This articles outlines scientific research regarding the harms from pesticides to bees. Originally published on The Conversation. Republished with permission.
Neonicotinoids, the most commonly used pesticides in the world, were banned in the EU in 2018. More than 99,000 people petitioned the UK government to support the ban amid a wealth of scientific evidence linking this group of chemicals to poor health in bees, from the reduced production of bumblebee queens to slashed sperm counts among male honeybees.
The UK government had pledged to keep the EU’s restrictions post-Brexit, but recently granted a special exemption to allow farmers to use the neonicotinoid thiamethoxam on sugarbeet throughout 2021, and possibly until 2023.
Dire Consequences
If this signals the government’s intention to roll back regulations on agricultural chemicals now that the UK has left the EU, the consequences for pollinating insects could be dire. Research into the effects of these pesticides on pollinators is still ongoing, but new harmful effects are discovered all the time.
In a new study, my colleagues and I have uncovered the most recent example. We looked into the effect of these pesticides on the body clock and sleep of flies and bumblebees. Just like us, insects need sleep. And, like us, they have an internal sense of time – more commonly known as a body clock – which helps them synchronise their activity and sleep patterns with the rest of the world. Your body clock might allow you to wake up just a few minutes before your alarm goes off. For insects, it ensures they’re able to forage in the day when flowers are open and sleep at night when it’s usually too dark to fly.
Using lab-based colonies of buff-tailed bumblebees, the most common British bumblebee species, we showed that a neonicotinoid pesticide called imidacloprid turns night into day for bees. Foraging bumblebees were fed concentrations of imidacloprid that were similar to what they might encounter in the wild (around ten parts per billion). After exposure, the dosed bees were more likely to try to forage at nighttime and sleep in the daytime, and they were more sluggish overall, going on far fewer foraging trips than normal.
At the same time as we were experimenting on bumblebees, we were also studying the response of fruit flies to neonicotinoids. Scientists often use fruit flies as a model to help understand other animals, as we have a deep understanding of their genes and the ability to edit them. In our study, we labelled the brain cells which set the pace of the fruit fly body clock with fluorescent dye, to see if the pesticides could be directly affecting them.
In a normal fly, these cells collect information from the eyes and other light-sensing organs. The cells then change shape between daytime and nighttime and release signals to other parts of the body to ensure that sleep and other activities happen at the right time of day. But neonicotinoids appeared to interfere with both of these processes, freezing the body clock cells in daytime mode. Given how similar these cells are between fruit flies and bees, this process may be behind the effects on sleep and foraging that we saw in bumblebees.
The environmental impact
If bees can’t synchronise their foraging with the dawn, when nectar and pollen are most abundant, this will limit the amount of food they can gather, stunting the colony’s ability to grow and produce more bees.
The body clock is also an important part of communication in bees. Honeybees have a dance language which lets them tell each other where the best flowers are. They use the position of the sun in the sky as a tool for navigation, which means that honeybees need to be able to keep track of the time of day within the darkness of the hive. If their body clock is disrupted, it could affect their ability to communicate vital information to each other and reduce their ability to forage and pollinate.
The changes to sleep that we saw in the buff-tailed bumblebees are also worrying. Sleep during the night helps bees form memories, and so if neonicotinoids are disrupting their sleep, it could cause problems with remembering important information, such as the route back to the hive. The correct timing of sleep is also really important for childcare in the colony. When bumblebees are looking after their young, they have to tend to them and feed them round the clock, taking little naps between feeds. If neonicotinoids change their sleep patterns in a way that they can’t control, adult bumblebees may struggle to properly care for the next generation. All of these effects could potentially prevent colonies from growing and reproducing properly, threatening their long-term survival.
Bumblebees, like honeybees and other bees, are important pollinators for 84% of crops and 80% of wild flowering plants in Europe. Neonicotinoids pose a real threat to not only the health of these pollinating insects, but the agriculture and ecosystems they support. As a scientist who studies the effects of these chemicals, I hope that the “emergency use” that was recently granted by the UK government isn’t a sign of worse things to come.
Written By Max Wilbert and originally published on January 25, 2021 in Sierra Nevada Ally. In this article Max describes the plans for an industrial scale lithium mine, the harm this will cause and why we need to protect the area for endangered species.
Thacker Pass landscape. Image: Max Wilbert
On January 15th, my friend Will Falk and myself launched a protest occupation of the proposed lithium mine site at Thacker Pass, Nevada. We have set up tents, protest signs, and weathered more than a week of winter weather to oppose lithium mining, which would destroy Thacker Pass.
You might already be wondering: “Why are people protesting lithium? Isn’t it true that lithium is a key ingredient in the transition to electric cars, and moving away from fossil fuels? Shouldn’t people be protesting fossil fuels?”
Let me put any rumors to rest.
I am a strong opponent of fossil fuels and have fought against the industry for over a decade. I’ve fought tar sands pipelines, stopped coal trains, and personally climbed on top of heavy equipment to stop fossil fuel mining.
Now I’m here, in northern Nevada, to try and stop lithium mining. That’s because, in terms of the impact on the planet, there’s little difference between a lithium mine and an open-pit coal mine. Both require bulldozing entire ecosystems. Both use huge amounts of water. Both leave behind poisoned aquifers. And both are operated with massive heavy machinery largely powered by diesel.
The encampment at Thacker Pass. Image: Max Wilbert
I want people to understand that lithium mining is not “good” for the planet.
Sure, compared to coal mining, a lithium mine may ultimately result in less greenhouse gas emissions. But not by much. The proposed Lithium Americas mine at Thacker Pass would burn more than 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel every day, according to the Environmental Impact Statement. Processing the lithium would also require massive quantities of sulfur—waste products from oil refineries. One local resident told me they expect “a semi-truck full of sulfur every 10 minutes” on these rural, quiet roads.
This is not a “clean transition.” It’s a transition from one dirty industrial energy source to another. We’re making the argument for something completely different, and more foundational:degrowth. We need economic contraction, relocalization, and to stop using and wasting so many resources on unnecessary consumer products.
When people think about wilderness and important habitat, they generally don’t think of Nevada. But they should. Thacker Pass is not some empty desolate landscape. It’s part of the most important Greater sage-grouse habitat left in the state. This region has between 5-8% of all remaining sage-grouse, according to Nevada Department of Wildlife and BLM surveys.
Thacker Pass is home to an endemic snail species, the King’s River pyrg, which biologists have called “a critically imperiled endemic species at high risk of extinction” if the mine goes forward. Burrowing owls, pygmy rabbits, golden eagles, the threatened Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, and hundreds of other species call this place home, watershed, or migration corridor.
Thacker Pass is home to important old stands of Big sagebrush who are increasingly rare in Nevada and threatened by global warming.
One biologist who has worked in Thacker Pass, and who asked to remain unnamed for fear of retaliation, told me the Thacker Pass area “has seen the rapid decline of native shrubland/bunchgrass communities that form the habitat foundation.” He continued, “Those communities (particularly sagebrush) are already under tremendous stress from the dual-threat of invasive annual grasses (especially cheatgrass) and the increased fire returns that those volatile fuels cause.”
Now the BLM is permitting Lithium Americas corporation to come bulldoze what is left, tear away the mountainside for some 50 years, and leave behind a moonscape.
We are engaging in direct action and protest against this mine because the public process is not working. Despite sustained opposition, BLM ignored serious concerns about this mine and “fast-tracked” this project under the direction of the Trump Administration. We mean to stop the mine with people-power.
If you are interested in joining us, visit our website, to learn more about getting involved. And speak out on this issue. We can’t save the planet by destroying it. Transitioning away from fossil fuels and fixing humanity’s broken relationship with the planet will require a more critical approach. Follow
DGR stands in solidarity with indigenous peoples worldwide. They are often decisive defenders of the landbase that is their home and also the most vulnerable people, facing endless attacks, harassment and genocide by the culture of empire.
This is an excerpt from an article originally published on Mongabay.
The Philippines’ Department of National Defense has unilaterally terminated an accord that ensured the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines were off-limits to the military and police.
The defense secretary justified the move by alleging that insurgents from the banned communist party and its armed wing are using the campuses’ sanctuary status as cover for their recruitment and propaganda purposes.
The decision has alarmed displaced Indigenous students who are harboring at UP’s Quezon City campus after the military bombed or took over their schools in a counter-insurgency campaign that began in 2018.
Critics say the move is the latest blow to human rights and environmental activists in the Philippines, following the recent enactment of an anti-terrorism law seen as giving the armed forces free rein to perpetuate abuses in a country already rated as the most dangerous in Asia for environmental and land defenders.
MANILA — Indigenous youths harboring from a military-led counterinsurgency in the Philippines may soon lose the only safe space they have known for the past two years.
Under a nearly 40-year pact, the 17 campuses of the University of the Philippines are off-limits to the country’s military and police. Since 2019, a group of 68 Indigenous students and teachers have taken refuge at the UP campus in Quezon City, where they attend a makeshift school following the forcible closure of more than 160 schools catering to Indigenous communities, or lumad, in the southern island of Mindanao.
But in a letter dated Jan. 15 this year to the UP president, National Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana unilaterally declared an end to the pact, effectively stripping the sanctuary status of the campuses of the country’s leading public university.
Lorenzana cited “recent events” that identified UP students as members of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing, the New People’s Army (CPP/NPA), and said that “national security issues” and the safety of students against rebel recruiters are the main driving forces for the termination of what’s known as the UP-DND accord or the Enrile-Soto accord.
“The Department is aware that there is indeed an ongoing clandestine recruitment inside UP campuses nationwide for membership in the CPP/NPA and that the ‘Agreement’ is being used by the CPP/NPA recruiters and supporters as shield or propaganda so that government law enforcers are barred from conducting operations against the CPP/NPA,” the letter, addressed to UP President Danilo Concepcion, says.
The Department of National Defense (DND) says it will not “station military or police” on campuses and will not “suppress activist groups, academic freedom and freedom of expression.” The DND has nothing to gain from suppressing these activities, Lorenzana wrote: “We want them [the youth] to see their Armed Forces and Police as protectors worthy of trust, not fear.”
But despite the secretary’s reassurances, the news has triggered alarms for Indigenous students, who could now be targeted in military raids. The development threatens a repeat of the military attacks on Indigenous schools that occurred after President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in Mindanao in 2017, says Ruis Valle of the Save Our Schools Network (SOSN).
In 2018, the military conducted a series of campaigns and operations to crack down on lumad schools in Talaingod, in Mindanao’s Davao del Norte province, after Duterte threatened in 2017 to bomb the schools.
He had accused the CPP/NPA of using the schools as training grounds.
Since then, more than 160 schools catering to Mindanao’s Indigenous inhabitants have been bombed or transformed into military detachments, and completely shut.
The group of Indigenous students and teachers who sought sanctuary at UP’s Quezon City campus have consistently called for the reopening of Indigenous schools forced to close by the government, the SOSN says. It adds the now-scrapped UP-DND accord “served as a protective barrier for lumad children from direct military and police harassment.”
Human rights and environmental groups have also expressed concern at the DND’s latest move, calling the accord’s termination an attack on UP “as a democratic space.”
Since 2012, the university has “opened its doors to the lakbayan and kampuhan of indigenous people, national minorities, and farmers protesting mining plunder, land grabs, and other attacks against their ancestral lands,” the Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment, an NGO, said in a statement to Mongabay.
The university has also been “one of the few safe spaces” for environmental and human rights defenders to mobilize amid the government’s militaristic approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. Duterte signed a controversial anti-terrorism law during the lockdown, which critics say worsens an already fragile climate for environmental defenders and Indigenous groups in the Philippines. Eco-watchdog Global Witness rates the country the most dangerous for environmental and land defenders in Asia.
“The University of the Philippines is one of the pillars of academic freedom and critical thinking in the country,” Kalikasan said. “It is because of this freedom and critical thinking that the University can produce great minds that have excelled in different fields, including environmental protection and defense.”
Featured Image: The University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City, Metro Manila.
Image by Ramon FVelasquez via Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
In this episode of the Green Flame Lierre Keith Speaks on Biden Executive Order
In this timely episode of the Green Flame Jennifer Murnan interviews Lierre Keith regarding a new development in the war on women. That development is Biden’s executive order on “gender identity” signed the day of his inauguration, and it will eviscerate Women’s Rights.
Lierre Keith is the founder of the Women’s Liberation Front, WoLF founder and board member, a radical feminist for over 40 years and is the author of 6 books.
Here’s an excerpt from today’s episode:
[9:24]
…so what Biden has done, has said, taking this Bostock decision instead of sex, we’re now going to have gender identity so every place in the law that was protecting women as a group, as a class based on our biology, now they’re going to instead look at that through the eyes of “gender identity” and they can’t define gender identity, it’s not in this executive order, there’s literally no definition. The few states that have tried to have definitions, I mean, in New Jersey it’s like “gender identity is a gender related identity” and I’m not making that up, it’s completely circular and this is because it’s complete nonsense. I know we all keep using the emperor’s new clothes as our big metaphor but I don’t have a better one, it’s just complete nonsense, it means nothing. Yeah, “a circle is a thing we call a circle,” great! Does not tell you what a circle is! And the most ridiculous thing is that we all know what a man is and what a woman is, this isn’t actually up for debate. We have been a sexually dimorphic 500 million years on this planet, we’ve had sexual reproduction, there’s just men and there’s women, this is actually not very complicated, they have made it complicated, it is not complicated, we all know who can bear the babies and who doesn’t. For the whole history of patriarchy, they’ve never had a problem figuring out who the women were: was going to be sold as a child bride, was going to have her genitals mutilated, was gonna have her feet pound, wasn’t allowed to vote, I mean, in 1976 when my mother divorced my father she couldn’t get a credit card in her name, she couldn’t get a bank account, didn’t happen to my father! We all know who that happened to and why we have a feminist movement. Anyway, so Bostock has now come to fruition, we saw this in the ruling, anybody can read it all, this information is public and that’s what they said, that gender identity was essentially a discreet group of people and they deserve protection and we’re just going to go with it, again, never defined it because it’s not definable, it’s simply an internal feeling and it has nothing to do with physical reality. So this executive order, the federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination, now have to provide the same, let’s say, they’re going to prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity, this involves all the Federal Civil Rights offices across the country which are now going to have to enforce this. This is where you used to go if you felt like there was workplace discrimination or something that was one of the legal remedies that you had, so women aren’t going to have that remedy anymore, men will.
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
Across the internet, women have been expressing relief at the end of the Trump era.
Even Canadians are posting moving images of Kamala Harris and Jill Biden in outfits representing progress. No true feminist would wear a black suit and red tie, after all. What America needs now is jewel tones.
I’m hard pressed to understand what trauma Canadians have endured watching an egomaniac tweet himself into internet jail… If anything, it provided dedicated progressive posters with four years of conversation starters. Now what will you meme about?
Either way, I’m just glad all this division and polarization will finally come to an end.
Canadians and Americans alike will have to band together to find something new to distract themselves with. Maybe this time it will be mass surveillance and the end of free speech? OR. Or. Wait no I have a good one. An end to women’s sport and sex-based protections?
The first thing U.S. President Joe Biden did, the day after his inauguration, was to sign 15 executive orders, including rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement and reversing a policy that blocks U.S. funding for programs overseas linked to abortion. Not bad. He also implemented a mask mandate on federal property, as well as on buses, planes, and trains.
But Biden’s courageous “100 Days Masking Challenge” (ooooh fun! It’s like a game!) wasn’t the only decision allowing us to collectively breathe a hot sigh of relief. He also signed an executive order to implement certain aspects of the Equality Act, which sounds like a great thing, unless you are a woman who, in 2021, hoped for equality under the law. Sorry, Karen. Equality is not for you. Put your mask back on.
The order ensures “that federal anti-discrimination statutes that cover sex discrimination prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity” and bypasses the tedious legislative process normally required to pass legislation.
But hey, we’re talking about equality, you guys.
And who would vote against that! As far as I’m aware, democracy just means other people get to decide what’s good for you. People who vote against ungood things are fascists.
Lest you had been fooled into believing an “Equality Act” was, at least in part, about combatting sex-based discrimination, seeing as women are the half of the population who spent the last 100 years fighting for equal rights under the law, we are reminded that our status as “woman” only matters if you are the kind of woman who is a man.
The original Equality Act introduced in 1974 by Bella Abzug did in fact seek to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex (as well as sexual orientation and marriage status) but as we all now know, thanks to Twitter’s fact checkers, humans have surpassed sex. We are now a mass of amorphous theys whose rights are determined by the kind of porn we prefer. The Equality Act of 1974 did not go on to become legislation, and has been reintroduced in various forms over the years, bringing us to modern times, where equality is still needed, just not for chicks.
Today, the important thing, in terms of ensuring equality, is that mediocre male athletes be permitted to compete against girls and women, lest they have to live with their male-based mediocrity. As such, this “Equality Act” ensures that individuals cannot be discriminated on the basis of their “gender identity,” which sounds nice because no one should be discriminated against, but in this case we’re using the term “discrimination” to defend the rights of men to claim they are female and be treated as such.
You might ask why men would wish to be treated as “female.”
Well, for starters, to ensure they are not denied access to abortion should they become pregnant with delusion. But there are a few other good reasons, too. One of which being that, should these men find themselves charged with sexual assault, they can avoid being stuck in prison with a bunch of violent dudes. Fair enough. No one wants that. Problem is that, as “women,” these men now have the right to be imprisoned in women’s facilities, meaning female inmates are now subject to the male violence no one wants anything to do with. Seems unfair, right? Too bad, Karen! That’s equality!
The really important thing this Equality Act does, though, is to level the playing field for males who aren’t good enough athletes to compete against other male athletes. It is more fair for them to compete against women who are, due to their biology, not as strong or as fast as male athletes. Indeed, women’s bodies are different than male bodies, but we’re no longer allowed to talk about why that is, because material reality is not very polite, and impoliteness kills.
Men can now not only legally access women’s facilities — including washrooms, locker rooms, and dressing rooms — but as “women,” they can also win sport competitions, races, scholarships, and accolades previously reserved for girls and women, which they fully deserve, because the hardest thing about being a woman is being male.
In October, Biden promised us he would enact the Equality Act during his first 100 days as President.
He is a Good Guy (which is why you voted for him, right?) and Good Guys keep their promises. So, he is following through. None of this was a surprise, and now we can all celebrate this brave new world, free from the burden of independent thought.
Personally, I’m just relieved Americans no longer have a crazy guy as president! Imagine if the leader of your country believed that males could become female through pronouncement, then enacted legislation on that basis! LOL.
This article was originally published on Feminist Current: Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including The Spectator, Unherd, TheCBC, New Stateman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog.
Editors note: The sketch by Monty Python really nails it:
