The New York Times is talking about bees today. Across the continent hives are being deserted, their inhabitants vanishing, and we don’t know why.

This is troubling. Why? Bees play a much larger role in our society than just honey producers. Flowering plants are pollinated by insects, and in Western agriculture, that insect is typically the honey bee. Just one species of bee pollinates on the order of $10 billion of crops in the US alone, and that is the species currently in rapid decline.

In the past, the collapse of a single bee species would be relatively inconsequential. Before the spread of European style agriculture, North American crops were pollinated by a diverse variety of thousands of different bee species. These native species have been largely pushed aside in favor of the domesticated honeybees, which are typically more efficient than their smaller native counterparts. The pursuit of higher yields in the short term has lead to a far less robust system than the one that had evolved gradually with native agriculture. Now we are seeing the consequences of our rapid erasure of biodiversity.

The bee situation may not destroy our society, but it is a manifestation of the larger environmental crisis, and it points out how ill-prepared we are to deal with it. When the costs of climate change are calculated, complex reactions such as the collapse of pollinators due to lack of biodiversity are not often taken into account, and therefore we cannot rely on the standard economic projections of the world economy. Human society is built upon agriculture, which must be part of a stable ecosystem. The ways in which we disrupt these systems through deforestation, pollution, land exploitation, and introduction of invasive species are legion and highly unpredictable. Rapid changes in climate and habitat alterations are bound to introduce countless more similar problems, and at the present, we have no clue how to deal with them.

While I have no suggestions at present, I do wish to raise awareness. Technological progress is advancing ever more rapidly, and with it grows our ability to influence the environment and climate of the earth. However, our inputs into this system produce unpredictable effects. As our hand in the environment grows stronger, the more likely our blind grasps will halt the intricate machinery of the earth.

For further information on the Bee crisis:
http://www.nrdc.org/OnEarth/06sum/bees1.asp

More posts on the similar topics to come.

-jmw