Why is this affecting me so much? Perhaps because I fell in love with bats years ago, working on a reference work on mammals — the many faces of bats are so astonishing. Perhaps it’s because they eat half their weight in insects every night, an amazing feat of evening echolocation that keeps farmers’ fields free from certain moths and thus their voracious larvae, removes a thousand mosquitos a night per bat. Or it’s that the cause of death is starvation, because their hibernation systems aren’t working right, and they’re agitatedly using up their fat stores too fast; they’re found as gaunt sacks of bones, outside the caves, as well as inside.

Or it’s because they’re such a joy to watch in the twilight sky, and I’ll miss them.

But in the end I’m freaked mostly by what I was thinking on the way into work: the fungal growth around the bats’ noses are indicative of weak immune systems, as well as lack of colonial grooming. What would make an entire colony’s immune systems weak? Well, perhaps some of the biome-breach realities that we’ve been seeing, where chemicals move up the food chain, disrupt endocrine systems, and cause strange immune system responses.

Picture this: some delectable insect that apple growers (let’s say) keep at bay with chemicals — a fly, a moth, or something like that — has evolved a resistance to that chemical. That means that the fly doesn’t drop to the ground dead (like it used to do), but rather flies around, perhaps ill, but not dead. It becomes ideal bat-food — a slow-moving prey without its wits about it.

Now, the top predator of the winged areas is ingesting thousands of these insects, nightly. Like swordfish, and tuna, and killer whales in the ocean, the chemicals concentrate in the predator (or scavenger). This may have been going on for the last couple years, and just now has built up to toxic levels.

Or, the late winter (as one bat-watcher noted) in the region resulted in the bats flying too late in the year, after the insects had disappeared; they went to bed hungry, and are waking up too early, hungry, emaciated, and ill.

I dearly hope that there’s a specific cause that can be identified, rather than remain the mystery that the bee colony collapse disorder is currently.

I fear we are reaching tipping points of toxicity in our biospheres, and it scares the hell out of me.

Yesterday I was in the local thrift store and the cashier — a toothless woman in her 60s — and I had this discussion. When I said “plastic bags are awful” her reply was “Why don’t we go back to paper, like we used to?”

Couldn’t argue w/ her –in fact I’d found a comrade. Of course opting for paper is its own problem, albeit not as troubling as plastic.

Target is a different story altogether. Now I haven’t tried calling corporate and demanding they switch over the paper, but somebody  has, because now on their plastic bags is printed a list of things you can do “Reuse your Target Bag”

1. Tiny Trash Can Liner

2. Doggy Duty

3. Water Balloon

4. Road Trip Rubbish

5. Soggy Laundry

You get the idea. At least they’re thinking about this, but do any of these solutions do anything but DELAY the inevitable throwing away?

That rhymed, but I didn’t mean it to.

I mean, you can go to Target and walk away w/ five or ten such bags — how you gonna reuse them all?

You’re not. So why take ANY away?

That’s the best solution. Take your own cloth bag/s to Target — tell them to keep their bloody plastic to themselves.

Jim

“Only once during the past seven years did the strong northerly winds of spring and summer go away — and that time, in spring and early summer of 2005, the pendulum swung wildly the other way, with little wind at all until partway through summer.

That set off a chain of events that scientists concluded were responsible for a startlingly widespread wave of seabird deaths — from the Farallon Islands off San Francisco to Vancouver Island.

After that, researchers from Oregon State University, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife looked intensely at waters off the Oregon coast for the research announced Thursday. And the same thing is happening off Washington’s coast.

Mary Sue Brancato and her colleagues first noticed it on a visit to the coast in 2000 or 2001.

We were out there for another (research) project and we were like, ‘What is it with these thousands of dead crabs?’ ” said Brancato, a marine biologist who works at the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary.

Those were Dungeness crabs. Later other species were affected, Brancato said, leading scientists to surmise it was some widespread cause. By 2004 they were taking measurements to document low levels of dissolved oxygen, the kind of oxygen sea creatures can use.

Holy shit.

I need to take a break and get outside, remind myself that the earth is still here, still beautiful, and worth any amount of work it takes to make any small improvement.

Jim

Given the discipline we must maintain, this was a pickle. How to introduce a brand new — even in this nascent stage of the site — kind of communication?

Of course it goes w/out saying that we were attracted to the intrinsic rhythmic structure of the haiku — after all, the second line always contains SEVEN SYLLABLES! And we do like that magic number seve.

But the clincher was this: Traditional haiku is a type of communication whose purpose is to capture (otherwise) ineffable moments of seasonal transitions. That first poo-too-weet of the bird of spring. The first glimpse of the crocus. You get the idea, you studied the form in grade school. So what better modality of communication about the chaos and miasma of change wrought by environmental devastation (in all 7 forms) than the haiku?

We could if we’re not careful go haiku crazy!

Our other concern was if you don’t cleverly mark the word w/ caps: “PostApocHaiku” and instead write all in lower caps “postapochaiku” it might make people want to respond with a: Gesundheit!

And what is wrong, one’s spiritual proclivities notwithstanding, with a simple “God bless” in response to a sneeze…or some larger cataclysm.

I am,

James

and

“Overall, this site has SO MUCH cool stuff going on in it. I responded best (of course) to the academic pretentions/spoof elements (loved the pronunciation guide, for example) …”

On this last one, we’re not sure what she’s implying regarding “academic pretentions” or “spoof elements.” We hope this tester clarifies it for us in the future.

Was it a malicious action from one of our former colleagues? We can’t believe any of them would do that.