Bees are disappearing /dying in record numbers. This is serious business and very personal. Guys, no bees = NO COFFEE. Ladies, no bees = NO CHOCOLATE. These are just 2 of the many many fruits, nuts and veggies we will no longer see on our tables if bees continue to decline.
Bees are disappearing. Maybe it's due to toxins in chemical pesticides. Maybe it's stress caused by commercial bee-keeping techniques, maybe it's disease.
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures just out show food prices have doubled since 1980. But in real terms food has never been cheaper. However, cheap food comes at a cost, and that cost is the destruction of the soil - and with it, the future.
Global warming could just be the break our farmers need. If we start paying our farmers to save us from climate change, then climate change may just save our farmers.
I don't know if it's a good or a bad thing, but Woolworths has been given the green light to buy the eight Macro Wholefoods stores in Sydney and Melbourne. The Macro stores - the "superstores" of the Australian organics industry - will be rebranded as Thomas Dux, to go with the two existing Thomas Dux gourmet food stores that Woolies already owns.
It's worth reading this interview with James Lovelock from a couple of months back in The New Scientist. The author of the Gaia Hypothesis - known for his bleak pronouncements on climate change - predicts 90 per cent of mankind will die in the next century from even two degrees of warming.
Well, don't forget peak oil entirely, but as this New Internationalist article explains, a shortage of fertile topsoil could be more alarming. Agricultural soil loss is outpacing soil formation tenfold. With world population rising fast will we run out of land to feed ourselves?
