{"id":238310,"date":"2023-07-03T12:00:19","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T11:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=238310"},"modified":"2023-06-30T03:57:05","modified_gmt":"2023-06-30T02:57:05","slug":"its-time-to-stop-the-insect-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/its-time-to-stop-the-insect-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Stop the \u2018Insect Apocalypse\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em>28 Jun 2023 – <\/em>I was reading about bumble bees recently \u2014 specifically, their looming demise, thanks to human greed and ignorance \u2014 and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We should<\/em> have eaten from it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, we did, but then apparently upchucked everything we learned and, in the process, fooled ourselves into thinking that technology has allowed us to recreate the Garden of Eden from which we\u2019d been banned. You might call it the Garden of Capitalism, in which humans can take what they want without consequences, forever and ever and ever. This seems to be the myth at the core of dominant global culture.<\/p>\n

But of course there are consequences, which we officially refuse to let ourselves see. For instance, Amy van Saun<\/a>, an attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, writing about the shocking disappearance of bees and other pollinators of much of the food we eat (fruit, vegetables, nuts), notes that one of the primary causes is the ever-increasing use of pesticides, in particular, something called neonicotinoids (or \u201cneonics\u201d), which wreak their own special hell on the planet\u2019s ecosystems.<\/p>\n

Neonicotinoids \u201care the most widely used insecticides in the world,\u201d she writes. \u201cUnlike traditional pesticides, which are typically applied to plant surfaces, neonics . . . are absorbed and transported through all parts of the plant tissue.<\/p>\n

\u201c. . . Modeled after nicotine, neonicotinoids interfere with insects\u2019 nervous systems, causing tremors, paralysis, and eventually, death. Neonicotinoids are so toxic that one corn seed treated with them contains enough insecticide to kill over 80,000 honey bees.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, like cluster bombs, land mines, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, \u201cthey persist in the environment,\u201d almost as though \u2014 forgive the analogy \u2014 commercial farming is like an ongoing war on nature.<\/p>\n

If neonics are so dangerous, what is the Environmental Protection Agency doing about it? Not very much, as it turns out, despite scientific evidence of its danger, which is why Center for Food Safety, along with the Pesticide Action Network North America, are suing the agency. As van Saun writes, \u201calmost half of all U.S. farmland is planted with pesticide-coated seeds,\u201d but the agency refuses to regulate them.<\/p>\n

The result, according to a U.N. report, is that cropland is approximately 50 times more toxic than it was a quarter of a century ago, at the beginning of the 21st century, and the world is currently experiencing an \u201cinsect apocalypse<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

And indeed, it begins to appear that the EPA has a mission that transcends \u201cenvironmental protection.\u201d It may well be that this agency \u2014 part of a governmental culture that supports and benefits from wealth and war \u2014 has a mission that is more about official denial of the dangers of planetary exploitation. The EPA\u2019s refusal to acknowledge the damage caused by neonics is just a small part of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cCritics accuse the EPA of being inappropriately cozy with the pesticide industry, and biasing its decisions to favor companies selling pesticides,\u201d the Guardian<\/a> writes. \u201cSeveral EPA scientists came forward last year, publicly alleging that EPA management routinely pressures EPA scientists to tamper with risk assessments of chemicals in ways that downplayed the harm the chemicals could pose. . . .<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scientists complained, among other things, that key managers move back and forth between industry jobs and positions at the EPA.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is when I started hearing an alarm go off in my head: Cultural malfunction alert! Cultural malfunction alert! This is what things look like when exploitation prevails: when grabbing all the goodies you can is at the cultural core, rather than something a bit more complex, such as understanding \u2014 and revering \u2014 the eco-reality (also known as nature) in which we live.<\/p>\n

And beyond that, can we not create a culture that faces the paradoxes of life with a certain level of openness and a continued interest in learning? Life is not something to be reduced to simplistic opposites: win vs. lose, good vs. evil. There is darkness within all of us, but we can\u2019t let it determine our fate or shape our understanding of the world. Yet I fear this is the nature of \u201cmodern,\u201d as opposed to indigenous, culture. Humanity, over the past few millennia, has moved its sense of reverence away from Mother Earth<\/a> and essentially to Father Sky, rather than continuing to revere both. As a result, Mother Earth is ours to do with as we choose.<\/p>\n

The opposite viewpoint \u2014 apparently the indigenous viewpoint, which European land-grabbers called \u201csavage\u201d \u2014 isn\u2019t quite so simple. The natural world, while rife with struggle, can\u2019t be reduced to \u201csurvival of the fittest.\u201d Rather, it exists in a state of complex cooperation among all concerned \u2014 plants, animals \u2014 and evolves via the interdependence of all life.<\/p>\n

As Rupert Ross wrote in his remarkable book about indigenous culture, Returning to the Teachings<\/a><\/em>: \u201cThe Lakotah had no language for insulting other orders of existence: pest . . . waste . . .weed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back to pesticides then. Back to weed killers. Back to climate change and the apparent inability of the polluters who purport to be in charge of Planet Earth to address it adequately: Superficial change won\u2019t do it. The change has to be cultural. It has to be spiritual.<\/p>\n

Believe me, if we fail to change who we are and the bees \u2014 the pollinators \u2014 disappear, we\u2019ll all feel the sting.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/span><\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em><\/span>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u00a0Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 Jun 2023 – I was reading about the looming demise of bumble bees thanks to human greed and ignorance and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We ‘should’ have eaten from it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[952,1128,1926,519,401,1358,1848],"class_list":["post-238310","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-agriculture","tag-bees","tag-bible","tag-ecology","tag-environment","tag-insects-extinction","tag-pesticides"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238310","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238310"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238310\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238317,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238310\/revisions\/238317"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238310"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238310"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238310"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}