Mark Morford on the "Honeybee Apocalypse"
by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg, St. Louis, MO on 05.10.07
We've written about "colony collapse disorder" and the massive decline in honeybee populations a number of times here at Treehugger. Yesterday, SFGate.com and San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford offered his two cents on this disturbing development, and we thought it was worth a nod. According to Morford,
What's killing all the bees? Is it some sort of new, ultra-resilient parasite? Is it pesticides? Overbreeding? Stress? Pollution and genetic diddering and cell phone towers? Is it Ashlee Simpson? No one has a clue. Check that: A few smart people have a clue or two (it's a newfangled parasite! says the guy who helped find the cause of SARS), but at this point they're basically just guessing. Most say it's likely some complicated tangle of causes, some mishmash problem that won't be so easy to decipher.Doom and gloom? Perhaps. Morford's Swiftian approach may put some off, but there's also a glimmer of hope here that we can respond to this "karmic bitch-slap" and see the "honeybee apocalypse" as a canary in the mine moment that spurs us to action. At the very least, we can laugh... ::SFGate.comI know what you're thinking. And yes, chances are very good we'll figure it all out before the Great Pomegranate Wars of 2010. Surely we'll manage to finagle and wend and sneak our way out of yet another calamitous man-made (or at the very least, man-assisted) natural catastrophe because, well, this is what we do. We're a scrappy species. We have science and money and brains that deduce. Surely we'll find a way to seduce the bees back to life and it's entirely possible you've already read about and then forgotten this disturbing story entirely because, well, what the hell can you really do about it?
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Why don't we domesticate another variety of pollenating insect for redundancy purposes?
We're acting like this is a new occurance. What about the frogs that are growing 3 legs. Didn't we say then that this must be our fault and we must change now? Are the bees Strike Two and what will be Strike Three You're OUT!!
I cannot laugh at the destruction of a species that gives us far more than they take.
Unfortunately, it's going to take something extremely devastating for the world to truly wake up. Then...We'll attribute it to God and not man itself and further put our collective heads up our arses.
The frogs growing three legs was actually caused by a perfectly natural parasite. It's a shame we can't use this example, but it's hard to find a canary for a field that is so very based on long term trends. I think we should try to focus on issues we understand the cause of when trying to win new Greenies.
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=575