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Wednesday, 2 June 2010

Bees or mobiles - your chance to vote

As BP continues its increasingly farcical mud-and-golf-ball experiments with mile-deep engineering in the Gulf of Mexico, it turns out that rising waters behind the massive - and massively controversial - Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze in China are causing all kinds of unforeseen seismic activity, requiring hundreds of thiusands more people to be removed from their homes and ancestral lands.  More evidence that our opinion of our cutting-edge engineering prowess - in particular where massive interventions in nature are concerned - far outstrips our actual capabilities.

Meantime scientists in India claim to have found evidence that electropollution (or "electrosmog" as they call it), may be behind the failure of honeybee colonies, due to interference with the bees' navigation systems.  People seem dubious, but I wonder what would happen they turned out to be right, and that the only way to save the world's bees (and most of our agricultural output) was to shut down all our mobile phone networks?  I've absolutely no doubt that the response would be to keep the networks open, in the utter confidence that we could engineer a solution (by genetic modification perhaps?) to keep the bees flying...

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