pesticides

Booklist called it a "must-read." Kirkus deemed it a "hard-hitting, eye-opening narrative." To Publishers Weekly it is "a damning picture." Carey Gillam's Whitewash uncovers one of the most controversial stories in the history of food and agriculture at a time when a new political administration has set about slashing regulations of pesticides.

Bugs and germs are big problems—and they’re evolving. Each year, 2,300 people in the U.S. die from drug-resistant bacterial infections and farmers lose billions of dollars of crops to insects that evade pesticides. But there is reason for hope. In the fight to protect our food and health, bugs and germs may also be part of the solution. Natural Defense by veteran science writer Emily Monosson is the first book to bring readers into this exciting new world.

The Cavendish banana was truly fortunate to have been discovered by humans. Without our adoption, this sweet and attractive—but seedless—banana would have disappeared into the jungle long ago because, as a genetic mistake, it was doomed to be an asexual and probably short-lived anomaly. Instead, like winning the big lottery, the Cavendish became the most famous of all bananas, despite having no evolutionary future whatsoever. However, the time has come, the course has been run, and the Cavendish is now likely to disappear, but only to be replaced in the grocery display by another genetic anomaly, another as-yet-unknown seedless banana.

Mosquitoes, along with their disease-causing hitchhikers like West Nile, Equine encephalitis, Dengue, and now Zika, are on the move, finding new habitats and naïve populations ripe for infection. Just as Lyme has made tick experts out of us all (no, that one is just a dog tick), we are on a first-name basis with mosquitoes like Aedes and Culex.