Originally posted by: zinfamous
But seriously...we lose the honeybees we are most definately screwed.
We will not be screwed. We will be inconvenienced.
We will find other ways to pollinate crops, even if its a brute force method like dumping pollen on the crops from the air.
It's the natural world that we need to worry about. Nobody is going to care enough to hand pollinate ButterCup-Like Flower #7297343.
What happens if another creature relies solely on the seeds of ButterCup-Like Flower #7297343? It suffers or dies too.
And the local foodchain crumbles.
Does anybody realize that we lose ~50 species a day(Depends on the source, it ranges from the low teens to thousands)? Fifty! A day!
Think about that for a minute. I dunno. That blows my mind. Fifty unique organisms
do not exist anymore because of our actions. At the least.
Most have no understanding of the loss that this is. Even the loss of one organism should be extremely alarming, especially if we didn't know very much about it. We get most of our insights from the natural world. Nearly all of our drugs are derived from discoveries pertaining to new chemicals, reactions, etc; the results of studying microorganisms. Or maybe not so micro-organisms.
How many of you know that we have only discovered a few percent of the total estimated microorganism species on the planet? Being the widest variety, they are also suffering the most. No doubt, most of the species in those numbers are microorganisms.
That's where it starts. This started something like 30,000 years ago; Humans became resourceful enough to start influencing the natural evolutionary rate of ~1 species extinction every few days. This snowball has been rolling for a long time, and it is getting very large now. Where does it stop?
We have ideas of where it stops. What other mass extinctions do you know of? The only difference is those are theorized to have been caused by natural disasters.
I'm not saying this bee thing has anything to do with this, it probably doesen't.. I am saying that we need to take care of our home. We claim to be intelligent. Let's be intelligent. Regardless of what you believe; "The planet will be here long after we're gone..". No doubt. The natural world collapsing around us wouldn't be a fun thing to go through, and assuming it is preventable in the first place, we should try.