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

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