The best example of colony collapse disorder is not disappearing bees but the decline of the world’s coral reefs.
Today’s Miami Herald business section features a front page story: “tourism in the Florida Keys goes more upscale, prompting a shakeout.”
The report suggests that the migration to higher paying tourists is a deliberate shift by Keys business owners. Baloney.
In reality, global warming has already pushed away the local economy that supported bait shops, gas stations, and lower cost housing: all gone the way of the coral reef. All that is left, is high end tourism.
Now some people will say that only high end tourism can sustain an economic model screwed up by high insurance costs.
Read Warren Buffet’s recent annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, one of the world's largest insurance holding companies, and you will understand why "it would be a huge mistake to bet that evolving atmospheric changes are benign in their implications for insurers."
Extreme weather events combined with overdevelopment on fragile coasts has ratcheted premiums and the costs of reinsurance through the roof.
So whether it is decimated coral reef tract or increased insurance rates is immaterial: we are already experience colony collapse disorder in the Florida Keys and it is not some mysterious phenomenon applying to bees.
The mainstream media has started to ask the question: how much are Americans willing to pay now, to change the impacts that are leading to global warming.
By the time we agree that colony collapse disorder is a phenomenon that equally applies to civilization, we could be looking at ourselves in the mirror, amazed we didn’t act on the basis of precaution.
This makes us wonder: if we can't even agree to protect our watersheds (ie. South Miami Dade Watershed Study) in a time of severe drought, and if the Miami Herald won't make the connection between what is happening in the Keys, the economy, and colony collapse disorder: will we even know what is happening, when it is happening to us?
1 comment:
Floridians are definitely abandoning the hive and heading for higher ground. Where I reside in Western North Carolina we are being inundated with droves of fleeing SoFla's. Sadly, they are bringing their bad habits along with them and our once green slopes are now scarred by ridiculously out of scale homes. Trees are cut down to provide a maximum view of the mountains. Sound familiar? One can only hope the housing crash will slow the tide of those escaping the mess they made only to mess it up here. It goes round and round...
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