By Robin Marantz Henig, OnEarth Magazine:

This story originally appeared in OnEarth Magazine.

Jackie Christensen was 32 when her body began to betray her. She had just returned to work after the birth of her second son and when she tried to type, two fingers on her left hand refused to cooperate. "They wouldn't go where I would want them to on the keyboard," says Christensen, who at the time -- it was 1997 -- was co-director of the food and health program at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a Minneapolis think tank. "I also had what they frequently call frozen shoulder, with a very low range of motion in my left arm."

The first neurologist Christensen went to responded flippantly to her suggestion that she might have multiple sclerosis, which she had self-diagnosed because of her relatively young age and the fact that she was female. "If you want me to write that down, I will," she remembers him saying, refusing to pursue the matter further. A second neurologist thought it was all in Christensen's mind and referred her to a psychiatrist. Over the next several months, her symptoms got progressively worse, and she finally consulted neurologist number three. His startling diagnosis: Parkinson's disease.

"I thought, 'I can't have Parkinson's because I'm not old,'" Christensen recalls. But a trial of the standard treatment, a drug called L-dopa, seemed to work. Based on that clinical observation, the diagnosis was confirmed. This was in 1998, when Christensen was not quite 35, and she has been on L-dopa, with varying degrees of success, ever since.

Why did a disease that usually affects people in their sixties and seventies, and that affects men more often than women, strike this vibrant young mother? Christensen, a lifelong environmental activist, suspected an environmental cause -- not only because she was politically inclined to, but because she knew that accumulating scientific information was pointing in that direction. In the past few years, Christensen has been part of a movement exploring a possible connection between exposure to environmental toxins -- in particular, the organophosphate pesticides -- and Parkinson's disease, through her work with the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, a national network of advocacy and scientific organizations. She is co-founder of CHE's working group on Parkinson's Disease and the Environment.

A cause-and-effect relationship between environmental neurotoxins and Parkinson's is difficult to prove. As with many other scientific efforts to establish disease causation through population studies, there will probably never be a smoking gun that settles things once and for all. Population studies can detect associations between certain suspected agents and diseases such as cancer, but it's hard to draw conclusions about what causes a disease from studies that can register only correlations. In the case of Parkinson's and the environment, however, there has been a steadily mounting consensus about such a connection, and the pace has quickened in the past year or so.

A January 2009 consensus statement from CHE, in collaboration with the Parkinson's Action Network, a patient advocacy group, found that there was "limited suggestive evidence of an association" between pesticides and Parkinson's, and between farming or agricultural work and Parkinson's. This followed by just a few months the publication of Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging, a report co-authored by the Science and Environmental Health Network, a consortium of advocacy groups based in Ames, Iowa; it included a summary of 31 population studies that have looked at the possible connection between pesticide exposure and Parkinson's. Twenty-four of those studies, according to the report, found a positive association, and in 12 cases the association was statistically significant. In some studies, the group found, there was as much as a sevenfold greater risk of Parkinson's in people exposed to pesticides. In addition, in April 2009, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), published a provocative study connecting the disease not only to occupational pesticide exposure but also to living in homes or going to schools that were close to a pesticide-treated field.

Taken together, 30-plus years of research add up to an increasingly persuasive conclusion: exposure to pesticides and other toxins increases the risk of Parkinson's disease, and we are only now beginning to wrestle with the true scope of the damage.

Parkinson's is the second most common neurodegenerative disease (after Alzheimer's) in the United States, affecting between 1 million and 1.5 million Americans. The majority of cases occur in people over 65, about 60 percent of them male. It leads to uncontrollable tremors, muscle rigidity, and the inability to direct your arms or legs to move when you want them to. People with Parkinson's often have a masklike, impassive expression. They may have difficulty speaking clearly and develop a characteristic shuffling gait. Cognitive skills usually are not affected, though some functions like memory and decision-making can be impaired, and, in the face of the gradual and inevitable encroachment of physical limitations, people with Parkinson's often become depressed.

In part because it can take many forms, Parkinson's disease is difficult to diagnose. Several movement disorders have been classified in the general category known as Parkinson's-like syndrome, or parkinsonism. Scientists are divided about whether Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism are even related in any meaningful way, beyond sharing some symptoms. The two conditions may not even involve the same brain defects. The strict definition of Parkinson's disease is a loss of cells in the substantia nigra, a small structure in the basal ganglia region of the midbrain (though other brain structures are now thought to be involved as well). The substantia nigra ordinarily secretes the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is involved in many of the brain's functions, including the control of motor activity.

Often a diagnosis of Parkinson's disease is made the way it was made for Christensen: by a trial run of L-dopa, which boosts dopamine in the brain. If it works, the problem must be Parkinson's. It's a circular kind of logic, but it's all that most doctors have. There still are no definitive blood tests or brain scans to make the diagnosis.

In trying to establish risk factors for Parkinson's, one of the first decisions investigators must make is which cases to include in their epidemiological studies. Some studies include all patients, those with parkinsonian syndrome as well as those with definitively diagnosed Parkinson's. Some researchers limit their study subjects to people with Parkinson's disease and a demonstrated reduction of dopamine.

One of the more restrictive studies is a small subset of the massive Agricultural Health Study (AHS), which began in 1993 and involves nearly 90,000 individuals licensed to apply pesticides to crops, as well as their families. The AHS, conducted by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, has tracked these workers to determine their risk of developing cancer and other serious diseases.

In 2002, scientists decided to look at a segment of this large database to assess the environmental risks for Parkinson's. This study-within-a-study, with the catchy acronym FAME (Farming and Movement Evaluation), compared the pesticide exposure of 114 AHS participants who have Parkinson's disease, as diagnosed by two specialists from the team, with exposure among 384 control cases matched for age, sex, and state of residence (either Iowa or North Carolina, where all the subjects are from). A group of scientists led by Caroline Tanner of the Parkinson's Institute of Sunnyvale, California, and Freya Kamel of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences looked at five possible risk factors in these 498 individuals: pesticide exposure; exposure to other neurotoxins; lifestyle factors such as diet, smoking, and caffeine use; the amount of melanin, or pigment, in the skin; and specific genetic variations, particularly those in genes involved in the production of dopamine or the metabolism of xenobiotics -- non-natural chemicals such as drugs and toxins that are transported and detoxified through pathways that scientists already understand.

The FAME study, the results of which are being prepared for publication next year, found that pesticide exposure was a significant risk factor for Parkinson's disease. The parent AHS study found that people who had been exposed to pesticides sporadically over a lifetime were 1.2 times more likely to develop Parkinson's than those who had not been. And when the exposure was heavy -- the kind of lifetime exposure seen in career pesticide applicators, or a single massive exposure as the result of a spill -- that increased risk jumped to 2.3 times. The riskiest pesticides were found to be some of those most commonly used in American agriculture, among them Paraquat and Trifluralin, both herbicides used to kill broadleaf weeds in food crops. (Paraquat is now restricted to commercially licensed users in the United States because of its toxicity, but it remains the second most widely used herbicide in the world, applied to more than 50 crops in 120 countries.)

These results were part of a cascade of findings pointing to a connection between environmental toxins, especially pesticides, and Parkinson's disease. As long ago as the 1970s, epidemiologists noticed that Parkinson's was more likely to occur in people who had grown up in rural areas, especially those who had lived on farms. But they were not sure which aspect of a rural background was relevant. Living near livestock? Drinking well water? Being exposed to pesticides? "It's been very difficult to pin down an explanation," Kamel says.

Pesticides seemed the most likely culprit. "Animal models have shown that specific pesticides can cause parkinsonian changes," Kamel says, "and we have mechanistic data also" -- that is, evidence of biological processes at the level of the interaction between brain cells and the chemicals in common pesticides -- that can explain how a cause-and-effect relationship might work. "To the degree we understand the neurological mechanisms that may be related to Parkinson's disease," Kamel says, "it seems that certain specific pesticides might play a role."

"Despite remaining uncertainties and data gaps," wrote the authors of the 2008 report by the Science and Environmental Health Network -- Jill Stein, Ted Schettler, Ben Rohrer, and Maria Valenti -- "the body of evidence linking pesticide exposure to Parkinson's disease fulfills generally accepted criteria for establishing causation." When combined with "extensive laboratory animal data" specifying the underlying biology of this relationship, they wrote, "collectively, this evidence supports the conclusion that pesticide exposures can cause Parkinson's disease in some people."

Like most other population studies, this one has no way of proving that, for any one individual, X definitely led to Y -- that Jackie Christensen's early-onset Parkinson's disease, for instance, was caused by her exposure to pesticides as a teenager. To Christensen, however, the causal connection is clear. Growing up in rural Minnesota, she spent summers working on local farms. In her early teens, this meant engaging in a practice known as "walking beans." A pickup truck would drop off a bunch of youngsters, including Christensen, at one end of a field, and they would walk the rows of soybeans, weeding as they went. Later, Christensen and her friends rode a "bean buggy," a rig attached to the front of a tractor from which they would spray the herbicide Roundup, sometimes dyed purple so they could see where it was landing, carefully aiming for the weeds and trying to avoid the beans. Often she was dressed in nothing more than a bathing suit and a baseball cap. "I had a great tan those summers," she wrote in the introduction to her book, The First Year: Parkinson's Disease; An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed, "and I had no idea nor gave any thought whatsoever to what I might be exposing myself to, or what the effects might be. After the first day or two of spraying, I could no longer smell the odor of the herbicide. I do remember that when I would come home, my mother would immediately tell me to take a shower because I smelled like chemicals."

As a young adult, Christensen had a single massive chemical exposure, during a political demonstration that involved wading into the Mississippi River in St. Louis. Wastewater treatment runoff made the water as neon green as Mountain Dew. She says it's "anybody's guess" what was in the water, but since many of the industries in
St. Louis at the time discharged their wastes into the river, she says the brew probably included organophosphate pesticides, dry cleaning solvents, and other compounds. "After that action, within an hour I had a headache," she says, "and I was nauseated and felt fatigued and lousy for a week. I know now that those are common symptoms of acute pesticide poisoning. At the time I didn't think about what was causing it. I was 25 and thought I was bulletproof."

Since the British physician James Parkinson first described the "shaking palsy" in 1817, Parkinson's disease has been linked to a variety of possible environmental causes, both natural and artificial. It has been linked, too, to genetic factors, dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, when early-onset Parkinson's was first found to run in a few scattered, unlucky families. Those who study the connection between Parkinson's and the environment suggest that it's probably the combined result of having a genetic predisposition to the disease and a dangerous exposure to some sort of neurotoxin. A favorite expression of people in this field is that "genetics loads the gun and environment pulls the trigger."

In the 1950s, scientists noticed that a large proportion of the Chamorro people, who live on the Pacific island of Guam, were gripped by a syndrome that rendered them stiff and immobile by middle age. It looked a lot like Parkinson's disease. What made the situation so fascinating (and so perplexing) was that in some patients the symptoms were closer to two other neurodegenerative diseases -- Alzheimer's and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease). After decades of research, scientists discovered that the culprit was a local dietary staple: a rodent known as a fruit bat. The bat drank nectar from the cycad tree, from which it received a concentrated dose of a brain toxin, the amino acid beta-methylamino-L-alanine (BMAA). When people ate the meat of the fruit bat, they ingested huge amounts of BMAA. The story was told in 2002, when the journal Neurology published an article about the fruit bats and their "biomagnification" of BMAA. The findings are still the subject of some debate, but they were consistent with the accumulating picture: that at least some environmental agents might account for at least some forms of parkinsonism.

In 1982, six young people showed up in emergency rooms in northern California unable to move, speak, or eat on their own. This time the detective work was accomplished much more rapidly. It took only a few weeks for William Langston, then a neurologist at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, to put the story together. The patients were all heroin users, and they had all used a batch of garage-concocted heroin that was contaminated with the chemical compound 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine, or MPTP. "At the molecular level, very little separated a toxic chemical from a harmless one," Langston and John Palfreman wrote in their book, The Case of the Frozen Addicts. But that small chemical change was enough to turn the designer heroin into one of the most potent known neurotoxins, virtually wiping out all the cells of the substantia nigra, which produces dopamine. MPTP has a molecular structure very much like the herbicide Paraquat. So the "frozen addicts" were taken as further evidence that both pesticide exposure and MPTP could be related to the same kind of dramatic brain damage.

The tragedy of the addicts (who recovered some function with L-dopa treatments) had a silver lining. MPTP turned out to be an excellent way to create parkinsonian symptoms in experimental animals -- a necessary first step in the search for a cure.

Scientists also observed these symptoms in groups of people exposed to unrelated compounds, such as heavy metals. One in particular, manganese, was implicated in a 2006 study of residents of the steelmaking town of Hamilton, Ontario, who had a higher-than-expected rate of Parkinson's disease. Investigators attributed this to the manganese content of particulate air pollution from factory emissions. It turns out that manganese is an ingredient in the widely used fungicide Maneb.

But pesticides remain the clearest culprit. One study found that in the brains of people who had died of Parkinson's disease, the substantia nigra had higher levels of Dieldrin (an organochlorine pesticide no longer approved for use in the United States) and of lindane (an insecticide occasionally still used to treat scabies and lice) than did the brains of people who had died of other causes. Laboratory studies have also provided important clues to the connection between pesticides and brain damage. When human brain cells are grown in culture and exposed to a variety of chemicals, several widely used pesticides -- in particular, Paraquat and Rotenone, a natural pesticide approved for use in organic foods -- have been shown to cause increased levels of alpha-synuclein, a protein in the substantia nigra, similar to the levels that are seen in people with Parkinson's disease.

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

By Dara Colwell, AlterNet:

As the recession renews interest in the growing hemp marketplace as a potential boon for the green economy -- even Fox Business News has touted it -- hemp is becoming impossible to ignore.

But the plant's potential extends far beyond consumer-generated greenbacks. A low-input, low-impact crop, industrial hemp can play a significant role in our desperate shuffle to avoid catastrophic climate change.

"In terms of sustainability, there are numerous reasons to grow hemp," says Patrick Goggin, a board member on the California Council for Vote Hemp, the nation's leading industrial-hemp advocacy group.

Goggin launches into its environmental benefits: Hemp requires no pesticides; it has deep digging roots that detoxify the soil, making it an ideal rotation crop -- in fact, hemp is so good at bioremediation, or extracting heavy metals from contaminated soil, it's being grown near Chernobyl.

Hemp is also an excellent source of biomass, or renewable, carbon-neutral energy, and its cellulose level, roughly three times that of wood, can be used for paper to avoid cutting down trees, an important line of defense against global warming.

When it comes to hemp, environmental gains are inexorably intertwined with economic ones. The auto industry, hardly synonymous with being green but which has had the research dollars to apply new technology, can vouch for Goggin. For years European car makers have been using hemp-fiber-reinforced composite materials to replace fiberglass and in other components, such as door panels or dashboards. And now their American counterparts have joined in.

Blending hemp with plastics is not only cheaper for producers, but natural-fiber composites are roughly 30 percent lighter, which in turn leads to greater fuel efficiency for customers. And when they finally hit the junkyard, those parts partially biodegrade. Ford, General Motors, Chrysler, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Honda all use this technology.

Now, where there are cars, there's fuel, or these days biofuel, which has become a contentious issue as America fights for energy independence while attempting to combat climate change.

Biofuels -- fuels derived from plants -- actually are nothing new. Rudolph Diesel, who invented the diesel engine, designed his machine to run on peanut oil, and his contemporary, Henry Ford, intended his Model-T to run on ethanol, of which hemp provided the major feedstock until the 1930s. Even Thomas Edison championed bio-based fuels, suspicious of the growing dominance of the petroleum industry, which boomed after America began taxing alcohol -- as both a beverage and a fuel -- to help pay for the Civil War.

To wean ourselves off foreign oil, the U.S. heavily subsidized the corn-based ethanol industry to the tune of $7 billion in 2006, according to zFacts, a Web site run by economist Steve Stoft.

Critics argue that the production of corn-based ethanol is problematic because corn consumes more energy from fossil fuels (such as petrochemical, nitrogen-based fertilizers) than it yields, and its production has a negative impact on the price and availability of edible corn, a staple in countries such as Mexico.

In 2007, because so many farmers north and south of the border switched to growing industrial corn, the price of corn flour in Mexico skyrocketed 400 percent, sending rioters into the streets. People need to eat and to do so, they have to be able to afford food, which begs the question: How green is ethanol when it deprives folk of basic food?

"In reality, corn isn't a viable option," says Goggin, who explains that hemp, which can be grown both as food and fuel -- its seeds, harvested for protein and essential amino and fatty acids, or for oil, which is converted into biodiesel -- has roughly four times the cellulose biomass potential of corn. "Compared to hemp, which can be harvested for multiple purposes, it's very inefficient."

As biomass, hemp can be converted into fuels such as methane, methanol and gasoline, which can help curb the world's growing appetite for palm oil used to make biodiesel, and which is having a colossally negative environmental impact.

In densely populated Indonesia, companies are draining local peat swamps and clearing virgin tropical forests, home to the endangered orangutan, to make room for palm oil plantations. This alone has resulted in 2 billion tons of carbon-dioxide emissions being released into the atmosphere a year, according to the conservation nonprofit Wetlands International.

The same is happening in Brazil's biodiverse cerrado region south of the Amazon, where sugar cane and soy plantations are replacing native vegetation. Deforestation now accounts for 25 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions, according to the Global Canopy Program, an alliance of rainforest scientists based in Oxford, England. Tropical forests are essentially the planet's lungs -- and without lungs, well, it's a no-brainer ...

"If all the diesel engines today were converted to use hemp biodiesel, you could wipe out world hunger while providing a natural balance to global warming" says Paul Stanford of the Hemp and Cannabis Foundation, which has worked to end marijuana prohibition and restore industrial hemp.

As hemp, which has a short harvesting period (roughly 120 days for seed), grows it sequesters, or captures, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Because biofuels emit less carbon dioxide when burned, more carbon is actually absorbed by the plants used to produce it. So, as more hemp grows, more carbon dioxide would be sucked out of the atmosphere.

"Growing hemp would improve air quality -- isn't that good enough reason to do it?" says Chris Conrad, a respected authority on cannabis and industrial hemp and who wrote Hemp, Lifeline to the Future. Only Conrad, who also teaches at Oaksterdam University, America's only cannabis college, in Oakland, Calif., knows his question is rhetorical. America is the world's only industrialized nation to prohibit the growing of industrial hemp.

That's because the Drug Enforcement Administration has historically lumped hemp in with marijuana, although the plants are different breeds of Cannabis sativa, just as Great Danes and Chihuahuas are different breeds of Canine familiaris.

While hemp contains minute levels of THC, marijuana's psychoactive ingredient (compare 0.3 in Canadian industrial hemp versus 3-20 for medical marijuana), to get high you would have to smoke a whole field of it -- but you'd probably get a headache first. Still, because marijuana has been the most politicized plant in American history, a history of smear campaigns flaming public hysteria and far too lengthy to address here, hemp hasn't escaped the association with its distant cousin.

In 1937, America passed the Marijuana Tax Act, which criminalized cannabis and levied high taxes ($1 per ounce) on medical marijuana and industrial hemp. Although growing hemp wasn't technically disallowed, the law made it prohibitively expensive, so it fell into decline.

Hemp experienced a short resurgence during World War II, when the government launched an aggressive campaign to grow hemp in the face of a severe fiber shortage. In 1944, the National Farmers Union called for the widest use of hemp within the American market, according to documents on the North American Industrial Hemp Council Web site, for hemp was always considered an essential American crop -- as American as the first pair of Levi's made from hemp fiber in 1849.

But after the war, hemp production again faded away, perhaps because the DEA has always maintained it can't differentiate between industrial hemp and marijuana, a seemingly American shortcoming.

As it stands, we can't grow hemp but we can import it, and we do, in the form of clothing, bath towels, rugs, food and car components from Canada, China and Europe, which have utilized the crop to bolster their economies. Last year, annual hemp retail sales in North America amounted to $300 million.

Our legal quandary has hurt us economically, but the environmental impact is just as great. For example, California, an agricultural giant that nets $36.6 billion dollars a year, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, is the world's 12th-largest carbon emitter and a state with a reputation for being an environmental maverick.

In September 2006, California passed Assembly Bill 32, announcing its compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, a move Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger celebrated by exclaiming, "The global warming debate is over!" But four days later, Schwarzenegger vetoed, for the second time, a bill to legalize the growth of industrial hemp, stating the measure conflicted with federal law.

If California, which grows cotton -- one of the most water and pesticide intensive crops in the world, could legally replace cotton with hemp, it could clean up the environment while supplying the domestic market with a crop that has thousands of applications. In 2005, cotton was worth $630 million to the state (although the industry is shrinking due to globalization). According to "Illegally Green: Environmental Costs of Hemp Prohibition," a report written by analyst Skaidra Smith-Heisters and issued by the Reason Foundation, hemp produces more fiber and uses half the irrigation water and nitrogen fertilizer that cotton does.

"If hemp was freed up of its legal hassles, it would encourage the business climate to implement small-scale solutions, and you would see all kinds of innovation coming from this," says Smith-Heisters.

But until industrial hemp is legalized, innovation will have to come from overseas, or over the Canadian border. "Our lack of infrastructure is a great disgrace. We were once the leader in hemp technology, and we voluntarily absented ourselves from one of the most important global resources that exists," says Conrad. "We'll keep losing and face economic and environmental collapse if we remain afraid of this plant."

Canada, which produces hemp for seeds, and Europe, which mainly produces hemp for fiber, are leading the way. At the end of May, the European Industrial Hemp Association held its sixth annual international conference in Wesseling, Germany, where experts, traders, cultivation consultants and investors met to exchange information about the latest developments concerning hemp. Of the 100 or so participants, less than a handful was American.

"It was disappointing not to see any American officials educating themselves about hemp, the struggles we're facing within the industry or for pure research-and-development purposes," says Anndrea Hermann, vice president of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance and a Missouri native. Hermann attended the EIHA conference and hopes one day hemp won't be seen as a specialty crop, but as a staple. "The conference was an opportunity to pick great minds."

And with hemp, there's growing opportunity. Among exciting developments is hempcrete, a generic term for hemp-based building material used to replace concrete. In France, which has grown industrial hemp without interruption, hemp plaster is common due to its high insulation properties.

Hemp can be made into almost any building material, including roofing, flooring, paint, insulation pipes and bricks. In addition, hempcrete tends to be stronger and absorb greater humidity while sequestering carbon dioxide. A joint venture with U.K.-based Lime Technology, American Limetec in Chicago is the first American company to distribute hemp-lime materials.

"Europe has already proven it can get the hemp market rolling, that it's viable and that it can be done sustainability. It makes sense for us to do it, too, though it will never happen until we get started -- and we can't until the federal government makes the distinction between hemp and marijuana," says Eric Steenstra, executive director of the Hemp Industries Association, which represents the domestic hemp industry and seeks to educate the public about hemp products. Steenstra says that every man-made fiber we wear or walk in, sit on or drive and fly in, or cook with are by-products of the petroleum industry -- and all of which could feasibly be replaced by hemp.

America seems to be getting closer to getting started. To date, 28 states have introduced hemp legislation, and 15 have passed it -- although that the legislation is not uniform. Some states have authorized studies of industrial hemp and its viability as an industry, some have legalized growing it (although they still face pressure from the DEA over permits) and others have asked the federal government to relax its laws against hemp.

Eight other states (Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Montana, North Dakota, Vermont and West Virginia) have removed barriers to its production or research. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has reintroduced the Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2009 to the House of Representatives, though what happens with the bill remains to be seen. And now that the Obama administration has announced an end to medical marijuana raids, hemp advocates are hopeful their window of opportunity is finally opening.

"We're getting close to the tipping point, and a large part of that is due to the work the states are doing. They're setting a precedent, which is the federalism our founding fathers dreamt of," says Goggin. Though hemp advocates are aware that America's insufficient infrastructure -- from the lack of processing plants to the dearth of businesses actually using in hemp in their products -- will require a massive coordinated effort, their optimism is growing as they push to get the plant legalized.

"Hemp is not going to solve all our problems, but it is an important piece of the puzzle. Why not use the resources available to assist us in the process of combating climate change?" says Goggin. "To blindly scapegoat and ignore hemp is backward thinking. At this point, we need to be forward thinking."

June 18, 2009

Dara Colwell is a freelance writer in San Francisco.

Bahamas Caribbean Blog International

Oscar Sánchez Serra

TYLER MacNiven flew to the Bahamas from California and from there to Havana on June 7; being a U.S. citizen he was unable to fly direct to the Cuban capital and, in fact, he is not even permitted to come to us via a third country. According to U.S. legislation he is exposing himself to a sanction. However, a dream that he was at the point of realizing is once again calling him to get over any barrier.

He arrived in Cuba on June 8, on the same day that our newspaper reproduced the Reflections of Fidel Castro “Ridiculous response to a defeat” (published on Sunday, June 7 in Juventud Rebelde), in which the leader of the Cuban Revolution exposed another of the dirty maneuvers of the empire, with irrefutable arguments against a ridiculous Cuban espionage comic strip right at the time that, as Fidel says, “some contacts were being made between the governments of the United States and Cuba on important issues of common interest.” Or, curiously, “24 hours after the defeat suffered by U.S. diplomacy at the OAS General Assembly.”

Tyler was not taken by surprise at the new “Reflection,” he follows them all and is a confirmed faithful and disciplined reader. “Every day I go on line to see if there’s something new.” What did impact on him was the relation of one of its paragraphs to the objective of his return to Cuba. And that is: “I’ve come back seven years later to fulfill my dream, to embrace Fidel, because I know that that embrace will allow me to embrace the very heart of Cuba, I want to make my contribution to the friendship between our two peoples,” he tells us with notable emotion.

In “Ridiculous response to a defeat,” Fidel states: “The people accused are Walter Kendall Myers and his wife Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers. The report added that the former had worked as a specialist on European affairs and that in 1995 – 14 years ago – they had traveled to Cuba, and were received by me during their trip. During that period, I met with thousands of different U.S. citizens for diverse reasons, either individually or in groups; sometimes, there were groups numbering several hundred, such as the students who traveled to Cuba on the Semester at Sea Project, so for that reason I could hardly remember details of a meeting with two individuals. Now I realize why George W. Bush prohibited the cruise ship students from continuing to visit Cuba. They talked with me for many hours, despite the fact that they came from upper middle-class families.”

“I was one of the members of that project in 2002, we met with Fidel in the International Conference Center for more than four hours. When he ended his speech, I raised my hand and was given the floor, I was able to talk with him. I wanted to express to him, and I did, my gratitude to the Cuban people and to him. We had eaten some sandwiches at the University of Havana and some of us got sick, I remember that I sat down somewhere in Havana to rest and soon afterward collapsed on the ground. A group of Cubans came rushing up to me and kindly tried to help me up, but seeing that I still felt bad, got me into a private car with an unknown driver and took me to the nearest hospital.

“I was attended to by three highly specialized doctors and recovered soon afterward. What I was grateful for was not so much the professionalism of the doctors or being attended to without charge, but that I think that I was cured by the displays of kindness of this people, who have won my heart for ever. I, as an American, was treated like one of you, like a Cuban. It really made an impression on me.”

He recounted that he felt somewhat embarrassed and ashamed, or perhaps just shyness and, on that occasion, and didn’t ask Fidel for the embrace he so much desired. But, he told us that “at the end of the session in the International Conference Center, a good friend of mine, Dominic, said: “Mr. President, as we can ask you anything, I should like to make a petition: can I give you an embrace?”

His friend’s question ran through his entire body, and… “Then Fidel answered Dominic, “without charging you a cent, come down, I’m waiting for you.” “While my friend was running down to the stage I sunk down in my seat and, when Fidel and he embraced each other, to the applause of all us, I understood that I had lost a great opportunity. But I also felt very happy over the humanity of that man, by embracing Dominic he was embracing all of us and my country as well.”

Sitting beside Tyler, my colleague Alberto Núñez and I felt an admiration for that story. He asked us to help him attain his dream; we replied that what we could do was to tell his story. He gave us a video of that meeting with the Comandante en Jefe and we reciprocated by giving him the 236 Reflections of Fidel. He eyes shone to know that he had all of those texts.

It was then that he told is than during the by then close to six days that he has been in our country, he feels that, in addition to his dream of embracing Fidel, he is experiencing another unique one, “the human warmth and also that of this early summer, the smile on the face of every man, woman or child, the openness of this country, its music, its people. It is really wonderful to come from the United States and to know that you are welcome, and more than that, loved. I am sorry that my Spanish isn’t good enough to be able to take in more of this reality that I am seeing here. I remember that Fidel said to me jokingly that time in the International Conference Center that the doctors who attended me would have to be criticized for not speaking English; I criticize myself too for not knowing more Spanish, but I’m going to learn a lot more.”

As he left, after telling us that he is to tour our country from the west to the east, until July 8, Tyler said to us: “I’d like to say to you the same words with which I ended my dialogue with Fidel that day in 2002 at the International Conference Center. I said then ‘Thank you Fidel’ and now I am saying, ‘Thank you Fidel, thank you Cuba.’”

granma.cu

Bahamas Caribbean International Blog

Translated by Granma International