dead bee

dead bee



As you may know, the bees are dying off. Nobody knows why. Read about it:
bees dying by the millions
.why are bees dying?
why are all the bees dying
the bees are dying and they act like it's a mystery

Now, as I've said before - if there was a mass die-off of humans that wouldn't be a terrible thing in the long run, but if all the bees died then the situation would be much worse. What annoys me most about most of the reporting done on this subject is the assessment of the magnitude of the problem in terms of the dollar value of the the crops involved. This is the wrong way to approach the solution to a potential environmental catastrophe. The value of a certain wild species can only be evaluated in terms of its relationship to other species, its role in the ecosystem, and its intrinsic worth as a product of evolution. Any species can be exploited by humans and given a price tag in terms of its use value within the capitalist system. Science has long regarded the ecosystem as a perfect system of supply and demand - a complete free market system where anything goes. This is a valid way of looking at it, but we must remember that it is not adjusted to benefit humans. In recent years, some scientists have been presenting the arguement that the environment is self-regulating and promotes stability. This is often misinterpreted religiously as the Gaia hypothesis (which is an interesting idea, full of the kind of colorful and profound mumbo-jumbo that turns me on). This theory proposes that although humans are destablizing the environment, the destablized elements themselves will negate the source of the destabilization and the environment will find a new equilibrium. This means that destabilizers such as biological, chemical, and radioactive pollution, global warming, mass extinction, the propagation of non-native species etc etc will combine to create specific conditions that disfavor the survival of humanity. Once humanity is eliminated or forced to adapt the destabilization will be nullified. Allegorically similar to the functioning of the immune system. Of course, many other species will be destroyed, but in a few tens of millions of years the environment will reach a new period of stability.
I beleive this theory and don't see this process as being negative. I don't think it means that we all have to die, but it might. The alternative is to adapt. Adaption by evolutionary means requires a lot of death (what do you think natural selection means?)- which it looks like may be a big part of the 21st century. But for mutation and natural selection to result in adaptation requires a lot of time - thousands of years is pretty much top speed. We don't have thousands of years, we have tens, maybe less. Plus, because of the memetic environment (which operates on the timescale of days and hours) there is a second selector that creates its own competitive environment, nullifying the first. This is why natural evolution no longer functions to create adaptive humans.

If it is not too late to stop complete environmental catastrophe we have two choices -
do nothing, wait until it is too late and die out (the stupidest choice),
or remake society so that we are no longer destabilizing the environment (the most challenging choice).
If it is too late we have two choices -
do nothing and die out (the most likely possibility)
or use technology to adapt to a world without a functioning natural environment - i.e. the explotation of domesticated species and a complete move into a mechanical environment, total immersion in the plane of the second replicator, eventually leaving our biological bodies behind (the second hardest choice).

BTW
More prescient stuff - the owner can claim it if they wish...

bees are dying my room
sometimes
I trap them under a glass
and bring them to the balcony
mostly I find their corpses
beneath a layer of dust
by the window

O, I am

the unliberated
masses will all die
by me
my drunken friend
will never find
any one of my three
jars of honey