Someone sent me a list of 24 things that are headed for extinction in America. It's too long for a single post, so here are four of them.

4. Honey Bees
Perhaps nothing on our list of disappearing America is so dire; plummeting so enormously; and so necessary to the survival of our food supply as the honey bee. Very scary. 'Colony Collapse Disorder,' or CCD, has spread
throughout the U.S. and Europe over the past few years, wiping out 50% to 90% of the colonies of many beekeepers -- and along with it, their livelihood.



Most people don't realize how many foods we take for granted are dependent upon pollination by bees. Almonds is one of them. The cause of this is still unclear, but it's being studied with half-hearted support from the US Govt.

3. News Magazines and TV News
While the TV evening newscasts haven't gone anywhere over the last several decades, their audiences have. In 1984, in a story about the diminishing returns of the evening news, the New York Times reported that all three network evening-news programs combined had only 40.9 million viewers. Fast forward to 2008, and what they have today is half that.



I heard once that news is the cheapest to produce. Hard to imagine a network eliminating news and weather, though, isn't it? Seems like they'd all have to do it at once so their few news viewers didn't migrate to other networks.

2. Analog TV
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, 85% of homes in the U.S. get their television programming through cable or satellite providers. For the remaining 15% -- or 13 million individuals -- who are using rabbit ears or a large outdoor antenna to get their local stations, change is in the air. If you are one of these people you'll need to get a new TV or a converter box in order to get the new stations which will only be broadcast in digital.

I don't see this as a great loss because painful as it is for antenna users to make the switch and I'm sorry about the tsunami of old TVs that might go to the landfills, it's progress, like touch-pad telephones versus rotary dialing.



1. The Family Farm
Ninety-one percent of the U.S. FARMS are small Family Farms. Since the 1930s, the number of family farms has been declining rapidly. According to the USDA, 5.3 million farms dotted the nation in 1950, but this number had declined to 2.1 million by the 2003 farm census (data from the 2007 census hasn't yet been published).

It seems like most of America doesn't seem to care where their food comes from, and they are perfectly happy to let it come from other countries, even though the nutritional value is probably a lot less than locally grown, and we have the occasional tainted food scare, not to mention trade deficits. One of the silver linings to the current housing market problems has been the slowing of the rampant development of family farms into tract housing.