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WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING
By Bob Weaver
Looking for clean air, land, water, and bees.
As the Trump administration just finalized its biggest climate policy rollback, requiring the U.S. power sector to cut its 2030 carbon emissions 35 percent over 2005 levels - less than half of what experts calculate is needed to avert catastrophic warming of the planet, we should contemplate life on earth, living things and life itself.
Major rollbacks with the clean water act and the reinvention of pesticides, including abandoning the commission that watched the pollution of the Ohio River, we should contemplate life on earth, living things and life itself.
We have politically been led to call such beliefs a hoax (follow the money).
Last year was the highest loss of honeybees that has ever has been recorded, an annual survey shows.
Honeybees are directly connected to life on earth.
Here in Central West Virginia, a local beekeeper group is marching against their disappearance from our own environs.
United States Beekeepers lost over 40% of colonies during the last year, with the survey showing an increasing number in a winter die-off.
The latest annual nationwide survey is conducted by the University of Maryland-led nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership.
Honeybees pollinate $15 billion worth of food crops in the United States each year, so their health is critical to food production and supply.
“These results are very concerning, as high winter losses hit an industry already suffering from a decade of high winter losses,” says Dennis vanEngelsdorp, associate professor of entomology at the University of Maryland and president for the Bee Informed Partnership.
There are several environmental things killing honeybees like pesticides on land and in water, which causes poor nutrition for honeybees, and then there are mites.
The mites feed off the bees and in the process pass on viruses that are killing honeybees.
We have been programmed by some of the world's biggest producers, with the help of politicians, that all bad things with the environment are just "acts of God," or cyclical results of Mother Nature, that the consumption of human beings are of little problem.
Will we ever take responsibility for our conspicuous consumption and life on earth?
I fear the answer is not likely.
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