The Canary in the Coal Mine

Honey bees are a favorite of mine. Videotaping these industrial wonders doing their thing in flowers of all types never ceases to amaze but less of them come around doing what they do best because of what we are doing to their world.

We know what is killing the bees. Worldwide Bee Colony Collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical companies claim. The systemic nature of the problem makes it complex, but not impenetrable. Scientists know that bees are dying from a variety of factors - pesticides, drought, habitat destruction, nutrition deficit, air pollution, global warming and so forth. The causes of collapse merge and synergize, but we know that humanity is the perpetrator, and that the two most prominent causes appear to be pesticides and habitat loss.

Biologists have found over 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly "pesticide cocktail" according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable.

Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agribusiness converts grasslands and forest into monoculture farms, which are then contaminated with pesticides. To reverse the world bees decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and destructive agricultural system.

In almost every way, if one looks at how we produce food and generate energy at industrial levels, the processes are inherently destructive as seen by the following:

1. 90% of the fish stocks in the ocean are being harvested at a rate too fast for the sea to replenish.
2. People and animals in PA are getting sick because of the environmental impact of fracking on their environment.
3. The Alberta Tar Sands project is the largest land operation in the world. It could grow to the size of New York before all the Bitumen is extracted from the earth. 
4. The tar sands di bit is the dirtiest fuel on earth.
5. GMO corn is now banned in eight nations including Hungary, France and Mexico, but not in the US, due to the negetive impact it has had on the environment.
6. Beef and chicken are unofficially considered frankenfoods thanks to the extensive use of steroids, antibiotics and genetic manipulation to produce livestock able to grow bigger and faster in time frames not possible to achieve without the use of these methodologies. See Food Inc as reference.

Any questions?