For the past several years, about 40 percent of honeybee hives in the United States did not make it through the winter, one of the highest rates of mortality ever recorded.
When people have the knowledge and feel the costs of their actions, they make better decisions – for themselves and for the environment.
Government regulation came with a cost and has its limits.
When regulators moved beyond those obvious sources of pollution, they expanded their authority at the expense of personal freedom and economic growth.
In the same way Uber allowed individuals to use information technology to connect people and provide more choice, smartphones and personal technology allow us to live the stewardship ethic that is so much part of the way conservatives already live.
Now, several companies offer technology to monitor a home’s electricity use in real time.
It doesn’t matter if your goal is to reduce environmental impact, reduce the amount of oil money going to hostile countries like Russia and Iran, or simply to save energy.
These new technologies do what government bureaucracies and politicians cannot – cut electricity demand in ways that honor personal freedom, allowing people to make their own choices using their own information.
While the left’s approach to environmental protection demands we change our lifestyles to conform to their worldview – forcing people onto transit on their schedule – conservatives empower people to make their own decisions, providing options like car sharing.
The conservative approach recognizes that personal incentive and liberty are not only consistent with environmental protection, when combined with technology, they are the most effective tools to promote environmental stewardship.

Editor’s note: This column was originally published in summer 2016.
This weekly column about dog training publishes on Fridays in the Steamboat Today.
Our parks and trails are increasingly polluted as this product is leached into the ground.
According to the EPA, this contaminant is as toxic to the environment as chemical and oil spills and is the number 1 cause of water pollution.
This is our only way to contain the spread of contamination to our planet.
Editor’s note: This column was originally published in summer 2016.
This weekly column about dog training publishes on Fridays in the Steamboat Today.
Our parks and trails are increasingly polluted as this product is leached into the ground.
According to the EPA, this contaminant is as toxic to the environment as chemical and oil spills and is the number 1 cause of water pollution.
This is our only way to contain the spread of contamination to our planet.

President Trump’s first 100 days have been devastating to environment, say green activists.
Out of all the groups in the liberal coalition, environmentalists may have had the worst of it during the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.
Leading green activists say President Trump has already done a full term’s worth of damage, rolling back Obama-era regulations and installing one of their chief critics as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Since his confirmation in February, the EPA has already started to dismantle the Clean Power Plan — federal rules limiting carbon emissions from power plants — and a host of other regulations.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Pruitt are intent on reversing eight years of EPA policy under the previous administration, transitioning the agency away from its Obama-era focus on climate change and expanding its regulatory reach, toward enforcing existing protections against air and water pollution.
“I would call this an extreme agenda that for someone who didn’t even win a majority of the vote is out of line with the values of the American people,” said Erich Pica, president of the environmental group Friends of the Earth.
He didn’t run on any of that, yet that’s what his extreme agenda is doing right now.” Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said this week that “the hallmark of the president’s first 100 days” has been a relentless “assault on our climate, environment and national heritage.” On the heels of the executive order reviewing national monuments, other environmental activists accused the president of using his first months in office to sell out the country to the fossil fuel industry.
Environmental groups also are suing the administration over virtually every move it makes on the energy and climate front, meaning many policies, ultimately, will be set by federal courts.
“The rules and the regulations will be litigated over the course of time, but it’s the budget stuff that could have the long-lasting impact on how these agencies operate,” Mr. Pica said.
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RIO DE JANEIRO, April 24 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – A Congolese park ranger, a Guatemalan indigenous land rights activist and an octogenarian Australian who blocked a coal mining firm from taking her family’s farm were among the six winners of one of the world’s most prestigious environmental prizes on Monday.
Announced in San Francisco, the 2017 Goldman Prize Environmental Prize worth $175,000 to each winner comes as violence against land rights campaigners continues to rise globally.
The prize committee is looking at ways to improve safety for the winners so they can continue their campaigns, she said.
Some of this year’s prize winners say danger is part of life for environmental campaigners.
Another winner, Rodrigo Tot, a land rights campaigner and community leader of Guatemala’s indigenous Q’eqchi people, said one of his sons was murdered because of his activism.
Tot has led campaigns to protect indigenous land from government and foreign mining companies seeking to tap into the nickel deposits in central Guatemala.
We don’t want our resources to be polluted," Tot said.
But the fight continues.
Australian family farmer Wendy Bowman, a co-winner of the prize, is known for her successful fight to stop coal mining expansion that she says causes air and water pollution.
She stopped Yancoal, a Chinese-owned mining company, from taking her family farm and has refused to sell her land to the company, the prize committee said.

Knoxville water pollution remains a concern for professionals, environmental groups.
The sunlight bounces off the flowing water of the Tennessee River and connecting streams.
It might be a picturesque scene for residents, but what lays in the water is a concern for professionals and environmental groups in the Knoxville area.
“The Tennessee River has routinely listed as one of the top 20 most populated rivers in the U.S.,” according to Dr. Mike McKinney, a professor of Environmental Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Then, increasingly agricultural, we have a lot of runoff from tomato farms and crops,” McKinney said.
“We have funded a $38,000 research lab on second creek to monitor the water quality and water pollution…that will go over for three to four year period,” according to Preston Jacobsen, a sustainability manager at UTK’s Office of Sustainability.
Creeks are a lot worse than the rivers.
Water pollution has also affected Knoxville’s drinking water.
Knoxville’s drinking water comes from the Tennessee River and although the water is filtrated, some chemicals are still present in the water, according to McKinney.
Knoxville residents can help reduce Knoxville’s water pollution by getting involved in cleanup efforts and promoting environmental awareness, according to Jacobsen.

Environmentalists and others who have studied the effects of pollutants in water and their ecosystems know it can have drastic effects on both.
These technologies include everything from filtering water to produce clean drinking water to installing water trash cans to dispose of the garbage on sea coasts and in other bodies of water.
Two Australian surfers, Andrew Turton and Pete Ceglinski, decided to address the situation by inventing a bin similar to an automated pool cleaner.
This device was made to withstand cleaning marinas, harbors, ports and inland waters such as rivers and lakes.
People are addressing disease-causing agents in water as well.
Because of this, innovations to provide clean drinking water are growing.
This is made by Vestergaard, an international company that makes other water filtration products such as filter bottles.
Students at Carnegie Mellon University have also taken an interest in the situation.
This “LUV Water” uses the water’s weight to rotate a motor that powers UV-LED lights that kill waterborne pathogens.
With water pollution a growing problem, one of the most effective solutions would be to cut the source of the pollutants.

Maryland Assembly session gives environmentalists ‘reason to celebrate’.
Lawmakers ban fracking, freeze changes to oyster sanctuaries, pass more green-backed bills From “fracking” to oysters to clean energy, environmentalists had multiple reasons to smile when Maryland’s lawmakers wrapped up their work in Annapolis earlier this week.
Larry Hogan, the General Assembly made Maryland the first state with known natural gas reserves to pass legislation prohibiting hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to extract it.
Lawmakers bucked opposition from the Hogan administration, meanwhile, to impose a moratorium on opening any of the state’s 51 oyster sanctuaries to commercial harvesting.
That vote in late March came in response to a plan drafted by the Department of Natural Resources to open some areas put off-limits to harvest seven years ago.
Watermen said they wanted to try a new “rotational harvest” plan in some sanctuaries where oysters didn’t appear to be thriving.
They managed to craft a $43.5 billion state budget without slashing Bay restoration and other environmental programs.
Ann Swanson, executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Commission, said those bills marked a significant milestone: “It celebrated the fact that Maryland had used its dedicated funds to retrofit its largest sewage treatment plants, and now could begin redirecting the money to the next tier of important work.” The legislature’s Democratic majority also pushed through a resolution opposing the Trump administration’s proposal to eliminate federal funding for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program and slash the Bay-related efforts of other agencies.
Other measures of note that passed: – Energy: Lawmakers overrode a Hogan veto of a renewable energy bill that passed last year.
Some Bay-related bills pushed by environmentalists failed to pass, leaving advocates to hope they may fare better next year after further study.