Better Look Now

                       What    have    we    done .... ?

Most damage to our only home and the inhabitants we share it with began in the 19th and early 20th century, though now we note signs of sincere attempts to turn it all around, like hybrid cars and living "green".  But hard facts are truly written in stone.  Far too little, much too late. 

By 2035 the only place you'll see a wild bumble bee is - nowhere.  Dead in a museum, that's about it.  The bees that honey-farmers keep have been disappearing all over the globe in such great numbers science has taken notice.  By the way, without bees...well, follow it through.  They're both predator and prey.  Most life forms eat them or their by-products.  They pollenate flowers and allow fruit to grow.  Even carnivores eat fruit, we all do.  For some animals, it's their main source of energy.  If you extinguish prey, the predator starves.  Extinguish the predator and the prey also starve, from over-population.  But here's something much more alarming:

In a world-wide search for the cause of this disappearance, entomologists have discovered something called CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, it's a virus, an immune disease, much like our Human IV.  They are infested with a parasitic worm which weakens their immune systems, and not only that, they cannot seem to digest their food and are starving to death, while eating.  The grain and pollen they eat sits undigested in their abdomen and kills them in great numbers.  Lab experiments show that this parasite also affects their ability to learn, memory, sense of community, basics for this animal.  They fly from the hive and cannot find it again.  They die.      

Green turtles are off the endangered species list - they're now on the 50-year line into extinction. 

Orangutans will also go extinct, in approximately 20 years, just around the corner. 

The cargil hummingbird cannot be found in the wilds of Indonesia or Asia anywhere, they may have completely died out there except in very high mountain nests, few in number.  Why?  Human animals like to boil their nests for soup.  Don't we have enough Campbells? 

The Arctic (northern) polar bear is dying out from sickness and addiction to human garbage.  Though a "protected" species, they too, are slowly sliding off the endangered list into extinction.  Another 30 years, maybe.  The generation of adult bears were once cubs, watching their mothers feed on dump-heaps of human waste and have grown to believe that's their main food source.  Many safeguards have been attempted but the bear remains a predator species, which is its want, and will certainly kill for what it believes is its food.  Introduction into the wild has been a real failure, the animal doesn't understand how to hunt, how to distingush what is food and what isn't, and which animals they must compete with for food.  This means sure death, they won't be able to fight off wolves for a deer carcass.  Those that do are being shot as pests by cattlemen whether it's hunting season or not.  Worst of all, because global warming is past control, their one habitat is disappearing.  They live on the Arctic sea ice sheets, which are melting into the sea as ice floes and much of it will be completely gone by the middle of this century.  Gone.  (I'm thinking of the rise in water levels all over the globe) When the solitary polar bear is forced into close living with others of its kind, the stress levels rise and lethal fighting insues - polar bears are a "marker" species, one of many which tell the human what condition this planet is in. 

Have you heard of M15?  It a gigantic glacier, a mountain of an iceberg, its bulk obviously found under the sea.  It's the highest found in the Arctic.  Due to higher temperatures, it broke off from it's main ice sheet a few years ago.  It's floating out to sea, crashing off in smaller ice floes and melting into the waters.  As the sea rises and habitat is lost, not a creature will be left unaffected.  Not a one.  From penguins, otters and seals to migrating birds.  And the incredulous find?  Parasites are living in the ice of the arctic glaciers and ice sheets.  Worms in the ice.  Not the usual marine bacteriological life that exists there normally, perfectly set in the food chain of this harsh climate, but parasites expelled from the dead bodies of other marine life.  This is advance notice of a planet gone terribly astray, extreme, unnatural, dangerous to life.  And we don't know where else life exists, now shouldn't that say at least some small thing about its value?         

Though the majority of the problem for our fellow inhabitants of earth is habitat loss, it's very frightening to discover an immuno-dificiency in the honey bee.  Parasites which starve them.  Life would not exist as we know it wthout this humble creature.  Why do we need so much land??  I still say the human animal has populated itself out of all control and if a higher species existed here we'd have been rounded up and shot in controlled numbers a few hundred years ago to save this planet and its other inhabitants.  Natural disasters do "cull" the human herd, but there's still too many of this one suicidal species - if humans were more of a beneficent life form, one that cared for and respected this earth and its other animals, things would never have gotten to this frightening level.  We brought on the industrial age which is killing everything.     

People are causing catastrophic futures they say they're sick of hearing about.  They're going to get alot sicker.