Jul 11, 2011
I went to see the documentary Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? In equal measure, it was a sobering indictment of our arrogance as a species and a reminder of the sacredness of life. We need to pay attention.
Humans need bees to survive. They pollinate our food and play an integral part in the web of life, the life we depend on for our very survival. If ever there was a keystone species, it is bees. As the film showed, bees have been revered from the beginning of human existence. They are celebrated in the artwork of the earliest peoples.
Therefore, we should all care about the worldwide disappearance of bees and the development of the colony collapse disorder. The reasons for the loss of bees include mono-crop agriculture, pesticides, industrialization of how bees are used to pollinate crops, and the genetic modification of our food.
The solutions are simple and local. Returning to bio-diverse, local and smaller scale farming based in traditional practices of seed saving and natural pest control must be the priority. Bees are part of that return to local. Instead of trucking bees from one end of the continent to the other, bees need to be part of the local biodiversity. Bee-keepers and hives need to be year round permanent residents of each bio-region.
In the film, one bee-keeper stated that reversing the loss of bees is more urgent and more critical than dealing with climate change. On one level he is right. The loss of bees will bring misery to humanity. In fact, we might not survive the demise of the bees.
The loss of the bees and climate change stem from the same root cause. To solve the bee problem, we would need to make the commitments necessary to address climate change. The solutions are interconnected and both require challenging the fundamental premise on which we have created our illusion of prosperity.
Our economy is based on the belief that we can separate ourselves from nature and her planetary limits. We have done so for 150 to 200 years. The ability to do so is the result of cheap fossil fuels.
The bees are telling us that we can no longer misuse resources. So is climate change. Man’s dominion over nature will soon be over. We must quickly learn to work with the planet toward a mutually beneficial future.
The problems in agriculture are symptoms of this greater malaise. To shift from a preference for monoculture cash crops to human scale biodiverselocal mixed farming would help mitigate Greenhouse Gas emissions. To see our pollinators as part of the landscape rather than a commodity to be trucked in for a short-term intervention, would reform how we approach land and resource use. That too is a strategy for dealing with climate change.
An article in the Globe and Mail implores us to develop climate policy to “reduce the risk of catastrophe”. The central premise is “that sudden, catastrophic changes in climate are a real possibility. Such events include the breakdown of ocean circulation patterns and the melting of ice caps.”
To these we can add the disappearance of the bees.
Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us? may be the most important film you could see. The photography is beautiful. The message is critical.
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