Dead bird outbreak worsens across Southeast US

The latest bird deaths in the wildlife mystery appeared on the roadside of Interstate 65, near Huntsville, Alabama on Saturday. The 300 black-colored grackles strewn over a white blanket of white snow was an eerie scene for motorists driving past the carcasses.

Since the beginning of 2011, thousands of dead birds and millions of dead fish have been reported worldwide. In Faenza, Italy, more than 700 doves were found dead with blue stains on their beaks. Authorities say it was a sign of suffocation. Sweden also reported dead birds last week. In the United States, strange bird deaths have been reported in Kentucky, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama and California. Dead fish and crabs have been reported by the millions in Maryland, Illinois, Arkansas, New Zealand, Brazil.

A recent report in the Huffington Post claims scientists have discovered the cause of death for the Doves in Italy. "We are fairly confident the birds died as a result of massive indigestion brought on by over-eating," Rodolfo Ridolfi, a director at the regional zoological institute, told The Daily Mail.” Additional data suggest that dead birds across the United States are the cause of blunt trauma and internal bleeding.

What all the reports lack is what prompted the bird deaths. Why did the birds in Italy suddenly eat themselves to death? In the US, the internal bleeding claimed to be the cause of death of the birds in Beebe, Arkansas could have been caused by impact, after falling from the sky. But what cause the birds to fall in the first place?

Birds and fish are at the top of the food chain, so whatever affects them also soon affects humans. There is some speculation that pollution from chemicals and oil from the BP Gulf oil spill has infiltrated the environment on a global scale. NOAA had suggested this possibility last year, during the height of the crisis.

However, much of the Gulf oil spill data has been hidden through contracts between BP and scientists, so the connection may be difficult to document. Concealing oil spill damage data was the purpose of the BP contracts, to reduce the company’s monetary damage penalties.

There are any number of reasons for the sudden death of birds and fish worldwide. Climate change, pollution, and theories of the Apocalypse are among them.

One thing is certain; there is a reason for the sudden death of wildlife across the globe, we just have no solid evidence to support any of them right now. Until we do, the speculation, and perhaps the birds deaths, will go on.

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Dead birds, dead fish, climate change, the Gulf oil spill and the Apocalypse

How quickly people seem to forget the anger and frustration they felt when they were watching the BP Macondo well erupting a volcano of black poison into the Gulf of Mexico. Nine months later, millions of fish and birds are suddenly, inexplicably dropping dead all over the world. Is the fear brewing among a confused population a subtle admission that we have finally lost the war we have been waging on our planet?

From the earliest days of civilization, humans have been trying to conquer and harness the forces and resources of nature. Each time we are humbled by an earthquake, or tornado, we pick up the pieces and rebuild, as if falsely convincing ourselves that an act of nature will never touch us again.

With technology came unnatural disasters; namely oil spills. Since the 1950’s when widespread oil drilling began, a feeding frenzy for black gold has evolved. It has pushed us deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth to fuel our growing thirst for energy. Along the way, political corruption and the drive for corporate profits have made oil spills one of the deadliest assaults on our world.

All oil spills are avoidable. Including the Deepwater Horizon disaster that polluted the Gulf of Mexico with so much oil, methane gas and toxic chemical dispersant, no one can say with certainty that the 5 million barrel event has not changed our environment forever.

In the midst of our delusions that the pollution of our atmosphere for the past 70 years has had no effect, we are fighting the battle of climate change. Science proves that our planet is changing. The debate revolves around whether it is natural, or if human pollution is either causing or accelerating it.

On New Year’s Eve 2010, thousands of birds, followed by millions of fish all over the world began to suddenly die. Like everything else we don’t truly understand, we manufacture what we think is a rational explanation for a disruption in our ecosystem that is mysteriously devastating the top of the food chain on four continents. Must be bad weather, authorities say, or perhaps noisy fireworks.

The always arrogant human race has blinded itself to the possibility that at the start of 2011 our planet reached a breaking point and finally said to us, “Enough. The damage is already done.”

Corporate greed and corruption has spread through our governments like a malignant cancer. And even if we found the strength to implement a ‘cure’ tomorrow, the decades of damage we have already done may be irrevocable and irreversible.

Prophesies of the Apocalypse do not always specify how or why we will meet our end, only that we inevitably will.

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Obama hesitates to call polar bears endangered species

Pressure from corporate polluters may be causing the Obama Administration to keep from changing the protection status of polar bears form threatened to endangered.

“A change from threatened to endangered status “would have profound consequences,” said Richard Ranger, senior policy advisor for the American Petroleum Institute, a lead litigant on the industry side,” according to The Los Angeles Times.

Climate change is at the heart of the debate over the fate of the polar bear. The ice sheets they call home are rapidly shrinking, and with them go the polar bear’s ability to hunt and breed.

If polar bears were declared an endangered species, the companies responsible for polluting the environment and increasing greenhouse gases would be forced by law to comply with stiffer regulations. That would cost them money, which in turn, may cut their profits.

According to The LA Times, “There is a pronounced push-back from industry because they rightly see that they will have to modify or mitigate their activities to comply with the laws,” said Andrew Wetzler, director of the Land and Wildlife program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the groups suing to change the polar bear’s status to endangered.”

The battle over greenhouse gasses and climate change is about more than preserving animals like the polar bear; it’s about corporate profits versus anything that stands in their way. In this case, that includes the polar bear.

It’s difficult to image a world without polar bears. They have been an icon of the arctic and featured in children's stories for centuries. If they lose this battle, the next generation may only know them as another animal that went extinct. And when a child asks, ‘what happened to the polar bears?’ the only answer we will be able to give them is, we let them die because we didn’t have the political strength to save them.

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