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Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:01:53 -0400 |
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Once again Jim provides entertaining, well honed, logic with its low
ph designed to cut right through the crap. Only this time, as is often the
case, the appearance of logic is created by skillfully dissecting out and
displaying only part of the picture. What is absent from Jim’s reasoning
this time is mention of the reality that in the world of government
research money, like all forms of government funding, it’s a free for all
out there; it’s every scientist and farm group for themselves. That’s just
the way it is. Not only that, it’s usually really hard to get funding via
the legislative process, especially by means of a stand alone bill. It is
the nature of legislation, especially funding bills, to automatically come
with coat tails. It is SOP in Washington to grab onto those coat tails
because it’s a hell of a lot easier to ride the coat tails of a bill that
has momentum than to create a separate bill and enough momentum for it to
make it through the gauntlet.
I admit, I haven’t really followed this Pollinator Protection Act, but
frankly I would be surprised if it made it through with out earmarks from
some much more unrelated areas than Native Pollinators.
The fact is that beekeeping research is and always has been under
funded. So has research into native pollinators and entomology as a
whole. It is understandable that beekeepers would want everyone else to
keep their hands off their research funding bill; to keep it strictly on
task. But it’s not despicable of those interested in native pollinators to
want a piece of the pie. They have a harder and more strictly
environmental argument to make for deserving research money. Their
argument, like many environmental arguments, is more difficult to relate
directly to economic interests. This may be the chance of a life time for
them. Everyone knows what a raw deal the Native Pollinators got when the
European Honeybees came to North America. Give them a break, Jim :>).
Steve Noble
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