9 ms·

Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth

152 points by cwal37 12y ago

cwal37 12y ago
For me the real money-quote comes near the end: "For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops. The old mutualism, where we make homes for bees so bees can make us honey, is turning into fraught co-dependence. We need bees on an industrial scale to fertilize our food, and the bees need us to keep them alive in an increasingly hostile industrial landscape." Articles like this really hit home for me and speak to those somewhat behind-the-scenes large-scale transformations of the natural world that you don't always see until you're a part of. I grew up in IL and attended undergrad at UIUC. I wasn't in CS or engineering, but this[1] program where perhaps my strongest focus was ecology. It is difficult to convey just how incredibly altered the ecology of the IA-IL-IN corn belt is. A giant swathe of land that was denuded, drained, tiled, and channelized. A few random things that stand out as a part of this from undergrad. I worked with a professor briefly who practically begged farmers to let him install small riparian buffer strips to greatly reduce the hypoxia-inducing agricultural runoff. But no matter how small the width of the strips proposed, it's a hard bargain to just hand over a strip of your potentially producing land. I saw a series of farms where channelization of streams on their property had led to large erosion problems, and were working to restore a kind of anchored natural meander. The idea being that you would be able to avoid the wholesale erosion, but also control the extent of the bend. UIUC itself was an utter joke in terms of institutional ecological initiative. We have the Morrow plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in the united states, but no restored prairie, nothing to hint at what we replaced. You can find some if you go off of campus though, in Urbana. It's just kind of weird to think back to being in the middle of this giant living machine. Watching it flush its effluent down to the Gulf, and seeing everything else shrivel and die around it. I went Monarch tagging a few months ago[2], and that is a sad endeavor (but also incredibly fun, everyone should run through a meadow catching butterflies at some point in their life). Everyone involved knows their habitat has decreased dramatically. EDIT: And just one more thing. This might sound kind of cheesy, but I have always loved bumblebees, our rotund, fuzzy, endemic workers. They remind me strongly of hot, lazy, Midwestern summers from my childhood. I sort of vaguely knew that they weren't doing well[3], but this article reminded me of that, and I'll be sad to see them go. [1] https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ [2] https://vimeo.com/108187852 https://vimeo.com/108187852 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status
- brd 12y ago
  I'm constantly tempted to jump head first into the fight to help fix the giant living machine we've been slowly breaking for decades. I've got notes scribbled down on a better dietary framework, on creating incentive systems for farmers, on improving distribution to consumers. There are so many different areas of the problem to tackle that its a little overwhelming to know where to start or how best to get involved. I'm genuinely saddened to know how far removed I am from the food I eat and the fact that helping seems so far-fetched just makes me all the more distraught.
  - searine 12y ago
    >to help fix the giant living machine we've been slowly breaking for decades. It is a fallacy to assume that the machine was ever working properly.
    - brd 12y ago
      I'd agree, I wasn't trying to imply we need to reach some unfounded past equilibrium. However, it's fair to say we've not made things better ecologically speaking but luckily we have the cognizance and ability to improve things if we can figure out the economic incentives to do so. I don't think anyone would argue that in the long run we humans would be better off managing our ecosystem a bit more rationally than our current haphazard approach.
  - bjelkeman-again 12y ago
    I think the important thing is to just start, somewhere, anywhere. I got really frustrated with the IT Industry I was working in and left it to work on sustainable food production. Which I did end up doing for a bit. I got derailed, am now back in IT, but, the tools I now work on are used more and more in food security work for the poorest. What I have seen though is that the startup process we learn in IT projects. Build something iteratively, with a lean startup approach goes a very long way in many business areas. You have skills that few in business posess. Use them and do something good. I did. You can too.
  - Tossrock 12y ago
baq 12y ago
the funny thing is, honey bees are only one species of more than a hundred and there are plenty of bees that are solitary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees maybe i'm understating it a bit, but my guess is that if honey bees died off, efficiency drop in agriculture would be temporary, except for honey industry.
- JanezStupar 12y ago
  And all the tasty fruits that require pollination would become a lot more expensive.
  - fixedd 12y ago
    I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand. Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.
- rosser 12y ago
  However temporary it might be, it would still be long enough to have an appreciably adverse impact on us.
  - divegeek 12y ago
    I doubt it. We're very flexible omnivores, and have acquired the capability to create supplements for whatever specific nutrients we lack. The impact would be to the variety and tastiness of the food we have available, but I doubt it would significantly impact our ability to feed the population, or the health of that population. Oh, I'm sure that good access to fruits and nuts does make us healthier than we'd be without it, but it's a matter of small degrees, not life or death.
rwallace 12y ago
According to the article, the reason for the massively increased use of herbicides is that it's less labor-intensive than other ways of getting rid of weeds. When we can find ways to produce a given quantity of food with less land, water, fertilizer and fossil fuel, this, as far as it goes, is an un-alloyed good. But less labor is not as clearly so. Of course for a time it was necessary: we needed to move on from the situation where agriculture required ninety percent of the workforce. But nowadays we are finding the economy provides too few jobs, and in particular too few jobs that don't require specialized skills or markers of political status. Maybe there is some optimum of labor efficiency in agriculture, and we've overshot that optimum?
- chris_va 12y ago
  From an economics standpoint, local "optimum" can be easily evaluated by looking at the cost of labor. Labor is expensive in the US, significantly more than herbicides, and weeding is extremely labor intensive. However, that ignores the long term costs, which may be what you are alluding to. Farms don't operate at huge profit margins, so they cannot compete with each other if they started hiring significantly more labor. One primary feature of governance is passing on long-term expected costs (e.g. ecological collapse and unemployment) to citizens/businesses optimizing for short-term profitability. In this case, you would want the government to somehow identify each farm's contribution to the ecological cost, and figure out how to pass that cost along. One possibility would be a pollution style tax. If herbicides all of a sudden cost significantly more due to taxes, then other solutions (like labor) will become more common. Our society also benefits from an increase in the number of jobs, which may have also been what you meant by "optimum". Creating meaningless jobs (e.g. picking/weeding when you could use a machine for less) does not add any long term economic value itself, though it does increase stability. It would be more efficient to just tax the economic base, though, and use the money for something economically more productive than weeding.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  There is a lot of work being done on agricultural robots that will displace even more farm workers. Which, given how back-breakingly awful farm work is, shouldn't be viewed as an entirely bad thing. What happens to the people displaced, I dunno. Malthusians and Luddites have been telling us we're all going to die in a mass of unemployment and poverty for a quarter of a millenium, and they've been consistently wrong, mostly because they lack the imagination (as we all do) to see how humans will cleverly adapt to the new reality. In the medium term, agricultural robots may displace a lot of pesticide use as well, because if you have a solar-powered 24/7 robot weeding, you don't need chemicals. This also should be viewed as a good thing. But a world where robots can do everything, including writing this post for me, creates an interesting problem. Most people--especially men--are not well-suited to not having work. How we fulfill people's need to work in a world where there is no work that needs to be done is an interesting problem to have. But remember that there was a Roman emperor who killed off an early attempt at industrialization and rudimentary assembly lines because he feared what the newly-unemployed would do, and worried that surplus slaves would revolt. It's hard to argue, knowing what we know now, that he made the right decision. Our inability to see our own future shouldn't stop us from embracing it.
warble 12y ago
"Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) only affects honey bees in managed hives. The cause of this disease is still unknown, and there may be a number of contributing of factors, including pesticides, stress, and malnutrition. " - http://www.helpabee.org/urban-bee-legends.html http://www.helpabee.org/urban-bee-legends.html This is also interesting: http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-bees http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-b... and I heard this a while back: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.htm... After reading about these and other related articles I had assumed CCD was mostly a non-issue. Maybe I'm wrong?
slacka 12y ago
> "By way of example he points to the expansion of crops genetically engineered to resist the herbicide glyphosate, which kills weeds that bees previously would have fed on. “We’re sterilizing the Earth,” he says." As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. We could have plants that eliminated the need for oil based fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover does and that are resistant to disease and insects. Instead I somehow ended up in this Bizarro World, where Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops. We fight nature. If instead we worked with it, we could make our ecosystem healthier. For example switching to organic no-till farming could sequester an estimated 78 billion metric tonnes of carbon.[1] Not to mention the heath benefit of that the organic food would provide and impacted of reduced fertilizer runs off. It's a shame we as a society don't have the desire to work with mother nature. >“Bees aren’t a canary, they’re a mirror, telling us our agricultural system is out of whack.” [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Environmental http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Environmental
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - shadowfox 12y ago
    > I don't really see what is evil about Monsanto? They're just a regular technology company. We, better than anyone, should understand technology companies. Not the OP. "Evil" is a value judgement that many may not agree with. But imho Monsanto is a little bit more than "just a regular technological company" as you put it. This section on Wiki makes an interesting read for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_con...
    - randomdata 12y ago
      For what it is worth, the Silicon Valley tech giants have their own fair share of lawsuits[1][2][3]. I don't think that detracts from what kind of company they are. I am a practicing farmer though, so I actually have to deal with them, not just read about them from afar, so perhaps I am biased on the subject. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_litigation
acd 12y ago
It was the pesticides that killed the bees. Monstanto corp always doing good things for humantiy agent orange etc
mijoharas 12y ago
> For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

152 points by cwal37 12y ago

For me the real money-quote comes near the end: "For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops. The old mutualism, where we make homes for bees so bees can make us honey, is turning into fraught co-dependence. We need bees on an industrial scale to fertilize our food, and the bees need us to keep them alive in an increasingly hostile industrial landscape." Articles like this really hit home for me and speak to those somewhat behind-the-scenes large-scale transformations of the natural world that you don't always see until you're a part of. I grew up in IL and attended undergrad at UIUC. I wasn't in CS or engineering, but this[1] program where perhaps my strongest focus was ecology. It is difficult to convey just how incredibly altered the ecology of the IA-IL-IN corn belt is. A giant swathe of land that was denuded, drained, tiled, and channelized. A few random things that stand out as a part of this from undergrad. I worked with a professor briefly who practically begged farmers to let him install small riparian buffer strips to greatly reduce the hypoxia-inducing agricultural runoff. But no matter how small the width of the strips proposed, it's a hard bargain to just hand over a strip of your potentially producing land. I saw a series of farms where channelization of streams on their property had led to large erosion problems, and were working to restore a kind of anchored natural meander. The idea being that you would be able to avoid the wholesale erosion, but also control the extent of the bend. UIUC itself was an utter joke in terms of institutional ecological initiative. We have the Morrow plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in the united states, but no restored prairie, nothing to hint at what we replaced. You can find some if you go off of campus though, in Urbana. It's just kind of weird to think back to being in the middle of this giant living machine. Watching it flush its effluent down to the Gulf, and seeing everything else shrivel and die around it. I went Monarch tagging a few months ago[2], and that is a sad endeavor (but also incredibly fun, everyone should run through a meadow catching butterflies at some point in their life). Everyone involved knows their habitat has decreased dramatically. EDIT: And just one more thing. This might sound kind of cheesy, but I have always loved bumblebees, our rotund, fuzzy, endemic workers. They remind me strongly of hot, lazy, Midwestern summers from my childhood. I sort of vaguely knew that they weren't doing well[3], but this article reminded me of that, and I'll be sad to see them go. [1] https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ https://www.earth.illinois.edu/ [2] https://vimeo.com/108187852 https://vimeo.com/108187852 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bumblebee#Endangered_status

brd 12y ago
I'm constantly tempted to jump head first into the fight to help fix the giant living machine we've been slowly breaking for decades. I've got notes scribbled down on a better dietary framework, on creating incentive systems for farmers, on improving distribution to consumers. There are so many different areas of the problem to tackle that its a little overwhelming to know where to start or how best to get involved. I'm genuinely saddened to know how far removed I am from the food I eat and the fact that helping seems so far-fetched just makes me all the more distraught.
- searine 12y ago
  >to help fix the giant living machine we've been slowly breaking for decades. It is a fallacy to assume that the machine was ever working properly.
  - brd 12y ago
    I'd agree, I wasn't trying to imply we need to reach some unfounded past equilibrium. However, it's fair to say we've not made things better ecologically speaking but luckily we have the cognizance and ability to improve things if we can figure out the economic incentives to do so. I don't think anyone would argue that in the long run we humans would be better off managing our ecosystem a bit more rationally than our current haphazard approach.
- bjelkeman-again 12y ago
  I think the important thing is to just start, somewhere, anywhere. I got really frustrated with the IT Industry I was working in and left it to work on sustainable food production. Which I did end up doing for a bit. I got derailed, am now back in IT, but, the tools I now work on are used more and more in food security work for the poorest. What I have seen though is that the startup process we learn in IT projects. Build something iteratively, with a lean startup approach goes a very long way in many business areas. You have skills that few in business posess. Use them and do something good. I did. You can too.
- Tossrock 12y ago

baq 12y ago

the funny thing is, honey bees are only one species of more than a hundred and there are plenty of bees that are solitary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee#Solitary_and_communal_bees maybe i'm understating it a bit, but my guess is that if honey bees died off, efficiency drop in agriculture would be temporary, except for honey industry.

JanezStupar 12y ago
And all the tasty fruits that require pollination would become a lot more expensive.
- fixedd 12y ago
  I didn't RTFA, so it may have been mentioned, but I recently listened to a year-old episode of RadioLab where they were talking about an apple-growing region in central China where in the 90s the bees just disappeared (probably due to pesticides). Being China, with the associated labor costs, the farmers paid people to go out on ladders and carefully pollinate all of the flowers on the apple trees by hand. Long story short, the humans were WAY better at it than the bees (I forget the % increase, but it was significant), but it was so tedious that the labor costs still drove the end-user cost of the apples above what the market was willing to pay.
rosser 12y ago
However temporary it might be, it would still be long enough to have an appreciably adverse impact on us.
- divegeek 12y ago
  I doubt it. We're very flexible omnivores, and have acquired the capability to create supplements for whatever specific nutrients we lack. The impact would be to the variety and tastiness of the food we have available, but I doubt it would significantly impact our ability to feed the population, or the health of that population. Oh, I'm sure that good access to fruits and nuts does make us healthier than we'd be without it, but it's a matter of small degrees, not life or death.

rwallace 12y ago

According to the article, the reason for the massively increased use of herbicides is that it's less labor-intensive than other ways of getting rid of weeds. When we can find ways to produce a given quantity of food with less land, water, fertilizer and fossil fuel, this, as far as it goes, is an un-alloyed good. But less labor is not as clearly so. Of course for a time it was necessary: we needed to move on from the situation where agriculture required ninety percent of the workforce. But nowadays we are finding the economy provides too few jobs, and in particular too few jobs that don't require specialized skills or markers of political status. Maybe there is some optimum of labor efficiency in agriculture, and we've overshot that optimum?

chris_va 12y ago
From an economics standpoint, local "optimum" can be easily evaluated by looking at the cost of labor. Labor is expensive in the US, significantly more than herbicides, and weeding is extremely labor intensive. However, that ignores the long term costs, which may be what you are alluding to. Farms don't operate at huge profit margins, so they cannot compete with each other if they started hiring significantly more labor. One primary feature of governance is passing on long-term expected costs (e.g. ecological collapse and unemployment) to citizens/businesses optimizing for short-term profitability. In this case, you would want the government to somehow identify each farm's contribution to the ecological cost, and figure out how to pass that cost along. One possibility would be a pollution style tax. If herbicides all of a sudden cost significantly more due to taxes, then other solutions (like labor) will become more common. Our society also benefits from an increase in the number of jobs, which may have also been what you meant by "optimum". Creating meaningless jobs (e.g. picking/weeding when you could use a machine for less) does not add any long term economic value itself, though it does increase stability. It would be more efficient to just tax the economic base, though, and use the money for something economically more productive than weeding.
tjradcliffe 12y ago
There is a lot of work being done on agricultural robots that will displace even more farm workers. Which, given how back-breakingly awful farm work is, shouldn't be viewed as an entirely bad thing. What happens to the people displaced, I dunno. Malthusians and Luddites have been telling us we're all going to die in a mass of unemployment and poverty for a quarter of a millenium, and they've been consistently wrong, mostly because they lack the imagination (as we all do) to see how humans will cleverly adapt to the new reality. In the medium term, agricultural robots may displace a lot of pesticide use as well, because if you have a solar-powered 24/7 robot weeding, you don't need chemicals. This also should be viewed as a good thing. But a world where robots can do everything, including writing this post for me, creates an interesting problem. Most people--especially men--are not well-suited to not having work. How we fulfill people's need to work in a world where there is no work that needs to be done is an interesting problem to have. But remember that there was a Roman emperor who killed off an early attempt at industrialization and rudimentary assembly lines because he feared what the newly-unemployed would do, and worried that surplus slaves would revolt. It's hard to argue, knowing what we know now, that he made the right decision. Our inability to see our own future shouldn't stop us from embracing it.

warble 12y ago

"Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) only affects honey bees in managed hives. The cause of this disease is still unknown, and there may be a number of contributing of factors, including pesticides, stress, and malnutrition. " - http://www.helpabee.org/urban-bee-legends.html http://www.helpabee.org/urban-bee-legends.html This is also interesting: http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-bees http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-b... and I heard this a while back: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.htm... After reading about these and other related articles I had assumed CCD was mostly a non-issue. Maybe I'm wrong?

slacka 12y ago

> "By way of example he points to the expansion of crops genetically engineered to resist the herbicide glyphosate, which kills weeds that bees previously would have fed on. “We’re sterilizing the Earth,” he says." As a child, I dreamed that I would grow up to a world where genetically modified organisms were the key to sustainable agriculture. We could have plants that eliminated the need for oil based fertilizers by enriching the soil like clover does and that are resistant to disease and insects. Instead I somehow ended up in this Bizarro World, where Dr. Evil runs Monsanto. Where they’ve turned large tracks of fertile land into a barren, sterile wasteland that can only grow their GMO crops. We fight nature. If instead we worked with it, we could make our ecosystem healthier. For example switching to organic no-till farming could sequester an estimated 78 billion metric tonnes of carbon.[1] Not to mention the heath benefit of that the organic food would provide and impacted of reduced fertilizer runs off. It's a shame we as a society don't have the desire to work with mother nature. >“Bees aren’t a canary, they’re a mirror, telling us our agricultural system is out of whack.” [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Environmental http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-till_farming#Environmental

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- shadowfox 12y ago
  > I don't really see what is evil about Monsanto? They're just a regular technology company. We, better than anyone, should understand technology companies. Not the OP. "Evil" is a value judgement that many may not agree with. But imho Monsanto is a little bit more than "just a regular technological company" as you put it. This section on Wiki makes an interesting read for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto#Legal_actions_and_con...
  - randomdata 12y ago
    For what it is worth, the Silicon Valley tech giants have their own fair share of lawsuits[1][2][3]. I don't think that detracts from what kind of company they are. I am a practicing farmer though, so I actually have to deal with them, not just read about them from afar, so perhaps I am biased on the subject. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc._litigation [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_litigation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_litigation

acd 12y ago

It was the pesticides that killed the bees. Monstanto corp always doing good things for humantiy agent orange etc

mijoharas 12y ago

> For thousands of years we carried bees by raft and barge, by wagon and train, across oceans and continents, so they could make us honey and wax. Now we’ll try to carry them through the Anthropocene so they can pollinate our crops.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]