I had Real Time with Bill Maher on TV while doing some work overnight, and one of Bill’s guests was the actress Ellen Page (the pregnant girl in Juno; Kitty Pride in the X-Men, etc.). She was promoting a documentary about bees, and the gist of their discussion about it was that the bees were dying off, and if they died off, then the plants would die off, and then us. That was the first I’d heard of that. The last time I remember someone raising warnings about bees it was about there being too many of the killer variety.
Beeocide as a new fear reminded me of Michael Crichton’s didactic novel State of Fear.
On pp.571-572 of that paperback version I linked to above, Crichton has one of his characters opine that it wasn’t a coincidence that stories about global warming began appearing in the media shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall lessened fears of nuclear winter: that the powers that be need to continually stoke fear, because people in fear are easier to control (here, incidentally, is clip of William Shatner, while promoting Star Trek II on Merv Griffin’s show in 1982, offering as an explanation for the franchise’s appeal that it shows a future in which humanity hadn’t blown itself up).
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