Stop Canada’s Seal Hunt! This song has no correlation to the issue at hand rather than the double meaning of the word “club”, yet before pushing my environmental issues and concerns on others I do like to provide some background music. “Back in the day” I used to listen to this song during the aftermath of a long night out. Now, I can’t help but to think of slaughtered baby seals.
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Shock pictures: Is this what the Canadian government means by ‘humane’ slaughter?
From the Daily Mail article: “The great tragedy of the slaughter is that it was stopped 25 years ago, following a ban on the import of seal pelts into the European Union. But the Canadian government eventually found a loophole and ruthlessly exploited it. Five years ago, the cull re-started with a vengeance when the authorities ordered the battering to death of a million baby seals. Since then, another 1.5 million baby seals have been slaughtered- almost one-third of the seal population. Every year, British and European politicians have rushed to condemn the slaughter. Yet every year they have failed to take concrete action.”
Hey farmer, farmer put away that DDT, now. Give me spots on my apples, but leave me the birds and the bees. Please.
I heard this song from the seventies last night and couldn’t help but to instantly think about pesticides and the perplexing disappearance of the over-worked and under-appreciated honey bee.
Although DDT isn’t directly listed as a cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, pesticides have been included in the list of factors that may be to blame for honey bee loss.
“Colony Collapse Disorder (or CCD) is a little-understood phenomenon in which worker bees from a beehive or Western honey bee colony abruptly disappear. From 1971 to 2006, there was a dramatic reduction in the number of feral (wild) honeybees in the US (now almost absent); and a significant, though somewhat gradual decline in the number of colonies maintained by beekeepers. However, late in the year 2006 and in early 2007 the rate of attrition was alleged to have reached new proportions, and the term “Colony Collapse Disorder” was proposed to describe this sudden rash of disappearances. The cause or causes of the syndrome are not yet well understood. Theories include environmental change-related stresses, malnutrition, pathogens, mites, pesticides, radiation from cellular phones or other man-made devices, and genetically modified crops with pest control characteristics.”
(Excerpt from Colony Collapse Disorder)
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?
“The steady increase in beekeeper migration has masked the issue of pollinator decline from much public awareness, however sudden blocks to such migration could have catastrophic results on the global food supply.”
(Excerpt from Pollinator Decline)
Bees aren’t the current root of rising food costs, but one day, perhaps? Until then we’ll keep our fingers crossed that they don’t keep hopping in that big yellow taxi with Joni Mitchell’s old man.
