When bees disappear, will (wo)man soon follow? : Melbourne Indymedia

Column: Shooting Dead Horses
ReligionAndSpirituality.com
April 3, 2007

Last week I received an email from a friend reporting a
sudden, devastating collapse in America's bee population. The
message triggered an immediate unpleasant shiver through my body

Being a bit skeptical, I assumed this was just another piece of
alarmist misinformation finding its way onto Internet distribution
lists. A few minutes' research not only confirmed the story, but
made me realize that the problem is far from local. In official
circles, the condition is called either Fall-Dwindle Disease or,
more commonly, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The communication I received stated: "Honeybees are flying off in
search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their
colonies. During the final three months of 2006, a distressing
number of honeybee colonies began to diminish from the United
States, and beekeepers all over the country have reported
unprecedented losses. According to scientists, the domesticated
honeybee population has declined by about 50 percent in the last
50 years. Reports of similar losses to the honeybee population
have been documented before in beekeeping literature, but are
widely believed to have occurred at this scale previously only at
a regional level. With outbreaks recorded as far back as 1896,
this is regarded as the first national honeybee epidemic in U.S.
history."

The topics grabbing headlines these days leave little room in the
news for the plight of an insect. What we fail to appreciate is
that without an abundance of bees to pollinate crops, the United
States could lose as much as 30 percent of its food supply.
According to Zac Browning, vice president of the American
Beekeeping Federation, "Every third bite we consume in our diet is
dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food."

There is no doubt about what is happening - or its consequences if
the situation is not rectified. What remains murky is the cause.
According to Walter Haefeker, director of the German Beekeepers
Association, CCD has four possible causes: the varroa mite,
introduced from Asia; the widespread practice of spraying
wildflowers with herbicides; the practice of monoculture (a single
crop covering a large area); and the controversial yet growing use
of genetic engineering in agriculture.

However, it is the thinking of one of the cell phone industry's
former scientific hired guns that caught my attention. When George
Carlo, M.D., the celebrated author of "Cell Phones: Invisible
Hazards in the Wireless Age" and current chairman of the nonprofit
Science and Public Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., weighs in
with an opinion, we'd all be fools not to listen carefully.

On a recent conference call, Dr. Carlo laid the blame for the
sudden demise (often within 72 hours) of entire bee colonies on
the recent proliferation of electromagnetic waves (EMF). He cited
the startling statistic that, at present, there are some 2.5
billion cell phone users around the world. While this (plus the
explosive growth of cell phone towers) used to be the major
concern, the problem has been significantly exacerbated by the
recent introduction of satellite radio. Imagine being closeted in
a confined environment filled with chain smokers; it would be
impossible for you to get a breath of clean air. It is becoming
equally difficult for you to avoid the now-measurable damage from
EMF exposure.

Dr. Carlo commented that the constant electromagnetic background
noise seems to disrupt intercellular communication within
individual bees, such that many of them cannot find their way back
to the hive. His conclusions are confirmed by a recent study
conducted by three departments of Panjab University (India), which
has found that cell phone towers - the dominant source of
electromagnetic radiation in the city of Chandigarh - could well
be the cause behind the mysterious disappearance of butterflies,
some insects (like bees), and birds.

Andrew Weil, M.D., author of "Spontaneous Healing and 8 Weeks to
Optimum Health," fully agrees: "Electromagnetic pollution may be
the most significant form of pollution human activity has produced
in this century, all the more dangerous because it is invisible
and insensible." In some countries, up to 10 percent of the
population suffers from a serious EMF-induced condition that Dr.
Carlo and others call membrane sensitivity syndrome. In a recent
address to the Health, Social Services and Housing Sub-Panel in
the United Kingdom, Carlo explained: "Originally, this type of
condition was the result of high chemical exposures; we used to
call it chemical sensitivity. Now we have identified the same type
of condition in patients who are exposed to various types of
electromagnetic radiation. It is a medical problem. People who
have membrane sensitivity syndrome have internal bleeding. They
can be in a room where somebody puts on a cell phone, and they
will end up having an immediate reaction; they will go home and
they will bleed and in their stool they will have blood. This
condition is very debilitating. It prevents these people from
being able to work; they cannot earn a living, they have difficult
relationships with their children, their spouses give up on them.
... It is a very, very serious medical problem."

The bees are the modern-day counterpart of the canaries that
miners used to carry with them as they descended into the mine
shafts. If the birds died, it was an early warning of a buildup of
toxic gases in the mine. When canaries die or bees disappear, we
are being cautioned that we too are in immediate danger. It is
time to listen to the message nature is telling us. Denial - the
favorite ploy of those whose profits are being threatened - is no
longer an option. As Arthur Schopenhauer said, "All truth passes
through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is
violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."

I shudder to think of what will become of humankind if we linger
too long in stage two: "no more bees, no more pollination, no more
plants, no more animals, no more man."

http://www.religionandspirituality.com/spirit_metaphysical/
view.php?StoryID=20070403-080248-2657r
- - -

Jean-Claude Gerard Koven is a writer and speaker based in Rancho
Mirage, Calif. He is a featured weekly columnist for UPI's (United
Press International) ReligionAndSpirituality.com and the author of
"Going Deeper: How to Make Sense of Your Life When Your Life Makes
No Sense," recipient of both the Allbooks Reviews editor's choice
award and the USABookNews.com award for the best metaphysical book of the year. For more information, please visit:
http://www.goingdeeper.org.

http://www.counterpunch.org/castro04072007.html

Where Have All the Bees Gone?
And Other Reflections on the Internationalization of Genocide

By FIDEL CASTRO

The Camp David meeting has just come to an end. All of us followed
the press conference offered by the presidents of the United States
and Brazil attentively, as we did the news surrounding the meeting
and the opinions voiced in this connection.

Faced with demands related to customs duties and subsidies which
protect and support US ethanol production, Bush did not make the
slightest concession to his Brazilian guest at Camp David.

President Lula attributed to this the rise in corn prices, which,
according to his own statements, had gone up more than 85 percent.

Before these statements were made, the Washington Post had published an article by the Brazilian leader which expounded on the idea of transforming food into fuel.

It is not my intention to hurt Brazil or to meddle in the internal
affairs of this great country. It was in effect in Rio de Janeiro,
host of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, exactly 15 years ago, where I delivered a 7-minute speech vehemently denouncing the environmental dangers that menaced our species' survival. Bush Sr., then President of the United States, was present at that meeting and applauded my words out of courtesy; all other presidents there applauded, too.

No one at Camp David answered the fundamental question. Where are the more than 500 million tons of corn and other cereals which the United States, Europe and wealthy nations require to produce the gallons of ethanol that big companies in the United States and other countries demand in exchange for their voluminous investments going to be produced and who is going to supply them? Where are the soy,
sunflower and rape seeds, whose essential oils these same, wealthy
nations are to turn into fuel, going to be produced and who will
produce them?

Some countries are food producers which export their surpluses. The
balance of exporters and consumers had already become precarious
before this and food prices had skyrocketed. In the interests of
brevity, I shall limit myself to pointing out the following:

According to recent data, the five chief producers of corn, barley,
sorghum, rye, millet and oats which Bush wants to transform into the
raw material of ethanol production, supply the world market with 679
million tons of these products. Similarly, the five chief consumers,
some of which also produce these grains, currently require 604
million annual tons of these products. The available surplus is less
than 80 million tons of grain.

This colossal squandering of cereals destined to fuel production -and
these estimates do not include data on oily seeds-shall serve to save
rich countries less than 15 percent of the total annual consumption
of their voracious automobiles.

At Camp David, Bush declared his intention of applying this formula
around the world. This spells nothing other than the
internationalization of genocide.

In his statements, published by the Washington Post on the eve of the
Camp David meeting, the Brazilian president affirmed that less than
one percent of Brazil's arable land was used to grow cane destined to
ethanol production. This is nearly three times the land surface Cuba
used when it produced nearly 10 million tons of sugar a year, before
the crisis that befell the Soviet Union and the advent of climate
changes.

Our country has been producing and exporting sugar for a longer time.
First, on the basis of the work of slaves, whose numbers swelled to
over 300 thousand in the first years of the 19th century and who
turned the Spanish colony into the world's number one exporter.
Nearly one hundred years later, at the beginning of the 20th century,
when Cuba was a pseudo-republic which had been denied full
independence by US interventionism, it was immigrants from the West
Indies and illiterate Cubans alone who bore the burden of growing and
harvesting sugarcane on the island. The scourge of our people was the
off-season, inherent to the cyclical nature of the harvest. Sugarcane
plantations were the property of US companies or powerful Cuban-born
landowners. Cuba, thus, has more experience than anyone as regards
the social impact of this crop.

This past Sunday, April 1, CNN televised the opinions of Brazilian
experts who affirm that many lands destined to sugarcane have been
purchased by wealthy Americans and Europeans.

As part of my reflections on the subject, published on March 29, I
expounded on the impact climate change has had on Cuba and on other basic characteristics of our country's climate which contribute to
this.

On our poor and anything but consumerist island, one would be unable
to find enough workers to endure the rigors of the harvest and to
care for the sugarcane plantations in the ever more intense heat,
rains or droughts. When hurricanes lash the island, not even the best
machines can harvest the bent-over and twisted canes. For centuries,
the practice of burning sugarcane was unknown and no soil was
compacted under the weight of complex machines and enormous trucks.
Nitrogen, potassium and phosphate fertilizers, today extremely
expensive, did not yet even exist, and the dry and wet months
succeeded each other regularly. In modern agriculture, no high yields
are possible without crop rotation methods.

On Sunday, April 1, the French Press Agency (AFP) published
disquieting reports on the subject of climate change, which experts
gathered by the United Nations already consider an inevitable
phenomenon that will spell serious repercussions for the world in the
coming decades.

According to a UN report to be approved next week in Brussels,
climate change will have a significant impact on the American
continent, generating more violent storms and heat waves and causing
droughts, the extinction of some species and even hunger in Latin
America.

The AFP report indicates that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) forewarned that at the end of this century, every
hemisphere will endure water-related problems and, if governments
take no measures in this connection, rising temperatures could
increase the risks of mortality, contamination, natural catastrophes
and infectious diseases.

In Latin America, global warming is already melting glaciers in the
Andes and threatening the Amazon forest, whose perimeter may slowly be turned into a savannah, the cable goes on to report.

Because a great part of its population lives near the coast, the
United States is also vulnerable to extreme natural phenomena, as
hurricane Katrina demonstrated in 2005.
According to AFP, this is the second of three IPCC reports which
began to be published last February, following an initial scientific
forecast which established the certainty of climate change.

This second 1400-page report which analyzes climate change in
different sectors and regions, of which AFP has obtained a copy,
considers that, even if radical measures to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions that pollute the atmosphere are taken, the rise in
temperatures around the planet in the coming decades is already
unavoidable, concludes the French Press Agency.

As was to be expected, at the Camp David meeting, Dan Fisk, National
Security advisor for the region, declared that "in the discussion on
regional issues, [I expect] Cuba to come up () if there's anyone that
knows how to create starvation, it's Fidel Castro. He also knows how
not to do ethanol".

As I find myself obliged to respond to this gentleman, it is my duty
to remind him that Cuba's infant mortality rate is lower than the
United States'. All citizens -- this is beyond question -- enjoy free
medical services. Everyone has access to education and no one is
denied employment, in spite of nearly half a century of economic
blockade and the attempts of US governments to starve and
economically asphyxiate the people of Cuba.

China would never devote a single ton of cereals or leguminous plants
to the production of ethanol, and it is an economically prosperous
nation which is breaking growth records, where all citizens earn the
income they need to purchase essential consumer items, despite the
fact that 48 percent of its population, which exceeds 1.3 billion,
works in agriculture. On the contrary, it has set out to reduce
energy consumption considerably by shutting down thousands of
factories which consume unacceptable amounts of electricity and
hydrocarbons. It imports many of the food products mentioned above
from far-off corners of the world, transporting these over thousands
of miles.

Scores of countries do not produce hydrocarbons and are unable to
produce corn and other grains or oily seeds, for they do not even
have enough water to meet their most basic needs.

At a meeting on ethanol production held in Buenos Aires by the
Argentine Oil Industry Chamber and Cereals Exporters Association,
Loek Boonekamp, the Dutch head of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD)'s commercial and marketing
division, told the press that governments are very much enthused
about this process but that they should objectively consider whether
ethanol ought to be given such resolute support.

According to Boonekamp, the United States is the only country where
ethanol can be profitable and, without subsidies, no other country
can make it viable.

According to the report, Boonekamp insists that ethanol is not manna
from Heaven and that we should not blindly commit to developing this
process.

Today, developed countries are pushing to have fossil fuels mixed
with biofuels at around five percent and this is already affecting
agricultural prices. If this figure went up to 10 percent, 30 percent
of the United States' cultivated surface and 50 percent of Europe's
would be required. That is the reason Boonekamp asks himself whether
the process is sustainable, as an increase in the demand for crops
destined to ethanol production would generate higher and less stable
prices.

Protectionist measures are today at 54 cents per gallon and real
subsidies reach far higher figures.

Applying the simple arithmetic we learned in high school, we could
show how, by simply replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent
ones, as I explained in my previous reflections, millions and
millions of dollars in investment and energy could be saved, without
the need to use a single acre of farming land.

In the meantime, we are receiving news from Washington, through the
AP, reporting that the mysterious disappearance of millions of bees
throughout the United States has edged beekeepers to the brink of a
nervous breakdown and is even cause for concern in Congress, which
will discuss this Thursday the critical situation facing this insect,
essential to the agricultural sector. According to the report, the
first disquieting signs of this enigma became evident shortly after
Christmas in the state of Florida, when beekeepers discovered that
their bees had vanished without a trace. Since then, the syndrome
which experts have christened as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has
reduced the country's swarms by 25 percent.

Daniel Weaver, president of the US Beekeepers Association, stated
that more than half a million colonies, each with a population of
nearly 50 thousand bees, had been lost. He added that the syndrome
has struck 30 of the country's 50 states. What is curious about the
phenomenon is that, in many cases, the mortal remains of the bees are
not found.

According to a study conducted by Cornell University, these
industrious insects pollinate crops valued at anywhere from 12 to 14
billion dollars.

Scientists are entertaining all kinds of hypotheses, including the
theory that a pesticide may have caused the bees' neurological damage
and altered their sense of orientation. Others lay the blame on the
drought and even mobile phone waves, but, what's certain is that no
one knows exactly what has unleashed this syndrome.

The worst may be yet to come: a new war aimed at securing gas and oil
supplies that can take humanity to the brink of total annihilation.

Invoking intelligence sources, Russian newspapers have reported that
a war on Iran has been in the works for over three years now, since
the day the government of the United States resolved to occupy Iraq
completely, unleashing a seemingly endless and despicable civil war.

All the while, the government of the United States devotes hundreds
of billions to the development of highly sophisticated technologies,
as those which employ micro-electronic systems or new nuclear weapons
which can strike their targets an hour following the order to attack.

The United States brazenly turns a deaf ear to world public opinion,
which is against all kinds of nuclear weapons.

Razing all of Iran's factories to the ground is a relatively easy
task, from the technical point of view, for a powerful country like
the United States. The difficult task may come later, if a new war
were to be unleashed against another Muslim faith which deserves our
utmost respect, as do all other religions of the Near, Middle or Far
East, predating or postdating Christianity.

The arrest of English soldiers at Iran's territorial waters recalls
the nearly identical act of provocation of the so-called "Brothers to
the Rescue" who, ignoring President Clinton's orders advanced over
our country's territorial waters. Cuba's absolutely legitimate and
defensive action gave the United States a pretext to promulgate the
well-known Helms-Burton Act, which encroaches upon the sovereignty of
other nations besides Cuba. The powerful media have consigned that
episode to oblivion. No few people attribute the price of oil, at
nearly 70 dollars a gallon as of Monday, to fears of a possible
invasion of Iran.

Where shall poor Third World countries find the basic resources
needed to survive?

I am not exaggerating or using overblown language. I am confining
myself to the facts.

As can be seen, the polyhedron has many dark faces.

[Perhaps it's just the Internationalization of the Hunger Experiment
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15306.htm
to get rid of the not-divinely-chosen masses...]

we can sort this problem out
einstein of all people probably has the worst understanding of cause and effect when it comes to disasters
after all, he did give us the equation we used to create the nuclear bomb
--thanks, einstein--
he also did not take into account that we have seed reserves and if worst comes to worst, we can still produce seeds in controlled environments, and unpollinated plants just produce seedless fruit anyway.
we will just have to use our breeding knowledge to produce new bee varieties and maybe try t grow a new variety of corn other than bt corn

this sounds like republican mis-information aimed to lower peoples confidence in order to bankrupt the government that they have now decided is too likely to become fair to people

dont listen to them

they are just as anti america as the most anti american person you can think of