Friday, May 13, 2011

Earthlings and the disappearence of bees

I've been writing blogs for weeks, although none of them have been published. The problem is that I can't figure out how I want to say what I want to say. I have seen some disturbing material over the last few weeks, have had some transcendent experiences and even started writing a descriptive short story involving a harpy.

Perhaps the problem is that the things I want to write about make me so angry I don't know how to articulate the point without baring my rows of shark teeth and scaring everyone away. This isn't even a good analogy (see my writers block???). I don't mind scaring people (in fact, I positively enjoy it. Everyone needs a good scare sometimes) it's that I don't want to sound like I'm whining because how does that change anything.

Take Earthlings. It is a documentary dubbed "the vegan turner" because the footage of slaughterhouses, puppy mills (you think I'm joking? Where do you think those pet shop puppies come from? Some nice lady with a big garden and a dog who has a whoops every few months?) and fur farms are so graphic they made me want to be physically sick. Joaquin Phoenix (the narrator of Earthlings) keeps intoning that if we had to kill our own animals we would all be vegetarian. This is a silly statement. Human beings are the ones who watch chickens and pigs in overcrowded stalls get cage madness and eat each other (and then we eat the cannibalistic animals: healthy living, folks) and who skin (and by that I mean pull off the skin and fur from the tail over the head, not shave it off like you would a sheep) live animals so that the viewer sees shots of a muscle and bone bloodied animal blinking.

Many people don't want to watch it because they don't want to become vegetarian, they don't want to be put off their meals. The problem is that the meal was off before they got to it. I mean, eat meat if you want to, but know where what you are putting in and on your body came from. I suppose it all boils down to what you can live with (or in this case, what pigs can live with, which is a lot. Most of them are still alive when they are boiled and then when their gristle is burnt off them with a blow torch. Farms sure ain't what they used to be like when babe became a sheep-pig).

When I write that, my hands go cold and I can hear a roaring behind my ears. I understand that some people don't think of animals as equal to people and that we are omnivores and should be eating meat. I even see that some people don't care that animals live in a constant state of excruciating pain from the time they are born because they are "just animals". I don't agree with it, but fine. Even on this most egocentric level however, we should not be eating animals killed in this condition because it is really bad for our health (never mind that of millions of sentient beings who live in terrible pain. Deep breath: take it from the anthropocentric perspective...) It's also(but we all know this right?) really bad from the planet. Too many cows=methane=bad?

We all know we're messing up the planet but I read of another disturbing trend. Bees are disappearing in entire hives (called Colony Collapse Disorder) because of a strange disease no one understands. Some have said it is owing to mobile phones, others say it is caused by insecticides. Either way, we've caused it and it will bring big problems. No more bees=no more pollination=very bad.

Albert Einstein said "If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live". I can only hope we can begin to fix this mess.

2 comments:

  1. Clea, I wish I could tell you something to make it better. But I still struggle with these things, all day every day.

    The only way I cope is to think of wisdom from my friend Thomas K. "There is beauty yet." It is something I cling onto, and I try take comfort in the fact that humans won't be around for very much longer, and maybe the planet will get another chance.

    More than that, I can't really tell you. All I can do is hug you and tell you that at least you care, at least you try, and that already is a great deal of something in a world that doesn't even want to give a fuck.

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  2. i know what you mean, about writing and writing and doing nothing about it.sometimes i want to curse the skill and the need to write frustrations away.but keep writing,even if it's just for you!

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