[Pollinator] Challenging the commodification of pollination

Sat Mar 27 09:48:57 PDT 2021

I am looking forward to looking at these two papers.

I do, however, think there are severe problems with conceptualizing the commodification of pollination as either pollination markets (where actual dollars are exchanged for stocking with honey bees, alfalfa leafcutting bees, mason bees or in creating alkali bee beds) or where the markets largely exist in theory as ecosystem services.

For one thing, this model does a poor job of explaining how the utility vs inherent value arguments not only recur in history, but in drawing the connections between these two seeming opposing poles in how they function to shape the debate.

Social theorists, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, recognized commodities not to be 'things', but fundamentally a social form - a form of society. The tendency to place inherent value out of this form of society is a way of avoiding all the dimensions of this social form by imagining there is some kind of outside perspective (most recently this has taken the form of the absurd notion that human beings can somehow advance a perspective that transcends the human). Somehow, inherent value and utility need to be grasped as one of the same form of society, which never seems to transcend the problem it looks to solve, only reproducing the debate for each generation to spill ink over.

I have also spilled my own ink on this matter:
Melathopoulos, Andony P., and Alexander M. Stoner. "Critique and transformation: On the hypothetical nature of ecosystem service value and its neo-Marxist, liberal and pragmatist criticisms." Ecological Economics 117 (2015): 173-181.

Best,

Andony

[cid:3c6bf50f-e326-4f1f-9e86-8c6ff0b7c92a]

Andony Melathopoulos, Assistant Professor Pollinator Health Extension
Department of Horticulture | Oregon State University
4017 Agricultural and Life Science Building | Corvallis, OR 97331-7304
cell: (541) 452-3038 | Andony.Melathopoulos at oregonstate.edu<mailto:%20Andony.Melathopoulos at oregonstate.edu>

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________________________________
From: Pollinator <pollinator-bounces+andony.melathopoulos=oregonstate.edu at lists.sonic.net> on behalf of Evan Abramson <evan at landscapeinteractions.com>
Sent: Friday, March 26, 2021 7:56 AM
To: Kit Prendergast <kitprendergast21 at gmail.com>
Cc: Pollinator List-serv <pollinator at lists.sonic.net>
Subject: Re: [Pollinator] Challenging the commodification of pollination

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Thanks for sharing Kit. I am happy to see you're also getting the word out on this (underrepresented) perspective.

I don't want to take any credit for the article that I posted, as I was not involved with the writing or research of it.

As a designer and planner, my focus has been to recommend specific plants for specific landscape typologies in particular geographic regions, so as to best support those pollinator species which are of the highest conservation priority. Not based on their ecosystem services, but rather on their contributions to functional diversity.

For those interested in such an approach to community-based conservation, we recently completed a Pollinator Action Plan for Lincoln, Massachusetts which directly embodies this approach to pollination systems design. The pdf can be downloaded directly at: https://lincolnconservation.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/LandscapeInteractions_LincolnPollinatorActionPlan_web_final.pdf

On page 14 of the plan, the chapter Diversity is Resilience includes the following discussion:

Diversity is strongly linked to the resilience of natural communities (Helzer 2009). A diverse combination of plant and animal species in a community increases the likelihood that the loss of one species can be somewhat compensated by other species that might play a similar role in the ecosystem...Ecological resilience may be the most important attribute for any natural system, especially in the face of rapid climate change, continuing loss and degradation of habitat, encroaching invasive species and other threats (Helzer 2017).

Best,
Evan

On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 6:30 AM Kit Prendergast <kitprendergast21 at gmail.com<mailto:kitprendergast21 at gmail.com>> wrote:
Dear Evan,
I completely concur with the sentiment in your article and so glad more researchers are moving away from the capitalist anthropocentric mentality. I published a similar critique last year (I have attached the pdf with this email as I could not afford open access)

Prendergast, K.S. (2020), Beyond ecosystem services as justification for biodiversity conservation. Austral Ecology, 45: 141-143. https://doi.org/10.1111/aec.12882

Thank you for sharing your article with us.

On Thu, 25 Mar 2021 at 23:44, Evan Abramson <evan at landscapeinteractions.com<mailto:evan at landscapeinteractions.com>> wrote:
One million species are threatened with extinction globally, including more than half of the native bee species in North America. 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.

Marshman J. & Knezevic I., (2021) “What's in a name? Challenging the commodification of pollination through the diverse economies of 'Bee Cities'”, Journal of Political Ecology 28(1). p.124-145. doi: https://doi.org/10.2458/jpe.2307

--

Evan Abramson
Principal
L a n d s c a p e | n t e r a c t i o n s
Designing Biodiversity through Pollination Science
646-244-8380
landscapeinteractions.com<http://landscapeinteractions.com>
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--
Kit Prendergast
Native bee scientist, conservation biologist and zoologist
PhD researcher (Curtin University) and Forrest Scholar
ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1164-6099
[https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0B-GFGp5FCfbOYXU3WkViRGctemM&export=download]

--

Evan Abramson
Principal
L a n d s c a p e | n t e r a c t i o n s
Designing Biodiversity through Pollination Science
646-244-8380
landscapeinteractions.com<http://landscapeinteractions.com>
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