According to Thursday's Free Press, there has now been a 90% die-off of the cave-dwelling bat population in the northeast due to a still unidentified pathogen associated with the fungal condition known as “white nose syndrome.”
Coupled with the massive collapses occurring among bee colonies, this is not just a sad scenario, but an extremely alarming one with regard to our food security. These creatures play a vital role in natural insect control for fruit and vegetable crops. What is happening to our future chances for survival on a purely subsistence level while all of our energy and resources are directed toward “growing” an already enormous and dysfunctional consumer economy and waging an irrational war on the other side of the globe? We have surrendered much of our investigative science capacity to corporate agendas, and what remains in the way of publicly funded efforts is frequently targeted by the right, either as a waste of money or a moral menace. Ignorance and hubris threaten our very survival, but as we are witnessing in Copenhagen, the industrialized giants seem to be locked in a paralytic state of denial. This will end badly.
Though it would be tempting to link this to climate change, we just do not know, but with all of the recent weirding of the planetary weather – there will some day be linkage perhaps.
Messing with the food web is so under reported, under studied in our chem lawn world we live in, our children have soooo much work ahead, and we are such horrible occupiers of these times – just totally irresponsible in so many ways.