sunflowers

The End Of Flowers And The Foods And Pleasures They Provide To All

Seventy-five percent of all plants depend on insects to survive and reproduce

One out of every 3 bites of food humans eat comes from insect-pollinated plants

Globally in the past 30 years, half of the world’s most vital insects have disappeared, in Europe, more than 75% of insects are gone.

Why is it that we have, and have had for decades, the means to save the insects but have been prevented from saving them? Has our inaction now brought us near to the end of flowers?

There can be no doubt of the end of flowers is near. Flowers have an inseparable relationship and dependence upon insects and the plight of their insects is now at a shocking state. Anyone who has been driving a car for 20 years or more can tell you that these days there are far fewer insects splatting on our car windscreens. But while this might sound like a good thing for motorists it is the everyday proof of the destruction of nature by our high and rising CO2. Insects are amongst the first and most familiar forms of life succumbing to deadly oxidative stress effects of the trillion tonnes of long-lived CO2 already emitted into the air over the past century.

Eighty percent of flowering plants are pollinated by insects, so it goes to reason that the cataclysmic decline of insects will soon be reflected in a similar cataclysmic disappearance of flowers and flowering plants. Below is a list of just a few of the common foods humanity depends upon that depend on insect pollination.

Say goodbye to these favourites.

ALFALFA, ALMOND, ANISE, APPLE, APRICOT , AVOCADO, BANANA, BASEL, BEANS, BLUEBERRY, BREADFRUIT,  CARDAMOM, CASAVA, CASHEW, CHERRY, CHOCOLATE, COCONUT, COFFEE, CORIANDER, CRANBERRY, DAIRY PRODUCTS (milk cows eat mostly alfalfa), EGGPLANT, FIG, GRAPE ((oh no not our wine), GRAPEFRUIT, HONEY, KIWIFRUIT, LEMONS, MACADAMIA NUT, MANGO, MELON, NUTMEG, OLIVES, ORANGES, OREGANO, PAPAYA, PEAS and LEGUMES, PEACH, PEAR, PEPPERS, PEPPERMINT, POTATO, PUMPKIN, QUINCE, RASPBERRY and BLACKBERRY, RAPESEED OIL, SAFFRON, SAFFLOWER OIL, SESAME, STRAWBERRY, SUGARCANE, SUNFLOWER OIL, SWEETPOTATO, TEA PLANTS, TEQUILA (AGAVE), THYME, TOMATO, VANILLA, WATERMELON, WALNUT, YAM, ZUCCHINI

Today on this planet the environmental ’cause celeb’ is climate change, it seems that almost every environmental plight is defined as being ‘climate change.’ This is the politically corrected name for the term ‘global warming.’ If you listen to the legions engaged in the din you are almost certain to come away believing that global warming and climate change is all that matters.  It is not climate change that describes the most important characteristic of the CO2 elephant in the world’s environment. It is simply the CO2 in its tightly linked role with photosynthesis and respiration. It has far more direct, immediate, devastating, and deadly effects than its slow role in warming and changing the climate.

It is important to refocus our attention away from climate change and onto the immediate deadly effects of CO2

Insects and elephants

All over the world insects are reported to be disappearing. They aren’t gone completely anywhere yet, but their numbers reveal far more than decimation, 75% of our insects are missing in Europe. — click to read more

Of course, this is only if you might want to keep the flowers and bees and all manner of other insect and ocean life on this blue planet. If you do you will have to ‘buck the system’, not by becoming a ‘climate change denier’, but by taking on the direst problems of CO2 first.

Think if you task as if you were a doctor and your patient has taken a lethal overdose of poison.

You’d not be entering into a long dialog with your patient about the possible long-term side effects of the antidote that will save them from dying immediately. Nor would you first send them up to the psych ward for drug counseling so that they could be taught the dangers of taking a second lethal overdose. I hope every doctor would administer the antidote without delay, but alas it does not seem to be the case.

The cataclysm now closing in on our insects and flowers is merely the beginning of the end. Our songbirds are disappearing as well. If they were canaries and we were in coal mines, the alarms would be ringing, and we’d be running for our very lives.
But it seems to be human nature to ignore the death of Nature around us. If we are still making money and not personally suffering we figure the job of taking care of Nature is someone else’s job.

lonesome whippoorwill

As their food, the insects, disappears so do our small birds, it seems so many of our simple pleasures like birds singing and flowers blooming are doomed by our inaction. — Click to read more

Who will speak for the birds? Whip-poor-wills, known as ‘nightjars’ in Europe, are one of many species of small birds disappearing throughout most of their range. The organization ‘Partners in Flight’ describes them as a “Common Bird in Steep Decline”, and the North American Breeding Bird Survey estimates a 69% drop in populations between 1966 and 2010. Nowhere are they found in sufficient abundance as to restock their former abundance. It seems they are simply doomed and with them their melodious night-time bird song that, over the ages, have lulled so many to a peaceful.

Climate change has brought forth countless proposals to mitigate the harm it will do. Plenty of people are backing raising hundreds of billions, even trillions in climate taxes to develop solutions for the future so long as the cash comes today.

But at the tragic heart of the issue is the fact that it is NOT Climate Change that we have to worry about first and foremost. The deadliest threat to life as we know it is the lethality of yesterday’s trillion tonne dose of CO2 we have forced upon GAIA herself (that includes us). GAIA has some advice to those willing to consider this — don’t waste any more time.

Taking care of GAIA means we need eco-restoration not geo-engineering

We have poked Nature/GAIA and made her cringe. To suggest we can cure Nature with some future massive technofix is absurd. We are not going to save her at some uncertain time in the future we have to do it now. The important thing to the ecosystem that we call Gaia is her biology/ecology it is that we must be concerned with. If we take care of her she will take care of us.

The trillion tonnes of yesterday’s CO2, emitted by our fossil fool age, is wreaking havoc on this planet, it is now clearly seen to be a lethal overdose of CO2 that is effectively our genocide against the smallest and most vulnerable of life, the insects of the land and the plankton of the seas.

The revolutionary solution needed to save the flowers, the insects, the birds, and ourselves is to restore Nature. By replenishing sufficient plant life to take in that first lethal overdose of CO2 is a task very difficult to do with plants on land such as forests. But this is a blue planet that is mostly ocean and in that ocean there are sufficient green plants standing at the ready, well drifting at the ready, to save this world for all. All that they require of us is the simple replenishment of the vital mineral dust our fossil fuel/fool age has denied them — their vital dust. Replenishment of that vital dust and the resulting restoration of ocean plankton pastures will come at a cost of mere millions.

The Triage Approach common to all emergencies demands that we treat the most immediate and grievous problems first!

Worry about the secondary problems second, we’ll be lucky to survive to have any problems to deal with we don’t deliver the antidote within this decade.

Just 60 years ago the ocean plankton pastures produced the vast majority of our planet’s oxygen as they performed 85% of all photosynthesis.

OceanNPP_declines

Only downwind of the Sahara and Arabian peninsula are ocean pastures receiving sufficient vital dust to remain productive, everywhere else there is a 50+ year ever-worsening drought of dust.

NASA Earth Observatory Dying Ocean Pastures

As a result of CO2 impacts on the ocean, we’ve witnessed a terrible loss of ocean plant life.

In each five year period since 1950, an amount of ocean plant life equal to all of the plant life in the Amazon Rainforest has repeatedly disappeared from the oceans.

In just 60 years we have stood by idly and watched as 12 rainforests of plants have been wiped from the face of this “Earth’s” oceans.

This Yin and Yang of plant life on land and at sea is explained more fully in this posting…

eco-restoration

We have proven we can restore the ocean plants and in doing so bring ocean life back to historic health and abundance. In doing so we repurpose humanities deadly CO2 overdose into new ocean life and indeed new life everywhere on this blue planet. — click to read more

We now know definitively that as we replenish and restore that missing dust to the ocean pastures they return to the state of health and abundance they and we enjoyed in the not so distant past. The amount of mineral dust, rock dust, needed by ocean pastures as provided by Nature is vast. But if delivered by the intelligent hand of man it can be a trifling amount costing mere millions not billions to bring back ocean plankton pastures, to bring back the fish that once thrived on those pastures, and to manage billions of tons of CO2.

You have a choice, sit back and do nothing and perhaps start drying some flowers for the future. Your grandchildren might be in awe as they try to imagine what those dried flowers pressed between the pages of your family bible might have looked like carpeting this Earth. Or you can join me.