A little bit about the birds and the bees....

Like it or not, we are all intrinsically connected to bees for our food security.  Their health and survival is our health and survival.

Bees, and other natural pollinators fertilize 90% of all we eat either directly through fruit and cereals, or indirectly via the mixed fodder which fattens the animals we eat. Bees, hoverflies, moths and bats are vital to the human food cycle.

But something bad is happening. Bees are dying. 

Bees are suffering from climate change and disease, but to halt the decline, there is something we can do right now: stop the use of pesticides.

The natural order of nature is being arrested by chemically treated seed, much of which is impregnated with pesticides before being sown. The pesticides enter every cell of the growing plant – leaves, flowers, pollen, roots – and the bees absorb these chemicals as they feed on the flower nectar.

The bees do not drop down dead instantly – that would be too easy to detect – but the pesticides, chiefly the neonicotoids , are a type of ‘nerve agent’ . The bees suffer brain damage similar to epilepsy. It is permanent.  They cannot find their way home, and they die.

Defra's chief scientist Dr Ian Boyd said, "Neonicotinoids will kill bees, let me be absolutely clear about that.”

Dr Christopher Connolly from Dundee University has produced the latest in a line of studies by British universities which prove that neonicotinoids are disastrous for bees. Research at Stirling University found they caused problems for queen bees. Then Newcastle University found they damaged bees' ability to learn – and, this has been fatal.

By 2050, we are going to have to feed 9.2 billion people – so in the next 50 years or so we are going to have to produce as much food as humanity has produced in our entire history.
UNFORTUNATELY THIS WILL NOT BE POSSIBLE IF WE DECIMATE OUR NATURAL POLLINATORS WITH PESTICIDES

85% of our queen bees have been lost already; beekeepers are reporting alarming colony declines, The UK is importing hundreds of thousands of bees every year to pollinate our fruit and crops. This is the very loud ring of an alarm bell telling us all to wake up!

And it’s not just about the bees, its about the birds too – and all flowers and wildlife in the interdependent ecosystem on which humans totally rely.  Between 1970 and 2010 in the UK, farmland birds dropped in alarming numbers. Turtle doves declined by 93 per cent, and will sadly soon be extinct; grey partridges by 91 per cent; corn buntings by 90 per cent; skylarks by 58 per cent. The sights and sounds of the countryside today are but a pale echo of the past.

The biggest problem we have is the Goliath pesticide industry, which is using strong-arm tactics to push its arguments in favour of the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. But the evidence is clear: the natural abundance of, bees, butterflies, moths and birds is in a terrible spiral of decline.
Alternatives to pesticides exist. It is possible to farm without neonicotinoids. Environmentally-friendly farming involving simple techniques such as crop rotation do not require the use of chemical pesticides.

Farmers need to urgently change their methods, and this will take time.  In the meantime, small gardens will be the lifeline to bees this year, so please make sure you don’t use any chemicals in yours.

Warriors of the Pacific Islands Fight Climate Change

Today I am posting in full a letter from  Mikaele Maiava, who is writing from the Pacific Island archipelago of Tokelau. This is worth reading in full because of the courage and determination a small Pacific island is showing in the face of climate change forced on them by the energy greedy nations of the world.

"Last October, Tokelau turned off the last of its diesel generators. In their place, we switched on our solar plants, making Tokelau the first country in the world to become 100% renewably-powered.

I woke up before sunrise that day, excited about the history Tokelau was making. My whole village made its way to the site of over 100 solar panels -- we could see the many hours of hard labor that had gone into this project. As we counted down to the switch, I could feel future generations smiling at us and thanking us. Our children's future suddenly looked brighter because we had the vision (and perseverance) necessary to get off fossil fuels and switch to 100% renewable energy.

You might wonder why we bothered. Aren't we doomed to lose our islands from sea-level rise? I don't blame you for thinking that if you did. So often the global media victimises the Pacific Islands and portrays us as helplessly succumbing to climate change and rising seas. But the global media know nothing of who we really are, or how it feels to live on these paradise islands we call home. They don't know that as Pacific Islanders, we are warriors, and that the land we live on is part of us.

We know that the longer the fossil fuel industry gets its way, the worse climate change will be, and the more sea-level rise will threaten our islands. But giving up on our home is not an option. We are not drowning.
We are fighting.

That's why on March 2nd, Pacific Islanders across 15 diverse nations will be mobilising at prominent locations to perform our unique war challenges, songs, and dances. We'll be laying down a challenge to the fossil fuel industry. It is their coal and oil and gas vs. our future. They cannot both coexist. And it is our future that has to win.

In this moment, and in the years to come, we need you to walk beside us. Because we live far away from the mines and power plants that threaten our future, we need the world's solidarity. Click here to stand with us during this weekend of Pacific Warrior climate action!

We want to show the world that people from countries and cultures everywhere are standing with us -- the Pacific Warriors -- in the fight against climate change.

Fakafetai lahi,
Thank you,
Mikaele Maiava"

RAPE

The scale of rape in the UK, as in the world, is the tip of an ugly iceberg of violence. Rape often comes as part of a package of abuse. Institutional abuse, cultural abuse, domestic abuse. Rape is violence, rape is a tool of warfare, rape is the sick subjugation of the abused by the oppressor and it is not to be tolerated for even one single moment, under any circumstances whatsoever, by any individual, institution or government.

The figures below represent a holocaust. A women’s holocaust without end.

1 out of every 3 women in the world has been raped, beaten or abused

30% of people in the UK think that violence against women is OK.
50% think it should be kept behind closed doors
More than 100 million women are missing from the world's population - a result of discrimination and female infanticide.
Two thirds of the 774 million adult illiterates worldwide are female
At least 60 million girls worldwide are forced into marriage before the age of 18.
An estimated 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk of female genital mutilation each year.
A third of teenage girls in a relationship suffer an unwanted sexual act.
A quarter of girls suffer physical violence, such as being slapped, punched or beaten by their boyfriend.
1 girl in 16 is raped
64% of students know women whose boyfriends or partners have hit them
25,000 men in England and Wales move from one relationship to another, serially abusing their partners
 

Everyone in society is responsible for these figures (from Amnesty International) by either looking away, or feigning blindness. And society will not change until each one of us changes. True equality means real respect. You do not beat or rape a person you respect, and you respect your equals. 

We must remove the shame and stigma from rape victims and honour those who are raped. Only by applauding the bravery and resolve of the abused can we turn the tables on these cowardly oppressors. 

Rape is the ultimate crime of an unequal world.

Limits to Growth

Queen Elizabeth 1^st took a bath once a year – whether she needed it or not.

Many people now take 2 showers - a day. This is very relevant to our current stage of consumption.

Consumption of our resources such as water, land, clean air and fossil fuels is now at an unsustainable level. 

At the time of Elizabeth 1^st the world population was about half a billion. Today it is 10 billion. That is a lot of showers. Clearly there have been many improvements since the year 1500: we are now more hygienic, warmer, better fed and more healthy, but the way we have gone about improving our lifestyles has come at a price. And although we might think everything is quite expensive enough already, we are not actually paying the full price.

The full price would include the cost to the environment. Trees don’t bill us for their loss of forests, endangered animals do not bill us for their loss of habitat. The oceans ask no price for the pollution humans pour into them, and the air will not send us an invoice for the extra greenhouse gasses it has to burden. If the fish and whales took us to court for murder of their family members we would at least have more life left in the sea.

In 1972 a group of eminent scholars, called the Club of Rome, published a book called Limits to Growth.  They spent years pulling information together, then modelled it to create a future trend scenario. Their conclusions were that we were using up the natural resources of the planet too quickly, and if we did not change our ways, collapse was inevitable. Limits to Growth was an early warning siren. Sadly few people listened. 

Please do look at this very good explanatory graph and updated info here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Looking-Back-on-the-Limits-of-Growth.html

In essence, they estimated that if human beings continued to consume more than nature was capable of providing, global economic collapse and abrupt population decline could occur at around 2030. In other words humans are taking too much, and not giving enough back, and sooner rather than later there is going to be a very big problem.

Governments baying for economic growth at all cost are digging us deeper into the quagmire. They pursue this because they measure success in money, not in wellbeing or protection of the ecosystems on which we all actually depend in order to stay alive. 

Ever more dangerous and unwholesome methods are being used to extract fossil fuels. Tar sands are huge wasters of energy and put more CO2 into the atmosphere in their extraction than when they are burnt. Fracking - or hydraulic fracturing – pumps toxic chemicals into the ground to release small pockets of gas, deep sea oil drilling has an abysmal record, but still they do it.

But there is another way of doing business. Growth is still possible, but only if we invest in technologies such as renewable energy supplies, allocate money for innovation and research so that we can overcome our dependence on dirty fuels and convert to clean energies such as wind, tide and sun. We need to stop wasting so much, and stop polluting the air with CO2 and poisons from incinerators and dirty industries. We need to reuse more of what we have, and recycle more of what we need such as metals and plastics. Recycling leaves more in the resource pot for the next generation.

If you had the choice between a car burning fossil fuels, and a long and healthy life for your children, which would you choose?

Limits to growth was updated in 2008, and the data was found to remain relevant. Update document can be read here http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf

Avarice is a vice, the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable. - John Maynard Keynes

Poised on the brink of economic meltdown as we are, governments all over the world are baying frantically for growth. But growth is not the answer to our problems.

Way back in the 1700’s Adam Smith recognized a limit to economic growth. He predicted that in the long run, population growth would push wages down, and natural resources would become increasingly scarce. 

Consider a steady state economy - an economy of stable or mildly fluctuating size, minimal chance of the boom and bust cycle, less opportunity for outright greed. The term can apply equally to a national economy, a local, regional, or global economy. To be sustainable, a steady state economy must not exceed ecological limits, and that is it’s most important attribute.

Our recent and unprecedented growth in economic activity has significantly shifted the balance of nature with potentially disastrous consequences for the ecology of the planet, for our own well-being but particularly for that of the next generation. It is a mistake to believe that more growth will diminish our problems. In the long term more growth would be a disaster, as continuous growth is completely incompatible with sustainability.

A steady state economy does not imply a stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living (and a bigger likelihood of it being improved), when minds cease to be engrossed by the shallow art of obtaining more money.

The human economy is embedded in nature, completely. Without the natural world to draw upon, there is nothing to make money from. But we have been perverse. We have exploited nature to its very limits, maybe beyond its ability to absorb our delinquency. Economic processes are actually biological, physical, and chemical processes. Humans don’t create anything, they transform it into something else – plastics, cars, toxic waste.

Economic growth cannot be relied upon to alleviate poverty either. On the contrary, economic growth has polarized wealth – mostly into the hands of the few. If the pie isn’t getting any bigger, we need to cut and distribute the pieces in a fair way. Poor people who have trouble meeting basic needs tend not to care about sustainability - how can they when the priority is finding the next meal. At the other end of the scale, excessively rich people tend to consume unsustainable quantities of resources. Fair distribution of wealth, therefore, is a critical part of sustainability and the steady state economy.

60 years ago, John Maynard Keynes said “The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems – the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.”

Economic collapse is extremely painful. But environmental collapse - the collapse of the planet's support systems which sustain life on earth as we know it - that is truly unbearable.

Governments have their heads stuck in the past. They can only think of recreating what has been – growth. But the future will be different. The future needs the fairness and sustainability only steady state economics can bring.

More here at http://steadystate.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_economy

Redefining Prosperity

50 years of incessant advertising and lies has made us think that prosperity means having more money to buy more ‘things’. Yet each of us knows that beyond a certain level, the ownership of ‘things’ makes us no happier and certainly no healthier. There is a perception that a bigger car or house increases our social status, but that perception is marginal at best. It does not make for a better human being.

Prosperity is defined as being flourishing, thriving and successful. To be a flourishing, thriving and successful human being depends more upon health and happiness than the size of your bank balance. The misplaced clamour for economic growth has put many economies into decline, and economic notions of prosperity are at last being seen for what they actually are – a negative impact on personal and national self esteem.  It seems that we have mistakenly equated the acquisition of monetary wealth with our feelings about ourselves.

If the crazy drive for economic growth has got us where we are – a society becoming less equal by the day, public borrowing at levels in excess of £1 trillion in the UK (US $15 trillion), shrinking tax receipts and rising unemployment - why oh why is the government baying for more growth?

Our socio–economic order is rotten. Greed and irresponsibility have fuelled little but disaster. Yet still we hear the cry for a return to ‘business as usual’. Certain groups and individuals know exactly what to do, because they know how much they have to gain from it. A return to the old order – as if that was possible – would continue to magnify the wealth of the few. We now know that the problems facing communities right now are a result of ‘growth’. We do not want a return to the old order. 

We live in a world of finite resources. No matter how deep we dig, the fossil fuels will eventually disappear, so for starters an oil based economy does not make much sense. Uranium too is a fossil fuel, and its supply is finite. Gas, coal – all the fossil fuels can only be mined for so long, and they will be no more.

Life for us all is poised to change. There are a lot of mouths to feed, so we must look to ourselves and our communities for the answers. Big Money and Big Corporations will be dragged screaming into their own decline, because the last thing they want to see is ordinary people managing their  our own way into the future – and it could be a lot better than the past.

A sensible government would be looking to real prosperity. It would be using sustainable energy sources and guiding us towards non-financial goals such as family life, health and community. The Buddhist definition of prosperity is based on collectivism and compassion, and that is not a bad place to start.