50 Ways to F**k the Planet

1 To bee or not to bee

Buzz off

AGENDA

* Wipe out honeybee population

* Enjoy your picnic in peace

* Destroy countryside and crops

* Save your £1 coin for something better than a wonky trolley

It may be small but it’s certainly not lacking in fertility. The honeybee is a rampant member of the insect world, visiting flower after flower in a frenzy of pollination. Humans rely upon its promiscuity for flora, fauna and food. In your efforts to totally f**k the planet, there’s an easy way to eliminate this bumbling competition. Very soon the bee will not be.

What a sting

Enthralled with its immutable sense of progress, humanity seems to have forgotten that sometimes it’s the little things that matter most. Don’t make the same mistake. While you must be prepared to battle against Greenpeace and outperform Hugh Hefner, make sure you don’t forget that little Don Juan, the bee. At the start of the twenty-first century, civilization finds itself dependent on this single insect. One in every three tablespoons of food derives directly from the pollinating prowess of the humble honeybee, with supermarkets gleefully cashing £50 billion worth of produce a year. So long as it’s flogged by the kilo, chances are that the honeybee’s enviable powers of fertilization have played a part. Shop shelves would look very different in a world devoid of the services of Apis mellifera. Hundreds of vital crops and cereals would wither. Fruit and veg staples would fade away. There’ll be no more worrying about getting your five a day then! At last, gherkin-free burgers!

Entomologists (insect nerds) warn that society has become way too reliant on the honeybee. Behind the sophisticated production lines of the world’s great supermarkets, the truth is that the security of the food supply lies squarely on the honeybee’s busy shoulders. Surely then, all you need do is shoulder the bees out of existence and hey presto, you’ve delivered a deadly sting to humanity. But surely these valuable creatures are under constant MI5 protection? Don’t be ridiculous!

Oh Mighty One

As yet you can only dream about Colony Collapse Disorder, the mysterious ailment that has performed such a sterling job vanquishing America’s bee population. It is a strange and abrupt disease that persuades millions of bees to abandon their queen and fly off to certain suicide. Your real money-shot enlists the services of a parasite no larger than a full stop. The size of the varroa mite belies a voracious appetite. Once its jaws are clamped to a bee’s stomach, it gorges upon the blood until the host’s immune system can take no more. Predictions suggest that the varroa mite is able to cause a complete species ‘die-out’ in as little as a decade. Ostensibly, it is the Aids equivalent for bees. Honeybees are drained in hours. Hives collapse in days. With this little buddy, your job is done in a matter of weeks. Thankfully there’s no bee equivalent to the condom. No Red Cross setting up clinics in the meadows. The way ahead is clear. Facilitate varroa’s global spread and you’ve found the fastest route to being bee-free. In theory, nothing should stop every colony succumbing to these marauding blighters. In time, earth’s long-term food supply will be jeopardized, plunging the planet into civic strife and conflict.

Fight or flight

At the start of 2008, the softly-spoken types of the British Beekeepers Association decided they could take no more. Barely able to hide their hysteria, its leaders warned ministers that Britain risked ‘calamitous’ economic and environmental hardship if the honeybee disappeared. They were not alone in their squawking. Supermarket executives agitated privately over the future fate of this bumbling insect. Apparently, safeguarding a tiny creature vital for global cereal and fruit production falls far beyond their wiles. With one of the core underpinning elements of their business at risk, they wait nervously for the first complaints to trickle in – inadequate pollination produces the misshapen, shrivelled food that so horrifies their customers.

When varroa began ravaging Britain’s hives during the Nineties, the pesticide pyrethoid was promptly administered to halt the destruction. Its use came with a strict health warning over effectiveness: ministers were told the measures would triumph for a finite period only. As it transpired, only a handful of years. After that varroa mites would become immune to man-made chemicals. And so, funding was granted to develop a biological defence that would safeguard food supplies in the future.

Dr Brenda Ball, the world’s foremost expert on varroa, led a team of scientists at the Rothamsted Research Institution in Hertfordshire. There was a troubling period when it seemed that, finally, a cure for varroa might be on the horizon. Significant progress was underway when, in the spring of 2006, the government withdrew financial support. Ball’s team became redundant. Her pioneering work to protect nature’s pollinator remains incomplete to this day. Within months of funding being terminated, the minister for sustainable farming and food hailed an ‘environmentally-friendly’ initiative to encourage more British-produced fruit and vegetables. No reference was made to the fact that without the honeybee this would prove largely impossible. His omission provides a salutary, but inspirational lesson to those bent on environmental Armageddon: you can often do a lot worse than put your faith in the elected few.

The government has handed out yet another ‘proceed to go’ card on your journey towards bee obliteration. The bee inspection service, conceived to monitor early signs of infection in hives, suddenly found its funding halved. Research on protecting the honeybee currently stands at around £200,000, a fiftieth of their pollinating value to the economy. Matters came to a head during a fraught meeting in November 2007 between beekeepers and government officials, when the farming minister Lord Rooker confessed that he too knew the bleeding obvious. ‘If we do not do anything, the chances are in ten years’ time we will not have any honeybees,’ he said. Despite this, the British Beekeepers Association claims that funding continues to be denied. It seems bees are a victim of classic British stoicism. Admitting there is a problem remains a far cry from actually doing anything about it.

Every other international attempt to quash varroa has yet to yield an answer. Every new pesticide leads only to a new resistance. The parasite is always one step ahead. And so, its spread continues apace. In London, the first round of colony inspections during 2008 found all of the bees were dead. Few are the places left untouched by its blood-thirsty proboscis. China has submitted. The Americas have been penetrated. Australia is exhausted. Europe has its knickers round its ankles. Recently the invasion of southern Africa began. Hawaii is rapidly becoming unique in offering concrete assurances it is a ‘varroa-free’ locale. We’ll see.

A sticky situation

Seemingly limitless in its vision of global conquest, there appears to be little requirement to encourage the worldwide operations of the varroa mite. At the moment, it is simply a case of kicking back and watching its worldwide domination unfold. Soon, experts predict, the entire planet will be contaminated by an epidemic immune to the chemicals concocted to kill it. A virulent new strain may explain why hundreds of millions of honeybees vanished in almost half of America’s states in weeks, threatening £8 billion of crops. Perhaps Colony Collapse Disorder isn’t such a pipe-dream after all…

Wild honeybees, the quintessence of British rurality and heralded by everyone from William Shakespeare to Jill Archer, are on the way out. Those little buggers you see bouncing from flower to flower are invariably imported from Europe or Australia or from colonies reared by man. While you must put up with the fact that, temporarily, sufficient quality crops can still be grown in Britain, both you and the ever-growing British varroa empire can thank the government for opening the door to foreign infestations.

The demise of the honeybee has coincided with a 30 per cent increase in fertilizer use. It is no coincidence. Supermarkets, after all, must somehow compensate for a loss in natural fertility. This can only accelerate the extinction of the honeybee; the wax in beehives doubling as a peculiarly potent sink for airborne toxins. The chemicals, as well as poisoning the bees, also kill off the flowers that provide the honeybees’ food. Beyond the farmers’ fields the meadows are starting to look depressingly sterile. Research confirms that wildflowers like the clover and dandelion are dying in tandem with bees, their mutual dependency dragging one another to the grave. Valentines will be a cheap affair this year.

Oh Be-hive!

As long as governments pontificate on taking varroa seriously, there is only one winner. According to the Cardiff-based International Bee Research Unit, the one hope involves the genetic breeding of a new generation of honeybees, with jaws strong enough to yank the mites off their bodies. ‘With what funding?’ you may snigger. Evolution is all out of time.

There was a time when the distant hum of the honeybee was as sure a signal of summer’s onset as traffic jams on the M5. These days you can enjoy your picnics and beer gardens free from their monotonous droning. While you sup your Guinness, varroa does the dirty work. Once, their sting was a childhood rite of passage, but now you can save yourself the trip to the pharmacy.

WHAT’S THE DAMAGE?

* Mysterious disease suddenly eradicates varroa parasite. Honeybee saved at the final hour. Unlikely.

* Miracle cure for varroa discovered by maverick oddball scientist. Slim possibility.

* Pioneering breakthrough discovers natural alternative to the wild honeybee’s pollinating prowess. Yeah, right.

* The value of the honeybee is belatedly recognized by the government. Generous funding to protect the species is immediate. Unforeseeable.

* Varroa runs riot. Hawaii finally succumbs in late 2012. Three years later, remaining bee farms inside high-security sealed factories are infiltrated. Anticipated.

Likelihood that wild honeybee is extinct by 2020: 72%

2 A hard halibut to break

Fins ain’t what they used to be

AGENDA

* Upset the natural order of the seas

* Stake out the salmon

* Free the finned-ones

* Interbreed and weaken the species

When it comes to wanton ecocide, it’s sometimes good just to lay a marker, to show the world who’s boss. And there are few better species with which to demonstrate your superiority in all matters ecocidal than one so finely developed as the wild salmon. Until now, these marvels of evolution have always allowed instinct to guide them thousands of miles across open waters in a current-defying voyage to their spawning grounds. But survival of the fittest? Pah! At last, man has perfected the means to subvert the natural order.

Breeding frenzy

The first step was to fish wild Atlantic salmon practically to the point of exhaustion; the second to begin farming replacement fish. And therein lay the evil genius of the plan, the ‘extinction vortex’. The new man-reared specimens were inferior in all ways but one – they had what it took to destroy their wild friends. Covertly released with the excuse of having ‘escaped’ from farms, their mission was twofold: to breed with their genetically superior wild cousins, and then to infect them with disease. Talk about eliminating the competition. The torpedo-like physique of wild salmon – in some ways the SAS of the aquamarine world – became weakened by intermingling with the flabby farmed types, the genetic equivalent of a couch potato with fins, and the salmon’s instinctive ability to survive in the wild was shot. No longer could it make its trans-Atlantic migration back home. It was fin-ished.

Born to be wild

Under cover of darkness, the men bobbed towards the vast sea cages. As their dinghy pulled alongside the expanse of steel mesh, the balaclava-wearing figures on board grimaced at the writhing coil of bodies. At a silent signal, they began to hack at the cages with steel-cutters. That September night, 15,000 halibut were liberated from their underwater prison at Kames Marine Fish Farm, Oban, off the west coast of Scotland. It was a textbook ‘release’. Police were left floundering with but a single clue: the letters ALF daubed on a nearby wall. No one was ever caught.

In many respects, the Animal Liberation Front represent everything you probably can’t be bothered with. Their abiding philosophy is, after all, to draw attention to and to condemn ‘speciesism’, an assumption of human superiority leading to the exploitation of animals. Yet these are emancipated times; tribal loyalties and prejudices have no place in the quest to deliver environmental catastrophe. To satisfy such lofty ambitions, you must adopt the same methods, if under quite a different agenda. The guiding principles of the ALF are to ‘liberate animals from places of abuse’, such as fish farms, and to ‘inflict economic sabotage’ on those who profit from caging creatures. These two tenets fit nicely with your task to mass-release farmed salmon into the oceans of the world.

Establishing contact with militant wings of the ALF is challenging, but surmountable so long as you do not make the mistake of explaining that your real motive is to rid the seas of wild salmon, dress head to toe in khaki, and take out a subscription to the Socialist Worker. The actual act of liberation is no doubt a more important concern to animal activists than the genetic carnage they unleash upon the world in setting free caged animals. Despite this, it is best to err on the safe side and keep the master plan secret for as long as possible.

The ALF is a loose network of autonomous cells and in order to meet like-minded members you will need to join demonstrations against animal-research centres, trawl internet message boards or subscribe to its newsletter. But rest assured, the ALF are out there, with the organization describing its members as including ‘PTA parents, church volunteers, your spouse, your neighbour or your mayor’. High-profile members are usually under police surveillance and officers typically video demonstrators at protests. A new face might attract unwanted attention. Also, do be prepared for the possibility that even ALF sympathizers may refuse to sabotage fish farms. If this is the case, don’t just give up. Seek out the Animal Rights Militia (ARM) or the Justice Department, who believe that direct action is the way to go. If these two underground over-the-top movements prove too elusive, try the Lobster Liberation Front, which has already attacked fishing interests with varying success and might be persuaded to broaden its target base. Certainly, there should be enough activists around who possess the necessary zeal and wile to successfully liberate fish. After all, past attacks have proved that activists have the determination to navigate freezing waters at night, the strength to cut through heavy netting and the guile to evade security.

Let’s go fishing

Enticing possible recruits will rely on propagating several set arguments. Make sure you encourage rumours that farmed salmon are being obscenely crammed into cages and force-fed processed proteins by machine. Don’t forget to mention the colourings and antibiotics which are prophylactically tipped into cages. Refer to caged fish as ‘the battery chickens of the sea’. Animal activists will be unable to resist such bait. If more persuasion is required, refer to a past Scottish Executive salmon report which reveals that farmed salmon are recognizable from their small heads, deformed bodies, and diseased gill covers. If this fails, concoct a story about how they are electrocuted with prods if they don’t finish their tea.