[lit-ideas] Re: Bees and Seas
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:42:49 -0800
Andy, ever the skeptic, wrote
The NYT article about the bees is probably accurate, but the NYT is
very industry friendly so one has to wonder the extent to which
they're understating the effects of pesticides on the immune systems
of bees.
Do you mean that the NY Times is understating the effect of pesticides
in this article? That the article is somehow biased in favor of
industry---? Or what? This is an article about a group of scientists who
cooperatively discovered the probable cause of hive collapse. The Times
article is a newspaper article, not a scientific treatise. If you want
to read the original paper, here's the link.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0006481
Michele Obama started her campaign to grow food. Pesticide
manufacturers demanded (demanded) that she use and promote pesticides
in her garden even if they weren't needed. I don't know what happened
with that. She probably caved because the food industry
is staggeringly powerful. No one can go up against them.
Apparently /she/ did. Twenty seconds of scanning Google hits would have
shown you that. Maybe your practice of getting all of your information
from the History Channel needs to be upgraded
Your obt. servant,
G. W. Leibniz
a
On the related issue of plastics, birds in the Great Lakes were
suddenly turning gay. Males were flying off with males. It turns out
that the ostensibly male birds were in fact androgynous, with both
male and female reproductive organs. The reason for it was birth
defects basically from a class of chemicals called phthalates, no
doubt among others. There are so many plastics molecules and they're
so ubiquitous they almost can't all be studied. Needless to say
industry isn't bending over backwards to study them, and government is
now owned by industry.
I learned something interesting just recently. It turns out that a
source of microscopic poisoning in the oceans is washing fleece
fabrics. Washing fleece mechanically removes the fibers that
eventually wash into the oceans and are eaten by sea life. Needless
to say they aren't good nutrition for sea life. Plastic too winds up
in the oceans (in huge quantities). Some is beaten by waves into tiny
particles that are eaten by fish that mistake it for plankton. (The
plankton eat the fleece particles.)
Here's the documentary I saw a while ago on overfishing. It's where I
learned about Mitsubishi.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/197316/the-end-of-the-line
Andy
Other related posts:
