A plethora of diverse possibilities
This coming week is National Pollinator Week and we are looking forward to celebrating these important critters that are crucial to the survival of 80% of the world’s flowering plants.
That, of course, includes most fruits and vegetables, which means that pollinators are also responsible for roughly 1 in 3 bites of food we consume each day.
When we think of pollinators, we mostly think of honey bees since they are the ones we hear the most about. Honey bees have become especially important, but it is not because of how they rank in the wide world that is our ecosystem, it is because of the ways that we have managed our agricultural systems, and I would say that we could learn a lot from the mistakes that have been made.
Honey bees are not native to the United States. The early settlers brought them over from Europe similar to farm animals like cows and pigs.
The arrival of honey bees was so noticeable to the Native Americans that they began to refer to them as the “white man’s flies” and saw them as an indication of the encroachment on their own communities.
There were plenty of species of bees, mind you, but honey bees were a new addition to the early North American insect culture.
Today there are over 500 species of native bees in Georgia, many of whom are pollinators, but we rarely talk about those.
In fact, there are thousands of species of critters that can list “pollinator” on their resume including various species of wasps, birds (especially hummingbirds), butterflies, moths, flies, mosquitoes, beetles, ants, slugs and snails along with all of those various kinds of bees.
In a perfect, pre-industrial world these numerous creatures would exist in a broad variety and pollinate a broad variety of plants.
But, in the post-war population boom of the 1940s, we decided that in order to feed a lot more people, we had to get bigger and more focused in the way that we produced crops in this country. Produce staples began to get bred down to a few highly productive and less perishable hybrids and farms became larger and more monochromatic in the interest of producing huge amounts of inexpensive food.
Don’t get me started on the creation of chemicals that would control weeds and pests and promote oversized crops. That has created a whole bundle of problems beyond the topic at hand.
But, one thing is very clear, all of these choices added up to an elimination of habitat for the variety of insects that could have pollinated plants, so the only option left was to rely on the single managed pollinator species, the honey bee, to take up the slack.
Now bee farmers must ship thousands of hives of tens of thousands of bees all over the country to provide pollination for crops from one season to the next.
Almonds, citrus, blueberries, cranberries, peaches, and a long list of other US crops are completely dependent on the introduction of honey bees to pollinate their blossoms each year. This system is flawed, and the advent of Colony Collapse Disorder was the first sign of how fragile our food system is.
The best way to counter the problems created by mega monoculture farming is to start supporting your local farmers that work on a much smaller and more diverse scale in order to allow for the peaceful and healthy existence of a variety of insects instead of relying on just one.
Speaking of diversity, we are also celebrating National Pride Month here in June, and I can’t help but see the correlation in messaging. Pride is about celebrating the rights to peaceful and healthy and happy existence for the full variety of people that exist in our world.
Diversity is a beautiful thing, both in our natural world and in our social community.
Clinging to the monochromatic constraints of our own narrow view of existence at the expense of all others is no way to run a community. It takes all types to make up a lush and fruitful world and we have the opportunity to foster that diversity by respecting the rights of all.
Thank goodness we have the freedom to celebrate different perspectives in this country, and deciding that your right is more important than another’s is the first step towards destroying that freedom our ancestors fought so hard to obtain.
When those honey bee-toting settlers arrived on this continent it was with the goal of creating a new world based on the rights of its citizens to live with greater freedoms than they had experienced in the old country.
They hoped to escape the rules under which their lifestyles and religion were dictated by authority, and they fought hard to establish such a place. They were not afraid of the idea that their neighbor might believe differently, as long as they had the right to live and worship as they chose.
June is a time to celebrate the rich variety that makes up our community, from birds and butterflies and bees to humans of many shapes, colors, sizes and beliefs. Let’s be strong enough to create a world in which we can all live safe and healthy and prosperous lives alongside each other rather than narrowing our view to a boring and achromatic place. The possibilities are endless when we do.