From David Byrne's blog - the END?

According to Einstein we’ve got a little over 4 years. Here’s a quote from him:

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

And in today's NY Times it says that more than a ¼ of the honeybees in the U.S. have vanished. The article continues with a lot of head scratching as to why but sort of says “gee, we dunno.”

In Speigel, the German newsmagazine, they say, “Beekeepers on the east coast of the United States complain that they have lost more than 70 percent of their stock since late last year, while the west coast has seen a decline of up to 60 percent.”

A month or so ago I read a similar article that said the bees were disappearing out west. Then, a few weeks later, I read a seemingly unrelated article that said that growers of GM tangerines were furious with beekeepers for allowing their bees to wander into the GM-planted fields.

The explanation for their anger is simple. GM crops have been carefully and sometimes expensively modified to have certain desirable characteristics — seedless tangerines, in this case. Bees, as an important part of the chain of life, cross-pollinate plants by “accidentally” rubbing pollen from one flower onto another further away. This is not really an accident, for, as Einstein points out, life as we know it has come to depend on it happening. If this “accident” or “byproduct” ceases we are goners.

Anyway, though it was not mentioned in the tangerine article I asked myself if the two articles could be related — if GM agribusiness could be trying to eliminate bees.

Call me a conspiracy nut, but it sure sounds likely to me. They are the ones who would principally benefit — they have a motive and incentive.

Would a civilization commit suicide? You bet they would — they’ve done it all the time. I read Jared Diamond’s book Collapse and, sure enough, according to him culture and greed trump common sense and reason every time — although in many cases it took a disaster like a drought or war to push things over the tipping point.