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THE BEARS AND THE BEES: HUMANS MESSING UP THE NATURAL WORLD, AGAIN
By Patt Morrison
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-lions-and-bears-and-bees-humans-messing-up-the-natural-world-again-20120716,0,3323675.story
July 16 2012
L.A., we have been seeing waaaaay too many movies -- and not enough
nature documentaries.
First, the news:
Glen Bearian -- so named for his Glendale haunts and with a clever
Armenian-sounding surname for a city with a large Armenian population
-- had been cooling off in a local pool not long before he was
tranquilized and carted back to the Angeles National Forest by Fish
and Game officials for the second time in four months.
He's been wandering around foothill streets, and in April, before
he was shipped back to the wild the first time, he startled
a gadget-absorbed pedestrian who -- in the fashion of so many
text-obsessed people who have almost walked right into me -- almost
ran right into the bear in Montrose.
And then my colleague Steve Lopez just reported on urban beekeepers in
Los Angeles, where the law bans hives but where residents are tending
their own backyard hives, which may be the saving of bee populations
that are collapsing in the wild. (I know an urban beekeeper, but
you'll never Abu Ghraib that out of me.)
And in May, Santa Monica police shot and killed a mountain lion that
had wandered into a courtyard in a city office building and gotten
trapped -- killed unnecessarily, to some locals' way of thinking,
and they made their feelings known.
Here's what I meant about the movies. It appears that Disney films and
horror movies shape our relationships with wild creatures. Either we
anthropomorphize them as cute and cuddly, or we are terrified of them,
but in neither case do we know very much about them.
Take Glen Bearian, who, thanks to one of his fans, has his own Twitter
account. When Fish and Game officials ship him "home," where is home?
We have pushed our homes into their homes. They're here among us
because we are now where they have always been. As Glen Bearian's
Twitter account declared, "Maybe the city took a wrong turn and ended
up in my forest." Exactly.
Drought, and construction in hillside and mountain habitats, all
mean a dwindling dwelling space and shrinking food supply for these
critters. One mountain lion who was being tracked by wildlife officials
was killed in September 2011 crossing the 405 Freeway. The cats need
a wide range to forage, and if they can't get it, they'll be trapped
into a genetically inbred and confined population that is as fatal
for mountain lions' future as any freeway hit and run.
The bear can't be driven 100 miles into the wilderness and dumped,
like Hansel and Gretel, in hopes he can't find his way back. The rule
is 30 miles back into his familiar habitat. And that means, as Fish
and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan said, that "based on his history,
I think it's probably 50-50 that he comes back."
How many "strikes" will the bear get, wandering back into a
neighborhood for food, before animal officers declare him a menace and
stop returning him to the wild and say they have to kill him outright?
Ditto the bees. Anyone in a neighborhood complains and the bees are
exterminated as if they were pests, instead of a tiny, vital part of
the food chain. All those killer bee movies seem to make city folk
think that the honeybee, the workhorse of agriculture, ornamental
and comestible, is out there raring to kill us.
I was astonished by some of the comments on Lopez's piece, people
demanding that the city wipe out all beehives because someone in
their family has a serious allergy to bee venom.
Really? Kill off all urban bees because you're afraid your child might
be stung? While we're at it, let's take out school and park swing sets
because someone might get hurt. Let's chop down that tree because some
kid might try to climb it. Oh wait, we did that already, didn't we?
Without bees, whole swaths of agriculture could collapse, floraculture
could collapse, all the creatures dependent on them would go -- boom,
boom, boom, domino, dead.
Already honeybees are themselves in a state of collapse in parts of
the country. Bees are so scarce that California almond growers are
having to patronize rent-a-hive businesses to get the bee pollinators
into their orchards. Agriculture isn't just "out there" either. Urban
gardeners and urban gardens could help to save bee populations, and
Los Angeles still bears traces of what it once was, even after World
War II: the richest agricultural county in the nation.
We humans had better wise up. At the rate we're going, with the
attitude we bring to our dealings with these creatures -- destroying
their homes to build ours, intolerant of even the insects whose
survival is closely tied to our own -- in very short order the only
place we'll be able to see them is on movie screens.
By Patt Morrison
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-lions-and-bears-and-bees-humans-messing-up-the-natural-world-again-20120716,0,3323675.story
July 16 2012
L.A., we have been seeing waaaaay too many movies -- and not enough
nature documentaries.
First, the news:
Glen Bearian -- so named for his Glendale haunts and with a clever
Armenian-sounding surname for a city with a large Armenian population
-- had been cooling off in a local pool not long before he was
tranquilized and carted back to the Angeles National Forest by Fish
and Game officials for the second time in four months.
He's been wandering around foothill streets, and in April, before
he was shipped back to the wild the first time, he startled
a gadget-absorbed pedestrian who -- in the fashion of so many
text-obsessed people who have almost walked right into me -- almost
ran right into the bear in Montrose.
And then my colleague Steve Lopez just reported on urban beekeepers in
Los Angeles, where the law bans hives but where residents are tending
their own backyard hives, which may be the saving of bee populations
that are collapsing in the wild. (I know an urban beekeeper, but
you'll never Abu Ghraib that out of me.)
And in May, Santa Monica police shot and killed a mountain lion that
had wandered into a courtyard in a city office building and gotten
trapped -- killed unnecessarily, to some locals' way of thinking,
and they made their feelings known.
Here's what I meant about the movies. It appears that Disney films and
horror movies shape our relationships with wild creatures. Either we
anthropomorphize them as cute and cuddly, or we are terrified of them,
but in neither case do we know very much about them.
Take Glen Bearian, who, thanks to one of his fans, has his own Twitter
account. When Fish and Game officials ship him "home," where is home?
We have pushed our homes into their homes. They're here among us
because we are now where they have always been. As Glen Bearian's
Twitter account declared, "Maybe the city took a wrong turn and ended
up in my forest." Exactly.
Drought, and construction in hillside and mountain habitats, all
mean a dwindling dwelling space and shrinking food supply for these
critters. One mountain lion who was being tracked by wildlife officials
was killed in September 2011 crossing the 405 Freeway. The cats need
a wide range to forage, and if they can't get it, they'll be trapped
into a genetically inbred and confined population that is as fatal
for mountain lions' future as any freeway hit and run.
The bear can't be driven 100 miles into the wilderness and dumped,
like Hansel and Gretel, in hopes he can't find his way back. The rule
is 30 miles back into his familiar habitat. And that means, as Fish
and Game spokesman Andrew Hughan said, that "based on his history,
I think it's probably 50-50 that he comes back."
How many "strikes" will the bear get, wandering back into a
neighborhood for food, before animal officers declare him a menace and
stop returning him to the wild and say they have to kill him outright?
Ditto the bees. Anyone in a neighborhood complains and the bees are
exterminated as if they were pests, instead of a tiny, vital part of
the food chain. All those killer bee movies seem to make city folk
think that the honeybee, the workhorse of agriculture, ornamental
and comestible, is out there raring to kill us.
I was astonished by some of the comments on Lopez's piece, people
demanding that the city wipe out all beehives because someone in
their family has a serious allergy to bee venom.
Really? Kill off all urban bees because you're afraid your child might
be stung? While we're at it, let's take out school and park swing sets
because someone might get hurt. Let's chop down that tree because some
kid might try to climb it. Oh wait, we did that already, didn't we?
Without bees, whole swaths of agriculture could collapse, floraculture
could collapse, all the creatures dependent on them would go -- boom,
boom, boom, domino, dead.
Already honeybees are themselves in a state of collapse in parts of
the country. Bees are so scarce that California almond growers are
having to patronize rent-a-hive businesses to get the bee pollinators
into their orchards. Agriculture isn't just "out there" either. Urban
gardeners and urban gardens could help to save bee populations, and
Los Angeles still bears traces of what it once was, even after World
War II: the richest agricultural county in the nation.
We humans had better wise up. At the rate we're going, with the
attitude we bring to our dealings with these creatures -- destroying
their homes to build ours, intolerant of even the insects whose
survival is closely tied to our own -- in very short order the only
place we'll be able to see them is on movie screens.