>
> >I don’t think most of the general population knows about what is going on
> in the environment.


Exactly--since most of the general population is urban and disconnected
from nature.

It's easy to point the finger at agriculture or pesticides, but the amount
of intensively-managed farmland has not changed that much over the years,
and the pesticides used today appear to be more eco-friendly than those
used from the 1950s through the 1990s.

That leaves as the main suspects CO2 and climate change (unless it is the
simple smell of humans).  And this is where the Precautionary Principle
kicks in--if the consequence of inaction is irreversible (such as the
extinction of species), then it is better to err on the side of caution
than to wait for hard proof.

Of interest, is a graph from Nature magazine that illustrates the level of
CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 400 million years.  To a biologist, the
graph strongly suggests that photosynthetic plants have maintained a
dynamic equilibrium of CO2  for the past 20 million years, and especially
since the last ice age.  But we humans are now releasing buried carbon at a
rate that the biosphere is unable to process back into storage.  The
long-term consequences may be severe.
-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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