Poisoning our Pollinators

I continue to have a gut-level sense that, when conclusions are finally drawn to explain honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder, that, yes, it will be attributed to many different stressors. But I predict that the lion’s share of blame will ultimately be fixed on pesticides.

Hers’s one more nail in that particular coffin.

Honeybee deaths linked to seed insecticide exposure 

I’m certain that, like so many other pending catastrophe’s, the average person does not have a clue about the seriousness of the threat of pollinator loss to the capacity of our agricultural land to actually supply enough food for seven billion hungry mouths.

And yet–in the US, though many European countries quickly banned the neonicitinoid insecticides–the use of these poisons goes on unabated, because the corporations who make them have bought the politicians who control agencies that would ostensibly monitor the use of any agent toxic to honeybees.

I mean, after all, isn’t this just another verse of the silly Spotted Owl or Snail Darter follies we heard about decades ago? Why should American profits and “progress” be impeded by a danged little bug, anyway? Humans own the planet, by gawd. They even named the current geological epoch after us!

I’m proud to be an Anthropocene American. (I’m hearing a my-country-right-or-wrong song here, and might just venture away from this amazingly lucrative writing career and slide into lyric writing to flesh out this prideful patriotic patois of pollination pathology. Stay tuned.)