Tag Archives: control

The Obama administration pushed out an environmental rule just in time for Trump to reverse ’em.

by DenaUGEfcsg Posted on December 19, 2016

That’s according to a Reuters investigation that analyzed blood tests from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over 1,100 of those communities have lead levels four times as high as those observed in Flint.

Nationwide, the exposure could be much higher: Data was only available for 21 states, accounting for 61 percent of the U.S. population.

The CDC estimates that 2.5 percent of children across in the United States have at least slightly elevated levels of lead, which can lead to lowered IQs, developmental delays, and learning difficulties, as well as miscarriage and premature birth. The local water supply is frequently the source of lead, but some communities are additionally plagued by industrial waste, lead paint, and lead pipes.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump vowed to address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure — including the lead crisis — but many of his cabinet picks have a history of combating legislation that protect public health.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sued that very agency for using the Clean Water Act to prosecute waterway polluters. According to Pruitt, the Act threatens the “property rights of the average American.” He didn’t mention their brains.

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The Obama administration pushed out an environmental rule just in time for Trump to reverse ’em.

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There are over 3,000 U.S. communities with lead levels twice as high as in Flint.

by BeatrizMcGhee Posted on December 19, 2016

That’s according to a Reuters investigation that analyzed blood tests from state health departments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over 1,100 of those communities have lead levels four times as high as those observed in Flint.

Nationwide, the exposure could be much higher: Data was only available for 21 states, accounting for 61 percent of the U.S. population.

The CDC estimates that 2.5 percent of children across in the United States have at least slightly elevated levels of lead, which can lead to lowered IQs, developmental delays, and learning difficulties, as well as miscarriage and premature birth. The local water supply is frequently the source of lead, but some communities are additionally plagued by industrial waste, lead paint, and lead pipes.

On the campaign trail, President-elect Trump vowed to address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure — including the lead crisis — but many of his cabinet picks have a history of combating legislation that protect public health.

Scott Pruitt, Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, sued that very agency for using the Clean Water Act to prosecute waterway polluters. According to Pruitt, the Act threatens the “property rights of the average American.” He didn’t mention their brains.

Source:

There are over 3,000 U.S. communities with lead levels twice as high as in Flint.

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

by CoyYlgpzorgdmw Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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Mick Mulvaney, the ultra-conservative South Carolina congressman whom Donald Trump has tapped to be his budget director, has questioned whether the federal government should spend any money on scientific research.

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Mulvaney, a deficit hawk who recently spoke before a chapter of the right-wing-fringe John Birch Society, would be in charge of crafting Trump’s budget and overseeing the functioning of federal agencies. One thing he seems to believe the budget and the agencies should not be funding is research into diseases like the Zika virus.

Two weeks before Congress finally passed more than $1 billion to fight the spread of Zika and its effects, Mulvaney questioned whether the government should fund any scientific research. “Do we need government-funded research at all,” he wrote in a Facebook post on September 9 unearthed by the Democratic opposition research group American Bridge. Mulvaney appears to have deleted his Facebook page since then.

In the post, he justified his position on government-funded research by questioning the scientific consensus that Zika causes the birth defect microcephaly. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) concluded in April that the Zika virus causes microcephaly and other defects. But Mulvaney wrote:

And before you inundate me with pictures of children with birth defects, consider this:

Brazil’s microcephaly epidemic continues to pose a mystery — if Zika is the culprit, why are there no similar epidemics in countries also hit hard by the virus? In Brazil, the microcephaly rate soared with more than 1,500 confirmed cases. But in Colombia, a recent study of nearly 12,000 pregnant women infected with Zika found zero microcephaly cases. If Zika is to blame for microcephaly, where are the missing cases? According to a new report from the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), the number of missing cases in Colombia and elsewhere raises serious questions about the assumed connection between Zika and microcephaly.

According to the New York Times, the relatively low rate of microcephaly in Colombia has indeed puzzled some researchers, who point to the fact that many women likely delayed pregnancy or had abortions when testing revealed the birth defect. But that doesn’t change the scientific consensus linking Zika to microcephaly.

Here’s the full post from Mulvaney:

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Trump’s Pick for Budget Director Isn’t Sure the Government Should Fund Scientific Research

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Infant Mortality Rose 1.3% Last Year

by VeroniqCollier Posted on December 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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Today the Centers for Disease Control announced that life expectancy at birth declined slightly between 2014 and 2015. I wonder how they calculate that? They’re basically predicting death rates around the year 2100, and it hardly seems likely they can do this. My understanding is that it’s based on age-specific death rates prevailing for the current year, but what makes anyone think those death rates will remain the same for the next 80 years?

That’s a question for another blog post, I suppose. One thing is for sure, however: we can certainly take a look at death rates right now. And this, in particular, is disturbing:

Infant mortality in the US is already far higher than it is in the rest of the developed world. It’s under 450 in France, Germany, and Britain, for example, and under 350 in Italy, Japan, and Norway. The only OECD countries with higher infant mortality rates have per-capita incomes less than half ours.

To make things worse, the rate of infant mortality among blacks is double what it is among whites and Hispanics. It’s a horror story—and apparently it’s getting worse. How is this possible?

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Infant Mortality Rose 1.3% Last Year

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This November, Marijuana Activists are Pushing Pot Over Pills

by MarceliDenney Posted on October 21, 2016

Mother Jones

With less than a month to go before Election Day, several state level marijuana legalization campaigns have rolled out messaging that pitches weed as an alternative to deadly opioid painkillers.

This week, groups backing recreational legalization in Arizona and Massachusetts launched ads arguing marijuana should be an option for pain patients. Arizona’s Regulate Marijuana Like Alcohol campaign ran its ad during Thursday night’s NFL game, featuring former pro quarterback Jim McMahon, whose career included a stint with the Arizona Cardinals, talking about the painkillers he was prescribed for injuries.

“I was using them daily pretty much the rest of my career,” he says in the ad. “It takes its toll.”

Framing marijuana as an alternative medical treatment is of course not a new argument for pot proponents, but the strength and prominence of the country’s opioid epidemic has given marijuana activists a new chance to argue that cannabis offers a safe, overdose free option to fight pain.

Legalization activists are pointing to recent studies to make their case. One paper that came out last month found that states with medical marijuana saw fewer suspects in fatal traffic accidents test positive for opioids. And earlier this year, researchers at the University of Michigan found chronic pain patients who used medical marijuana were able to reduce their use of opioid drugs by 64 percent.

“It’s not just an argument, it’s an argument based on solid data,” said Jim Borghesani, communications director for the legalization campaign in Massachusetts, a state with one of the higher rates of drug overdoses in the country.

Earlier this month, Nevada backers of recreational marijuana legalization ran an ad showing a marine veteran who says he was prescribed OxyContin, Percocet, and Hydrocodone. After taking so many pills, “You’re addicted; You know you’re addicted,” he said. With marijuana, he says he can treat his pain but “I can also live.”

Proponents of a Florida bill legalizing medical use are running an online ad similar to the TV spots from the recreational legalization campaigns, showing a doctor who condemns prescription painkillers as “dangerous narcotics that have significant risks.”

The death toll from opioid painkillers is staggering, rivaling that of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s. In 2014, there were nearly 19,000 opioid painkiller deaths, along with more than 10,500 heroin overdose deaths, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Painkiller abuse has ravaged communities across the country, and opened the door for a heroin addiction crisis in some towns.

Marijuana advocates have long pitched the drug’s promise to bring relief to people diagnosed with serious diseases, highlighting an evolving series of conditions.

“For years, it was all about cancer and AIDS and glaucoma and these things, and then all of a sudden in 2013 with Sanjay Gupta it became about epilepsy and kids with intractable seizure disorders,” said Ben Pollara, head of the pro-medical-marijuana campaign in Florida. “What you’re seeing with opiate use and abuse and addiction as a rationale for marijuana reform has come about it a similar way.”

Just about three weeks out from the election, a new Gallup Poll shows 60 percent of Americans support legalization.

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This November, Marijuana Activists are Pushing Pot Over Pills

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

by Danilo1981 Posted on September 11, 2016

Mother Jones

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It would be impossible to fully replicate the depth of dread and disbelief that Command and Control—Eric Schlosser’s 2013 book chronicling the Air Force’s history of nuclear weapons mishaps—bestows on its readers. This is not to say that the haunting new documentary of the same name, co-written by Schlosser and director Robert Kenner (Food, Inc.), doesn’t pack a punch. While the film’s producers were forced to simplify and trim from the book’s deeper content, any viewer who has not read the original or who, like most Americans, pays little heed to our modern nuclear arsenal, is due for a fine scare.

The contextual backdrop of Schosser’s book incudes plenty of the kind of Cold War insanity that many Americans have relegated to the attics of our memories: the rush-rush nuclear buildup stewarded by the hawkish Strategic Air Command boss Gen. Curtis LeMay, the existential nuclear standoffs between JFK and the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev, the WarGames-esque computer glitches that falsely signaled Soviet nukes flying our way, and the shock of General William E. Odom, a national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, upon receiving a briefing on the SIOP, the nation’s top-secret plan in case of a nuclear conflict: “It was just a huge mechanical war plan aimed at creating maximum damage without regard to the political context,” Odom said. “The president would be left with two or three meaningless choices that he might have to make within 10 minutes after he was awakened after a deep sleep some night.”

But Schlosser’s coup de grâce was a list he obtained (via freedom of information requests) detailing a litany of nuclear fuckups by the Air Force. Although the brass typically blamed human error, the record in its totality suggested that America’s systems for safeguarding its nuclear weapons were profoundly broken, were they ever working in the first place. Some incidents were fairly minor and others reflected organizational ineptitude—an accidental shipment of missile nose-cone fuses to Taiwan, nukes sitting around in barely guarded storage igloos on foreign tarmacs, things like that. But the scariest part by far was the tale after tale of actual near-misses: nuke-laden B-52s fragmenting in midair, crashing and scattering radiation; immensely powerful warheads exposed to fire and intense heat and hurled or dropped into American fields and swamps. Yet somehow, by the grace of God, there was never an accidental nuclear detonation on American soil.

The film—which opens on a scene in September 1980, as young maintenance guys suit up to work on a Titan 2 missile in Damascus, Arkansas—features great archival footage and reenactments shot in a decommissioned silo complex. Command and Control dutifully follows the book’s basic outline. The central narrative thread involves a technician’s mistake at a Titan 2 silo that ended with the explosion of a missile whose warhead was more powerful than all the bombs America dropped in WWII combined, the nukes included. (The warhead didn’t detonate, obviously, but at the time nobody knew that it wouldn’t.)

Air Force maintenance men in a reenactment of the Damascus Incident. American Experience Films/PBS

This part of the story is related onscreen by the same former airmen, commanders, journalists, and politicos who appear in the book—largely men who were there or otherwise involved. Among them is then-Senior Airman David Powell, who was a teenager on an Air Force maintenance team when he dropped a nine-pound socket head down the silo shaft, puncturing the missile’s fuel tank. (To get a taste, read the scene as it appears in Schlosser’s book.) What comes after serves as a potent illustration of the breakdown of the military’s command-and-control structure, designed to prevent such accidents and deal with them effectively should they happen. Spoiler alert: Bad decisions are made by know-nothings up the chain of command, and bad things result.

A film, of course, delivers something a book cannot. We get to see real footage from nuclear detonations, from the actual Damascus Incident, and from some of the past nuclear mishaps, the worst one involved the accidental release of two H-bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1961—such an insanely close call that I still shudder to contemplate it. Better yet, we get to meet and hear directly from the Damascus men, including former Senior Airman Powell, an otherwise cheerful guy who tears up as he recounts how, after more than three decades, not a day goes by that he doesn’t think about that socket slipping from his hand—and the chain of events it set off.

As in the book, the tense Damascus narrative plays out against the backdrop of a nation bumbling its way along the nuclear learning curve. As Schlosser notes in the film, we’ve built some 70,000 nuclear weapons over the years, and the fact that none has detonated by accident is a testament to the smarts of the weapons designers at the Sandia Lab—guys like Bob Peurifoy, a regular presence in the film, who worked their asses off convincing the brass to install failsafe devices on the bombs. But there’s yet another key factor at play, Schlosser says: “pure luck.” And that, my friends, is unbelievably scary. Because, to quote Schlosser, nuclear weapons are simply machines, albeit “the most dangerous machines ever invented. And like every machine, sometimes they go wrong.”

Watching the quaint archival footage, a viewer would be tempted to view this problem as history, but to do so would be to bury one’s head in the sand. We still have plenty of nukes sitting around, and portions of our aging arsenal are essentially babysat, as our reporter Josh Harkinson discovered, by a bunch of disgruntled kids. The military screws things up routinely, of course, even if the public seldom hears about it. “Nuclear accidents continue to the present day,” Harold Brown, who was defense secretary under Jimmy Carter at the time of the Damascus Incident, says in the film. “The degree of oversight and attention has if anything gotten worse, because people don’t worry about nuclear war as much.”

It’s not just the US arsenal we need to worry about, however. North Korea just tested its most powerful nuke to date. And bitter enemies India and Pakistan are still young nuclear powers. Suppose a Pakistani nuke were to detonate accidentally. The first face-saving instinct might be to blame India. Not good. Peurifoy spent his entire career designing nuclear safety devices, and he believes an accidental detonation is inevitable, sometime, somewhere. “It will happen,” he says in the film. “It may be tomorrow or it may be a million years from now, but it will happen.”

Command and Control rolls out in selected theaters starting on September 14 in New York City. Click here for dates, cities, and venues.

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An Accidental Nuclear Detonation "Will Happen"

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Planned Parenthood Wins in a Florida Court

by ThomasMcPeak225 Posted on August 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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A federal judge permanently blocked parts of Florida omnibus legislation that aimed to cut off state funding for preventative health services at women’s clinics that also provide abortions, a measure that was perceived to have targeted Planned Parenthood clinics. Another provision in the law that would have vastly increased what providers have described as unnecessary records inspection requirements for abortion clinics was permanently blocked as well.

The ruling comes at a critical time for Florida—Zika is now spreading in Miami Beach and north of Miami, Gov. Rick Scott confirmed Friday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have issued a new travel warning that advises pregnant women to avoid the area. So far, there have been 36 confirmed cases.

“We are grateful the court stepped in to stop Rick Scott in his tracks and protect access to health care,” said Lillian Tamayo, CEO of Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida. “If this law had gone into effect, it would have made a bad situation even worse. With the threat of Zika growing by the day, this care is even more critical. It’s time to stop political attacks on women’s basic health care.”

The legislation passed the conservative Legislature with ease back in March, and Scott signed it into law shortly thereafter. The law specifically took aim at Planned Parenthood’s funding in the wake of a smear campaign by anti-abortion activist David Daleiden that alleged Planned Parenthood was selling fetal tissue for profit. (None of the investigations into Daleiden’s allegations have found the health care provider guilty of any wrongdoing.) In June, US District Judge Robert Hinkle temporarily put provisions in the law on hold after Florida Planned Parenthood affiliates challenged them as unconstitutional.

“The Supreme Court has repeatedly said that a government cannot prohibit indirectly—by withholding otherwise-available public funds—conduct that the government could not constitutionally prohibit directly,” Hinkle wrote in June when he placed the law on hold.

State and federal law already prohibit the use of federal funds to finance abortion procedures. The Florida law would have cut $500,000 in expected state funding that Planned Parenthood uses to fund health care screenings and a school dropout prevention program. Opponents of the law also criticized its requirements for records inspections at abortion clinics, fearing it would jeopardize patient privacy by making it easy to uncover details about mental health history, abortion care history, and HIV status.

As previously reported in Mother Jones, Scott had promised to allocate $26 million in state funds to deal with the health crisis, part of which would pay for CDC Zika prevention kits that include two kinds of mosquito repellent, tablets that kill mosquitos in water, and condoms. He has also said his office and Florida’s Department of Health were coordinating to go door to door in an effort to educate women in areas of concern about the risks Zika poses. It’s unclear whether any of those plans have been enacted.

The state could still appeal the decision, but because Scott ultimately decided to drop further legal action in this case, allowing for the injunction, it seems unlikely. Scott’s spokeswoman told ABC News that the governor is reviewing the order, and maintained that “Scott is a pro-life governor who believes in the sanctity of life.”

Originally posted here: 

Planned Parenthood Wins in a Florida Court

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The Devastation of the Opioid Epidemic, in One Chart

by Russel7134 Posted on August 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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The opioid epidemic in America is taking its toll on a class of victims who have received relatively little attention in the crisis: babies. The rate of babies born in drug withdrawal has quadrupled over a 15-year stretch, according to data released Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The report looked at the prevalence of babies born between 1999 and 2013 with neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), an illness caused by exposure in the womb to addictive drugs, primarily opioids—including heroin, methadone, and prescription painkillers such as oxycodone and hydrocodone (known by brand names OxyContin and Vicodin, respectively).

NAS isn’t known to have long-lasting effects, but babies going through it can suffer from tremors, seizures, gastrointestinal problems, and fevers. The increasing rates mirror the skyrocketing use of opioids across the country. In 2014, more than 47,000 Americans died from drug overdoses—a similar number to the fatalities during the HIV epidemic at its peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s. (According to the CDC, NAS can also be caused by non-opioid drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines, and barbiturates, but opioids are detected in the vast majority of cases.)

Only 28 states currently collect data on NAS, and some of those states have kept figures on the condition only for the past few years. But as the chart below shows, the number of babies born dependent on drugs varies drastically by state, with West Virginia, Vermont, and Maine showing the highest rates. That’s due in part to different use rates of opioids. West Virginia and Maine have some of the highest prescription opioid rates in the country, while Vermont is struggling with a spiraling heroin problem.

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In an attempt to curb the opioid crisis, the CDC released the first national standards for prescribing painkillers this spring. The recommendations, which are not binding, call for doctors to first try ibuprofen or aspirin to treat pain, limit short-term opioid treatment to three days, monitor patients’ drug use with regular urine tests and prescription tracking systems, and advise patients—particularly those who are pregnant—about the addictive effects.

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The Devastation of the Opioid Epidemic, in One Chart

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

by Sal05Hrbzqzqh Posted on August 5, 2016

We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

By on Aug 4, 2016

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

Athletes and tourists converging on Brazil this week are crowding into a country where rapid environmental change and natural weather fluctuations nurtured a viral epidemic that has gone global.

The Zika virus has exploded throughout South America, up through Mexico and Puerto Rico and into Florida, but the conditions it needed to fester in northern Brazil were rooted in urbanization and poverty. The initial Brazilian outbreak appears to have been aided by a drought driven by El Niño, and by higher temperatures caused by longer-term weather cycles and by rising levels of greenhouse gas pollution.

A truck sprays insecticide near grounds workers at Olympic media accommodations as part of preventative measures against the Zika virus.REUTERS/Chris Helgren

This combination of human and natural forces is emerging as the possible incubator of a disease that’s painfully elusive to detect, despite its cruel effects on unborn children.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an unprecedented domestic travel advisory this week, warning pregnant women to avoid a Miami neighborhood where more than a dozen Zika cases were confirmed.

The warning came six months after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency “of international concern” in Brazil, where the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics is scheduled for Friday.

Most Zika infections produce no symptoms, turning their hosts into unwitting harbors for the disease, which is mainly spread through mosquito bites. Unborn children risk microcephaly when their mothers are infected, meaning their heads are small — the result of unusual brain development.

While the effects of El Niño and other weather cycles are beyond the control of humans, the recent spread of the disease into the U.S. is a savage reminder of the heavy toll that humans are taking on their planet — and of the potential for those changes to bite back.

Climate Central research recently showed that warming temperatures have lengthened the mosquito seasons in three quarters of major cities in the United States.

For Americans unaccustomed to fearing tropical diseases at home, the northward march of the outbreak is delivering an exotic threat. Researchers are warning that the disease could reach the halls of power in Washington D.C. and the dense metropolis of New York.

Mosquitoes rely on water to breed and flourish, yet a drought that beset northern Brazil amid a heatwave in 2014 and 2015 — while the disease was stealthily taking root — is thought to have worked in the mosquitoes’ favor.

That’s because households began storing more water, ushering breeding mosquitoes and their larvae inside their homes. Like other developing countries, many in Brazil lack regular access to piped water.

“If you have a drought, you don’t have reliable water access, and that makes you go and get water and store,” said Sadie Ryan, a medical geographer at the University of Florida. “By storing it, you’re creating mosquito habitat.”

Small puddles and ponds of water that accumulate in urbanized areas also tend to favor the lifestyles of the types of mosquitoes that spread Zika, compared with those that tend to thrive in more remote regions. Ryan called these types of mosquitoes “urban capable.”

“In South America up to the ‘70s, there was a really big push for vector control,” Ryan said, referring to efforts to control mosquito populations, such as spraying insecticides. “Then the money went away for it.”

Meanwhile, temperatures have been rising globally because of the polluting effects of fossil fuel-powered industrialization, deforestation and livestock farming, and natural climate cycles have been exacerbating the rate of warming in some places, such as in northern Brazil and California. That’s significant, because mosquitoes can only survive above certain temperatures.

“Once you’re over that minimum temperature, there’s nothing killing the vector,” Ryan said. “There’s nothing slowing it down.”

In a February letter published in The Lancet, a British medical journal, the University of Haifa’s Shlomit Paz and Jan Semenza of the Stockholm Environment Institute and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control reported discovering a “striking overlap” between areas in Brazil that were afflicted by extreme weather linked to El Niño, and areas where Zika was lurking one month later.

More recently, a team of American and Venezuelan scientists took a closer statistical look at the relationship between climate and the Zika outbreak, and reported that El Niño and climate change were not the only important factors — though they were both important.

While the team blamed El Niño for the drought that fueled the Zika outbreak, they concluded that climate change and long-term weather cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is a long-term cycle in trade winds that influences surface temperatures globally, played important roles in pushing temperatures up to those favored by Zika-carrying mosquitoes.

The findings were hurriedly pre-published without being peer reviewed on the website bioRxiv. That provided health officials and policymakers with rapid information about the findings while the details continue to be reviewed and improved.

Anthony Janetos, a professor of earth and environmental studies at Boston University, who wasn’t involved with the recent study, warned that it does not definitively prove the links that the researchers reported.

Because of that, Janetos criticized the researchers for their choice of headline for the paper, which states that the Zika epidemic was “fueled by climate variations.”

“If they’d been able to show that the same patterns occurred in other outbreak regions, such as Puerto Rico, then their circumstantial case would be stronger,” Janetos said. “But they haven’t done that.”

Ángel Muñoz, a climate scientist with affiliations at Princeton and Columbia universities who led the research, acknowledged Janetos’s criticisms, and he said the headline would be changed prior to final publication.

“This paper is not an answer for a lot of the questions that we have, but it’s an important step,” Muñoz said.

“It’s not possible right now to show a formal link between Zika and climate, because no one has enough data,” Muñoz said. “You need years, not months.”

With models warning that the epidemic will worsen before it begins to improve, the human suffering that’s expected in the months and years to come may help scientists continue to tease apart roles of natural forces in driving the outbreak from those of climate change and other problems caused by humans.

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We’re starting to understand just how Zika and climate change go together

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Weeds That Are Good for Your Garden

by MeridithShade5 Posted on July 6, 2016

While some weeds are invasive and steal nutrients from intentionally planted flowers or edibles, there are other “weeds” that may actually helpyour garden or lawn. Before declaring war on those dandelions, read on to learn aboutsome of the beneficial volunteer plants.You might find some new helpers and save yourself some work.

1. Nitrogen Fixers

Plants require nitrogen to survive. The problem is most nitrogen naturally occurs as a gas in our atmosphere and is unavailable to plants.

Nitrogen fixing plants solve this issue with specialized root nodules that can take nitrogen from the air and store it in their roots. The nitrogen becomes available to other plants once the nitrogen fixers die and the roots start to decompose.

The legume family of plants are excellent nitrogen fixers, including clover, vetch, peas, beans, lupines, false indigo, and alfalfa. Leave these plants to die at the end of the season or till in perennial varieties to allow the nitrogen to be released.

Even some potentially weedy trees and shrubs are great for fixing nitrogen, such as sea buckthorn, broom, alder, locust trees, and Russian olives. The older roots that die off naturally will release nitrogen into the surrounding soil.

Dandelion

2. Deeply-Rooted Weeds

Plants with deep root systems, like docks, dandelion, pigweed, or thistles, will draw hidden nutrients to the soil surface. This often includes trace minerals that many of your shallow-rooted ornamental plants would have a hard time accessing. The deep roots also break up compacted soil to improve water permeability and texture.

These weeds are excellent to add to your compost. Try leaving some in place throughout the growing season to harvest and compost the leaves regularly before they start to flower or seed.

You can also dig up the roots at the end of the season. But make sure they dont survive in your finished compost. Try putting the harvested roots in the sun for at least a week to thoroughly dry out. Soaking the roots in a bucket of water until they ferment will also finish them off before adding to your compost.

3. Ground Covers

Ground cover plants in any form, including weeds, can help your garden in many ways.

Their roots will stabilize soil, preventing erosion and the loss of nutrient-rich top soil. The stems and leaves will provide shade to keep your ground moist and reduce irrigation needs.

Although it may sound contradictory, a good ground cover of weeds will also help with weed control. Weeds that make a tight mat of vegetation over the ground, such as purslane or dead-nettle, will prevent more invasive weeds from taking hold.

Chickweed

4. Edible Weeds

Many of our modern-day weeds were once sought-after food crops. The flavor of wild greens is often stronger than our cultivated varieties, but this is no reason to disregard them.

In fact, weeds such as lambs quarters, yellow dock, dandelion leaves, purslane, chickweed, and sorrel have two or three times the nutritional value of spinach or Swiss chard.

If you steam or saut the greens, it will remove any bitter aftertaste they may have when raw. Then you can use them as you would any other green vegetable in soups, stews, sauces, or as a simple side dish.

These are some tasty edible weeds you can try:

Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) eat the fresh leaves or dry the roots in small pieces and use in tea.
Clover (Trifolium pretense) leaves and blossoms are good fresh, blossoms can be steeped in tea.
Plantain (Plantago major) leaves are excellent steamed.
Sorrel (Rumex acetosella) lemon-flavored leaves are tasty raw when young, or steamed when older.
Watercress (Nasturtium officinale) tangy leaves are good fresh or steamed.
Chickweed (Stellaria media) fresh leaves are great in salad.
Lambs quarters (Chenopodium album) young leaves are good raw or steamed, and the seeds are also very nutritious.

5. Cover Crops

The main purpose of a cover crop is to provide more nutrients and organic matter for your soil. Many farmers and gardeners will purposely sow certain plants as cover crops, but you can also use your existing weed species.

Its recommended to regularly cut off the greens of a cover crop and leave them as a mulch to decompose on the soil, or take them to your compost. The plants can be tilled into the ground at the end of the season.

You can leave lush weeds you already have in place, such as clover, burdock, thistles, chickweed, or pigweed. Just make sure to keep cutting them down before they flower and make seeds.

Ladybug on Burdock

6. Insect Attractants and Repellants

You can help support pollinating insects by keeping some wild, flowering weeds around to provide food. Some of their favorites include dandelions, clover, thistles, evening primrose, borage, and Queen Annes lace. Allowing weedy shrubs, such as wild cherries or roses, to grow in unused corners of your yard is also useful.

These weeds can attract beneficial predatory insects to your garden as well, such as ladybugs, parasitic wasps and lacewings, which control your bad bugs.

On the other hand, some weeds can keep unwanted bugs away. A study in Florida found there was less armyworm damage in cornfields with weeds like dandelion, cockleburs and goldenrod. Plants like pennyroyal, feverfew and peppermint are known to repel mosquitos.

Weeds can also lure harmful insects away from your desired plants. For example, lambs quarters often attracts leafminers, which could attack your spinach or other greens instead.

7. Soil Indicators

Certain weeds grow best under specific soil and climate conditions. If you see them growing in an area, youll have a good idea of whats going on in that soil.

For instance, knotweed, sow thistle and plantain are all indicators of an acidic soil. Whereas sheep sorrel and yellow toadflax will often grow in poor soils low in organic matter.

If you see a lot of one or two types of weeds in a location, look into what theyre telling you before you make any further plans for the area.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Weeds That Are Good for Your Garden

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