Church of Stop Shopping Swarms RoboBee Lab - HoneyBeeLujah!
from Rev. Billy Talen for Buzzflash at truthout:
____ On May Day, we marched honey hee-pollinated food (a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, berries) into the Microrobotic Lab at Harvard University. We wore our bee-swarm costumes and the Queen Bee was regal. In this facility, scientists are sinning big time. They are accepting government money to design a replacement for the honey bee. The robot bee is called the RoboBee.
Two of the RoboBee project goals on the Microrobotics Lab website are artificial pollinaton and military surveillance. With the RoboBee research we have a blend of the visions of Monsanto's industrial agriculture and of world-wide military surveillance and control . . .
The scientists of the four-story high Microrobotics Lab are completely de-politicized intellectuals. You can see from the film - they had looks on their faces like we were apparitions. The final conversation in the film shows the degree to which the dangerous uses of this research are unimaginable to these folks. We tried to summarize our message in clear phrases: "We can't live with other life," and "Making robot bees doesn't make sense in the age of extinction." We know that there are Earth activists in the Harvard divestment community who oppose this kind of DARPA/Monsanto research taking place on campus. We are reaching out to them now to enlarge the nonviolent direct actions necessary. Members of the Harvard community who are coming to realize the DARPA/Monsanto research you have hiding in plain sight on your campus, please contact us.
Later in the afternoon on May Day, accompanied by a writer from The New Yorker and a camera crew from Al Jazeera, we entered a nearby Monsanto office building. We discovered that the food court by the reception desk acted like an echo chamber, heightening the sound from our bullhorn. We exorcised the building, and shouted: "Stop killing the honey bees." The Monsanto workers gathered at the windows, taking our picture with their iPhones.
Of course, we seem wackily comic to these people of the mono-culture. We are especially comic because we are serious. They say all politics is local. With earth activists, it is also true that all politics is spiritual. To turn to nature is to leave behind the fundamentalist gods that wreak such violence across the world. With the honey bee, there is so much more magic there than we can apprehend, and not magic of the non-Disney sort. The hive has a kind of intelligence in it that we cannot easily fold into our idea of our own supreme position, as Americans and as homo sapiens . . .
read more: http://www.truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/do-not-replace-honey-bees-with-robo-bees/18640-do-not-replace-honey-bees-with-robo-bees#.U3DdL6h-VyM.facebook
