31–40 of 65 posts
Some news story link the Volkswagen diesel scandal (and EURO6 norm/urea resin), gen modified crops (eg. Monsanto) and artificial fertilizer too the decline of such species (e. bees). We need independent research sponsored by the WHO, and states have to punish the bad actors like VW.
> The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide. This sentence feels weird and misplaced. Compared with the agricultural system's main task – keeping us from starving to death – its role as a job provider seems utterly insignificant.
Quite a lot of agricultural isn't to keep people from starving to death - think hemp, cotton, tea/coffee, sugar cane, natural rubber, chocolate, and coca in places it is legal. None of those things prevent people from starving at all. A lot of agricultural foodstuff is terribly inefficient at meeting the goal of "keeping people from starving." We grow them though (and produce in the case of meat) because humans reall…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its common knowledge IMO, but you can certainly Google it. Agriculture is a near-perfect free market, so organizations and governments often destroy crops to raise prices.
How does government interference in a market make it near-perfectly free? The U.S. agriculture market is infamous as a source of government waste and pork barrel spending: http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21643191-crop-pr...
The cynic in me wonders if we're simply doomed to having these useful species die off at this point. We've killed off a great deal of nature already, and it seems the major voting populations in our democracies are insulated enough in concrete cities and modern conveniences to not really care enough to force politicians to address these issues. And also, there's not much money in it compared to other courses of actio…
Remember how massive protests and objections prevented war on Iraq? Yeah, me neither.
> The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide. This sentence feels weird and misplaced. Compared with the agricultural system's main task – keeping us from starving to death – its role as a job provider seems utterly insignificant.
If ever there was a triumph of modern technology, it's been the past 200 years of farming.
Some news story link the Volkswagen diesel scandal (and EURO6 norm/urea resin), gen modified crops (eg. Monsanto) and artificial fertilizer too the decline of such species (e. bees). We need independent research sponsored by the WHO, and states have to punish the bad actors like VW.
That's a lot of conspiracy theory in one sentence. I'd be disappointed if the WHO ran after every breath of witchcraft published in somebody's blog.
Given that [certain] plants cannot survive without (these) insects, it results that (these) insects are an essential part of [those] plants.
Or, more grossly, (these) insects are actually part of the plant organisms. For the plants they are a form of detachable reproduction organs.
The other way around:
Bees have external "organs" - the plant part. The bees are part "animals", part plants - they need the plant "organ" for nourishment and they choose who the plant will mate with.
This way of looking at animals/plants has certain implications:
We can't just look at a peach garden without also considering the bees and other insects required for the garden's long term survival. Why stop at bees ? What about all the other insects/animals who depend on these "unified" organisms ? Are they also part of some sort of larger "organism" ?
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See, the reason it is very difficult to address many of the complex problems that we have in the world today is because we use these taxonomy systems (in programming terms - "class hierarchies") - they define and limit our ability to grasp the complexity of the full system.
And somehow, we maintain these taxonomy systems without refactoring them, even though our understanding of nature has grown considerably after these systems of categorization have been introduced many years ago.
Just like a well designed class hierarchy leads to a clean and efficient application, so should the way we categorize things and beings in nature determine the overall health of the whole system.
It is rarely possible to come up with the perfect class hierarchy from the very beginning, since the problem is rarely clearly defined and changes over time, so we refactor.
We need to keep our class hierarchies in sync with the objective reality and the same should be done to taxonomy systems, otherwise "reality" doesn't quite fit in our neatly defined boxes of boxes of boxes of things, like Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, etc
> The agricultural system, for which pollinators play a key role, creates millions of jobs worldwide. This sentence feels weird and misplaced. Compared with the agricultural system's main task – keeping us from starving to death – its role as a job provider seems utterly insignificant.
Quite a lot of agricultural isn't to keep people from starving to death - think hemp, cotton, tea/coffee, sugar cane, natural rubber, chocolate, and coca in places it is legal. None of those things prevent people from starving at all. A lot of agricultural foodstuff is terribly inefficient at meeting the goal of "keeping people from starving." We grow them though (and produce in the case of meat) because humans reall…
I'm maybe just repeating what the parent comment said, but that seems backwards to me.
If we treat agriculture's purpose as economy for economy's sake, which we have been doing, it seems counter-productive to our goals of staying alive sustainably.
"The causes of the pressure on these creatures intertwine: aggressive agricultural practices that grow crops on every available acre eliminate patches of wildflowers and cover crops that provide food for pollinators. Farming also exposes the creatures to pesticides, and bees are under attack from parasites and pathogens, as well." Seems like this should self-regulate quite well. If there are no bees to pollinate the…
A lot of field crops self or wind pollinate. Corn, wheat, soy, rice, etc.
Honest question though: Is this relevant to my argument?