Who Needs Bees Anyway?

It's amazing what you can do in six years if you really try...
In that time, we have managed to destroy most of the diversity that characterizes our planet—from the tiny bee to the giant polar beer.
One pays a price for ignoring science and the truth.
Nevertheless, I don’t think most of our White House executives responsible for contributing to this condition are going to lose much sleep over what they’ve done.

What does it matter if we don’t have polar bears…. And who cares about those pesky little bees who are too ready to sting you?

Well, here’s the skinny: A lot of people are concerned about just those things.

Why? Because they signal that our ecology, our environment and infrastructure are falling apart and we need to do something about it.

We’ve already allowed these dangerous signs to go unnoticed.

Consider a simple example: The frogs.

Hundreds of variations have mutated into genres that will not survive. They have mutated backwards if that’s possible and lost their adaptability.

Why is this bad?

Because like the canaries in the gold mine, we are just like the frogs—susceptible to many of the same things.

And when we ignore their plight, we ignore our own futures…

Things are going around us that are deplorable.

Consider the state of over-fishing. With the methods in play today, it’s like harvesting the bottom of the sea; only the commercial interests are only interested in a fraction of what they catch and so the rest are returned to the sea as dead fish and bivalves, creating toxic conditions for the remaining schools of fish.

This kind of fishing should be outlawed by the International Community and the US should take the lead. But we don’t feel any moral obligation to lead the world despite those voices in our president’s head which he attributes to a “higher authority…”

In every sphere, if we are not the primary cause of losses, we are contributing mightily to them.

And that does not auger well for our future.

We can’t seem to get it through our thick heads, that everything we do “there” has an effect over “here…”

Consider the Monarch butterfly who winters in Mexico.

Whereas during these migratory periods they are seen everywhere in South West Mexico, in the past few years their numbers have dwindled remarkably.

Some of our microbiologists sought the reasons why.

It turned out that on the way to Mexico they stopped off in the mid-west to catch up on their fill of corn.

Only they picked on the biologically altered strains and they couldn’t digest the corn and they died in the corn fields by the hundreds of thousands.

Sure, those interested in maximizing profits may say what does the plight of a butterfly have to do with feeding the world.

For some that may seem like a trade-off, but when a butterfly can’t digest the corn and survive, this may tell you that something is wrong in what we are doing.

But that is only the beginning…

It does not begin to discuss the fact that because of global warming, we are in danger of losing our penguin populations; or that warming up may further reduce the population of polar bears which have already been depleted from tens of thousands to a handful who may survive….

Or the fact that dwindling populations of wild animals in another fifty years may only be seen in zoos….

And while we even shrug at any perceived responsibility for the loss of bees, we should worry about it….because, ultimately, bees are responsible for pollinating most of the crops that we use for food…

Once upon a time, people believed in the forgiving nature of the planet.

We now know that that isn’t so. We know that if we do something over “there,” it will surely show up over “here…” in ways that we may not even be able to imagine.
And if we think Katrina is an abnormality, we should guess again.

Nature has finally popped up in our viewing glass although we are quick to dispel any lessons we might learn.

And that is the kind of dangerous mix of thinking that will force us to contend with rising tides of a foot or more in the next dozen years and increasing temperatures whose impact we can hardly gauge at this point of time.

The wise man said “prepare for anything,” it’s only the fool who plunges ahead unconcerned about the damage he causes and the longer term implications for the rest of us.

And while the unconcerned may ignore the abnormalities that have differentiated the last few years, others, more mature and seasoned, know that something is in the wind and we only ignore it at our peril.

Les Aaron
The Armchair Curmudgeon