Beeing There

I've got one more installment planned in my ongoing "Climate Crisis Future" series. These essays have been outlines, speculations on direction and shape of things to come, depending on what is and isn't done today and in the near future. But while some of the Climate Crisis dangers are obviously huge--like Katrina-like storms--and others are very visible over time, like dried-up lakes and buildings sinking into soggy permafrost, there are a lot of very small shifts that can have greater consequences that may not be readily apparent.

The dying off of coral reefs partly or mostly because of hotter oceans is a big thing when you can go and look at it, but coral reefs are remote from most of us. Even harder to see are the effects of animal and plant species going extinct, some even before scientists--let alone the public--know they exist. What we do know about the polar bear and the penguin is clear in terms of the impact on them. But there are lots of species whose place in the ecological chain are still mysterious.

There's a cautionary tale in the news now: the honeybee. Some people know a lot about this species and its place in our food chain. Though few of us are aware of it, much of our food supply is dependent on honeybees pollinating vegetable and fruit plants, and seeds. As stated in this New York Times article, Cornell University estimates honeybees are crucial to about $14 billion worth of foodstuffs annually. And now, suddenly and inexplicably, they are disappearing.

More specifically, bees are leaving their hives and not coming back. Nobody yet knows why, but what is usually a 20% loss of bees in colonies kept by beekeepers has suddenly become 70%. Nobody is yet linking this to global heating, but there is an appropriate point or two here. First, that we're more dependent than most of us think or know on very small and specific aspects of nature, including individual species. And second, our willed ignorance that in part permits mindless exploitation is vast.

We have no idea how bees find their way around, but they do. Creatures with such little brains should not be able to find their own hives after flying around in search of food, but they do. Scientists have even moved the hives and otherwise tried to confuse the bees, but they get back anyway. But not this time.

We don't know why partly because our dogmas tell us bees are stupid and so we didn't really notice this (though beekeepers did, but they don't get grants.) It's the same kind of thinking that has made a recent observation of chimps in Senegal so ignorance-shatttering. These chimps were observed repeatedly fashioning spears from tree limbs, and using them to hunt smaller prey hidden in hollow tree trunks. The human preconceptions that bit the dust include that only humans use tools (that one was obliterated awhile ago--it turns out that even birds use tools), that only humans fashion tools and weapons, and use them to hunt.

There was another preconception punctured as well. It turns out that most of the chimps doing this were female. There goes the male hunter, and all it implies.

It may be that these chimps are unusual in terms of the diet and the prey available to them, but it seems highly unlikely that chimps have sudden acquired the intelligence and skills to do this. But according to this report, scientists have never seen this before. Why not? It may be as ethologist Fran De Waal suggests in his study of peaceful conflict resolution among chimps--scientists never saw it because they weren't looking for it. They had a theory about dominance by the strongest, and never looked beyond it--they just accumulated more "evidence" for it.

What we don't know may kill us. Our self-satisfied blindness may be an even bigger barrier than our self-indulgent denial. We need to get over both.