And there before me was a pale horse

When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, "Come!" I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.



Sometimes the fourth horseman is just Death, and sometimes he is Pestilence. Either way, he's not good news. One of the themes of this blog over time (I've just started, remember, and nobody's commenting, so I can pretty much do what I want) is how to fix the Earth, regardless of the weights and measures that affect us. Humanity is currently facing a host of problems, and it's impossible to come up with solutions if the reality of the situation is not first realized.

So either Death or Pestilence; and it comes not just for humans.

There's a reason that bird flu is under such close scrutiny; because every civilized country fears a civilization-destabilizing pandemic. Take out the "dem" (no political meaning) and what's left is "panic". And if a full-blown case of Spanish flu hits again, that's what would happen. Look at what happened with SARS, and that was mild in terms of how many people could contract it. When the Spanish flu rode into town, healthy people in the morning were dead people by nightfall. Schools would close. People wouldn't go to the local grocery store. Businesses would tell employees to stay home. Congresses would phone it in. And so it goes.

But closer to home, think about what we poop. Everybody poops (I think there's a book with that title). And all that poop has to go somewhere. Unfortunately, most of the time and most of the where, it's just going into the stream, river, and ocean. There are some political affiliations that are concerned with the fate of the unborn child; what about the fate of the born children that are dying of diarrhea? There's a new book out called The Big Necessity that tells us all about the history of poop, crap, shit, turds, excrement, feces, doody, etc., and how civilization fared better when it was taken care of. Problem is, a lot of it is not being taken care of. Kids are dying, coral reefs are getting buried by algae and infected by bacteria and viruses, fish are changing sex and sporting lesions and tumors; and I'm only scratching the surface. I don't want to scratch any deeper or I might catch something.

And it's not just humans. Science has yet to come up with a better mass pollinator than the honeybee, and something a lot like Pestilence is attacking them, too. Now, not all of our agricultural crops depend on honeybees, but without them, there'd be a lot less produce being produced. Here's a partial list:

apples, peaches, soybeans, pears, pumpkins, cucumbers, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cashews, macadamias, cola nuts(!), avocadoes, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash, oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, kiwi, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe, honeydew, watermelon, carrots and onions (for seeds)

So we have to worry about Pestilence in the animal kingdom too. Trees are dying in great numbers; the wooly adelgid is destroying hemlocks, beetles and blister rust are destroying whitebark pines (whose nuts are a great favorite of bears), gypsy moths are still a major problem...

Much of the spread of Pestilence is attributable, at least in part, to the activities of humans. We can do a lot and should do a lot, for our sake and that of the environment, to control Pestilence. I'll get back to what we could and should do in a short while.