When I say that “the food supply is far more fragile than people realize,” this is what I have in mind.
It looks like fruit/almonds/etc. might get pretty expensive soon. Big commercial bee keepers, that provide pollination services worth $14 billion a year, have been experiencing die-offs of 50-90% of their colonies over the last two years.
No one knows why the bees are dying. In and of themselves, one species doesn’t really matter much (heh, even humans!), but the interdependency of a living system depends on all things living. In this case, bee bye-bye means everything pollinated by the itty bitty bees will be affected. Wichita Eagle:
“One out of every three bites of food we eat is produced as the result of insect pollination, much of it by bees,” said Bruce Broynton, a spokesman for the National Honey Board, which this week released $58,000 for research it hopes will lead to understanding the bee deaths.
Here’s a wake-up call about what you can do to understand and prepare for the future. Short version: relearning to make everything more local and smaller-scale.