So Harold Camping got it wrong (again) and the world didn’t end on May 21st, and we all laughed at the joke. Now I’ve seen this movie, which contained an equally sounding preposterous prediction from Rudolf Steiner, the eminent philosopher and social innovator, who in 1932 predicted that within 80-100 years all the honeybees in the world would totally disappear. And in case like me you’re not sure how that would affect us all let me explain, it means the END of our food chain. And this is no laughing matter. (Actually the bees affect 40% of our food, but that’s still enough to start panicking about!)
This pandemic fear started a few years ago with bees disappearing in mass numbers from their hives with no single explanation. This phenomena was named “Colony Collapse Disorder’ a term which in itself is enough to spread doom and gloom, and when you listen to all the world renowned experts that filmmaker Taggart Siegel has rounded up to add their opinions, the picture looks very bleak.
Evidently there are forces at work that are greatly contributing to this worrying scenario, the worst of which seems to be monoculture i.e. devoting large areas of farmland to a single crop. In California at the largest Almond Farm in the country they now have to ship in truckloads of bees from all over the country to pollinate the fruit. The forecast is that one day there will not be enough of these ‘migratory bees’ to go around and crops like this will simply fail.
Günter Hauk, a respected biodynamic beekeeper calls the crisis “More important even than global warming“, which may be a tad exaggerated, but it is certainly one that more of us need to be aware about and take note of if we are ever to be able to affect the outcome.
It’s a powerful argument that is very dramatically conveyed in this film, which cleverly uses wee touches of humor to help get the message over. I however left the theater quite depressed and vowed to immediately replace my rooftop spa with some hives, but by the time I biked the 6 miles back home in the fierce afternoon sun, my fervor had been dampened more than my sweaty t shirt. And one other thing put me off, and that was the fact that most beekeepers seemed to range from eccentric to really quite mad, and so I know I wouldn’t fit in. NO, I wouldn’t! But maybe you would?
★★★★★★★
Click for Trailer
Labels: documentary
