If this virus is an alien invasion, which side is the planet rooting for?
I have read a heartbreaking article about polar bears. Starting by the end of this decade, till the end of the century, all polar bears on Earth will have disappeared – starved to death because of human-made climate change. See https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/...
And it’s not just the polar bears. We kill everything.
I live in the country, used to the sound of frogs, insects, song birds, bees – now it is eerily quiet. Those of you old enough to remember a few decades back, would recall that on long cross-country drives, your car’s windshield was covered with the bodies of dead bugs that your car hit. It’s been many years since I have seen a dead bug on my windshield.
Milkweed flowers were the favourite food source for the monarch butterflies and hummingbirds. The government declared, decades ago, the milkweed to be a poisonous plant and ordered spraying them with weed killers. Now the same government is urging people to grow them again in an effort to save the monarchs. We have a patch in our front yard and it is owned by one single monarch - the only one I have seen for years. We also still have one solitary hummingbird on our feeder (there used to be 3-4).
In our greenhouse, we used to have clouds of insects buzzing about, pollinating our tomato plants. Now we have to go around with tiny brushes, from one tomato flower to the other, trying to hand-pollinate them, with limited success. We will have a lot fewer ripe tomatoes to eat this year than the year before and the year before that.
So, if this virus is an alien invasion in a deadly battle with humanity, I can just see the planet holding its breath, waiting for the outcome of this IQ contest between the invading army of microscopic lumps of protein and the crown of all creation.
So far we are losing.
If we will be gone, I don’t think we will be missed.
And it’s not just the polar bears. We kill everything.
I live in the country, used to the sound of frogs, insects, song birds, bees – now it is eerily quiet. Those of you old enough to remember a few decades back, would recall that on long cross-country drives, your car’s windshield was covered with the bodies of dead bugs that your car hit. It’s been many years since I have seen a dead bug on my windshield.
Milkweed flowers were the favourite food source for the monarch butterflies and hummingbirds. The government declared, decades ago, the milkweed to be a poisonous plant and ordered spraying them with weed killers. Now the same government is urging people to grow them again in an effort to save the monarchs. We have a patch in our front yard and it is owned by one single monarch - the only one I have seen for years. We also still have one solitary hummingbird on our feeder (there used to be 3-4).
In our greenhouse, we used to have clouds of insects buzzing about, pollinating our tomato plants. Now we have to go around with tiny brushes, from one tomato flower to the other, trying to hand-pollinate them, with limited success. We will have a lot fewer ripe tomatoes to eat this year than the year before and the year before that.
So, if this virus is an alien invasion in a deadly battle with humanity, I can just see the planet holding its breath, waiting for the outcome of this IQ contest between the invading army of microscopic lumps of protein and the crown of all creation.
So far we are losing.
If we will be gone, I don’t think we will be missed.
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The thing is, they have been classified as an invasive species and there are laws prescribing the plant's destruction.
Only thing is, there are quite a few people who stubbornly refuse to abide by the regulation (and the accompanying not-insubstantial fine) and proudly keep them in their gardens.
Although I neither destroy them nor cultivate them, I'm personally rooting for the "keepers". Hell, any plant mad enough to actually start spreading in a place like Finland deserves to be allowed to spread, methinks!