Synergies

Everything is connected, nothing happens in isolation as seen through the lens of quantum theory, a universal condition that readily applies to the plight of the honey bee and what is being done to this wonderful insect through a synergistic set of atrocities. 

The real issue, though, is not the volume of problems, but the interactions among them. Here we find a core lesson from the bees that we ignore at our peril: the concept of synergy, where one plus one equals three, or four, or more. A typical honeybee colony contains residue from more than 120 pesticides. Alone, each represents a benign dose. But together they form a toxic soup of chemicals whose interplay can substantially reduce the effectiveness of bees’ immune systems, making them more susceptible to diseases.

In reading Our Bees, Ourselves, one readily sees commonality with the honey bee problem with our own in terns of  our continued existence on this planet as we are doing the same thing to earth as to the bee. In addition to poison, we plunder the seas, pollute the environment and push the resource overshoot ever closer to June, the point of no return in terms of earth being able to sustain us as our population grows ever larger while earth's resources diminish ever faster. 

Our survival depends on conservation, bio diversity and the complete transition to sustainables while, at the same time, finally abandoning the notion of unlimited growth based on the false premise that earth's treasures are infinite while in fact, they are anything but.