the way that science and chemistry
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and medicine were being portrayed in the media.
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Well, we debunk junk, that\'s our motto.
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494
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helping shape public opinion, helping shape the discourse
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around these controversial issues.
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This is just a fascinating email from Monsanto.
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It shows a Monsanto executive making the case
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that Monsanto should donate to ACSH because,
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and in bold type, you will not get a better value
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for your dollar than ACSH.
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502
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we would get maybe a small gift
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from a company here or there,
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but that didn\'t stop me from going after them
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if I felt like they were doing something wrong.
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If you just say the word chemical, it scares people.
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These chemicals are in the water
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and we\'re going to grow an arm out of our back.
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These scares you would hear
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about different chemicals and drugs
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most of the time would be false,
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but it makes great headlines.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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515
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it\'s gonna be difficult,
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everything gets eaten up by bugs.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[continues speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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524
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to the agrochemical industry\'s billions,
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NGOs defending pollinators
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have to make do with very limited resources.
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Beatrice Robrolle-Mary has created an association
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to alert the French and European political leaders.
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[conversing in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
532
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533
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after more than 15 years of struggle,
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NGOs like hers believed they had won.
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Three of the main neo-nicotinoids were to be banned
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and the EU was about to introduce
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a new risk-assessment system.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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the agrochemicals union complained
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that 65 of their 67 principal products
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would not pass these new tests.
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For this MEP, classified as a \"person to be monitored\"
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in Monsanto\'s files,
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the lobbies made use of all possible pressure tactics
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at their disposal.
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This former chairman of the Pesticides Research Committee
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even suspects them of having hacked his email account.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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in stripping the reform of any substance.
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The most accurate toxicity tests simply disappeared
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and the accepted mortality rates for insects
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were greatly increased.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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back-tracked and reintroduced neonicotinoids,
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by way of exemption, in 2020.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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Europe remains vulnerable to the arrival
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on the market of new molecules
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that are already replacing
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the old generation of neonicotinoids.
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Like sulfoxaflor or flupyradifurone.
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know that these chemicals have a certain shelf life
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so they\'re developing new ones.
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We are fighting to pull off these old ones.
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[speaking in foreign language]
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[speaking in foreign language]
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in human history.
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We have to, as humans, take action
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because it\'s a crime against our children.
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It\'s a crime against our grandchildren.
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neonicotinoids have never been banned.
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In developing countries,
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the use of these chemicals facilitates
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the expansion of intensive monoculture farming,
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which in turn contributes to continued deforestation
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and the eradication of millions of invertebrate species.
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[dramatic orchestral music]
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[singing in foreign language]
