Most Recent Campaign Headlines
The global grassroots organization Slow Food was among the groups that called for far greater attention by world leaders to the "debilitating" loss of biodiversity and the disastrous effects the decline is having on food system, which was outlined in a first-of-its kind report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reported last week that in 2018 it issued so-called "emergency" approvals to spray sulfoxaflor—an insecticide the agency considers "very highly toxic" to bees—on more than 16 million acres of crops known to attract bees.
Buying organic food is among the actions people can take to curb the global decline in insects, according to leading scientists. Urging political action to slash pesticide use on conventional farms is another, say environmentalists.
Something catastrophically wrong happened in 2018 to monarch butterflies. Idaho wildlife biologist Ross Winton spent years working with monarch butterflies. With the help of volunteers, he would carefully put a tiny tag the size of a paper hole punch on about 30 to 50 of the iconic insects each summer in the Magic Valley.
Researchers who work on GMO crops are developing special “artificial diet systems”. The stated purpose of these new diets is to standardise the testing of the Cry toxins, often used in GMO crops, for their effects on non-target species. But a paper published last month in the journal Toxins implies a very different interpretation of their purpose.
You’ve seen the headlines:
America’s Wild Bees Are Dying and Ecosystem Collapse Will Follow, reports Newsweek.
Pesticides Are Harming Bees in Literally Every Possible Way, warns Wired.
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here, says the New York Times.
Here’s your opportunity to do something about it.
Now that the federal government has reopened, it’s time to talk to your U.S. Representatives and Senators about what you’d like them to accomplish this year.
We hope you’ll put the Save America’s Pollinators Act at the top of your list.
If you’ve been following OCA’s Save the Bees campaign, you’ve seen the recent headlines.
The increasing use of pesticides is a ticking time bomb for all insects, including pollinators. Declining insect populations could soon have dire consequences, not just for insects but for all the animals and plants that rely on them—from insect-eating birds, shrews, lizards and frogs, to the 120 pollinated U.S. crops worth more than $15 billion annually.
While soybean farmers watched the drift-prone weed killer dicamba ravage millions of acres of crops over the last two years, Arkansas beekeeper Richard Coy noticed a parallel disaster unfolding among the weeds near those fields. When Coy spotted the withering weeds, he realized why hives that produced 100 pounds of honey three summers ago now were managing barely half that: Dicamba probably had destroyed his bees’ food.
Cape commercial bee farmers experienced a devastating revenue loss after thousands of bees were infected by a poison that left their hives ravaged. Many farmers initially did not know the cause, but tests carried out on bee samples revealed ant pesticides, lethally poisonous to bees, to be the culprit.
When Susan Weller traveled to Ecuador to study tiger moths in the 1980s, she found plenty of insects. A decade later, Weller, now director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, returned to conduct follow-up research. But the moths she was looking for were gone.
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