Bees And Cell Phones
A decade or more ago, I bought a book called Why Things Bite Back, and one of its key points was that technology solves old problems but creates new ones. Call it the Law of Conservation of Anxiety.
I thought of that book when I read today's news that some scientists believe that cell phone usage has created Colony Collapse Disorder. CCD is a catastrophe breaking over world agriculture like a tsunami. Bee colonies have been shutting down left and right in unprecedented numbers for no good reason. Why is this a problem? Because a wide range of farmers rely on bees to pollinate their crops. No bees, no crops, no food.
But I have to wonder about this theory, which arises from the fact that bees won't return to the hive when someone's using a cell phone in their vicinity. Why this year? Shouldn't we have seen a gradual decline in bee colonies inversely proportional to increased cell phone usage? And how would it spread to Europe from the U.S., given that Europe has deeper cell phone penetration than this country? Or is there a tipping point at work here? Or is it not just cell phones, but the increasingly ubiquitous wifi networks?
Scientists around the world are scrambling to find an explanation for CCD, so you can expect to hear any number of theories in the coming months. Fingers have already pointed to global warming; as with the cell phone theory, no experiments have shown conclusive connections.
And if cell phones are the problem, how do we fix that? Tell everyone to stop using them? Or require users to only call from a shielded place, such as a car?
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