By: Jim Taylor

When the canary dies…


Beehives are dying. Billions of bees die every year, of course. Drones – male bees who exist only for fertilizing the queen – get evicted from the hive every autumn to perish in the winter cold.

        But this is different. Beekeepers call it “colony collapse.”

        When David Hackenberg, a Florida apiarist, checked his hives last fall, he found 400 of them empty.

        “The bees were gone,” he said. “The honey was still there. There’s young brood [eggs] still in the hive. Bees just don’t do that!”

        Colony collapse differs from attacks of fungus and parasites.

        The bees abandon the hive – but they leave behind the queen and the young. The collapse occurs in two days or less. But there are no piles of dead bodies.

        And nothing else rushes in to fill the vacuum. Usually other insects or parasites will quickly take over an abandoned hive.

        The pandemic has afflicted about 27 U.S. states. New Brunswick has lost 85 per cent of its bee colonies. B.C.’s Fraser Valley beekeepers reported up to 90 per cent losses.

        Why? No one knows.



Frog fatalities too

Frogs are dying, too. Not just individual frogs, but entire species, all over the world.

        Scientists at least have an idea of what’s killing the frogs. It’s a fungus. “It infects the skin of the frog,” explained Ron Gagliardo, curator of amphibians at the Atlanta zoo. “It interferes with normal oxygen and water regulation through the skin, and it can kill the frog in the matter of a couple of weeks."

        But no one knows where the fungus came from, or how it has spread from continent to continent.

        There’s a tendency these days to blame everything on global warming. Certainly global warming affected the pine beetle infestation that has destroyed forests all through central British Columbia.

        Cold winters used to kill pine beetle larvae. Warmer winters allowed the beetle to proliferate. A few more warm winters could enable the infestation to spill across the Rockies into the boreal forests that stretch all the way to Labrador.

        But blaming global warming has become an “easy answer” syndrome. A few years ago, it was acid rain. Before that, socialism, demon rum, or the devil. Once everyone agrees something is a problem, it’s safe to blame it for anything.



Easy answers

 For a few years, I taught business communication. Participants often wanted to learn how to deflect criticism from corporate screw-ups. One technique we taught was to zoom in. Or out.

        “Zoom in” agrees that this is a problem. But it’s composed of smaller parts, over which “we” have no control.

        Big oil companies use this tactic constantly. They break down the cost of a litre of gasoline to shift blame onto taxes imposed by various levels of government.

        “Zoom out” makes the specific example part of a much larger problem—too big for any one person or corporation to cure.

        Currently, global warming is the favourite zoom-out distraction.

        I don’t say that to disparage global warming. I am convinced that global warming is real. I am also convinced that we humans, by our industrial activities—indeed, by the sheer pressure of population growth – affect global warming.

        But I am not convinced that it is the only cause of our manifold ills. Other causes also deserve exploration.



An unprecedented experiment

For example, we are the first generation in this planet’s existence to bathe ourselves in a sea of electromagnetic radiation.

        A century ago, humans were exposed to electromagnetic radiation only during thunder storms.

        Today, we have wireless communication for mobile telephones, radio broadcasts, computer keyboards, global positioning systems, and traffic radar. Transmission lines hum over parks and suburbs. Electrical currents pulse along streets and in walls, to light rooms, heat food, run clocks, power appliances…

        What effect does all this have on us? No one knows. Yet.

        Similarly, our industries have created thousands of chemical compounds that never existed before. Some may be benign. Others – dioxins, nuclear wastes, pesticides and herbicides – are frighteningly toxic.

        Governments set what they consider “safe” levels of exposure. Those levels may be legally safe, but we have no real idea how long-term exposure to even tiny levels of these chemicals will affect us.

Because it has never happened before. We have launched ourselves into an unprecedented experiment with naive confidence that everything will work out.

        Long before we had sophisticated technologies to analyze air quality, coal miners took canaries underground.

        As small creatures, canaries had a lower resistance to dangerous gases. When the canary keeled over, it was time to get out.

        Bees—like frogs and turtles and Atlantic cod – may be the canaries of our time.



Pay attention to the most vulnerable

Winston Churchill, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mahatma Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela have all been credited with the saying that you can judge a country by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.

        The health of our society, our civilization, our planet, is revealed first in its effects on the weak and the small.

        Like bees.

        "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe,” Albert Einstein once mused, “man would only have four years of life left."

        "No more bees,” he explained, would mean “no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

        “Four years” is certainly an exaggeration, for effect. But it contains a truth – human welfare is intricately interwoven with what we think of as lesser creatures.

        If bees and frogs are in trouble, so are we.

        The most vulnerable among us show the effects first. Perhaps it’s bees; perhaps children or the elderly. Perhaps it’s frogs; perhaps prisoners or refugees.

        “No one,” wrote John Donne, back in Shakespeare’s time, “is an island.”

        When the canaries keel over, it’s time to pay serious attention to our own well-being.

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Copyright © 2007 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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