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The Bears And The Bees: Humans Messing Up The Natural World, Again

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  • The Bears And The Bees: Humans Messing Up The Natural World, Again

    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.

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