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re: the "Environmental Working Group"*(in case you all were curious):

* Supporter of radical environmentalist causes
* Heavily funded by the Ford Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, the W. Alton Jones Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and the Turner Foundation

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) presents a dual example of bad science masquerading as environmental activism, and political corruption run amuck in the philanthropy business. Ostensibly created in 1993, the EWG actually began receiving foundation money in 1989 under the leadership of Kenneth Cook, at that time vice-president of the publishing house Center for Resource Economics/Island Press (CRE/IP). Early supporters included the Hewlett and Ford Foundations and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and by 1993 the group had accepted nearly $5 million.

CRE/IP was founded as Island Press in 1979 by Catherine Mellon, and was reorganized as the CRE/IP in 1984; the operations of CRE/IP were headed by Tides Foundation director Charles Savitt. Drummond Pike, founder of the Tides Foundation, has also served on the boards of both CRE/IP and EWG from its inception. In 1993, Cook separated EWG from CRE/IP and moved it under the umbrella of the Tides Foundation. In 1996, the Tides Foundation spun off the Tides Center and EWG was shifted to the new entity. In 1999, EWG incorporated as a separate entity.

In agriculture, EWG has been a leading proponent of the virtues of organic foods, despite the fact that those virtues are largely illusory. A 1999 report by EWG, How 'Bout Them Apples, claimed that children who ingested apples with legal residues of methyl parathion could suffer dizziness, nausea, or other illness. The EPA flatly denied the claim, which EWG could not substantiate. The legal limit of atrazine in drinking supplies is 3 parts per billion. EWG attempted to claim that the federal standard was 0.15 parts per billion, a statement that was simply untrue and was designed to garner headlines and induce panic. In 1996, EWG produced its landmark Shoppers Guide to Pesticides in Produce; EWG ignored the volume of pesticides, the real measure of toxicity, and focused instead on the number of stray or trace levels detected, a number which in no way illustrates potential health risks. The EPA quickly denounced the Guide as junk science, and the Guide's mastermind, EWG's Richard Wiles, conceded to investigative reporter Matt Labash that EWG did not have a single scientist or doctor on its staff. Despite the Guide's lack of scientific credibility, EWG's website trumpets the fact that organic food giant, Stonyfield Farms, has given EWG a grant to re-release the work.

EWG has published a Farm Subsidy Database that ignores how much subsidy money has been given for soil conservation and farm and timberland retirement. In addition, while EWG claims that subsidies have gone to wealthy corporations, EWG's own database makes clear that often those "subsidies" are actually negative subsidies, i.e., fines or other payments made by corporations to the Agriculture Department.

EWG has desperately waged war with chemical companies, using the Freedom of Information Act to acquire data that it intends to feed to lawyers, hoping to generate harassing lawsuits. Currently, EWG is attacking DuPont over Teflon, and hopes to involve the 3M Company in the suit. EWG has harassed the lumber and timber industries over the use of arsenic as a wood preservative, despite the EPA's assertion that the minimal level of arsenic constitutes no public health risk. EWG has manufactured alarmist statistics on the elevated level of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in farm-raised salmon, despite the fact that the National Cancer Institute denies that the trace levels of PCBs pose any health risk whatsoever. EWG has attacked the use of pesticides at virtually every opportunity, despite the minimal health risks posed by pesticides and the potential bacteriological dangers posed by organic foods, the industry which has been the real beneficiary of EWG's "science."

* Source: discoverthenetwork.org