United States of Rhythm Press League: Recent Episodes

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By John Lorinc

The Atlanta Local Food Initiative gets a major boost from city officials this week.
Credit ALFI

Expect to see more fruits and vegetables grown in the capital of the Peach State.

Earlier this week, the Atlanta City Council passed the urban ag zoning ordinance.

"This will allow Atlantans and their communities to have access to healthy and nutritious food," says Suzanne Girdner, the executive director of the Atlanta Local Food Initiative.

This ordinance allows Atlantans to grow their own foods, which can be sold at places like farmer's markets and local restaurants.

"In the case of Atlanta, where you have vacant lots, there's a potential there to use land for urban gardens or market gardens and ultimately, it's a way of revitalizing a community," says Girdner.

Supporters say the initiative has another benefit: it gives people in Atlanta healthier options.

"There are numerous folks who just don't have access to fresh, local produce, fresh foods and are getting most of their nutrition from convenience stores," says Mindy Goldstein, the director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic.

The directive originally came from the Mayor's Kasim Reed's office and is expected to get his signature of approval within the next few days.

Lorinc, J. (2014). Atlanta city council approves agricultural ordinance. WABE. Retrieved from http://wabe.org/post/atlanta-city-council-approves-agricultural-ordinance.

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WHEN LISTENING TO THE AUDIO, THE INTERVIEW BEGINS AT 30:48. CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS INTERVIEW AT DEMOCRACY NOW.

We speak with scientist Tyrone Hayes of the University of California, Berkeley, who discovered a widely used herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. But when he tried to publish the results, the chemical’s manufacturer launched a campaign to discredit his work. Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company, which later became agribusiness giant Syngenta, to study their product, atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States, and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms. When Hayes found results Syngenta did not expect — that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs, and could cause the same problems for humans — it refused to allow him to publish his findings. A new article in The New Yorker magazine uses court documents from a class action lawsuit against Syngenta to show how it sought to smear Hayes’ reputation and prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from banning the profitable chemical, which is already banned by the European Union.

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now we turn to the story of a University of California scientist who discovered that a popular herbicide may have harmful effects on the endocrine system. Tyrone Hayes was first hired in 1997 by a company that later became agribusiness giant Syngenta. They asked him to study their product, atrazine, a pesticide that is applied to more than half the corn crops in the United States and widely used on golf courses and Christmas tree farms. But after Hayes found results that the manufacturer did not expect, that atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs and could cause the same problems for humans, Syngenta refused to allow him to publish his work. This was the the start of an epic feud between the scientist and the corporation.

AMY GOODMAN: Now a new article in The New Yorker magazine uses court documents from a class action lawsuit against Syngenta to show how it sought to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from banning the profitable chemical, which is already banned by the European Union. To start with, the company’s public relations team drafted a list of four goals. Reporter Rachel Aviv writes, quote, "The first was 'discredit Hayes.' In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could 'prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.' He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to 'exploit Hayes' faults/problems.’ 'If TH involved in scandal, enviros will drop him,' Ford wrote."

Well, for more, we’re joined by TH himself. That’s right, Tyrone Hayes is with us, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, joining us from the campus TV station right now in Berkeley.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Can you tell us what happened to you, how you were originally tied to Syngenta, the research you did, and what prevented you from originally publishing it?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, here at Berkeley, I was a new assistant professor. I was already studying the effects of hormones and the effects of chemicals that interfere with hormones on amphibian development. And I was approached by the manufacturer and asked to study the effects of atrazine, the herbicide, on frogs. And after I discovered that it interfered with male development and caused males to turn into females, to develop eggs, the company tried to prevent me from publishing and from discussing that work with other scientists outside of their panel.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What was the process within the company? As you raised your findings, what was their immediate reaction to what you had come across?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, initially they seemed sort of supportive. You know, we designed more studies. We designed more analysis. And they encouraged me to do more analysis. But as the further analysis just supported the original finding, they became less interested in moving forward very quickly, and eventually they moved to asking me to manipulate data or to misrepresent data, and ultimately they told me I could not publish or could not talk about the data outside of their closed panel.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Hayes, talk about exactly what you found. What were the abnormalities you found in frogs, the gender-bending nature of this drug atrazine?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, initially, we found that the larynx, or the voice box, in exposed males didn’t grow properly. And this was an indication that the male hormone testosterone was not being produced at appropriate levels. And eventually we found that not only were these males demasculinized, or chemically castrated, but they also were starting to develop ovaries or starting to develop eggs. And eventually we discovered that these males didn’t breed properly, that some of the males actually completely turned into females. So we had genetic males that were laying eggs and reproducing as females. And now we’re starting to show that some of these males actually show, I guess what we’d call homosexual behavior. They actually prefer to mate with other males.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, where did you go with your research?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, eventually, what happened was the EPA insisted that—the Environmental Protection Agency insisted that the manufacturer release me from the confidentiality contract. And we published our findings in pretty high-ranking journals, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We published some work in Nature. We published work in Environmental Health Perspectives, which is a journal sponsored by the National Institutes of Health.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And when did you begin to get a sense that the company was organizing a campaign against you? What were the signs that you saw post the period when you published your findings?

TYRONE HAYES: Before we published the findings and before the EPA became involved, the company tried to purchase the data. They tried to give me a new contract so that they would then control the data and the experiments. They actually tried to get me to come and visit the company to get control of those data. And when I refused, I invited them to the university, I offered to share data, but they wanted to purchase the data. And then they actually—as mentioned in the New Yorker article, they actually hired scientists to try to refute the data or to pick apart the data, and eventually they hired scientists to do experiments that they claim refuted our data.

AMY GOODMAN: So, what did you do? I mean, you’re actually—I mean, this is very serious. You could bring criminal charges if you’re being threatened and stalked in this way.

TYRONE HAYES: Well, initially, I went to my vice chancellor here at the university. I went to my dean. I went to legal counsel here at the university. And I was told by legal counsel that—well, I was told, first of all, by the vice chancellor for research at the time that, "Well, you published the work. It’s over. So I don’t understand what the problem is." And I tried to impress upon her, Beth Burnside, at the time that—you know, that it wasn’t over, that I was really being pursued by the manufacturer. And eventually, when I spoke with the lawyer here at the University, I was told that, "Well, I represent the university, and I protect the university from liability. You’re kind of on your own." And I remember I looked at him, and I said, "But the very university, from the Latin universitas, is a collection of scholars, of teachers and students, so who is this entity, the university, that you represent that doesn’t include me?" But clearly there’s some entity that doesn’t really include us, the professors and students, and doesn’t really protect our academic freedom, I think, the way that it should.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you about one of your critics, Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health. When The New York Times ran a critical story about the herbicide as part of its toxic water series in 2009, she referred to its reporting as, quote, "all the news that’s fit to scare." This is a clip of Whelan from an interview on MSNBC.

ELIZABETH WHELAN: I very much disagree with the New York Times story, which is really raising concerns about a totally bogus risk. Atrazine has been used for more than 50 years. It’s very, very tightly regulated. Even the Environmental Protection Agency, which is not known for soft-pedaling about environmental chemicals, even they say it’s safe.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, it turns out that Syngenta has been a long-term financial supporter of Whelan’s organization, the American Council on Science and Health, paying them at least $100,000. Your comments on her remarks?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, again, they’re paid remarks. And one of the most disheartening things in this whole process is that many of my critics—you know, it’s one to be academic, if you come and say, "Well, we interpreted the data this way, and we want to argue about this point," but these people really didn’t even have an opinion. These opinions were written by the manufacturer, and they were paid to put their names on them, to endorse the opinions of the manufacturer. So, you know, that’s one of the most disheartening things, that they were really just personalities for sale.

And many of the things that she’s saying there is just not true. There are—any independent study, from any scientist that’s not funded by Syngenta, has found similar problems with atrazine, not just my work on frogs. But I’ve just published a paper with 22 scientists from around the world, from 12 different countries, who have shown that atrazine causes sexual problems in mammals, that atrazine causes sexual problems in birds, amphibians, fish. So it’s not just my work in amphibians.

And also, with regards to the EPA, one of the scientific advisory panel members on the EPA that was supposed to review atrazine turns out is paid and works for Syngenta. So the whole process was tainted. And, in fact, the EPA ignored the scientific advisory panel’s opinion and actually decided to keep atrazine on the market and not to do any more studies, when that clearly wasn’t the recommendation of the scientific advisory panel.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back just a second to your remarks about your university, because obviously there are many questions about major universities around the country being, in some way or other, supported financially by the pharmaceutical or the drug industry. But you are at a prestigious university, one of the top universities in the country, at Berkeley. Do you have some concerns about how your university responded to your—in your time of need, and the attack on your academic integrity?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, they’re not just my concerns. There are many at the university who fear that the university is just becoming a corporation. You know, we’re a public university that used to get a lot more support from the state. In my lifetime, tuition was free for students. Tuition has been rising. And it’s really an effort to monetize things, and that includes scientific researchers. There’s a lot of pressure on us not just to be scholars and to teach and to do research, but also to bring in funds that will support the university. So there’s some sentiment from the university that if you are raising a concern potentially that might cause the university to lose support or to lose funders, then you won’t necessarily get the support on the campus that you need. And we’ve seen this over and over again. A colleague of mine, Ignacio Chapela, for example, was in a fairly huge battle over the same company, Novartis, and its influences over scientific research at the university.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the significance of Syngenta? First of all, is it a significant presence at the university, at UC Berkeley? But also, the significance of Syngenta as a pesticide company and all that it makes, how powerful is it?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, when they were—when I was originally consulting for the manufacturer, they were Novartis at the time. And Novartis had a big influence on the campus. There was a major deal on the campus. I understand a fifth of the biological sciences’ support was coming from Novartis. And at the time, they both made pesticides, and they made pharmaceuticals.

One of my big concerns is that, as of the year 2000—prior to the year 2000, Novartis not only made atrazine, which is used on corn, of course, which is an herbicide, but it also induces an enzyme called aromatase. It causes you to make too much estrogen. And it’s now been shown that this herbicide, atrazine, and this mechanism, is potentially involved in development of breast cancer, for example. Up until 2000, the company also made a chemical called letrozole, which did exactly the opposite: It blocked aromatase, it blocked this enzyme, it blocked estrogen production. And this chemical, letrozole, is the number one treatment for breast cancer. So this company was simultaneously in 2000 making a chemical that induced estrogen and promoted breast cancer, and making a chemical that blocked estrogen production and was being used to treat breast cancer. So there’s a clear conflict of interest there, a clear problem.

The other problems are that something like 90 percent of the seeds that we use to produce our food right now are owned by the big six pesticide companies. So, again, there’s a conflict of interest where the companies have an interest in, I guess, getting us addicted to the pesticides, to grow the seeds that they also own. And Syngenta, of course, is one of those big six, one of the big pesticide or agribusiness companies.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And a New Yorker that delves into your story also says that you came to find out that the company was also reading your emails. Could you talk about that?

TYRONE HAYES: Well, I originally—I had some suspicion that they had hacked into my email. And originally found out—there was a professor at Minnesota, and I was going there to give a big lecture, and this professor in the School of Public Health, Deb Dubenofsky, said that she happened to be standing in line at the airport, flying back to Minnesota, and just by coincidence she was standing behind somebody who was having a conversation on his cellphone and who identified himself as an employee of Syngenta, and he made the statement, "We have access to his email. We know where he is at all times." So it wasn’t just paranoia on my part. I had direct evidence that they had access to my email. And at the time, I maintained a second and a third email that I could keep private, and I actually used that information, that they had access to my email, to send them information, and sometimes false information—for example, booking plane tickets through that email, because then I could sent them to the wrong place, so they wouldn’t necessarily be there to follow me when I was going to speak in other places.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, Professor Hayes, this is stunning stuff that came out in this class action suit. The suit wasn’t brought by you, but the documents that came out that referenced you, Tyrone Hayes, TH, and trying to discredit you, trying to discredit your family, talk—that was a lawsuit that involved atrazine contaminating water supplies.

TYRONE HAYES: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: But what was your reaction when you saw this? You suspected this. You felt you were being followed. You felt you were—they were trying to discredit you. But now you had the documents.

TYRONE HAYES: Well, you know, it’s funny. You know, the way the article reads, that I suspected—I mean, I knew. I knew many of the individuals who would follow me around. I knew who they were. I knew they had access to my email. You know, so, for me, I knew that these things were happening. This guy would directly come up and make lewd comments to me and threatening comments to me. But it was the kind of thing where, you know, it sounded like something out of a movie. I couldn’t go and tell my colleagues, like, "They’re following me around, and, you know, they’re hacking into my email"—

AMY GOODMAN: Did you record?

TYRONE HAYES: —because I would look crazy.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you put on a tape recorder?

TYRONE HAYES: You know, what I found—here’s how I’ll answer that question. What I found out, that it was much more powerful for me to suggest and have them think that I recorded everything than for them to actually know what I recorded. And that actually became sort of my protection. So, when this guy came up and threatened me and threatened my wife, to then go back and go, "Oh, my god, did he record that or not?" So, it was much more powerful for me to have them think that. But you can see in their handwritten notes that they were very concerned that I was recording conversations. There’s notes that they wanted to trap me, to entice me to sue, and these kinds of things.

And my reaction now, to see it all in The New Yorker and for—you know, all this open for the world to see, is—there are two reactions. One is, I can’t believe they wrote these kinds of things down, right? That you’re plotting to, you know, investigate me and investigate my school and investigate my hometown and all these kinds of things, and you wrote it down. But my other response is, this is quite analogous to, you know, when you hear these stories of somebody who’s been in jail for murder for 10 years, and then the DNA evidence gets them out, you know, and you ask them, "Are you happy?" Well, of course I’m happy, but I’ve also been in jail for 10 years. You know what I mean? So, of course I’m happy now that these documents have all been revealed, but it’s also been a very difficult time for me for the last—and for my family, you know, for the last 10 or 15 years, for my students, as well, for the last 10 or 15 years, to be pursued this way and to be under a microscope this way and to feel threatened this way for so long.

AMY GOODMAN: As we wrap up, what’s happening with atrazine today? Where does it stand?

TYRONE HAYES: It’s still on the market. We’re still studying it. A number of studies are still coming out from around the world. One recent study has shown that male babies that are exposed in utero to atrazine, their genitals don’t develop properly. Their penis doesn’t develop properly, or they get microphallus. There are studies showing that sperm count goes down when you’re exposed to atrazine. And this is not just laboratory animals or animals in the wild; this is also humans. We use the same hormones that animals do for our reproduction. And it’s a big threat to environmental health and public health.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Tyrone Hayes, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, who’s devoted the past 15 years to studying atrazine, a widely used herbicide made by Syngenta. We’ll link to the article in The New Yorker magazine that reveals how the company tried to discredit Professor Hayes after his research showed atrazine causes sexual abnormalities in frogs and could cause the same problems for humans. The article is called "A Valuable Reputation: After Tyrone Hayes Said That a Chemical was Harmful, Its Maker Pursued Him." This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

Democracy Now. (2014). Silencing the scientist: Tyrone Hayes on being targeted by herbicide firm Syngenta. Democracy Now. Retrieved from http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/21/silencing_the_scientist_tyrone_hayes_on

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An atrazine-induced female frog (a genetic male) is shown (bottom) copulating with an unexposed male sibling. This union produced viable eggs and larvae that survived to metamorphosis and adulthood. Yet, because both animals were genetic males, the offspring were all males. (Tyrone Hayes photo)

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | March 1, 2010

BERKELEY —
Atrazine, one of the world’s most widely used pesticides, wreaks havoc with the sex lives of adult male frogs, emasculating three-quarters of them and turning one in 10 into females, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, biologists.

The 75 percent that are chemically castrated are essentially “dead” because of their inability to reproduce in the wild, reports UC Berkeley’s Tyrone B. Hayes, professor of integrative biology.

“These male frogs are missing testosterone and all the things that testosterone controls, including sperm. So their fertility is as low as 10 percent in some cases, and that is only if we isolate those animals and pair them with females,” he said. “In an environment where they are competing with unexposed animals, they have zero chance of reproducing.”

The 10 percent or more that turn from males into females – something not known to occur under natural conditions in amphibians – can successfully mate with male frogs but, because these females are genetically male, all their offspring are male.

“When we grow these guys up, depending on the family, we will get anywhere from 10 to 50 percent females,” Hayes said. “In a population, the genetically male females can decrease or wipe out a population just because they skew sex ratios so badly.”

Though the experiments were performed on a common laboratory frog, the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), field studies indicate that atrazine, a potent endocrine disruptor, similarly affects frogs in the wild, and could possibly be one of the causes of amphibian declines around the globe, Hayes said.

Hayes and his UC Berkeley colleagues report their results in this week’s online early edition of the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In last week’s issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology, Hayes and colleagues published a review of the possible causes of a worldwide decline in amphibian populations, concluding that atrazine and other hormone-disrupting pollutants are a likely contributor because they affect recruitment of new individuals and make amphibians more susceptible to disease.

“These kinds of problems, like sex-reversing animals skewing sex ratios, are much more dangerous than any chemical that would kill off a population of frogs,” he said. “In exposed populations, it looks like there are frogs breeding but, in fact, the population is being very slowly degraded by the introduction of these altered animals.”

Some 80 million pounds of the herbicide atrazine are applied annually in the United States on corn and sorghum to control weeds and increase crop yield, but such widespread use also makes atrazine the most common pesticide contaminant of ground and surface water, according to various studies.

More and more research, however, is showing that atrazine interferes with endocrine hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone – in fish, amphibians, birds, reptiles, laboratory rodents and even human cell lines at levels of parts per billion. Recent studies also found a possible link between human birth defects and low birth weight and atrazine exposure in the womb.

As a result of these studies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is reviewing its regulations on use of the pesticide. Several states are considering banning atrazine, and six class action lawsuits have been filed seeking to eliminate its use. The European Union already bars the use of atrazine.

Hayes’s studies in the early 2000s were the first to show that the hormonal effects of atrazine disrupt sexual development in amphibians. Working with the African clawed frog, Hayes and his colleagues showed in 2002 that tadpoles raised in atrazine-contaminated water become hermaphrodites – they develop both female (ovaries) and male (testes) gonads. This occurred at atrazine levels as low as 0.1 parts per billion (ppb), 30 times lower than levels allowed in drinking water by the EPA (3 ppb).

Subsequent studies showed that native leopard frogs (Rana pipiens) collected from atrazine-contaminated streams in the Midwest, including from areas up to 1,000 miles from where atrazine is applied, often had eggs in their testes. And many males had lower testosterone levels than normal females and smaller than normal voice boxes, presumably limiting their ability to call mates.

Hayes’ research also established that many frogs in Midwestern streams contaminated by atrazine and other pesticides have compromised immune systems, leading to increased mortality from bacterial disease.

Those early studies were hampered by the inability to easily distinguish genetically male from genetically female frogs. Male frogs have two identical sex chromosomes (ZZ) while females have both a Z and a W – the opposite of XX female and XY male humans. But because all frog chromosomes look the same under a light microscope, it’s not simple to distinguish male from female.

To overcome this, Hayes’ colleague Roger Liu developed a line of all-male frogs so that the genetics would be unequivocal.

“Before, we knew we got fewer males than we should have, and we got hermaphrodites. Now, we have clearly shown that many of these animals are sex-reversed males,” Hayes said. “We have animals that are females, in the sense that they behave like females: They have estrogen, lay eggs, they mate with other males. Atrazine has caused a hormonal imbalance that has made them develop into the wrong sex, in terms of their genetic constitution.”

Coincidentally, another lab in 2008 discovered a sex-linked genetic marker in Xenopus, which has allowed Hayes to confirm the genetic sex of his frogs.

In Hayes’ study, where 40 frogs lived for about three years after hatching in water with 2.5 ppb atrazine, about 10 percent of the frogs appeared to be resistant to the effects of the pesticide. In ongoing studies, Hayes is investigating whether this apparent resistance is inherited, as well as whether the sex-reversed males have more susceptible offspring.

Syngenta, which manufactures atrazine, disputes many of these studies, including Hayes’, that show adverse effects of the pesticide. But Hayes said that “when you have studies all over the world showing problems with atrazine in every vertebrate that has been looked at – fish, frogs, reptiles, birds, mammals – all of them can’t be wrong.”

“What people have to realize is that, just as with taking pharmaceuticals, they have to decide whether the benefits outweigh the costs,” he said. “Not every frog or every human will be affected by atrazine, but do you want to take a chance, what with all the other things that we know atrazine does, not just to humans but to rodents and frogs and fish?”

Hayes’ long-term studies of the effects of atrazine on frogs have been assisted by many UC Berkeley students, including co-authors on the current paper: undergraduates Vicky Khoury, Anne Narayan, Mariam Nazir, Andrew Park, Lillian Adame and Elton Chan; and graduate students Travis Brown, Daniel Buchholz, Sherrie Gallipeau and Theresa Stueve.

The work was funded by the Park Water Co., Mitch Kapor, Freada Klein, the Mitch Kapor Foundation, the David Foundation, the Cornell-Douglas Foundation, the Wallace Foundation, the UC Berkeley Class of ’43 endowed chair and the Howard Hughes Biology Fellows Program.

Sanders, R. (2010). Pesticide atrazine can turn male frogs into females. UC Berkley News Center. Retrieved from http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/

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Scott Korb | June 26th, 2012

At a performance last August, the deliberate and sharply dressed emcee, who is also well known as an actor, announced his “official transition” to a huge audience gathered in the parking lot of a popular pub and pizzeria in Anchorage, Alaska: “My professional name will be my chosen and my legal name, which is Yasiin Bey. … And I don’t want to have to wait for it to be in Source or Vibe or someplace. I figure, we’re all here. We can see each other.” And then he spelled it out for them: “Y-A-S-I-I-N, first name. Last name: B-E-Y.”

When a few Alaskans made some disapproving noises, Bey responded, “I understand. I understand.” Cradling his signature bright red, vintage-style microphone, he then tried to make it clear he knew exactly what, and exactly whom, he was giving up. “No one has a more close relationship to Mos Def than me. I know that guy. Really good.”

To be fair, Bey’s mother, Sheron Smith, who manages a good portion of his career and whom even I, a reporter with no relationship to the family, call Umi, still mostly refers to her son by the name she gave him: Dante. So does the emcee Talib Kweli. “I refer to Mos Def as Dante, or ‘D,’’’ he recently told me. “I’m trying to get used to referring to him as Yasiin.” Obviously. Around his wrist, Bey even still wears a bracelet with links that spell it out: D-A-N-T-E.

Kweli and Bey have known each other since they were teenagers together in the early 1990s. (Bey, 38, is two years older than Kweli.) On the weekends back then, Kweli, who was raised in the neighborhoods of Park Slope and Flatbush and, like Bey, still calls Brooklyn home, would return from Cheshire Academy, a Connecticut boarding school, to spend time in Washington Square Park with other kids he knew from the city. There he became a fan of Bey, who sometimes performed in the park with his sister Ces and his brother Denard in a group they called Urban Thermo Dynamics. By the mid-90s, U.T.D. also had a video for their song “Manifest Destiny” on Ralph McDaniel’s public-television program "Video Music Box," which to Kweli was like “the end of the world. If you had a video in ‘Video Music Box,’ you made it.”

Of course today they’ve both made it. Although Kweli is probably best known as Bey’s partner in the hip-hop duo Black Star, who reunited last year for their first tour in more than a decade. Their 1998 release Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star—“a bunch of rhymes that we had built up, that we just kicked over tracks,” explained Kweli—was both critically acclaimed and continues to be adored by fans, and though Kweli says he’s “done songs and projects that I personally feel are better than Black Star … the impact that album had on the fan base when it came out is so phenomenal that none of that matters.” This year they plan to record, on Kweli’s label Javotti Media, as much of two new albums as possible. One of these works in progress is a tribute to Aretha Franklin; the first cut, “You Already Knew,” which was released in November, samples Franklin’s 1973 “Mister Spain”—“I can feel your blackness,” she sings—and features a line from Bey that brings together all his past and current identities but one, Mos Def: “You could feel it before I had anything to say / Yasiin, Dante, Black Star, ever see all day.”

The other album will feature the single “Fix Up,” which Black Star premiered on "The Colbert Report"last October. Introducing the band while wearing what Black Star calls their “classy warrior package,” which consists of a camouflage tie, pocket square, and cap, Stephen Colbert announced: “Great news, Yasiin says I can be Mos Def now.” Behind him, Bey cracked up.

“Yasiin” is an Arabic word and Yasiin Bey is Muslim, arguably the most prominent pop-cultural Muslim figure since Muhammad Ali, a hero of Bey’s, who went through his own series of name changes when entering the Nation of Islam under the wings of Malcolm X in the mid-60s. Depending on your perspective, Bey is either a convert from his mother’s Christianity and the church that shapes his earliest memories of music, or he’s what’s often referred to as a “revert” to the Islam of his father, Abdul Rahman, or Abi. (“Umi” and “abi” are Arabic words that mean “mother” and “father,” respectively.) As Bey’s brother, also Abdul Rahman, told me, “Everybody’s born Muslim.” In Islam, this fact is contained in the idea of fitrah, that every child possesses the innate understanding of the unity of God. It is our original nature. Coming to terms with that is, in part, simply what the revert does.

Convert or revert, that Bey is Muslim has never been a secret. His solo efforts dating back to the 1999 album Black on Both Sides, released on James Murdoch’s—yes, that James Murdoch—Rawkus Records, each open with the same blessing that starts all but one surah, or chapter, of the Koran: “Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem” (“In the name of God, the beneficent, the merciful”). Bey’s recent release, “Niggas in Poorest,” a remix of Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Niggas in Paris,” begins with a similar blessing. In this case, the prayer is followed by this announcement: “Live from America. Yasiin, Yasiin, Yasiin.” In the video, the name appears in Arabic script across the bottom of the frame. The song’s final line: “Allah is in control.”

For Bey, retiring “Mos Def” is nothing at all like when, in the late 1970s, folk singer Cat Stevens abandoned his music career when he became a Muslim and changed his name to Yusuf Islam. Islam, who returned to pop music as simply “Yusuf” with a 2006 album release, told The New York Timesthat he originally gave up music because its permissibility for Muslims “was just a gray area, so I stayed out in order to avoid conflict.”

Bey, however, seems to have come into his Islam through music. His father’s deeper impact notwithstanding, his conversion can be attributed largely to the influence of the pioneering hip-hop group A Tribe Called Quest. And though members of the group would not credit themselves with Bey’s becoming a Muslim, they were there when it happened—“so there,” deejay Ali Shaheed Muhammad told me. Bey declared himself a Muslim at Battery Recording Studios on 25th Street in New York City surrounded by members of Tribe during the making of their 1996 album Beats, Rhymes and Life.

By the mid-90s, Bey was often around the studio, spending time with the emcee Q-Tip, or Jonathan Davis (who would later take the Arabic name Kamaal Fareed). Seeing members of Tribe practicing and praying, and as Ali Shaheed Muhammad said, “just living … Islamic values, principles, and actions,” was a reminder for Bey of what he grew up in. As his association and friendship with Tribe grew, says Muhammad, he seemed to find it inspiring and comforting to have music around. The values of Islam were “innate in the music” of A Tribe Called Quest; through music, they were all “striving to earn the favor of the Creator in a world where you have to be mindful of the existence of the Creator.” And Bey was there to take it all in. What’s more, because Tribe was so successful—by 1996 they’d already had two albums go platinum—it was early on very clear to Bey what it could be like, as Muhammad put it, to “make a living in hip-hop.”

On the evening of December 17, Yasiin Bey, one in a long line of speakers, took the lectern in the Grand Ballroom of the Hilton New York, near Rockefeller Center, and before a Muslim audience of more than a thousand people, recalled spending certain Saturdays as a child with his grandmother walking the avenues that intersected Fulton Street in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, searching for an uncle who was addicted to drugs. “It was like another world,” he explained. “It was a completely other world. Skid row times a thousand. Filled with criminals, the poor, indigent, addicts. Just a lot of misery. And I would venture to say that as a child it was probably one of the worst neighborhoods in New York City.”

Some thirty years later, and largely because of an aggressive approach by the evening’s host, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, to moving crack dealers out of the neighborhood—an approach that involved muscle, which in 1987 landed the imam and several associates in jail—this piece of Bed-Stuy is a completely different place. Fewer drugs. More small businesses. More Muslims. At the center, on the corner of Bedford Avenue and Fulton Street, sits Masjid at-Taqwa, or “mosque of God-consciousness.” Wahhaj’s home base is a bustling mosque that began as a clothing store and a squat house for junkies and now, with the funds raised at this thirtieth anniversary event, is looking to build the five-story Taqwa Center, complete with basketball courts, an Olympic-sized pool, and room enough in the upper floors for a charter school.

Bey, whose connection to Imam Wahhaj and the mosque goes back to the mid-90s, was there as an entertainer to help raise funds; he’d been preceded on stage by Sheik Hamza Yusuf, a founder ofZaytuna College in Berkeley, California, the nation’s first four-year Muslim liberal arts college. The famous Hamza Yusuf, with his tight goatee, horn-rimmed glasses, and a black kufi with white trim, was the real headliner of the night, entertaining the crowd with stories of traveling through New York as a young convert, witnessing a gunfight in Harlem and an altercation between a friend, Abdul Qadir, and some New Jersey johns that ended with Qadir saying: “I’m a Muslim. We don’t hit first, so you go ahead and take your best shot.” But there was more. Yusuf witnessed that in the late-70s New York’s black Muslims—Muslims like Abi and Imam Wahhaj—“were right there on the front lines, and they were taking it to the streets,” he said. “They were talking about Islam with people, selling incense and giving dawah,” that is, inviting people to the faith.

Though he came to Islam through music—and as Talib Kweli has told me, “His reason for doing music is to give praise to God; that’s the reason why he writes”—Bey followed Hamza Yusuf onto the stage, choosing an approach that he thought would be appropriate for the audience, sensitive to those in the crowd for whom music’s permissibility isn’t a gray area at all.

At first he didn’t sing. Instead, Bey read a reported narration from the Prophet about the “most excellent” actions Islam calls on Muslims to take—“to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful"—followed by a quotation from Malcolm X’s 1964 “A Declaration of Independence.” Looking over the crowd, leaning forward and grasping the lectern, Bey read from notes he’d taken in a trim red book: “‘I do not pretend to be a divine man, but I do believe in divine guidance, divine power, and divine prophecy. I am not an educated man, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credential.’

“I feel very close to that quote,” he said, “because I’m not an expert in any particular field, I’m not a divine man, I’m certainly not a scholar, but I am sincerely happy to be here—sincerely happy to be a part of this ummah, to be a Muslim, and to be a native son of the community that Masjid at-Taqwa is in.”

What singing Bey did came after some spoken word, including a poem he’s recorded as the first verse of Kanye West’s “Lord, Lord, Lord.” The song Bey prepared was called “The Salaams,” the name for the greetings of peace Muslims share with one other. It began, “As-salamu Alaikum” (“Peace unto you”), and though the typical response is an immediate “Wa alayka al-salaam,” the crowd required a little goading.

“You can come,” said Bey, after waiting through some silence. “You’re part of it, too.”

The crowd laughed, and so they joined him, but without any melody at all: “And unto you be peace.”

Back in the day, “Taqwa was the spot,” novelist Eisa Ulen Richardson told me when we got together to reminisce about her relationship with Bey around the time he became a Muslim, a few years of heady, intense friendship that she recalls as being something like “summer camp.” Before they began running into each other at the mosque, Richardson knew Dante Smith mainly for his impeccable style and swagger around Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in the days, she says, “before every other resident … had a dog,” when you could see Foxy Brown drive down the street past where the guys from Digable Planets lived. The film director Spike Lee championed the neighborhood, living there and opening his office there.

When they first knew each other, Richardson and Dante Smith didn’t have lunch dates and they certainly didn’t talk about God. He performed poetry at Fort Greene’s Brooklyn Moon Cafe and “always had a smile on his face, even when he didn’t.” (As a local Brooklyn poet and a young television actor, Dante Smith, who appeared, for instance, in the short-lived Paul Haggis sitcom "You Take the Kids" [’90-’91], starring Nell Carter, and Bill Cosby’s "The Cosby Mysteries" [’94-’95], sometimes adopted the surname Bezé—a pig-Latin play on the surname he uses now.)

Eventually Richardson and Bey encountered each other outside Masjid at-Taqwa, and the two became friends as part of a larger group that included Kamaal Fareed from A Tribe Called Quest, his cousin Dexter Mills (the emcee known as Consequence), and several of Richardson’s girlfriends. “And Dante,” she said, “when we came to our discussions about Islam, he was always very serious about it, and he was always sincere about it. And he was always very worried that we would make the right decisions, so—as to not end up in hellfire. … In that time we were all hanging out together, I think he really did genuinely care about all of our souls. I really think he did.”

Since last August, explaining the retirement of “the mighty Mos Def” has been part of both his solo performances and the tour with Kweli. It's Kweli, along with Kanye West, who is a friend, whom Bey credits with helping him make the decision to proceed in his career without what now strikes him as the “artifice” of a “nom de plume.” (It’s worth pointing out that Kweli, which in Swahili means “true,” is actually the middle name of Talib Greene—so while Talib Kweli isn’t a nom de plume, exactly, he does consider it a stage name.) It hasn’t always been easy. Responding to the Alaskan crowd’s disappointment, Bey reacted like a stand-up comedian sparring with hecklers, a mode he seems quite comfortably in: “You know, some people have an emotional relationship with that name, Mos Def. So do I: I made it up.”

Performing in October with the Brooklyn Philharmonic at an event curated by WNYC’s "Soundcheck" host John Schaefer, a more serious, public-radio-friendly Bey took the stage, informing the audience that Yasiin was a name he’d “kept close to myself for a long while,” but that “many people close to me, and my intimates, and extended family and friends, have referred to me by that name for quite a while.”

The name dates back to Bey’s first trip to Saudi Arabia for the Hajj in 1998. “When he came back, he came back with the name Yasiin,” Kweli told me. “He didn’t ask anyone to call him that, but I definitely remember him saying, ‘My name is Yasiin.’”

Bringing “Yasiin” out publicly over the end of 2011—“unleash[ing] it,” as one friend put it—it became clear that over time Bey had begun to see the name “that the streets taught me,” as he told MTV, had become “something that could be boiled down into a persona. Or a product. Or a brand.” The name Yasiin Bey, on the other hand, would allow him, he told Schaefer that evening with the Brooklyn Phil, to “reassert my own humanness.”

This makes sense to the producer Anas Canon, founder of Remarkable Current, an independent media collective known for its relationship with Muslim artists and its international Hip Hop Ambassadors program, sponsored by the State Department. Canon has always known Bey as “Yasiin,” going back to the first Black Star tour. Over the years Canon has produced three tracks with Bey, including Amir Sulaiman’s “When I Die (Rebuild),” recorded at Bey’s Toronto home and released on Sulaiman’s 2007 Like a Thief in the Night. Convinced Bey is “100% committed to spiritual refinement,” Canon asked, rhetorically, “Why would a grown man go by a code name?”

As you might expect from someone who speaks freely about Bey’s eternal original nature, his brother Abdul Rahman contends “there’s never been a difference,” between Dante or Mos or Yasiin. Someone with a little more distance, though, can see things differently. Take, for instance, a young and admiring Muslim rapper like Big Samir, of the Colorado duo the ReMINDers, who recalls breaking fast with Bey backstage at The Boulder Theater on the first day of Ramadan, 2009. Introducing himself as Yasiin even then, Bey invited Big Samir and his wife Aja Black, the evening’s opening act, to his green room with the Arabic blessing, “Ramadan Mubarak!” and offered them food and tea.

In this act of generosity, Big Samir sees Bey “growing in Islam.” And looking back over his own career, Big Samir admits that Bey was proof to him that he “could be a Muslim and still be myself,” that he could be an emcee and still be a “good person.” What pride Kweli had in coming from the same crew as Bey, someone like Big Samir can feel in sharing his Islam.

Here’s a man who wears a beard and usually a kufi or some other head covering on stage and who accepts a gift from the audience with the Arabic phrase of thankfulness “Masha’Allah.” Bey’s pants’ cuffs are perfectly hemmed so as never to reach below his ankles; in Islam, says the Prophet, admonishing the arrogance of anyone who would walk dragging their garments behind them, “Whatever is below the ankle is in the fire.” If these are the kinds of things you notice, it’s impossible not to hear the new Black Star single a little differently: “Fix up look sharp / Black Star, good God / And when the sky look dark / Shine a light, look ahead, look up.” And it’s likewise impossible not to see Bey’s recent release of a scented oil called Harun No. 7, in partnership with a creative collective called Fellowship Mission, which also released “Niggas in Poorest,” as in keeping with the tradition of Muslims selling incense and giving dawah. Still, most impressive of all, perhaps, here is a man whose public name—indeed, his only name—represents as deep a mystery as Islam has ever produced.

What’s in a name like Yasiin Bey? The Muslims would tell you, Allahu alam. God knows best.

When Dante Smith became a Muslim, he didn’t choose just any Arabic name; he chose one that, by near scholarly consensus, is considered untranslatable and so profound that it’s known as the very heart of the Koran. According to Imam Dawood Yasin (a different spelling but the same Arabic name), of Dartmouth College’s William Jewett Tucker Foundation and one-time leader of Masjid Al-Islam in New Haven, Connecticut, unlike with most Arabic names taken on by Muslim converts, the meaning of the name Yasiin is almost a complete mystery.

“Yasiin,” the name of the thirty-sixth surah, or chapter, of Islam’s holy book, is also, according to at least one commentary, one of the names of the Prophet Muhammad. “Yasiin” is often recited in memory of someone who’s recently died. One part historic parable, one part meditation on the order of the heavens, and one part lesson on human accountability and resurrection, the surah brings together what Imam Yasin sees as those facts of life we can observe and understand with those experiences that defy rational explanation.

As for the word’s meaning, the dominant opinion of Islamic scholars is that no one knows. Despite the mystery, and largely because of it, says the imam, the word “yasiin” is about “acknowledging that humans will not know everything.” After all, “to know everything would make you a god”; and believing this would destroy the first pillar of Islam itself, that Muslims humbly acknowledge that there is no god but Allah.

For his part, Imam Yasin was brought to tears the first time he heard the surah, a recording of which was played for him in the home of near stranger outside Capetown in 1996 while he was working as a fashion model in South Africa, weeks before his own conversion and certainly before he knew Arabic. The audio recording made it back home with him to Nantucket after his conversion abroad, and after months of repeated listening—“a personal ritualistic practice”—the name, in all its mystery, became a part of him, he says, and a daily reminder of where “our ability to know stops and faith itself begins.”

When I spoke with Eisa Richardson in December about what the name “Yasiin” meant to the Dante Smith she knew from Brooklyn, she was careful at first about revealing too much of what they’d shared privately more than a decade ago, but it was clear they’d spoken about it at the time: “It’s a very special name that he chose,” she said.

A few days later, though, “loath[ing] loose ends,” she followed up with an email, part of which reads: “Dante chose faith, real Faith, the evidence of things not seen, when he chose Yasiin. I would be afraid to assume a name with an unknown meaning. Dante wasn’t. Perhaps he was unafraid because ‘yasiin,’ the word, expresses the unknown within, an unknown we all have, an unknown Yasiin, the man, was unafraid to claim in himself.”

During the holy month of Ramadan as 1999 came to a close, aboard a plane descending into Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Yasiin Bey moved through the aisle to sit alongside his friend Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Bey and his father had invited Muhammad to get away while the rest of the world dealt with whatever crazy apocalypticism would be associated with Y2K. The two friends had hardly talked at all during the long flight, but as they approached their destination, Bey had something important to tell Muhammad.

Unlike Muhammad, Bey had been to Islam’s holy cities before, and Muhammad recalls his friend advising him as they made their approach into King Abdulaziz International Airport, in the way a father or an older brother might: “This is Allah’s personal invitation to you … Everyone doesn’t get to come here.” It didn’t matter that Bey was the younger of the two, or that Muhammad had come into his Islam years earlier. The understanding that comes with travel to Islam’s holy cities made Bey seem to Muhammad like a kind of “elder,” in the sense of what Muslims know as a kind of living saintliness. Bey’s message, as Muhammad tells it, “turned on the water in my eyes.” The land of the Prophet, and, as I’ve seen more than once with some of the most renowned Islamic scholars in the country, the mere mention of the Prophet himself, has the power to bring grown men to tears. (Hamza Yusuf is just one such man.)

At various moments during this trip, Bey continued on like this, mentoring one of the people who’d witnessed his own entrance into Islam. On a bus ride from Medina to Mecca, Bey advised, “You probably have an imagination of what this city is like.” Beware of that, he continued: “This city is wild.” It was dangerous and also poor. You had to carry yourself, Muhammad recalled, as you might in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn, with a special awareness of your surroundings.

But for Muhammad and his hosts on this trip, with all that awareness of the profane came an even more striking awareness of the sacred in Islam. It’s one thing to see two people pray in a room, or even ten, or maybe as many as a hundred, but in Mecca, when the call to prayer came, even those who might not have had much, “just cardboard,” Muhammad continued, each day “they all dropped down to make the salat … nose and face to the ground in one place.” The power of prayer was mind-blowing.

In early December, Black Star came through New York City for an evening of two shows at the Best Buy Theater on Broadway and 44th Street, each one promising a performance of Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star in its entirety. By 9:00 p.m., the first show already forty-five minutes behind schedule and with just ninety minutes to go before the “HARD CURFEW” announced on the rear of the stage door, Bey was still missing. Kweli, who considers himself the more practical and predictable member of Black Star—he books studio time and then, when they’re together, waits for the “vibe to be right,” he’s told me—stalled at the front of the stage with a freestyle he’d put together in early October for Occupy Wall Street: “The water drawing away from the shore / This ain’t no ordinary storm.” All the while, Blacksmith Management’s Corey Smyth (pronounced Smith), Black Star’s manager, looked on, not seeming to enjoy himself while fielding updates over the phone regarding Bey’s whereabouts. The delay had him in a kind of panic.

When Bey finally arrived wearing a version of the “classy warrior package,” his explanation, whatever it was, fell on deaf ears.

“You got misinformation!” yelled Smyth. “You got misinformation!”

Chastened, Bey then took the stage to join Kweli in the song “Astronomy (8th Light),” the first track off the album.

As the song came to a close and they were together once again, Kweli announced: “I want to welcome Yasiin Bey to the stage!” He got the name right, but I can’t imagine there wasn’t at least a little sarcasm loaded into that remark.

See, it’s difficult to find anyone who will say anything frankly negative about Yasiin Bey, which for the Muslims who know him seems in keeping with Koranic prohibitions against gossip and backbiting, something Bey himself has been known to correct his friends against. Yet apart simply from what Ali Shaheed Muhammad sees as “the way he carries himself” as a Muslim, or what was otherwise described to me as Bey’s “way of being”—from the length of his pants’ cuffs and the shine on his designer shoes, to the humility he espouses in claiming to a thousand-plus Muslims gathered at the Masjid at-Taqwa fundraiser that he’s intimidated to be “standing on the same stage as Hamza Yusuf”—Bey’s most talked-about characteristic is his aloofness.

During our conversation, Eisa Richardson told me very frankly something I already knew: “Dante’s not good with time.” Ali Shaheed Muhammad “strive[s] not to be frustrated with him” for being near impossible to reach these days. Before agreeing to speak with me, Anas Canon reached out to Bey for permission but then never heard back. (We spoke anyway.) Canon told me he never calls Bey professionally; Bey gets in touch with him. Even Talib Kweli rarely talks with Bey when they’re not together. “And if the vibe ain’t right,” Kweli said, “he doesn’t work.”

Asked whether the name “Yasiin” presents any challenge to Bey’s career, Kweli, who is not a Muslim, said flatly no. “I think there’s no better time for him to do it. This is coming from the guy who’s named Talib Kweli—my career’s getting started when the Taliban’s blowing up buildings.” More to the point, however, at least in terms of their current music, Bey and Kweli have sworn off major labels—no more middle men: “At this stage,” Kweli told me, “the Black Star name is what it is, so it’s like, we own that. It doesn’t make sense to invite more hands into the pot.”

Asked what he thought about Bey’s future without “Mos Def,” Ali Shaheed Muhammad said, “It’s a ‘win-win’ for him,” an expression typically used to describe a single beneficial outcome for two competing parties. Somehow, though, when you’re talking about Yasiin Bey this makes a little sense.

As it approached 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in January, Yasiin Bey began wrapping up a tribute to the soul singer and poet Gil Scott-Heron, who died in May 2011. He’d opened—on time, not late—nearly two hours earlier with a forceful rendition of Scott-Heron’s “Free Will,” after which he requested a cup of tea. The crowd at the Highline Ballroom had thinned considerably since the Roots bandleader ?uestlove first took his place behind the turntables five hours earlier to warm up the room. Bey had been on stage then, too, behind ?uestlove dancing and goofing and absolutely beaming at the J Dilla beats being played by the deejay, who had backed most of the performers that night on the drums, including his fellow Philadelphian Bilal, the Grammy-winning saxophonist Gary Bartz, and the legendary jazz singer Jimmy Scott, who’d performed from a wheelchair positioned in a clearing in the front of the stage and posed for photographs with the other performers, including Bey, in a hallway just off the stage.

I sat with Umi as Bey finished his set following a long and loose rendition of “Umi Says,” from Black on Both Sides, perhaps his most deeply loved and important song. Photographer Jamel Shabazz, who shot photographs for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, a film Bey performed in, told me in an email that “Umi Says” is his “national anthem”; after Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” it’s been the “soundtrack to every photograph I’ve ever made.” Ideas from “Umi Says”—a mother telling her child “shine your light on the world”—appear as early in Bey’s music as that first U.T.D. video for “Manifest Destiny”: “And the word is, the big U got it goin’ on / … / Aiyo, we gotta shine the light, aight?”

Wrapping up his tribute to Scott-Heron, Bey combined “Umi Says” with a riff on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme,” words he sang as a refrain such that, if you listened carefully, they came to sound more and more like “Allah’s supreme,” just the same way Bey could turn the lyrics “to be free” into “truly free” in “Umi Says.”

“Do you know when he says, ‘I don’t wanna write this down,’” Eisa Richardson asked me, “and he’s saying, I’m speaking from my heart to your heart? That’s really Dante. … He not only shares that moment, but he makes that moment belong to all of us.” From heart to heart, “Umi Says” is just like “The Salaams.”

And that night, in the middle of it all, as if to say his own freedom and peace comes with this, still clutching that bright red mic, the name D-A-N-T-E still wrapped around his wrist, he sang out: “I just wanna be Yasiin.”

Scott Korb is the author of Life in Year One and the forthcoming Light without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College (Beacon, 2013).

Korb, S. (2012). Yasiin Bey would like you to quit calling him Mos Def. The Awl. Retrieved from http://www.theawl.com/2012/06/mos-def-yasiin-bey

Yasiin Bey - "I Don't Like"

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How to find wild edible plants
August 29, 2012
Wild edible plants are everywhere you turn. Not only is it free food, but eating wild plants is a huge stride toward wilderness self-sufficiency. Whether you're planning on surviving on free greens or you just want to be prepared next time you go camping, here's how to get started.
Steps

1. 1
   Know where the best food is, depending on where you live. Keep in mind that if you live in a humid region, the majority of wild food will be in the sun - whether clearing or 'edge'. In a dry region, such as the Southwest, most of the wild food will be near water.
2. 2
   Pick up a local plant guidebook. Get guides to the most common edible plants in your area, typically referred to as "weeds." Learn the top 20 or 25 and try to memorize them — they might come in handy later.

3. 3
   Start with the number-one habitat for wild edible plants — your lawn. Any place that is regularly cleared is loaded with weeds such as dandelion, chickweed, plantain, wild onion, violets, wood sorrel, henbit, clover, dead-nettle and sow thistle — all of which are 100% edible.

   • Start with grass. All grass is edible. Anything under 6" is easy to chew and digest. The flavor ranges from intensely sweet to mild to bitter - anyone who's tasted a shot of wheatgrass knows just how sweet grass can be. Grass that's over 6" can either be chewed for juice and spit out, or run through a manual wheatgrass juicer for a healthy shot.

   • 4
     Visit other areas that are regularly cleared. Try roadsides (note warning below), fields, parks, and so on. They will also have tons of edible plants. Chickweed can be picked by the bucketful. Here's what to look for:

     • Dandelion (taraxacum officinale): The young unfolding greens in the center are great raw. The entire plant can be steamed. The flower is the best part. Pick it off the stem, and with your fingers pinch off the green base of the flower, so there's no white sap (the sap is very bitter). You're left with a sweet, meaty, filling wild food that can be found in incredible abundance.
     • Chickweed (stellaria media): The entire plant can be eaten raw. It has a sweet, grassy flavor. If you want to avoid the stems, and eat mostly the new growth, pluck off the tops and eat those.
     • Wood Sorrel (oxalis spp): The whole plant is great raw - it has a nice acid flavor, refreshing. The flowers of the cosmopolitan weeds are yellow, but many varieties grow in the wild with pinkish flowers. This is a plant extremely common not only in lawns and cleared areas, but also deep in the wilderness. It should not be consumed in any quantity as it contains relatively high levels of toxic oxalic acid.
     • Henbit (lamium amplexicaule): Another plant entirely edible raw. It's a Lamium, a very mild mint. Like chickweed, it has a sweet, grassy flavor - pluck off the tops to avoid the stems. This plant will form huge carpets in places, very early in the year, with an understory of chickweed beneath it.
     • Dead-nettle (lamium purpureum): Another Lamium, just like henbit. It's eaten the same way - and will also form huge carpets covering the ground, especially in spring.
     • Plantain (plantago lanceolata): Young leaves in the center are good raw - have a slight salty flavor. There's both a common and an English plantain, that are very similar.
     • Sow thistle (sonchus spp): The young leaves are decent - treat it like dandelion, and try and avoid the bitter latex sap. Sow thistle has excellent yellow flowers very similar to dandelion, yet even better, that's prepared the same way and eaten raw. Unlike dandelion, sow thistle has an upright stalk and a more prickly-looking thistle-like appearance.
     • Wild onion (allium spp): Very common in areas that are mowed. A very mild onion that is excellent raw. Harvest bunches of it and use it just like scallions.
     • Cress (cardamine spp): This is one of the many wild plants in the mustard family common in cities. When young, the leaves are excellent raw, with a mild mustard flavor. As they get older the full plants can be steamed, just as you would prepare mustard greens at home.
     • 5
       Berries:Look for berries on ornamental shrubs, such as this silverberry. Ebbing's silverberry is frequently planted in cities as bushes and hedges - but it will escape into any disturbed habitat and form thickets. The stems, foliage, and berries are all speckled with silver. The red berries are excellent when fully ripe.
     • 6
       Look for berries on trees. Even in the dead of winter, such as on this laurelcherry. Like most wild cherries, these have a long ripening process and aren't fully ripe until the fruit starts to soften and shrivel.
     • 7
       Check out ornamental trees. These are planted for their showy flowers — those flowers can lead to fruit, such as cherries or crabapples or plums. They may be small, but can be very tasty.
     • 8
       Look for nuts beneath trees. Walnuts and hickory nuts can be smashed open with a rock and the edible flesh picked out. Fresh nuts are wet and filling and easy to digest, with a lot of flavor. Acorns are abundant beneath oaks — if the oak has round-lobed leaves, the acorns will need minimal to no processing. Some white oak acorns will have no tannin at all. And keep in mind you get used to it and stop noticing it after the first few — it's how pigeons eat so many acorns.
     • 9
       Find fruiting trees. Check roadsides (note warning below), forest edges, and beside water for fruiting trees. Fruit needs sun to ripen - there's not much fruit in deep woods. The 'edges' of any environment are the most productive - trees are fertilized and keep a moisture and humidity from the forest behind them, but have access to full sun at the edge of a clearing or waterway. This is where you will find fruit like persimmons, wild apples, mulberries, autumn olives, hackberries, and so on. Below are persimmons.
     • 10
       Look for plants that grow in wet areas. Search bodies of water for signs of cattail, bulrush, and watercress. Cattail typically needs an area of stagnant water to thrive, though it will grow in streamsides. Cattail can be in preposterous abundance in lakes and bays. The shoots are wonderful raw, and the pollen in early summer tastes like cake flour. You can gather whole bags of it. Pollen is so nutritious it's considered a "superfood."

     • 11
       Nibble on safe flowers. Sample the flower petals of plants you know to be nonpoisonous. Flowers are often very mild to sweet and full of antioxidants. Some excellent blooms are daylilies, azaleas, violets and honeysuckle. Flame azalea has so much nectar the flowers taste like Orange Crush.

       • The base of flowers can be strong to bitter — it's better to break off petals and not eat the green material. + 12
         Check out thorny brambles for food. Rose, blackberry, raspberry, and greenbriar are good examples. Rose has edible hips (the common weedy thicket-forming multiflora rose is the best - the hip is small and tangy), blackberry/raspberry has berries, and greenbriar shoots and tendrils, as well as berries that are rather tasteless but still edible. Below is a multiflora rose. + 13
         Learn your vines so that you can distinguish grape. Wild grapes are found throughout the U.S. and are one of the best wild foods. There's a variety which you will see everywhere throughout the South called "muscadine" — the grapes are thick-skinned and very large, with a flavor like bubble gum. Wild grapes have both edible leaves and tendrils as well as fruit — the leaves can be steeped in apple cider vinegar and used to make dolmas. Muscadine leaves are tougher and benefit from a week-long glass jar ferment. Grape vines also make very sturdy baskets. + 14
         Find deciduous leaves. Try the deciduous leaves of trees like linden, sassafras, boxelder, sourwood - all are excellent raw. Beech leaves are also highly edible when young, for the first 2 to 4 weeks. You can pull whole salads off the trees. Linden leaves are so large they can be used as tortillas. + 15
         *Pick the new growth off conifers in the spring*. The young green shoots at the tips of the branches are great raw - a pleasant acid taste. The male pollen cones on conifers are also edible - some are very sweet. And again, it's pollen - extremely nutritious. Many species of pine have edible nuts in the cones in late summer to fall.

     Wikihow. (2012). How to find wild edible plants. Wikihow. Retrieved from http://www.wikihow.com/Find-Wild-Edible-Plants

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     How to Build a Shelter in the Wild Woods

     Shelter is one of the essential elements of survival, along with food, water, and clothing. While we can generally depend upon our home to provide all the shelter we need, a disaster can deny us this, and we will have to make our own shelter. Beingexposed to the elements increases the chance of injury or illness, so knowing how to construct a simple survival shelter can have a profound influence on how we get through an emergency. You may also need a wilderness shelter if you become lost while hiking or camping in the woods. Knowing how to provide for your survival will increase the chances you and your family have of living through a trying situation.

     Using What You May Have At Hand

     If you are trying to construct a shelter near the site of your damaged home, you will probably be able to use some of the material at hand. Many people keep tarps in the home, and if you have one of these, you can put up a simple tent by stringing a rope between two trees, throwing the tarp over it, and then weighting the edges of the tarp after pulling it out. This kind of tent will keep the sun and rain off of you, but will do little to protect you from cold weather.

     You can also use some materials from a damaged home to make a more sturdy shelter. Only take materials that you can access safely, however. Boards can be used to make a fairly weatherproof structure that can be augmented with bedding from the house.

     A Little Home In The Wilderness

     There may be times when you find yourself in need of shelter when in the wilderness. People get lost, or something occurs (like a flooding river or landslide) that cuts them off from their return route. In any case, when you find yourself in need of shelter, begin constructing it immediately. Weather changes and nighttime will come on more quickly than you may suppose, and it will be much better to work while you can still see and in some comfort.

     While it is possible to use a poncho or emergency blanket to make a crude tent, if the weather is chilly, this will do little to keep you comfortable. Use the materials at hand, and even if you have no tools, it should still be possible to make a shelter of some kind. Also important is a first aid kit to make sure anything that happens in the wilderness is under control.

     If you are in an area with trees, look for a fallen one. This can serve as a foundation on which to make your shelter. Clear the area beneath the tree and then use fallen branches to construct a lean to ‘roof’ on one side. This should be the side facing the wind. Cover this with pine branches and then work to make the sides of the shelter to provide more protection. Bring pine branches into the shelter to use as insulation on the floor.

     Building a fire in front of your shelter will provide extra heat, just do not put the fire right in front of your door, in case you have to leave suddenly. To help reflect heat into your shelter, use rocks to make a low wall behind the fire. This sort of shelter will help you to survive everything but the most extreme winter weather.

     My Survival Goods. (N.D.). How to build a sheltor in the wild woods. My Survival Goods. Retrieved from http://www.survival-goods.com/Building_A_Wilderness_Shelter_s/489.htm

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     How to Make Mud Bricks Used in Adobe Huts

     Posted on July 28, 2012 by Linda Meyers

     In southwestern United States and Mexico (as well as other parts of the world), where there are not many trees, people often build houses out of mud bricks called adobe. Adobe houses are warm in the evening and cool in the daytime.

     If a mud brick is warmed by the sun, how long will it continue to give off warmth once the sun goes down?

     Materials for making mud bricks:

     - Soil
     
     - Water
     
     - Bowl
     
     - Large mixing spoon
     
     - Straw, dry grass or pine needles
     
     - 2 thermometers
     
     - One-pint milk carton
     
     - Clock
     
     - A sunny window
     
     - Pencil and paper
     

     How to make mud bricks:

     2. Gather some straw. If you do not have straw you can use dry grass, or dry pine needles.
     
     4. Put the straw, soil from your yard, and water into a bowl and mix it well.
     
     6. Open the top of the empty one-pint milk carton. Pour the mud mixture from the bowl into the milk carton.
     
     8. Make a hole in the mud by pushing a pencil halfway down in the middle of the opening. Loosen the mud around the pencil by moving the pencil in a small circle, and then leave it in the carton.
     
     10. Place the milk carton in a sunny window and leave it there for several days to dry.
     
     12. When the brick is firm and dry, take the pencil out of it and peel off the carton.
     
     14. Leave your brick in a sunny window for one more hour. Then, put the brick on a table out of the sunlight.
     
     16. Put a thermometer into the hole of the brick. This will measure the temperature inside the brick.
     
     18. Lay another thermometer nearby on the table to measure the temperature of the air outside the brick.
     
     20. Wait a few minutes, and then read and write down the temperatures showing on the thermometer inside and outside of the brick. (How long will it take before the thermometer inside the brick is the same temperature as the one outside of it?)
     

     Many people around the world use different materials to build their houses. What are some of the advantages to using adobe bricks to build a house? What could be added to the mud mix to make stronger bricks?

     Adobe bricks are not used for building in places where there is a lot of rain, or where it is cold. What would happen if adobe bricks froze and thawed a lot? What happens to adobe bricks if they keep getting wet?

     What are some other materials that can be used to build houses?

     Linda Meyers. (2012). How to make mud bricks used in adobe huts. Blog.Heifer. Retrieved from http://www.heifer.org/blog/2012/07/how-to-make-mud-bricks-used-in-adobe-huts.html

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Fusicologist on November 9, 2012

With millions of people across the Eastern Seaboard affected by Hurricane Sandy’s destructive force, Hip Hop icon KRS-One responds with a powerfully informative song titled “Disaster Kit”. With this song, KRS-One gives listeners tips on how to survive natural and man-made disasters over an ominous piano loop and hard hitting kicks and snares produced by legendary Hip Hop Reggae artist Mad Lion.

Moved by the tragedy that is still unfolding across the United States, KRS-One says, “This is an opportunity to show the world what Hip Hop is capable of. Obviously this project isn’t about raising money or making money. This is purely about knowledge and survival; I truly hope the world benefits from these words.”

According to KRS-One, the intention of “Disaster Kit” is to get the Hip Hop community mentally prepared for increased environmental instability. “By memorizing the lyrics of this song, you at least prepare yourself with a mental checklist against natural and man-made disasters.” KRS-One supports the free distribution of this information.

Disaster Kit is available as a free download

Find KRS-One on Facebook or Twitter at @IAmKRSOne

Fusicology. (2012). KRS-One releases exclusive public service song in light of increasing environmental instability. Fusicology. Retrieved from http://fusicology.com/2012/11/09/krs-one-releases-exclusive-public-service-song-in-light-of-increasing-environmental-instability/

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WE ARE STILL TROY DAVIS RALLY & MEMORIAL AFRIKAN DRUM CIRCLE-

1 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE MURDER OF TROY DAVIS!

Join us at Troy Davis Park (aka Robert Woodruff Park) downtown Atlanta, 7:00pm on September 21st as we commemorate the one year anniversary of the murder of Troy Davis, an innocent man whose life was taken by the state. We will also be paying homage to two of Troys family members, his mother Virginia Davis who, according to her daughter Martina, "died of a broken heart" shortly after Troy Davis' final appeal was denied and a few months before his execution...“I just think my mother died of a broken heart, but she made sure we were strong enough to deal with this,” Correia said. “It’s not just the inmate who is on Death Row. That whole family is on Death Row.” (source http://blackamericaweb.com/). Troys sister Martina Correia also transcended after losing an 11 year battle with breast cancer just months after Troys execution. We hold the state fully responsible for ALL of the Davis families losses and on September 21st we will show that we have not, and will never forget their blatant disregard for human life and the hypocrisy and corruption of the U.S. Injustice System.

WE ARE STILL TROY DAVIS!

The rally will include a drum circle, guest speakers, and spoken word selections. This is an event for everyone! We encourage all people, organizations, religious groups, political groups, etc... to join in on the memorial. Because WE are the people

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Martin Luther King Jr.

This event will be immediately followed by the "National Day of Action Against Mass Incarceration" By Georgians For Prison Abolition.

Please support both events! Please support the Davis family!

September 21st, 2012 -

Troy Davis Park (Woodruff Park)
7pm - Rally and Drum Circle

9pm - March Against Mass Incarceration to the Martin Luther King Center - Auburn Avenue
11:08pm - Vigil to mark the anniversary of Troy Davis' murder

*PLEASE FORWARD AND SHARE AMONGST YOUR NETWORKS***

Visit FTP MOVEMENT at: http://ftpmovement.ning.com/?xg_source=msg_mes_network

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August 30 2012
By Ronnie Cummins,
Organic Consumers Association

If you think you should have the same right to know what’s in your food as consumers in nearly 50 other countries, please help us pass this country’s first GMO labeling law – Proposition 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act – by signing this petition today.

You might think, what’s the point of signing another petition when Monsanto employees are in bed with the federal government? When politicians repeatedly reject the pleas of the 90% of consumers who demand GMO labeling? When Monsanto and Dow and DuPont and major food processors like Pepsi and CocaCola have already put up $25 million to defeat GMO labeling in California?

The point is this: Every news story we create that draws attention to this David vs. Goliath fight helps fire up California voters by showing them that every sane, health-minded consumer in the country stands in solidarity with them on this issue.

And fired-up voters are more likely to get out and vote.

Please sign this petition today. When we reach our goal of 200,000 signatures, we will hand deliver this petition to the White House, and make sure we have national media on hand to tell our story.

On the campaign trail in 2007, candidate Obama promised to support the right to know what’s in our food. President Obama, however, has since sided with Monsanto – not the voters who elected him, not the 90% of people in this country who want GMOs labeled.

Mrs. Obama is famous for the White House organic garden, for speaking out against childhood obesity and for better nutrition in school lunches. She’s the President’s closest confidante. So we’re calling on her to tell President Obama: Keep your word. Listen to the people, not the corporations. Do the right thing.

We may not be able to change the President’s mind with this petition. But we promise we’ll get his attention and hold him accountable – in an election year – for what he promised us four years ago.

Prop 37 is the best chance we have of defeating the corporate agri-giants and of forcing food manufacturers to stop hiding potentially dangerous ingredients in our food, without our knowledge.

Please sign today. And then forward this to everyone you know, and ask them to sign, too. Every action counts. Thank you!

Cummins, R. Proposition 37: The United State's first GMO labeling law. Mercola. Retrieved from http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2012/08/30/an-urgent-message-from-ronnie-cummins.aspx

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This is just one example of what KNOWING LAW does for God having a human experience in Amerikkka and the world.

A father rescues his son from police officers, a.k.a. police terrorists, f.k.a. slave patrol overseers by exclusively standing on his square using the process of LAW.