From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity: Bees, pollination services, and industrial agriculture (original) (raw)
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The Bio-Politics of Bees: Industrial Farming and Colony Collapse Disorder
Everywhere, honeybees and other insect pollinators are dwindling and dying, in a slowly but relentlessly unfolding crisis that has come to be known as “Colony Collapse Disorder.” This article draws upon theoretical currents from animal studies, environmental sociology and ecofeminism in order to explore the aetiology and significance of this crisis, an animal-techno-ecological assemblage of forbidding complexity and intense controversy. It is argued that the critical animal studies concept of the “animal-industrial complex” offers a potentially fruitful framework for grasping CCD, but that it ultimately rests upon notions of nonhuman animal subjectivity and objectification which do not translate persuasively to eusocial invertebrates such as honeybees. The article therefore develops a bio-political reading of the animal-industrial complex which reworks its conceptual underpinnings such as to render coherent the notion of an “apis-industrial complex.” This bio-political approach is articulated through a critical discussion of the relationship between the industrial organization of agricultural production and the vital materiality of complex living systems.
Journal of Political Ecology, 2021
One million species are threatened with extinction globally, including more than half of the native bee species in North America. In Canada, as of July 2020, 42 municipalities have signed a resolution to commit to the standards of the Bee City Canada program which includes creating and enhancing pollinator habitat, along with celebrating and raising awareness about pollinators in their communities. Our central argument is that the commodification of pollination has detrimental effects on people, pollinators, and ecosystems, and that a diverse economies framework is one conceptual model that can help shift our perspective. Within the 'save the bees' narrative, a capitalocentric, unidimensional image of pollination persists, driven by particular forms of market power and domination. Well-intentioned individuals and groups may be constrained by industry-dominated messaging that limits their understanding of appropriate interventions. Meanwhile, Bee City Canada offers municipalities the opportunity to engage in conservation efforts by starting where they are and building on a network of Bee Cities across the country. We conducted a collective case study involving in-depth interviews with members of Ontario Bee Cities. Our thematic interpretive analysis shows how a diverse economies framework can help us to understand the value and contributions of this initiative in previously undervalued and under-recognized ways and how they help to advance a whole-of-community approach. It is only through decentering the hegemonic market-based view of pollination that true conservation of bee diversity, and associated pollination services, can be prioritized. Our findings show that Bee Cities can animate a vibrant political ecology through a collective municipal identity, by centering bees (and other pollinators by proxy).
Be(e)coming pollinators: Beekeeping and perceptions of environmentalism in Massachusetts
PLOS ONE, 2022
In an era of mass extinction and biodiversity crisis, it is increasingly crucial to cultivate more just and inclusive multispecies futures. As mitigation and adaption efforts are formed in response to these crises, just transitions forward require intentional consideration of the hybrid entanglement of humans, human societies, and wider landscapes. We thus apply a critical hybridity framework to examine the entanglement of the pollinator crisis with the cultural and agricultural practice of hobbyist beekeeping. We draw on ethnographic engagements with Massachusetts beekeepers and find apiculture to be widely understood as a form of environmentalism—including as both a mitigation to and adaptation for the pollinator crisis. Illustrating how power-laden socioecological negotiations shape and reshape regional environments, we then discuss how this narrative relies on the capitalistic and instrumental logics characteristic of Capitalocene environmentalisms. These rationalities, which ob...
Commoning the bloom? Rethinking bee forage management in industrial agriculture
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Managed and wild bee populations are declining around the world, in part due to lost access to bee forage (i.e., nectar and pollen). As bee forage diminishes, the remaining acres become sites of contestation between beekeepers, land managers, ecologists, and regulatory agencies. This article applies a commons framing to contextualize these conflicts and attempts to resolve them. Drawing from the concepts of commons and commoning, I argue that nectar and pollen are common-pool resources for pollinators, beekeepers, and land managers, currently managed through varied access arrangements such as informal usufruct rights and pseudo-commoning practices. Like commoning, pseudo-commoning aims to collectively manage a resource through a set of protocols that involve equitable resource sharing and communication. However, because pseudo-commons are implemented from the top down, for example, from institutional actors driven in part by economic interests, they often do not result in widespread...
The smell of selfless love: Sharing vulnerability with bees in alternative apiculture
Environmental Humanities, 2014
The sudden decline of bee pollinator populations worldwide has caused significant alarm, not least because Apis mellifera, the European honeybee, is thought to be responsible for pollination of 71 of the 100 crop species which provide 90% of the world’s food supply. Here we investigate the response to colony collapse disorder of a committed group of beekeepers who live in southern England, UK. These beekeepers are inspired by the writings of Rudolf Steiner and the principles of biodynamic agriculture, and they care deeply about bees. Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on vulnerability as a shared condition of living, we examine the philosophies and practices of alternative apiculture along two axes: the gifts of honey and poison; longing, connection and bee-worship. The first emphasizes how poison and honey draw bee and beekeeper together in uneven gift relations; the second axis emphasizes how beekeepers make their bodies and their selves vulnerable to bees. We show how these beekeepers want us to do more than reshape bees’ vulnerability to colony collapse disorder; they want to recognize, and reconstitute, their own vulnerability to the bee. The lessons to be drawn are less about solving bee decline and more about how becoming less uncomfortable with vulnerability and seeking to put ourselves at risk to others becomes an ethical practice. The example of these alternative beekeepers suggests that we might learn to accept more generously the risks of cohabiting with awkward nonhumans, so as to loosen the hegemonic grip of a self-certain subject that is disrupted by an outsider.
Save the Bees? Agrochemical Corporations and the Debate Over Neonicotinoids in Ontario
In this paper, I will argue that, while important, the partial ban on neonicotinoids in Ontario does not go far enough to address the pollinator crisis, partly due to the role of agrochemical corporations such as Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, manufacturers of neonicotinoids, in the development of the policy. I will argue further that the agrochemical industry intervened in the debate around neonicotinoid pesticides in Ontario in order to shape and influence the process, most notably by forming powerful coalitions with large farmers’ organizations such as the Grain Farmers of Ontario (GFO). In Part One I will outline the current research on the impact of neonicotinoid pesticides on bees, including the problems caused by the uncertainty inherent in complex ecosystems. In Part Two I will examine the process utilized by the Ontario government in the creation of the partial ban on neonicotinoids and investigate the heavy role played in it by the agrochemical industry. I will examine the coalition the agrochemical industry formed with the GFO and how this shaped the narratives deployed in the debate about a neonicotinoid ban in Ontario. I will conclude by arguing that corporate manipulation of the creation of public policy regarding pollinator health in Ontario is an indication of the overall functioning of the capitalist-industrial agricultural system. Challenging this system will require radical social movements led by a coalition of environmentalists, bee-centered beekeepers and small-scale farmers. This coalition can put forward an agroecological counter-narrative that acknowledges the uncertainty inherent in complex ecosystems and posits small-scale farmers as stewards of biodiversity, allowing for the simultaneous flourishing of non-human nature and people.