Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys
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Once upon a time we had lots of small, local farms. Farmers relied on dispersed bee populations to pollinate their crops, enhanced and encouraged by the work of local beekeepers. When monoculture was but a glint in the agricultural eye, when cows, chickens, pigs, and more than one crop was still part of the farming dynamic, a farmer might also keep a hive or two. Before we replaced meadows and prairies with sprawling subdivisions, there was enough habitat for local bee populations to thrive and meet agricultural demands. Not anymore.
Today, when farms are massive and almost invariably dedicated to single crops, there just aren't enough local bees to do the work required. In addition, the crops we grow need to be pollinated at different times. So, for example, vast crops of almonds in California need to be pollinated in February when there aren't enough local bees around, so the growers import bees to do the job.
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums
In fact, we ship billions of bees from here to there and back again in tractor-trailer trucks to pollinate our food crops. Like so many other aspects of modern agriculture, bee pollination has become a business that matches the scale of our food-production system. So, out with the inefficient, inflexible, insufficient local bees and in with diesel-driven colonies of commercial bees that arrive in sufficient numbers where and when we want them. The top beekeeping corporation in America can put 70,000 hives on the road at one time.
What happens to bees in such circumstances is probably similar to what happens to all creatures living in crowded and overpopulated environments—illness can spread quickly. A dairy farmer in Vermont told me that, when you have a hundred cows in the milking barn, you can use antibiotics sparingly. But put a thousand cows together and you're applying antibiotics all the time. Whatever happens in one cow's blood stream tends to go through the whole herd quickly—and the more cows that are crowded together, the more viruses, parasites, and infections are in play.
The same thing happens to chickens and pigs in factory farms, which is why they get antibiotics routinely. Why would bees be an exception to the vulnerability to illness that comes with agriculture conducted on such a massive scale? You can't, however, apply antibiotics to bees the way you can to cows because bees are more likely to trade mites than infections, so new miticides are being developed.
Logically enough, bee vulnerability is increased if the immune responses of the bees are low. A friend of mine drove tractor-trailer trucks filled with bees as a summer job in college. He drove by night when the bees were in their hives and quiet. The goal was to get to his destination before dawn and unload the bees onto the targeted crop before they became busy, uncooperative, and agitated. When the trip was rough, when there were breakdowns or bad weather en route, he said, thousands of bees died. If stress kills bees, it is not unreasonable to assume it lowers immune response.
Bees have to be fed between trips. High fructose corn syrup is hauled to them in tanker trucks, which probably isn't any better for their health than it is for ours. Bees, of course, encounter and incorporate pesticides and herbicides in the fields they pollinate, as well as all the other background pollutants we have put into the environment. Toxic chemicals also lower immune thresholds. Who knows what those genetically modified plants they encounter do to them? Add it all up and you get overcrowded, malnourished, stressed-out, poisoned, possibly cell-phone radiated, disturbed bees. Any—or all—of this could contribute to the present colony collapse, or it could be due to some as yet unknown factor or development. When it comes to resiliency, however, it doesn't matter. What does matter is the missing redundancy in the system.
Flower Power
This sort of colony collapse has happened before. The occasional collapse of bee populations has been recorded over the past couple of centuries, though not in the present widespread form. Obviously, bee populations eventually recovered. Is it reasonable then to expect that they will recover again? Yes, but not right away. Habitat destruction —all those sprawling burbs where bee-flowers once bloomed -- mean less room for bees to recover and fewer colonies of dispersed local bees to replenish diminished populations. Lots of viable habitat is also an important aspect of resilience. In other words, natural pollinators are no longer resilient—they cannot quickly recover from a disturbance like an epidemic. If we expect to continue to rely on fossil-fueled bees, packed like Third World slum-dwellers onto trucks, then we can expect future die-offs as well, whatever the cause of this one.
If we understood and appreciated the need for resilience, we would not just rebuild commercial bee colonies as we certainly plan to do, but would also find ways to encourage local beekeepers to grow healthy colonies of dispersed bees. That way we wouldn't have all our bees in one basket. (The scientific term for such a precaution is modularity.). We would conserve or restore bee habitat. We would move away from agricultural models that require pollination on a scale that local bees cannot hope to satisfy and on schedules that are out of sync with what bees can do naturally and locally.
We could focus more on what makes bees healthy than on what makes them convenient and profitable. We might even realize that industrializing bees is not as efficient as we imagined. In the long run, such arrangements only make growers vulnerable to bee-colony collapse. And we would not be so quick to replace an ecological service (a process nature provides for free) that is resilient with an artificial version of the same with next to no resilience.
A World of Impotent Turkeys
When biodiversity is sacrificed to improve efficiency, we lose options and become vulnerable. American farmers, for example, once grew a wide variety of indigenous breeds of turkeys. Today, 99% of all the turkeys raised commercially belong to a single engineered breed. It has a very meaty breast and so is exceptionally efficient in terms of getting the most white-meat bang for the buck, but it must be intensively managed with high protein feed, medication, and climate-controlled housing. That's expensive to do, so just three corporate breeders supply just about the entire world's turkey market.
Sadly, those super-chested turkeys are incapable of reproducing on their own. Without artificial insemination, they would disappear in a single generation. Their genetic base is exceedingly narrow as well, making them highly vulnerable to disturbances. A catastrophic die-off of turkeys is likely sometime in the future. What would make this component of the food system more resilient? You fill in the blanks here—be sure you use the words "local," "dispersed," and "diverse."
We have likewise lost diversity and resiliency in the plants we eat. The diversity of the genetic base of the world's wheat and rice supplies is so diminished by commercial manipulation that these crucial crops are vulnerable to a catastrophic blight if scientists in agro-business labs don't remain one slight step ahead of evolving plant diseases. If, at any point, they falter in that race, widespread starvation and the political and social chaos that accompanies famine will only underscore, in the grimmest way possible, the dangers of imposing artificial notions of efficiency on a dynamic natural process. Untrammeled efficiency turns out to be as risky as it is arrogant.
Crossing Thresholds
Ultimately, the loss of resilience can result in profound and unanticipated changes that happen when thresholds are crossed and ecosystems shift suddenly into new patterns of behavior with no way back. I live in an arid western desert that was once a vast grassland. Pioneers reported that the grass was as tall as the shoulders of their horses. Hundreds of thousands of cows were driven in to graze on the abundant food. Settlers expected that, like the pastures they knew in the east or the Midwestern prairies, the grass would be an annual affair, that it would always return. Not so.
Once it was over-grazed, the grass died out and pinion and juniper trees moved in. Massive erosion followed and today the barbed-wire fences of those original ranches dangle twenty feet above the arroyos that were washed out under them. That, too, is an old story.
How many thresholds were crossed as the ancient forests of the Middle East were turned into parched wasteland by the manmade disturbances of clear-cutting and overgrazing? How many thresholds are we approaching today that we do not see coming? Already, major ocean fisheries have been so depleted that they will likely never recover but will shift instead into new, unrecognizable ecological regimes.
Restoring resilience to manmade systems will require an eye for options, an appreciation for redundancy, and a tolerance for chaos. Messy organizations may also be creative. But, hard as it may be, we will always find it easier to anticipate disturbance and build choices into our manmade systems than to understand how to conserve resilience in the natural systems that support us. To do that, we must grasp the deep underlying relationships between such "slow variables" as weather, soil composition, and plant succession that we often miss. We will have to learn to see how connectivity and feedback loops operate in nature and how futile it is, in the long run, to impose narrow notions of efficiency on natural systems that are profoundly dynamic and inherently unpredictable.
How resilient are we? Crisis is also an opportunity for change. As the bees die, we are getting an unmistakable warning. Without pollination, life as we know it is not possible. Think "tiny canaries in the coal mine." Then think "resilience."
Chip Ward is a former public library administrator and grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. His book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, is an account of his campaigns to make polluters accountable and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land explores the cutting edge of America's conservation movement. He writes from Torrey, Utah.
