1223 Yeah, Nature Recovers

Sunday, April 29, 2007

I've been reading and hearing a lot lately about bees disappearing. I was reminded again when I walked out the door this morning and passed the rhododendron. At this time of year the bush usually sounds like a woodworking factory, all the buzzing of bees in the blossoms. It was buzzing this morning, but at low volume. I counted. Only seven bees. There should be fifty times that.

So, yeah, there's something going on.

I'd been hearing for a long time about a parasite that was killing off hives, but there's a new theory, a complication, that's worse. Some are blaming people who grow genetically modified or patented crops, who don't want "wild" bees spreading random pollen through their crops, so they are using pesticide to specifically target bees. They don't feel guilty about it because they are merely protecting their crops.

No one raindrop ever feels responsible for the flood.

At one extreme are the doom-and-gloom people who say that if the bees die, we die. No more fruits and vegetables. In the middle are the people who shrug and say, oh, well, there's still grains. This morning on NPR I heard the other extreme, the cycle theory, that bee populations naturally fall periodically, that records from the 19th century show that farmers were worried about bees disappearing. They called it "the disappearing disease". And therefore there's nothing to worry about.

The "natural cycle" theory is also used by people who want to shrug off global warming. "Nature will correct. Nature will recover. She always has and she always will."

Uh, yeah. But do they forget that Nature doesn't much care about us as a species? That sometimes, even left on her own, her recoveries are cataclysmic? She'll go on, the Earth will go on, but possibly in a quite different mix. We are not that important to Nature. Given the almost overwhelming success of pathogens, I'm not sure we're all that important to God, either. Don't forget they're His creations, too. Maybe His favored pets. Maybe we're pet food, and we don't realize it. Gotta keep the "herd" (us) contented.

Well, that's not where I was headed. Where was I - oh, yeah, Nature recovering from cycles that disturb us.

We have to remember that in the past, human influence on Nature didn't tip any balances. She did her thing without interference. That's the way she was set up. Things got to a certain point, and swoop! they came around again to balance. Nothing in the past several thousand years (when was that last ice age?) has gone beyond a tipping point.

Human influence and interference can quite possibly push Nature past a tipping point too quickly for her to react, to recover naturally.

And THEN we die.
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