[Pollinator] SF Chronicle: Apocalypse Of The Honeybees

Wed May 9 10:43:03 PDT 2007

The CCD problem is being interpreted as a signal issue in the environment.
Here is an example:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/05/09/notes050907.DTL

Apocalypse Of The Honeybees

How poetically appropriate that the End of Humanity should come from such a
tiny, sweet source

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist <mailto:mmorford at sfgate.com> 

Wednesday, May 9, 2007

<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/g/a/2007/05/09/notes050907.
DTL&o=0&type=printable> What, you thought our happy downfall would be from
someth...

>From outta nowhere the tiny ones came, while humanity was busy trembling and
sweating in the face of major global cataclysm, of global warming and
nuclear war and rainforest devastation and melting ice caps and E. coli
outbreaks and Ashlee Simpson and lethal hurricanes and the Apocalypse-hungry
Christian right and a simply stupendously vile Bush juggernaut that has
threatened all intelligent life everywhere. Onward they came, buzzy and calm
and happy to be our very own adorable, unexpected harbinger of doom. 

Yes, now we can see it clearly. Now we can be appropriately alarmed and now
maybe we can even say, Oh holy hell, maybe we should have seen it coming all
along: Of course the end of mankind should come from something as sweet and
commonplace and unforeseen as the honeybees. 

Have you not heard? Have you not read of the dire honeybee apocalypse
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/02/national/a13425
9D66.DTL>  and what it might mean for the majority of the delectable food
crops in America, how we might soon face a very serious food crisis and
might be eating little more than bread and pine cones in the near future,
thus inducing widespread panic as we engage in violent bloody wars not for
oil or land or God but over asparagus and avocados and those incredible
Buddha's Hand fruits they use to infuse Hangar One Citron
<http://www.hangarone.com/fruit3.html> ? 

It's true. It's all because of the honeybees, those minuscule, absolutely
essential <http://blog.targethealth.com/?p=58> , beautifully pollinating
creatures that play such a vital role in our food supply, help nearly all
flowering crops grow and therefore provide a simply enormous portion of the
global diet including all citrus and many vegetables but excluding that
goopy liquefied toxic meat crap they inject into McNuggets, these incredibly
designed workhorse creatures that also make the world's sweetest stickiest
natural substance next to Jessica Alba and maybe Shiva's own bubble bath,
these lovely honeybees might, just might be a sign of our ultimate downfall.

It makes perfect poetic sense, don't you think? After all, are we not long
overdue for such a fatal environmental karmic bitch-slap? Has Mother Nature
not had just about enough of our arrogant invasiveness? Don't you already
know the answer? 

These are (some) of the facts: It appears the honeybee hives are collapsing.
And the wild honeybee population is down a staggering 90 percent. In the
past few months alone, U.S. beekeepers have lost one quarter of their 2.4
million colonies (five times the normal rate) to what's been deemed Colony
Collapse Disorder (also the perfect nickname for Bush's America, n'est-ce
pas?), and this very serious, inexplicable problem has already spread to 27
states and parts of Brazil, Canada and Europe. 

The stories are as alarming and mysterious as they are easy to brush aside
as Just Another Essential Natural System We Screwed Up and Now Have to
Scramble to Fix. But it might not be so easy. And if the trend continues, if
more hives collapse at such a shocking and unprecedented rate and if science
can't figure out a solution rather quickly, well, get used to your wheat
toast and clams. 

What's killing all the bees? Is it some sort of new, ultra-resilient
parasite? Is it pesticides? Overbreeding? Stress? Pollution and genetic
diddering and cell phone towers? Is it Ashlee Simpson? No one has a clue.
Check that: A few smart people have a clue or two (it's a newfangled
parasite
<http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/04/26/MNGK7PFOMS1.DTL> !
says the guy who helped find the cause of SARS), but at this point they're
basically just guessing. Most say it's likely some complicated tangle of
causes, some mishmash problem that won't be so easy to decipher. 

I know what you're thinking. And yes, chances are very good we'll figure it
all out before the Great Pomegranate Wars of 2010. Surely we'll manage to
finagle and wend and sneak our way out of yet another calamitous man-made
(or at the very least, man-assisted) natural catastrophe because, well, this
is what we do. We're a scrappy species. We have science and money and brains
that deduce. Surely we'll find a way to seduce the bees back to life and
it's entirely possible you've already read about and then forgotten this
disturbing story entirely because, well, what the hell can you really do
about it? 

I know the feeling. This is, after all, one of those slightly disquieting
science tales that you read about and then feel utterly powerless to respond
to, and hence all you can really do is hope the PTB are savvy enough to find
a solution and essentially save the world and then you take one look at the
Bush administration and you get that sickly sinking feeling that surely we
are doomed doomed doomed. 

No matter. Because here's the bottom line: Regardless of whether or not we
figure it out, Colony Collapse Disorder is merely one more of those charming
warning signs, one of those increasingly frequent messages from the gods
writ large across the sky of humanity's arrogance and merciless abuse of
nature's integrity. Hell, it's an abuse we've engaged in for so long we
don't even really think about it anymore. And therein lies our likely
demise. 

It won't be from global warming. It won't be from nuclear war or massive
earthquakes or giant angry robots <http://www.transformersmovie.com/>  from
outer space or an enormous asteroid striking Australia and wreaking
atmospheric chaos and it probably won't be from Jesus returning to this
bloody little sandbox and looking around at all the pseudo-Christian hate
and proselytizing and warmongering and saying, Oh holy hell, that's not what
I meant at all, and wiping the slate clean. 

No, odds are just incredibly good that our ultimate downfall will come from
a much more innocuous, unspectacular source, some from seemingly tiny but
absolutely critical natural system that we finally manipulated one too many
times and nature just went, OK, enough of this, I'm done with you gawky,
ridiculous bipeds. 

Maybe it will be from the disappearance of, say, some sort of rare,
beautiful tree bark that contained an enzyme that was more vital to our
genetic health than we ever imagined. Maybe it will be from the mushrooms,
those crazy massive underground organisms that serve the life cycle in ways
we don't even fully understand. Or maybe we will find out, just a tad too
late, that some odd species of sea grass that our pollution just wiped out
actually held the cure to a new, globally lethal disease. Whoops. 

See, the sweet, sticky ontological truth is nature doesn't really give a
damn whether our species lives or dies. It is very possible that we are not
nearly as essential or significant as we like to believe. Though I imagine
if nature had her druthers, she might very well choose to eliminate us like
a bad dream and let the honeybees and the ants and the trees and the whales
take over. 

But hey, maybe that's just the sardonic fatalism talking. I'm sure we'll all
be just fine for eons to come. Right? 

  _____  

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him <mailto:mmorford at sfgate.com> . 

 <http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a/> Mark Morford

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on
SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on
the e-mail list for this column, please click here
<http://sfgate.com/newsletters>  and remove one article of clothing. 

Mark's column also has an RSS feed <http://sfgate.com/rss>  and an archive
of past <http://sfgate.com/columnists/morford/a>  columns, which includes
another tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in
the street and give him gifts. 

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2007/05/09/notes050907.DTL

Jennifer Tsang
Coevolution Institute <http://coevolution.org> 
423 Washington St. 5th Fl.
San Francisco, CA 94111-2339
T: 415.362.1137

F: 415.362.3070

www.nappc.org

www.pollinator.org

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