According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him:
"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."
And in today's NY Times it says that more than a ¼ of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished. The article continues with a lot of head scratching as to why but sort of says “gee, we dunno.”
In Speigel, the German newsmagazine, they say, “Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.”
A month or so ago I read a similar article that said the bees were disappearing out west. Then, a few weeks later, I read a seemingly unrelated article that said that growers of GM tangerines were furious with beekeepers for allowing their bees to wander into the GM-planted fields.
We don't know, but Byrne suggests that genetically modified crops could be at fault. Could he be right? Anybody know? I am skeptical of Frankenfood alarmism, but if a connection could be made between the die-off of bees and GM food, that would be catastrophic.
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I'm wondering why no one thinks about the impact of insecticides. We've been spraying bugs like mad for many years, and bees ARE bugs, right? I love bees and hate mosquitos. What's a guy to do?
I think our fascination with bees goes back quite awhile. See the fourth book of Vergil's Georgics. I think it's because bees live in societies that seem, in some ways, to serve as an analogue for human societies. (So do ants, but it was a lot harder for the ancients to observe ants.)
Courageman, It was an Eddie Murphy routine.
I like this quote from David Byrne's column: "Would a civilization commit suicide? You bet they would they ve done it all the time. I read Jared Diamond s book Collapse and, sure enough, according to him culture and greed trump common sense and reason every time although in many cases it took a disaster like a drought or war to push things over the tipping point." Unfortunately, all of my life experience bears this out. Perhaps it's simply part of human nature to ignore the sword(s) that are hanging over our civilization and pretend we aren't headed for disaster on many fronts. When I read about the run-up to WWI and WWII, the picture seems quite similar.
Sooner or later, the borrowed time we have been living on will run out.
Courageman, It was an Eddie Murphy routine. It may have been, though I don't remember it and I'm a Murphy fan from way back (gooney-googoo). But the thesis nevertheless has been argued with a straight face. Don't make me dig up the footnotes, I know whereof I speak. What that fact says about the comedy of a pomo-drunk university and "activist" circles is not a subject on which I will speculate.
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