The natural economy that surrounds us
Bees, birds and butterflies are assets of real value
In this season – this late summer season arriving earlier this year because of climate change – the roadways are already bedecked with Queen Anne’s Lace.
They are fractals, you may have noticed. Each flower is made up of many tiny replicas of itself, all visited by hundreds of tiny bees, any number of the 300-400 species that exist in Ontario alone. You’ve noticed that, you can drink in the fragrance just as these tiny bees do. And you can witness and reflect on the phenomenon as a homo sapiens – a human thinking.
A robin dances in the grass and stops, head cocked, pounds its little feet again and listens – for the echo, for the invisible worm in the soil. It flies away, soars to the overhead branch of a Sumac, the slender leaves in perfect array along a stem that hold the weirdest blossom/fruit known in this part of the natural world, what is that? (An asset much to be desired by over-wintering birds who stop by often for a fastfood snack).
A Monarch alights. The great mother Osprey lifts her huge wings overhead, crests a breeze and turns towards the lake and the fish she’ll bring home to her babies in the nest she built - on a platform humans have constructed for her!!
That’s a habitat for plants, for bees, birds and butterflies – now, where do you live?
It’s our birthright to live in light, as humans, as homo sapiens. To live enlightened. No one has put you in a too-tiny place to live but you. Unlike in the political world where, unfortunately, fundamental human rights are not assured, in the realm of your own being, in the natural world, the sky is not even the limit. Your natural inheritance is huge, bigger than Bezos’ money in the bank. Once you count your assets, you’ll see that in order to “grow your portfolio” you’ll want to invest those assets in the world at large.
There’s an exercise children love to do, which is to encircle a place in the yard, the meadow, the forest and watch what happens there. The excitement cannot be contained. We can hardly imagine all that there is in the natural world in even the smallest circumscribed place.
But we can witness, observe and be astonished because here are our assets as human beings, evolved over these 65 some million years from various branches of humanoids that still echo in our genes.
Our heritage. Our assets. Intellect, compassion, empathy, clarity, conscience, kindness, creativity, Love, will, resilience, discipline, healing, tenderness, ingenuity, gratitude, courage, curiosity, equity, fortitude, forgiveness. Add on!
When we invest, these assets multiply for ourselves and for others as well. What an economy! This, dear readers, is not capitalism, nor communism, nor socialism nor any ism you can name because this natural economy is so vast and intricate that we have to invest all our own natural assets just to begin to get a glimpse.
Birds of a Feather
How do creatures that migrate know when to leave one habitat to head for another? We’ve all heard the plaintive cries of wild geese as they flock together to fly off to warmer regions when cool weather hits in our neighbourhood. But how do they know where to go, how is information transmitted from generation to generation? Are there fixed leaders?
It’s been recently discovered that there’s a protein in the brains of migratory birds that aligns them with the electromagnetic fields they navigate, making it possible for them to read the map, as it were, of the journey. And … how does that phenomenon come to pass?
Monarch butterflies have been in the news these days. Due to pesticide use, habitat loss and climate change, their population has declined precipitously. Where once a plethora of those beauties, clustered around swamp milkweed, for instance, or a butterfly bush, would have been taken for granted, now the very sight of a Monarch inspires excited delight in children and adults.
My grandson Salvador is already an expert at finding monarch caterpillars. He has one, Lalu, in a large tub which has become a chrysalis. And he has found five caterpillars in the pollinator garden his mother, Carlotta, planted for me with Megan Boyle, the other member of Three Sisters, a local business dedicated to planting pollinator gardens in our area.
There is currently an exhibition on Monarchs at the Peterborough Museum and Archives. It’s a perfect opportunity to get informed and then involved. You’ll be amazed at how many pollinator gardens exist already in the city and environs.
The rationale I’ve heard is this: with so many seemingly unsolvable problems confronting us these days – the feedback loops of climate change, threats of nuclear war looming again, struggles both economic and scientific on energy sources, racism and sexism front page news, demagogues pretending to champion democracy, cutbacks to social services and on and on – here is something every one of us can do that can make a difference. It’s self-interest, too – without pollinators we don’t eat. Up to 80 per cent of our food requires pollination. Because, as Chief Seattle said, “What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves.”
Bees, of course, are pollinators, too. When the Peterborough Pollinators first formed and began meeting regularly once a week, some of us could not believe our lack of understanding of the natural world. Who knew that there were 20,000 species of bees worldwide, let alone 400 in the province of Ontario alone?
Wendy Hicks came to a meeting with a photograph of the clear-winged hummingbird moth – another pollinator. How did something so beautiful come to be?
Once upon a time milkweed was considered a weed. Just like the current practice of slicing down roadside flowers, these plants, the only provider of food for Monarch caterpillars, were considered noxious. Now the swamp milkweed in my garden is a veritable Times Square of buzzing bees and flighty butterflies – and yes, even a ruby-throated hummingbird I saw just yesterday.
What is an ideal pollinator garden? Planted with mostly perennials, it’s one with what we like to call “seasonal affinities”, which means there are pollinator blooms in every season. So dandelions – that scourge of pristine lawns –is the first source of food for pollinators in the Spring. Other possibilities abound – here are a few. To learn more, Google pollinator plants Ontario:
• Spring: Bloodroot, Solomon's Seal
• Summer: False Indigo, Cardinal Flower, Swamp Milkweed, Butterfly Bush, Purple Coneflower, Blazing Star, Yarrow, Cosmos, Bee Balm, Delphinium, Phlox
• Fall: Joe Pyeweed, New England Aster, Goldenrod
To experience life in a beehive is to discover for yourself an inner calm you might never have expected, according to Mark L. Winston, author of “Listening to the Bees” and former director of the Dialogues programme at Simon Fraser University.
One of the world’s leading experts on bees and pollination, Winston reflects on natural philosophy in his book, stating that this discipline preceded science by thousands of years, with facts and philosophy about our relationship to the natural world and to each other. “Bees have complex societies as social as our own. And all bees have coevolved with plants, expressing the fundamental interdependence of all living things, ” he states. “The evolution of complex social behaviour is rare…we can learn about our own evolution and behaviour by examining that of the bees.”
Of the thousands of species of bees worldwide there are two groups – the long-tongued and the short tongued. Tongue length is crucial because it determines the flowers bees visit for their nectar. Studies of variables in this labiomaxillary complex form the basis for determining evolutionary relationships between the long-tongued and the shorter-tongued bees. An example of how coevolution occurs, in this instance amongst bees and deep-throated flowers, it’s a fascinating study.
The ways the discoveries of the social structures of bees has influenced the Dialogues process illustrates an interesting convergence of the species Homo Sapiens and Bees.
A conference held in B.C. in December 2016 called Bee Audacious , of bee keepers and wild bee enthusiasts, demonstrated how listening to bees can help facilitate the generation of new ideas needed in these times for new forms of stewardship. In the Dialogues process, conventional scientific approaches, while respected, were also transcended so that the views of professional beekeepers and the enthusiasts could also be honoured. What emerged was confirmation of the Dialogues belief that “collective wisdom is the best approach to cover the widest range of issues and yield the most resilient outcomes.”
As humans, with all our differences, we are facing unprecedented challenges. We have wreaked havoc on our natural world. But we are an intrinsic part of the natural world, capable of taking humane responsibility for the imbalances we have unwittingly created. We can be inspired by this - in The Dream of the Earth, the ecologist theologian Thomas Berry writes, “The greater curvature of the universe and of Planet Earth must govern the curvature of our own being. In the coincidence of these three curves lies the way into a creative future.”
If we feel outside of this, alien to it as some of us do – we can ask ourselves, Why should we not feel at home in our own home, Planet Earth?
As the Curve Lake elder Dorothy Taylor stated in the Mark Winston Dialogues session held in Peterborough recently, “Whatever gifts you have received from the Creator, you have equal responsibilities.”
May we be moved to live together on this beautiful Earth with radical gratitude. It’s the unexpected “interest” on the bountiful assets we all share.