Musings: Bee Love

I like Valentine's Day because it's always great to put the emphasis on love. I just can't understand why it's so often celebrated with such unloving commodities: blood diamonds, chocolate harvested with child labor, gold extracted in toxic ways and flowers raised in South America through practices that exploit women and use heavy applications of pesticides.

Unfortunately, we have heavy applications of pesticides happening right here, in the GMO fields that now stretch from Lihue to Mana. And as National Geographic reports, some of those very same pesticides, particularly imidacloprid, are apparently contributing to the demise of honey bees, a crucial pollinator:

A new study shows that long-term exposure to a combination of certain pesticides might impair the bee's ability to carry out its pollen mission.

"Any impairment in their ability to do this could have a strong effect on their survival," said Geraldine Wright, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University in England and co-author of a new study posted online February 7, 2013, in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

This study shows that when pesticides are combined, the impact on bees is far worse than exposure to just one pesticide.

Opposition to the pesticides used in the GMO fields is just one reason why folks rallied against GMOs yesterday. It was a sizable and lively crowd that lined the sidewalks on both sides of the Safeway intersection in Kapaa during the crush of pau hana traffic.

You can check it out in a video set to Makana's anti-GMO song, which has such salient lyrics as these:

Here comes the story of the GMO
 It’s on your plate and you probably don’t know 
And no real tests were ever done 
Just a big PR push and one company controls the food of all the world

The regulators ain’t workin’ for you 
They sold you out and you ain’t got a clue 
“It must be safe” I heard you say 
“I don’t believe they’d ever play with the health of our children,
would they?”

Monsanto and the others all make great claims
 Of feeding the world… and pests they overcame 
But yields are shrinking and the pests are getting bigger
 And no one knows what’s coming cause they pulled an early trigger

Remember the butterflies and bees that all died
 And the quarter million farmer suicides 
You think you might start asking why? 
So many living things would die from a thing that’s meant to feed the world

And all the cheerleaders talk of ending world starvation
 But it ain’t from lack of food, it’s from economic segregation
 They say Genetic Engineering is old as growing food 
But we know it ain’t the same in fact it’s way more crude

It ain’t science when you’re aiming a gun
 And praying the DNA don’t come undone
 They’re playin’ cowboy with our genes 
Ignoring all the unforeseen risks, they made a laboratory of Kauai

50 nations label transgenic food
  But out here in the US the consumer’s gettin’ screwed 
It didn’t change the price of food to label it elsewhere
 Now they’re spending millions just to keep us unaware

This is the story of the GMO 
It’s on your plate and you probably don’t know
 There never was a dry run 
Put on a grocery shelf, not one test to prove the safety of the food

Wake up, everybody. Time to bee love, before it's too late.