[Pollinator] Middle East Online - CCD

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First Published 2007-07-30, Last Updated 2007-07-30 13:44:18
Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys  

Because there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of 
life - no resilience - our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially 
vulnerable to crisis, says Chip War.  

The Case for Resilience  
Resilience. You may not have heard much about it, but brace yourself. You're 
going to hear that word a lot in the future. It is what we have too little of 
as our world slips into unpredictable climate chaos. "Resilience thinking," 
the cutting edge of environmental science, may someday replace "efficiency" as 
the organizing principle of our economy.  
Our current economic system is designed to maximize outputs and minimize 
costs. (That's what we call efficiency.) Efficiency eliminates redundancy, which 
is abundant in nature, in favor of finding the one "best" way of doing 
something -- usually "best" means most profitable over the short run -- and then doing 
it that way and that way only. And we aim for control, too, because it is 
more efficient to command than just let things happen the way they will. Most of 
our knowledge about how natural systems work is focused on how to get what we 
want out of them as quickly and cheaply as possible -- things like timber, 
minerals, water, grain, fish, and so on. We're skilled at breaking systems apart 
and manipulating the pieces for short-term gain.  
Think of resiliency, on the other hand, as the ability of a system to recover 
from a disturbance. Recovery requires options to that one "best" way of doing 
things in case that way is blocked or disturbed. A resilient system is 
adaptable and diverse. It has some redundancy built in. A resilient perspective 
acknowledges that change is constant and prediction difficult in a world that is 
complex and dynamic. It understands that when you manipulate the individual 
pieces of a system, you change that system in unintended ways. Resilience 
thinking is a new lens for looking at the natural world we are embedded in and the 
manmade world we have imposed upon it.  
In the world today, efficiency rules. The history of our industrial 
civilization has essentially been the story of gaining control over nature. 
Water-spilling rivers were dammed and levied; timber-wasting forest fires were 
suppressed; cattle-eating predators were eliminated; and pesticides, herbicides, and 
antibiotics were liberally applied to deal with those pesky insects, weeds, and 
microbes that seemed so intent on wasting what we wanted to use efficiently. 
Today we are even engineering the genetic codes of plants and animals to make 
them more efficient.  
Surprise Happens  
Too often we understand the natural systems we manipulate incompletely. We 
treat living systems as if they were simple, static, linear, and predictable 
when, in reality they are complex, dynamic, and unpredictable. When building our 
manmade world on top of those natural systems, we regularly fail to account 
for inevitable natural disturbances and changes. So when the "unexpected 
inevitable" occurs, we are shocked. Worse, we often find that we have "all our eggs 
in one basket," and that the redundancy we eliminated in the name of efficiency 
limits our options for recovery. This applies to manmade systems, too.  
Our efficient energy and food systems are perfect examples of how monolithic 
and brittle our infrastructure can become. Political turmoil in the Middle 
East, storms ravaging offshore oil wells, refinery fires, terrorism, and any 
number of other easily imaginable, even inevitable disruptions send gas prices 
soaring and suddenly our oil-dependent economy is pitched into a crisis. Because 
there is no readily available alternative to how we fuel our way of life -- no 
resilience -- our dependence on fossil fuels leaves us especially vulnerable 
to crisis. Our food system is likewise vulnerable, since it is so dependent on 
oil-based fertilizers and pesticides and relies on cheap and consistent 
supplies of gas for farm machinery and shipping.  
Redundancy -- alternative energy sources, for example -– would have left us 
options to fall back on in a time of such crisis. We did not develop those 
options, however, because they weren't considered "competitive." That is, if one 
energy source is cheaper to produce than others -- ignoring, of course, all the 
associated and unacknowledged environmental and health costs -- then that is 
the predominant energy source we will use to the exclusion of all others. 
Decades ago, oil and coal were cheap and so we constructed an entire energy 
infrastructure around those resources alone. (Nuclear squeaked through the door only 
because it was so heavily subsidized by government.) Solar and wind couldn't 
compete according to the rigid market criteria we applied, so those sources 
hardly exist today. We are still told that we will get them only when they 
become more competitive.  
Our focus on efficiency in building manmade systems has been short-sighted 
because it fails to anticipate change over the long run. Resiliency is 
eliminated at each turn by owners, managers, and planners steeped in the cult of 
efficiency and trained to cut out profit-reducing redundancy whenever it appears. In 
organizations, this usually works well -- at least for a while. But our 
attempt to maximize the use of natural systems has, in this regard, been an 
unmitigated disaster.  
Most of the technological means we use to overcome nature's inefficiencies 
seem clever and beneficial until the long-term drawbacks dawn on us. In the 
Northwest, for instance, dams seemed like a great way to produce electricity and 
make rivers navigable until, that is, the salmon began to die and an entire 
Northwest ecosystem that depended on salmon began to unravel. Until they broke 
under the power of Hurricane Katrina, the levees in New Orleans seemed to be a 
neat alternative to those messy coastal wetlands and inconvenient barrier 
islands we had wiped out for keeping storm surges in check.  
Bees Drop Dead  
The recent collapse of honeybee colonies across the United States provides a 
compelling example of how we removed resilience from a fundamental ecological 
service -- pollination -- to make it more efficient and the unexpected 
blowback we are now suffering from that. In this case, there is little resilience in 
the manmade system of food production that relies on healthy populations of 
commercial bee colonies to pollinate crops and too little resilience left in the 
natural world for bees to recover quickly from whatever is wiping them out.  
Pollination is a fundamental process that happens many ways -- birds do it, 
bees do it, even butterflies and moths do it. But humans who grow food rely 
almost exclusively on bees; and not the hundreds of species of wild bees either, 
but one bee, the European honeybee. Sometimes resilience in nature is the 
availability of diverse options to fall back on in times of disturbance, but even 
when there is one choice, like bees for pollinating crops, there are still 
resilient features, redundancies that we eliminate at our peril. For hundreds of 
years, numerous dispersed and varied bee populations meant that a scarcity of 
bees here could be compensated for by an abundance of bees there. Not anymore. 
We have grabbed this key ecological process to maximize its use and have 
wrung out what resiliency there was.  
Although the widespread disappearance of bees from our landscapes sounds like 
the stuff of melodramatic science fiction, like those movies about Ebola 
virus or asteroid strikes, the situation is both dire and all too real. 
Bee-tracking experts estimate that, across 26 states, between a half-million and a 
million of 2.4 million bee colonies have collapsed this year. Because many fruit, 
vegetable, and seed crops, worth about $12 billion annually, rely on the most 
affected bee, the European Honeybee, for pollination, bee loss will translate 
into increased food costs for consumers and a potential loss of food variety as 
well.  
Nobody knows for sure why bee colonies are collapsing. German researchers 
recently speculated that the rapid growth in cell-phone use might be a cause, 
that some kind of tipping point had been crossed where bees could no longer 
navigate and communicate in an electro-magnetic environment saturated with 
cell-phone signals. This speculation is based upon experiments in which forager bees 
abandoned hives next to which cell phones had been placed. But bee populations 
are collapsing across the nation, including in areas with less cell phone 
ubiquity.  
Where Have All the Flowers Gone?  
The suddenness of the collapse is puzzling, but one possibility would be the 
emergence of some new killer parasite or bee mite -- a development that could 
result in such a precipitous decline. After all, bee pollination is big 
business. Bees are transported and mixed today in ways never before possible, giving 
the tiny parasitic critters that bees carry in their guts all sorts of 
opportunities to find new hosts. But whatever the specific cause of bee colony 
collapse, the context of this pollinator catastrophe is an old story.  
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 War is a former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library 
System and grassroots activist turned writer/advocate. He has led several 
successful campaigns to make polluters accountable and to stop nuclear utilities 
from turning the Great Basin Desert into a radioactive sacrifice zone. His 
books, _Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1859843212/nationbooks08)  and _Hope's Horizon: Three Visions 
for Healing the American Land_ 
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1559639776/nationbooks08) , encourage others to embrace their roles as citizens and 
to act now to restore a democratic culture to America. He writes from Torrey, 
Utah.  
Copyright 2007 Chip Ward  
_TomDispatch_ (http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=180836)  
 
Laurie Davies Adams
Executive Director
Coevolution Institute
423 Washington St. 5th
San Francisco, CA 94111
415 362 1137
LDA at coevolution.org
_http://www.coevolution.org/_ (http://www.coevolution.org/) 
_http://www.pollinator.org/_ (http://www.pollinator.org/) 
_http://www.nappc.org/_ (http://www.nappc.org/) 

Join the Pollinator Partnership to save the bees, bats, butterflies and more! 
See _http://www.pollinator.org/_ (http://www.pollinator.org/)  for more 
information.

Our future flies on the wings of pollinators.



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