The American Bumblebee Has Vanished from Eight States
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
Note that the article identifies systemic causes (use of neonicotinoids, habitat loss) as causes, and correlational evidence ("States with the most significant dip in bee numbers have the largest increase in the use of pesticides like neonicotinoids, insecticides, and fungicides"), but the enforcement mechanism they mention is centered around individual actors after specific killed insects where it's presumed that attribution is clear. Does this make any kind of sense?
1. Would we know when bees are killed? The evidence that we know how to gather, so far as I can tell, is mostly counting live bees, not finding dead ones. Are there examples of small, highly mobile insects with ESA protection where we're actively seeking out and finding dead individuals?
2. Is it typically possible to attribute bee deaths to single actors? If a bumblebee is found at location X, we might guess that it would have ranged over an area with radius r around that (but we're not sure what its actual territory would have been) which includes N properties, N_d of which have been developed and N_p of which use pesticides, who is responsible?
3. And if the best scientific understanding is about broad practices (habitat destruction, pesticide use, ...) am I correct in my belief that we don't have any real mechanism of holding a class of individuals (e.g. Maine farmers who used neonicotinoids during a given time period) responsible for an impact to a bee population (e.g. it's estimated by experts to decline 5% in a given year) in the absence of a specific pile of dead bees?
With this, as with a number of other large issues, I think we need new concepts around group responsibility. We have a concept of class action lawsuits, where a large group identified by a criteria (e.g. people whose data was exposed by Equifax) can be plaintiffs, because individuals meeting that criteria can elect (or not) to be represented in that group. We do _not_ have a concept of a large group of people identified by a criteria (farms using particular pesticides, developers of properties in the urban-wildland interface) being held responsible for harms that proceed from that criteria.
The way we protect it is that all farmers can report a Grutto nest on their land. Then the government sends volunteers to find the nest. If the volunteer finds the nest, the farmer gets 1200 euro.
It's a simple scheme but I think it's very effective. It's a significant amount of money, the farmer will be looking out for the nests, and will make sure they don't get caught in their machinery.
I'm not entirely sure what the economics would be for bee hives. 1200 euro to put some stakes in the ground and make a small detour with your tractor, sacrificing maybe 10m2 of harvest makes sense. Not treating an entire field with insecticides might not.
The mfrs will cry “job losses” due to discontinuing production. Farmers will cry poor. Nothing will happen.
Lead paint, freon refrigerators etc.
It's not so clear they actually are, France banned neonicotinoids in Sep of 2018, but as far as I can tell it has not changed anything in terms of bee deaths in France.
I feel like this natural experiment should be more studied so we can tell if neonicotinoids are the problem or not.
The pervasive attitude of dealing with problems real or imagined with “who can the state punish?” rather than “what can I do to can I fix this?” is disturbing.
https://ec.europa.eu/food/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
climate - shake up of industrial winners if new policy is introduced so its on us to 'buy smart' rather than collectively 'produce smart'
schools and their performance - shake up of privilege funnels, tax bases, positions etc. if an equal division of funds is introduced so its on each family to find school and support rather than a system wide effort to make sure every kid has an educational experience that sets them up for success and participation in our democracy
immigration - shaking this up would have economic impacts we don't understand as the entire US economy is at least partially dependent on affordable/cheap labor or some form of second class worker to support supremely variable industries like farming. so its on you to immigrate correctly and complain about off-shored jobs instead of on the people who are offshoring them or hiring people without the 'correct' papers.
I just hope we can find enough energy to overcome that inertia as we stare down unavoidable consequences.
The bees are dying. Is taking action on this enough to change your vote from the party you ordinarily vote for to the alternative?
If not, and that means your representative can benefit in taking money from the insecticide companies without losing your vote, what result?
Notice how big a factor polarization is in this. The more people who have chosen a team and won't be dissuaded from supporting their side no matter what, the less politicians have to care what people think because it won't change enough votes to affect the outcome. Which is why everything is currently a shambles.
People individually have to take responsibility for their part in a systemic problem. It's a serious cultural problem to tell everybody that they don't need to do this unless someone is holding a gun to their head. Because the same culture says that doing the selfish thing is reasonable and good, and if that's true, why should they vote to ban it?
Meanwhile if people individually accept that they have to make some personal sacrifices to avoid doing harm then you barely need legislation at all, and to the extent that you do it can be a minimal fine with minimal enforcement that only acts as an anchor point. Because a culture where individuals are trying not to do collective harm only needs some notice that a given thing does collective harm, not jackboots with billy clubs. The opposite culture is doomed either way.
While possibly valid, this seems unrelated to
> The bees are dying. Is taking action on this enough to change your vote from the party you ordinarily vote for to the alternative?
>If not, and that means your representative can benefit in taking money from the insecticide companies without losing your vote, what result?
The latter is an inevitable consequence of first past the post voting and plurality-majority representation, rather than proportional representation. Until the US moves past these systems, it will always be a game of voting for the lesser evil.
PR has its own problems and the US would do better to adopt range voting to break the two party system, but any system where parties exist is still susceptible to the original problem.
If Party A does something bad in favor of a special interest, Party B might gain support. But they can estimate how much support they need to control the government. Now that they have more support, Party B can do some other bad thing in favor of some other special interest and still be competitive. If you add Party C to the mix, they still have the same incentive and opportunity to abuse their power.
You can have a party which always makes the decision that maximizes social utility, but you can have that in a two party system too. For that party to win votes, you need voters who are willing to elect that party instead of the one that promises you that you'll be the beneficiary of the kleptocracy.
But these are the same people who do the right thing even when no one is forcing them to. If you society is full of them then you don't need the use of force to make it happen. If it's not then an elected government will represent the majority of selfish jerks.
This is not an assumption, they'll have to do the right thing when society is properly setup. Can you chose not paying for your car registration? Can you drink on the streets freely (in USA)? It is just a mater of time before we agree that unlimited profit is bad for our future and outlaw it.
Who is doing the setting up? Some kind of Roman deity?
It's human individuals. If the individuals in a society are selfish then the ones in government will enact a kleptocracy. If they're not, you don't need to force them to do the right thing at gunpoint.
It's the culture that matters.
> It is just a mater of time before we agree that unlimited profit is bad for our future and outlaw it.
What is that even supposed to look like?
The closest realistic example would be stronger antitrust enforcement so that companies didn't get so big. But if the people in a society can't even manage to stop patronizing a company which is screwing them over then how can they be expected to organize enough to cause meaningful antitrust enforcement to happen?
Regardless, this seems like another instance of putting the responsibility on consumers/individuals, and not on companies that introduce these products with no regard to the potential downstream side effects. Guess it maybe ties into to "regulation" and "individual rights", like how instead of regulating fast food companies, it's been decided that it's the consumer's choice whether to eat fast food. I'm getting off on tangents that maybe aren't related, and I'd be interested to hear other perspectives.
Are the eight states from the title. Though it seems New York should be included since it says "The bumblebee species have declined by 99 percent in New York."
Also noteworthy
> In the Midwest and Southeast, population numbers have dropped by more than 50 percent.
To nobodies surprise, the culprit is pesticides. Interestingly the west's bumblee population isn't listed as being in trouble.
What do you call Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon?
Maybe it's a Canadian thing? -100W is the border of Manitoba and Alberta?
I've driven back and forth across it a lot. Obviously it's a gradient and not some magic barrier the great-tailed grackles cannot cross. And we do get western kingbirds a couple hundred miles east as well as western meadowlarks. It's still a handy boundary so that you know more or less what to expect in a given area ecologically.
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-merid...
https://weather.com/science/environment/news/2018-04-12-100t...
There's a definition based on climate that's used widely https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2018/04/11/the-100th-merid...
> So New Mexico is not part of the West?
Mid-west ≠ West:
I guess China still uses nicotine-based pesticides?
And, just to be super-clear, i come for the comments, and rarely the articles.
To me there are roughly three classes of bee: There are honey bees, which are the ones that are farmed by humans ie domesticated. They live in colonies of around 50,000 in mostly man made hives. There are wild bees that naturally form colonies. Bumblebees for example, live in colonies of around 20 to 2000 individuals. Finally we have the solitary bees. These do not form colonies at all.
What is happening is that various species of really useful insects are being wiped out. This isn't just in the US but everywhere.
This is perhaps the situation in the UK: https://post.parliament.uk/research-briefings/post-pn-0619/ feel free to grab the report and read it. It's not pretty reading.
https://ucanr.edu/sites/uccemerced/files/40411.pdf
There are many articles that have found viral audiences throughout the 02000s about how other bee species are on extinction spirals because of the American agriculture industry's lack of regulation. This happening to the bumblebee is not a real surprise and we've definitely seen it coming within the window to act.
The idea of planning for further out is not a bad one. I'm not sure how a giant clock inside a mountain helps with that.
The Clock of the Long Now is an artifact from thinking about that and other questions.
I'll certainly grant that many times the art or artifact that comes from that idea may become more visible than the idea itself... but for people who are inspired by the artifact and go on to disover the idea behind it, it can be, well, inspirational - and a way of doing something today that will have repercussions centuries and millennia from now.
It's obviously a place that the people who built it didn't want dug up. Just like all the ancient places that the people who built them didn't want dug up. Like the pyramids. We knew they were supposed to be dangerous and cursed and booby-trapped and whatnot. Didn't stop modern humans for a second.
I do really like the thought process, and again, I really want this to be a neat organization pushing people to think long-term. Unfortunately, when every project has the vast majority of people scratching their heads and trying to figure out what kind of drugs these folks are on, they're not really accomplishing much on that front.
> Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to asyet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?
> Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood. In clear, crisp language, he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and explores the possible "messages" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself -- from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.
From my impressions on the Long Now (and I found Deep Time a rather interesting read) the issue is not just sticking a zero on to say "think about the future" but rather that our current culture doesn't think about the future beyond the next news cycle, quarterly report, or election.
I'd contend that The Clock of the Long Now (and the intended level of technology to repair it) and the Rosetta Project are very pessimistic about the future of humanity. ( https://rosettaproject.org/about/ )
The recent HN post about the oak grove for repairing the USS Constitution reminds me of https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-lon...
> Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
That a several hundred year old grove was planted because the builders, being familiar with wood construction, knew that in a few hundred years that it would need to be repaired and they'd need the materials to do the repair.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...
> The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.
> The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
But yes, that's the intention behind the action here: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...
It just seems kind of cocky to think that we can forsee what sorts of problems are going to need to be solved in the year 10k. At least as far as technology is concerned. I can see arguing for a long-term outlook on social issues. Of course we need to be looking well down the road on environmental issues. But technology? They really think that we're going to have a problem with the number of digits in the date in the year 10k? It wasn't even really a problem in 2000.
Thinking about the future is important. I have the feeling they're not literally worried about the number of digits in the date. I'm pretty sure it's just supposed to get you thinking. But nothing they're doing makes logical sense. Yes we should be thinking about the future, but trying to shoehorn it into our modern framework is misguided in my opinion. The idea itself isn't bad, but I'm not sure they actually understand how to use it constructively.
I haven't read much about this group in 10 years. If someone has more recent experience with the concepts, please let me know where I'm wrong here. I honestly want this to be a useful group, but nothing I've seen them do actually helps accomplish anything useful.
I think it is significantly less likely that I'll be around when Y100K hits. I don't particularly care about anything that happens after my death. That's somebody else's problem.
On the broader subject of the 0s, it's ironic that they are added for reasons of long-term optimism. Because if NLP hasn't advanced to understand the context of shorthand dates in old texts in 10,000 years time, I'd say thats a pretty pessimistic view on long term progress.
Natural language processing is a joke of a field, and I don't see any future in which I will run a natural language processor that works on my old computers and takes all information and reformats it in a way that makes it most aesthetically pleasing to me. As a result, my only option is to write in a way that aesthetically pleases me and allows me to get away with the least amount of future effort. Rather than dedicate hours of my life to reformatting old text, I'll just write it correctly now.
> "write it correctly now"
Though in my opinion, your version of correct is quite amiss and misses the forest for the trees.
Its true that software that only reserves four digits for years becomes a problem in Y10K, but fixing that internal representation problem shouldn't have any effect on presentation, and if it does “5 digits fixed” presentation is a soft indication of the most short-sighted possible solution.
Or am I reading the page wrong?
In the Seattle area there are: yellow bumble bee tricolored bumble bee yellow-faced bumble Western Bumble Bee Franklin's bumble bee Rusty patched bumble bee
I have seen reports that at least some of these species ranges are greatly reduced.
I've also heard most bees are effectively invasive, at this point. And now they we have murder hornets... I really don't know what to think we far as actionable things.
Not that I'm arguing for giving up. Or rampant insecticide.
To my surprise. There is very little farm land in New Hampshire. For the East Coast, it’s very wild.
However, it is so far from the truth - in an attempt to create more vegetation we have decreased a critical component needed to help said vegetation grow.
Technology should be used carefully when in the environment of the unknown. Trials and observations should be conducted in limited capacity with a long window of study. Only then can we know of the consequences for our actions of disrupting naturally evolved and perfected equilibriums - be it that of the Earth or man’s immune system.
A laudable goal.
And yet, without the agricultural revolution of the 1960s, we wouldn't have grocery stores today with well-stocked shelves.
Cautiousness has its own price.
Mostly garbage. Garbage. And then you have this: https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/q4aeuc/e...
It obviously depends a bit on your store’s layout, but I’ve found the advice to be almost universal. The aisles contain all of the junk (an unbelievable amount of junk), and the good fresh ingredients — fruit, veggies, dairy, breads, meats — are around the outside.
The choice to discard perfectly good food is a diabolic one.
You can choose to think that there are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger. Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason (aka probability and cost of liability is too high compared to throwing it away).
Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them, and it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business.
There are other evil people out there so this is ok? Is that your argument?
> There are evil people intentionally choosing to throw the food away deriving happiness from others’ hunger
What are they, if not evil, because that's exactly what they're doing... throwing good food away while people in the neighbourhood go hungry.
> Or you can investigate the issue and determine that there is a good reason
But I have investigated the reason, and it isn't a good one. This food is thrown out BEFORE expiry date. This means that at the moment of destruction, it was completely legal to sell the food. If it was legal to sell, it was legal to give away. And I'm not saying that they should let dumpster divers just come and take what they want. I'm saying that there are organisations (soup kitchens, etc) that you can have legal agreements with that leave Amazon free of liability, just as if they'd be free of liability if they sold the food.
To not do this is evil.
> Retail businesses operate on razor thin margins where a few missteps would kill them
Selling food before it's best-before/expiry date is legal and is the core function of every retail business. They could sell this food for a $0.01 to a food kitchen and it would be no more a misstep or risk than if they sold it to any other customer.
> it is pretty naive to think the professionals in that business do not know how to run their own business
I said nothing of the sort. They know exactly how to run their own business. But they're evil people who are letting starving people suffer while they throw out perfectly good, FDA approved, non-expired, healthy food.
Progress isn’t just about whatever the new thing is it’s about finding something actually better.
It's not that we wouldn't have well-stocked shelves: it's that we wouldn't be alive. We can feed as many people as we do because of the incredible advances we've made in agricultural sciences. Without those, there just wouldn't be enough calories to go around. Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture? All this invective against technology is sophomoric, short-sighted, and fundamentally unserious, and if we followed the recommendations of people to whom science is a bad thing, just "playing god", then a huge number of us would simply cease to exist.
> Does the sum of all the joys of billions of people mean nothing to everyone who denounces modern agriculture?
The thing about that is that the story isn't over yet. Yes, billions of people owe their lives to the Haber–Bosch process (et. al., I'm obviously simplifying here) but if billions of people die due to ecological and economic collapse, is it really all worth it?
As a concrete counter-example to modern mass agriculture there are ecological systems of food production that result in high yields while increasing fertility, biodiversity, and biomass (such as Permaculture, Syntropic and Regenerative agriculture, etc.) So we can have our both well-stocked grocery shelves and healthy ecosystems.
https://cen.acs.org/environment/green-chemistry/Industrial-a...
Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
My current understanding is that the U.S. overproduces what it needs, exports the excess at dirt cheap prices, killing off developing countries’ farmer livelihoods. So in the U.S., there’s multiple birds killed with one stone.
https://gerrymarten.com/human-ecology/chapter03.html
The green revolution was a big increase in the carrying capacity of the Earth.
> Does your sentiment that we apparently couldn’t feed ourselves take into account population growth? What if the population had simply not grown as it did?
Of course it does. Listen to yourself here. You're saying that it'd have been better for billions of people to simply not have lived at all and for growth to be capped for all time. Would you go back in time, prevent the green revolution, and erase all those billions of people from history?
Christ, I think you would.
Limiting growth means billions, if not trillions, of people will simply never exist at all. All those moments of hope and joy and rest and relief: never existed, all on your say-so. We have a word for that: genocide.
We don't need to limit humanity's growth. We need to go to the stars.
To me that easily outweighs the sum of all those joys; temporary and impermanent, unlike the extinctions of species and glories the planet will never see again. And, I'll remind you that we still have more than enough starvation, despite the ability to feed all.
Your reading of the arguments here as "against science" are a straw man.
You're right. The arguments I'm reading here are not "against science". That's too specific. The arguments I'm reading here are actually against humanity.
As I mentioned in another post, suggesting that it would have been a good thing that the population not have grown over the past century is the same as wishing to wipe billions of people, along with their minds, memories, and experiences, out of history.
And for what would you erase these billions of lives? So some fish? A few trees? A few rocks? A toad spotted in some special way? None of these things can sing, feel hope, dream, or even suffer. Humans can. The desire to limit human growth on ecological grounds is monstrous and anti-human and there's no word for it other than "evil".
Temporarily taking more from the environment than is sustainsble brings temporary human happiness, followed by great human suffering when the environment we rely on collapses.
Civilizations throughout history have collapsed for this reason. Our civilization is not so powerful as to be immune.
There is no particular reason to believe that we've overshot the planet's carrying capacity, that our technological ability to deliver prosperity will break down, or that some kind of collapse is about to come.
This belief in imminent ecological collapse is just a rebranding of eschatology, the idea that the end of the world is coming and that when it does, the good and bad will be separated and judged. It's an aesthetic judgement --- you start with the premise that industrial civilization is bad, understand that bad things must be punished, and hope for Gaia to be the instrument of that punishment.
I don't subscribe to this kind of thinking. I don't see any limits to human ingenuity. There's no need to limit growth, and anyone attempting to do it is committing a crime against the future.
Our water sources are polluted. Our oceans are acidifying. We've strip mined our topsoil. Our rainforests are at a tipping point, on the verge of catastrophic loss. Did you see those fires in Australia last year? Disastrous weather events are up 83% in only twenty years. Top strategists and CEOs are preparing for water wars and refugee crises.
And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing? In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago? WTF Broseph.
Every single generation points to things going wrong now and thinks the end of nigh. It's been that way since at least the invention of writing. All you've done is present a list of problems. You have done nothing to build an actual case that the engine of human innovation is breaking down. What makes you think we won't overcome the problems you mention just as we've overcome all our previous problems?
> And you're here telling us there's no need to limit growth, that doing so is criminal, that the environmentalist cult predictions are failing?
Yes, I am. Because those predictions are failing, and they are failing because they imagine that we exist in a bizarre alternative world where we don't invent technology to solve problems but instead just breed, like deer or something, until we collapse. Wrong model, thus wrong predictions.
Did you know forest cover has actually increased over the past 100 years? Under your theory, we should have chopped down the last tree ages ago.
Our rivers don't catch on fire anymore either. Under your theory, we should all be drinking turpentine by now.
Turns out we can live in a clean world without arbitrary and murderously limiting growth or capping the number of people who can exist.
> In the comments of an article about how there's no American Bumblebees in eight states, which was predicted 20 years ago?
Well, yeah. Doing something about the neoniconoid pesticides causing the bee problem is probably wise. That's not the object of my objection.
The object of my objection is this idea that bees are suffering because humanity arrogantly tries to "play god" with technology and that we should stop and go back to the trees or something. That's an absurd and destructive worldview, and one that's embarrassingly common among comfortable tech types.
... It's not a strong argument.
That's not Chicken Little, that's the denouement of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Except in this case, the boy had decades of charts and photos and graphs showing that a whole pack of wolves were on their way.
Today, gardens amongst the general population basically don’t exist (are so few/small that they don’t represent a measurable fraction of food supply or available arable private land).
So, it’s difficult to know whether or not we would cease to exist.
I suspect not.
We'll see about that when most soil is barren and most bees are gone. That is, very shortly.
Any industrial action will disrupt Earth's equilibriums given the high level of consumption those in the developed world currently enjoy.
This is unfortunately a broad class of error; qualitative metrics which are difficult to measure and quantify get brushed aside by people who want to make rational data-driven decisions. Robert McNamara became infamous for this; the 'data driven' way he tried to manage the Vietnam War focused on hard quantitative metrics, like bodycounts, and de-emphasized or ignored qualitative metrics like popular opinion in Vietnam and America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
In the software industry, those that would rely on instrumentation and telemetry to guide product development often repeat the same mistakes. Many times I've seen user feedback ignored, derided, and demeaned. "Users are dumb, they don't know what they want. Ask users what they want and they'll ask for a faster horse." These ostensibly rational data-driven designers are ironically irrational because they ignore the well established limitations of their data-driven approach.
We can play God, do play God, and will continue play God. People used to think of electricity as the rage of an angry God. Now you're raging against progress on a device that harnesses lightning at a quantum scale in ways unthinkable even 50 years ago. Do you have no appreciation whatsoever for how much good it does to expand humanity's capabilities? Can you see only the downsides? The people complaining about technology and progress should propose actual fixes for the problems that appear instead of braying from the sidelines about how nobody should ever do anything.
But Science has not been put in service of understanding what is good for humans psychologically, spiritually, or even biologically. To the extent that it has, we are overwhelmed and outmatched by powerful economic forces in service of the profit motive. A profit motive that has locked us into dreams of perpetual exponential growth of a fundamental anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production that has us first harvesting and then paving the biosphere for profit.
And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted. Comments trying to stir up more shouting and polarization and finger pointing. In pursuit of that cathartic polarization, your comment is really just support of an absurd, extremist viewpoint that must have as a starting point a staggering ignorance about what humanity is currently smashing to pieces in its pursuit of material wealth, coupled with a willful ignorance to reflect on it. The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
What is profitable is what is good. That's the beautiful thing about markets and prices: they force people to be honest about their preferences. When someone pays money for something, that means that what he's getting in exchange is good for him. Who are you to argue otherwise? Why should your aesthetic ideals of humanity's future override the actual preferences of real people as expressed through their market behavior? This idea that we can distinguish what is right from what is profitable is moralistic arrogance.
> anti-biological system of roadways, electricity, and food production
When I say that a certain strain of environmentalist is anti-human, I'm talking about people who would write about roads and electricity as if they were grand mistakes and should be undone. That's absurd. People who think this way can never be allowed to have power. If they got it, they'd ruin billions of lives.
> And then we get comments like yours, thankfully and rightly downvoted.
If your ideas can be supported only by censoring those who disagree, your ideas are weak and deserve to fail.
> The cost we exact on our planet is enormous.
The planet is there for us. We have no obligation not to impose costs on "the planet" any more than we have an obligation not to inconvenience the air we breathe or the dirt we stand on. This idea that we need to trade off interests of "the planet" against those of people is absurd. Ecological preservation might be justified in some cases in the interest of people, but we are under no obligation whatsoever to negotiate with Gaia for human welfare.
Just another notch on mankind's pole I guess.
Sparrows do this. They are an invasive species and overtake native songbird population. Never seen anyone hate sparrows.
Magpies, people do hate them, not sure why but they are a type of "trash bird" near population centers.
Mice with wings
Also worth reading about the ornithologist who fought this
The animals you’ve devoted your life begin to be killed by the state, and your attempts to sway opinion cause you to instead be demoted to a janitor and deemed a revolutionary. Surreal.
I would not be happy for them to completely be gone. Have thought of putting up nesting boxes in the past. My understanding is that will largely be other bee species, though. Which is a long way to ask, how's many species of bee are there around? And anything in particular to help this specific one?
At first I asked myself, "Can honeybees really be such poor swimmers?" Then I noticed the hornet essentially pushing them into the water (shocking them? zapping them, disabiling them?) and later eating them.
I don't know if this hornet is an invasive species or if the predator-prey relationship is already known, but a single hornet can wipe out tens of bees a day. A contributor to honeybee collapse? Maybe.
But all these new developments and specifically HOAs of the last couple decades you'd probably be lucky to find a handfull.
How exactly is North Dakota the highest honey producing state in the Union?
Also, a bit of a dispute of this study https://www.beeculture.com/bumblebee-decline-claim-in-disput...
Australia, Spain, the Netherands, and (increasingly) China have had a lot of success using physical exclusion with nets, greenhouses, and high-tunnels. They have their own unique problems (plastic waste, rainwater runoff), but these systems get incredible crop yields without significant synthetic pesticide or herbicide use.
I really think highly automated, hydroponic, mostly non-vertical indoor farming is the future of vegetable agriculture, and represents huge potential added value (economic and otherwise) in the coming 100 years.
If you're interested in seeing some of these facilities, check out these videos:
1: Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fq6PQl7fr8
2: Netherlands https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM8Qz-fzJ6M
From the POV of the science of ecology agriculture (from ancient to modern times) is about the dumbest way to interact with Nature. It turns out that, once we understood more about how living systems actually work, we can design ecosystems that improve soil fertility and increase biodiversity and biomass over time while providing dense harvests (comparable to or even greater than modern destructive farming.)
Look at Permaculture, "Food forests", Syntropic agriculture, regenerative farming...
A good start might be "Treating the Farm as an Ecosystem with Gabe Brown Part 1, The 5 Tenets of Soil Health" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
You’ll be glad to hear that some of what used to be “fringe” thinking is becoming mainstream.
Cover crops, for example. They have been proven to dramatically reduce pesticide and herbicide needs over time (which will help pollinators greatly). Illinois, Iowa and Indiana have been piloting programs that reduce crop insurance rates for farmers that use cover crops. Once the value was proven, farmer demand exceeded the acreage the pilot programs could offer. So now, for the very first time, the USDA is putting this in place for the entire country (this fall).
There is hope.
The bees would be a sentinel species, just like the coal mine canary, or like fish are used as an early warning system of problems in the water supply.
Ironically I was moving it to create bumblebee habitat. But it was so heavy I only managed to move it half an inch before the bumbles freaked out.
Now the only bees we see around regularly are big ol' carpenter bees. Honey bees and bumble bees that used to be common are now rarely seen around my city.
> States with the most significant dip in bee numbers have the largest increase in the use of pesticides like neonicotinoids, insecticides, and fungicides, per Live Science.
There are several studies pointing to glyphosphat (this one just an example, use Google). Actually there are so many studies that Europe ends the use in December 2022.
https://www.beeculture.com/catch-the-buzz-its-not-the-glypho...