ANH-Intl e-Alert: To bee, or not to bee

Money – the solution or the problem?

It’s difficult to not see humans as their own worst enemy. We’ve evolved a world where the majority of population are ruled by economic vices of one form or another. Most of us spend the best part of our time just trying to earn enough to keep food on the table and the debt collectors from the door. A tiny proportion of people, in the boardrooms of the largest corporations in the world, and in the cabinet offices of the ruling elite, see money (they sanitise the word by thinking of it as ‘economic strength’) as power.

And with all of this, the best intellects the planet has to offer seem incapable of solving our big problems, like energy, poverty, environmental damage and healthcare. We’re forced into thinking we need more research, but actually what we need is better implementation of existing knowledge — and more freedom from an economic system that has a vested interest in keeping our problems unresolved.

Taking the wrong roads for the sake of profit

Governments, for example, continue to invest in fossil fuels and nuclear (fission) power stations, despite remarkable work going on, as publicised last week, in the low-energy nuclear fusion field that could almost certainly resolve the energy deficit in so much of the world.

It’s the same with poverty and hunger. We could produce enough food to feed the world, but those in industrialised countries have too much of the food we don’t need, and those in developing countries are left to starve. And the divide is made greater by the fact that indigenous systems of agriculture in developing countries have gradually been lost to the promise of short-term wealth, cash crops and exports, a process that has been wholly facilitated by so-called ‘first world’ nations.

And, as we uncover in one of our stories this week, we’re telling them to impose salt taxes to reduce their risk of cardiovascular disease? Don’t let me get started on just how far we’ve been taken down the wrong track by the medical establishment when it comes to our attempts to resolve the spiralling chronic disease crisis…

Bees in trouble

What we’ve done to the world around us — being as objective as it is possible to be — makes any of our species’ self-imposed harm pale into insignificance. This week we look at the issues facing recent colony collapses of honeybees. Our agricultural activities have already wiped out a wide range of species and strains of wild bees, and now it’s the turn of managed bee populations. The agrochemical companies have argued that colony collapses since 2007 are just part of a long-term natural cycle and that the bees will recover. But recent research on neonicotinoid insecticides tells a different story. Read this week’s feature on it, watch the video links, follow our calls to action—and make as much difference as you can.

In health, naturally

Robert Verkerk PhD
Founder, executive and scientific director