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Organic Bees are Thriving

| Friday, 25 May 2007

from TreeHugger.com

The buzz around organically maintained beehives seems to be "Epidemic? What epidemic?" (That and maybe "Someone should tell the Queen to start laying off the royal jelly, if you know what I mean.") While record numbers of bees in North America and Europe are vanishing en masse in a worrying trend experts have dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder" (CCD), organic beekeepers are reporting no losses.

Sharon Labchuk, a longtime environmental activist and part-time organic beekeeper, was quoted in a recent report at Red Ice Creations:

I'm on an organic beekeeping list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with the big commercial guys is that they put pesticides in their hives to fumigate for varroa mites, and they feed antibiotics to the bees. They also haul the hives by truck all over the place to make more money with pollination services, which stresses the colonies.

Because pollinators such as bees, birds, and bats affect 35 percent of the world’s crop production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading food crops worldwide, the decline in bee populations could potentially collapse the food chain and spell the beginning of an ecological apocalypse.

Theories abound, naturally—answers, not so much. "We've been pushing them too hard", Dr. Peter Kevan, an associate professor of environmental biology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, told Canada's CBC. "And we're starving them out by feeding them artificially and moving them great distances." Could we be pushing commercial bees too far? Kevan suggests CCD might be caused by a potent combo of parasitic mites, pesticides, and genetically modified crops. :: Infowars

In Debt We Trust Exposes Modern Serfdom

| Saturday, 12 May 2007

Please see the new documentary film by Danny Schector titled In Debt We Trust. This fascinating look into the credit and debit industry shows how the mall replaced the factory as America's dominant economic engine and how big banks and credit card companies buy our Congress and drive us into what a former major bank economist calls modern serfdom. Americans and our government owe trillions in consumer debt and the national debt, a large amount of it to big banks and billions to Communist China.

A CALL TO ACTION: Economics is called "the dismal science," yet this film is anything but; it exposes practices we can all relate to because they effect us all, adds Schechter. The film also talks about how we can fight back.

Deeper than the news, fast-paced, musically charged and deeply informative, In Debt We Trust is a call to action: film-making with an angry edge and a broad well-reported scope.

Solar Silicon Solution Wins MIT Energy Plan Contest

| Friday, 04 May 2007

RSI Silicon debuts a far less expensive method of producing solar grade Silicon, winning "People's Choice" award and first place in the Energy Business Plan contest held by MIT.

"This new breakthrough process could have a dramatic impact on the cost of future solar cells , accelerating market growth and future grid parity."

-- Travis Bradford, President of the Prometheus Institute

by Sterling D. Allan
Pure Energy Systems News
Copyright © 2007 Reaction Sciences, Inc (RSI) won the "People's Choice" award and first place in Massachusetts Institute of Technology's energy business plan contest Tuesday for its ultra-disruptive process which provides solar grade Silicon at a fraction of the cost of current Silicon process plants, with only 10% of the capital cost.

Ten finalists from 61 applicants, narrowed down to 30 semi-finalists, presented ten-minute summaries before a panel of judges in the concluding event of MIT's Ignite Clean Energy '07 Business Presentation Competition. (Ref.) James Dunn, RSI's VP of Operations and Business Development, and advisor for the New Energy Congress, prepared and presented the winning entry on RSI Silicon's behalf. (Ref.)