Salon.com > Richard Schiffman

How neglecting bees could endanger humans

Wed, 01 May 2013 18:50:00 +0000

If you are an almond farmer in the Central Valley of California, where 80 percent of the world’s production is grown, you had a problem earlier this spring. Chances are there weren’t enough bees to pollinate your trees. That’s because untold thousands of colonies -- almost half of the 1.6 million commercial hives that almond growers depend on -- failed to survive the winter, making this the worst season for beekeepers in anyone’s memory. And that is saying a lot, because bees have been faring increasingly poorly for years now.

Much of this recent spike in bee mortality is attributed to Colony Collapse Disorder, a mysterious condition where all the worker bees in a colony simply fly off as a group and never make it back to the hive. Scientists have been studying this odd phenomenon for years and they still aren’t sure why it is happening.

We started the fire: Global warming burns the West

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 11:45:00 +0000

If you want proof that the earth’s climate is changing, go virtually anywhere in the Southwest in the summer. Chances are high that you will see a brown line of haze on the horizon and smell smoke in the air from a forest fire somewhere in the arid region.

I spend my summers in a grove of ponderosa and pinon in the mountains of northern New Mexico. When I bought the land bordering the Carson National Forest 20 years ago, there had not been a forest fire to speak of on the mountain in living memory. Then a massive blaze in May 1996 burned 7,600 acres on the slopes above my adobe cabin and destroyed 27 of my neighbors' homes in a matter of hours. Smoke from the fire resembled the mushroom cloud from an atomic blast and was visible for over a 1,000 square miles of high desert.

Fire itself is not a sign of climate change. Lightning-strike fires are natural events in forests that help to maintain their ecological balance, thinning out overcrowded woodlands, enriching the soil with fresh carbon and creating clearings where the bushes, forbs and grasses, loved by wildlife, can flourish. What is not natural, however, is the size of some of the recent blazes, their sheer destructive power.

Limbaugh rejects teachings of Jesus

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 14:00:00 +0000

America’s most popular talk show host has spoken the word "Jesus" approximately 2,420 times during his last 20 years on the air. He has mentioned "Christ" 2,130 times and the "Messiah" 4,038 times, according to one blogger with a whole lot of time on his hands. The purpose of his exhaustive research was to dispel doubts about Limbaugh’s Christian credentials, which have been under fire lately by certain evangelicals who cite the fact that Rush -- according to his own brother, David -- was never “born again.”

This is a hot topic for fundamentalists. “Is Rush a real Christian?” is the most frequently Googled question about the controversial radio personality.

So I decided to do a little research of my own, which I hoped might shed some light on the impending holiday season. Do Rush Limbaugh and the Prince of Peace really see eye to eye? Often the answer is no.

NPR dodges the peril of socialist opera

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 17:00:00 +0000

The timing could not have been worse for the latest in a series of controversies to hit the nation’s scandal-prone public radio network. But the fact that it was pledge week didn’t prevent NPR from caving in to conservative pressure and canceling its distribution of “The World of Opera,” last Friday after right-wing bloggers indignantly reported that host Lisa Simeone had taken part in Occupy DC, a spin-off of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a protest against corporate greed that is spreading to cities nationwide. Earlier in the week, Simeone, an independent producer, was sacked from her other job as host of the public radio documentary series “Sound Print” for her political activities.