Bayer’s annual shareholder meeting was a PR disaster

Bayer’s annual shareholder meeting was a PR disaster -- and it’s all thanks to you!

With the international spotlight of the world on Bayer, we made sure to get one message trending online on Twitter, into the press and right in front of the shareholders’ noses: Bayer’s profits come with a hefty price tag -- the massive global die-off of our bees.

With your help, we sponsored beekeepers' attendance at the shareholder meeting and directly confronted Bayer about its bee-killing pesticides. The beekeepers joined a group of incredible SumOfUs volunteers, and together we made our protests heard, handed out leaflets and staged a mock-funeral for “the last bee”.

Want to check out the action? Watch the video to see how beekeepers and SumOfUs volunteers crashed Bayer’s shareholder party.

You don't have Facebook? No problem, here's the video on Youtube.

Me and my microbiome.

I Asked a Bunch of Scientists if Climate Change Was Affecting the Bacteria in My Gut

As many as 70 million Americans suffer from gastrointestinal issues, with an ongoing increase in celiac disease, food allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, and much else. Until recently, these maladies had been largely confined to the American population. But as our junk food-y diets and hygiene-obsessed lifestyles have been unveiled in the developing world, so have our illnesses. Whatever’s wrong with our stomachs is undergoing a diaspora.

At the same time, there’s been an explosion of interest in the gut microbiome, sometimes called the microbiota—the collection of bacteria, good and bad, that, among many other things, help us digest food and regulate our immune systems.

So if climate change is altering our weather and food supply, I thought, could it possibly be messing up our microbiomes—and thus, our stomachs? My stomach?
The scientific community, it turns out, is just starting to ask similar questions. And as part of my desperate search to divine what ails me—and to follow up on my hunch—I dove into what they’ve found so far. Read More

A eureka moment for the planet: we’re finally planting trees again

China plans to plant forests the size of Ireland. Latin American countries have pledged to restore 20m hectares of degraded forest and African countries more than 100m hectares. India is to plant 13m hectares, and on a single day last year 1.5 million people planted 66m trees in Madhya Pradesh alone.

Much of Europe is physically greener than it was just a few years ago. England is to plant 50m trees in a new coast-to-coast forest and newly planted saplings now cover tens of thousands of hectares of former farmland in Ireland, Norway and France. From Costa Rica to Nepal and Peru to Mongolia, tree planting has become a political, economic and ecological cause, and a universal symbol of restoration, regrowth and faith in the future. More than 120 countries promised in 2015 to plant and restore large areas of forest as a response to the climate crisis, and the UN has set a target to restore 350m hectares by 2030 – an area bigger than India.

This enthusiasm for a greener world, expressed in trees, is inspiring and overdue. For 200 years forested countries barely knew what to do with their trees. They were treated as expendable and a waste of space. But in a great cultural shift, they have changed from being dark and fearsome places to semi-sacred and untouchable. Read More