urbngreen

John Winston Lennon

9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980(1980-12-08)(1940-10-09)

Hold On To Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld

Teach Your Own, Learning all the time, Instead of Education: Ways to Help People do better, What do I do on Monday? by John Holt

Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves by Alison McKee

The Teenage Liberation Handbook How to quit school and get a real education By Grace Llewellyn.

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Learning at Home: a Mothers Guide to Homeschooling by Marty Lane
(A wonderful book written by a Victoria BC homeschooling mom)

Homeschooling and the Voyage of Self-Discovery: A Journey of Original
Seeking andHave Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow: Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love by
David H. Albert

Have Fun. Learn Stuff. Grow. Homeschooling and the Curriculum of Love

The Complete Home Learning Source Book : The Essential Resource Guide for Homeschoolers, Parents, and Educators Covering Every Subject from Arithmetic to Zoology by Rebecca Rupp

Home Learning Year by Year: How To Design A Homeschool Curriculum from Preschool Through High School by Rebecca Rupp

The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 88 Most Important Questions

Answered by Homeschooling’s Most Respected Voices by Linda Dobson

Homeschooling the Early Years by Linda Dobson

The Unschooling Handbook: How to use the whole world as your child’s
classroom by Mary Griffith

Hey there everybody.Its me after soooo long I just wanted to post again so I wanted to say Happy New Year to everyone!I will have Kids Corner back up and running in about 1 week or so.

BY Justin

There has been some debate and protest over the genetic modification of our food supply. Greenpeace has had an on going campaign to raise awareness about what is actually going on in the fields and in laboratories around the globe. Genetically Modified (GM) crops entered our food supply in 1996 , no labeling was required of modified crops and very little safety studies were done. According to University of Guelph professor of plant physiology, Ann Clark “the approval process has been largely based on assumptions.”

We know our food is being altered, who has not heard of Monsanto’s “round up ready” crops? Seeds that have been modified to grow despite being drenched in herbicide that kills every living green thing it touches.

There is another product of the biotech industry that is commonly overlooked, GM cotton. Used not only for fabric, cotton seeds are processed into pulp for animal feed and cooking oil. Although health Canada assumes that refined oil from these crops raise no concerns related to safety, there are many that would argue the process of creating GM crops can create unpredicted damage in its DNA. These incedental changes could produce dangerous toxins, allergens or carcinogins, which if fat soluble, could end up in the oil and our food. Biotech companies. like big tabacco before them, believe we should assume these products are safe, and Health Canada agrees.

According to the The Royal Society of Canada’s report it was found that “70 percent of the currently availalbe GM crops approved for commerce in Canada, including all the canola and cotton crops have not been subject to any actual lab or animal toxicity testing” The studies that have been done are not conducted by health Canada, but by the biotech companies themselves.

Although more independent studies are needed some tests have shown animals fed GM crops showed profound changes in their livers, kidneys and hearts, and most alarming is the damage to the reproductive organs and DNA function. Even Monsanto’s own studies on trangenic corn MON863 showed toxicity in animals liver and kidneys. The only human feeding study on GM food, published in Nature in 2004, found that genes inserted into GM soybeans transfered into the DNA of human gut bacteria.

It was announced that Health Canada would conduct studies in 2002, but according to a CBC TV report the research was abandoned less than a year later as it was determined to be “too difficult to put an effective surveillance system in place”

The European Union has been fighting to ban all GMO crops and an import ban has been argued by the U.S. that this is in violation of trade agreements. The institute for Responsible Technology is currently running a campaign to stop the poliferation of GMO in our food supply, but have we already gotten to the point of no return? The answer (and seeds) are blowing in the wind.

Image:World map GMO production 2005

• ██ The five countries producing more than 95% of commercialized GMO

• :Other country producing commercialized GMO.
• orange dot:Only experimental crops.

Spring has sprung in Vancouver! Lot’s of wildlife is out in Stanley Park.  Last week we saw eight baby geese!