
Save the Honeybee, Sterilize the Earth - cwal37
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/save-the-honeybee-sterilize-the-earth-pollination-industrial-complex-95566/#all
======
rwallace
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?

~~~
tjradcliffe
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.

~~~
fixedd
I don't really buy that a world where all the work is done by robots will be
an issue at all, unless it's only going to benefit the rich.

I imagine it will allow people to work on what they want to work on, instead
of what they have to work on. I, for one, would stop spending ~40 hours a week
building software for others and build myself an airplane instead. Next? Maybe
a sailboat. Sure, the robots could do it better and more efficiently, but I
enjoy doing that sort of "work".

But what do I know, maybe not everyone is like me. Maybe it'll turn into
Wall-E, or everyone just ends up sitting around watching Friends reruns, or
most people would form street gangs and battle it out out of boredom.

~~~
girvo
I'm firmly of the belief that will only happen if we have a basic income
system, which I'm all for.

~~~
zackmorris
Seconded.

------
slacka
> "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)

~~~
pnathan
> 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.

I don't precisely think that's a correct characterization (as someone who is
employed by a subsidiary of MON). Let's rephrase that:

\- Large tracts of land have been planted with high density crops without
weeds and highly resistant to pests.

This year I believe the record corn harvest was over 300 bu/ac. That's a vast
improvement compared to 100 years ago.

I was taken to a research area earlier this year and took two photos of corn
at a demonstration plot - one circa late 1800 farming practice, one circa 2014
farming practice.

\-
[https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/hvUBLxsj...](https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/hvUBLxsjU2H)
\-
[https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/H76wXT2U...](https://plus.google.com/116106755607615316501/posts/H76wXT2U3m2)

Quick, guess which one has the best yield/acre - and which one has the best
environment for honeybees. I'm not a beekeeper or an agronomist, but I
_strongly_ suspect that the focus on anti-weed, anti-pest farms is
aggressively hostile to non-food production. I'm inclined to believe
permaculture is the sustainable way forward, but I have no idea how to feed
the planet with permaculture without a massive human die-off.

~~~
slacka
I'm not saying we have to go back to the farming practices of over 100 years
ago, by plowing with oxen and using night soil for fertilizer. You're creating
a straw man argument. We need to use technology like GMO to work with nature.
But Monsanto sells herbicide and pesticide, so it's not in their interest do
to so.

> crops highly resistant to pests.

Farmers using Monsanto's GMO crops need to use MORE pesticide than no GM
crops.[1]

Our continued survival as a species depends on clean water,fresh air, fertile
soil. Millions of tons of soil are lost from land degradation. It may require
more effort, but we could feed 7 billion people with sustainable agriculture.
And if you really cared about the future of our civilization, you would
acknowledge the damage your employer is causing.

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-
pesti...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/02/us-usa-study-pesticides-
idUSBRE89100X20121002)

~~~
pnathan
I don't speak for my employer. With that out of the way -

I don't believe I was creating a straw man or negating the reality of our
ecosystem change - I want to make plain: high density crops with no pests or
weeds is a profound alteration from the way things are in a natural
environment. It allows a high level of density (more food), but cuts hard
against other things. The natural plant life is swarming with pests and
"Weeds" are a human classification.

WRT your link. We're forcing evolution to occur faster. That's pretty much
unarguable, yea?

I'm a software engineer, not an agronomist, so I can't speak to real practical
sustainable architecture of food systems. I simply don't have the science
needed to be intelligent about it. I don't _feel_ long-term ecosystem
alteration is a good thing to our system (see pictures I linked for an example
of the variance - which picture is more natural?). I'd like to experiment with
urban permaculture, but I don't think that could even feed my family (all 2 of
us).

Food is incredibly important - I would love to have a cunning idea to reduce
food waste globally, but I don't have that domain expertise at present to
produce a cunning and marketable startup there.

------
cwal37
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
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.

~~~
Tossrock
The only reasonable answer I can think of is to start spending more on food.
Either we start doing it now by supporting sustainable agriculture practices -
local farms, foods treated without pesticides, etc, or we'll do it later when
the whole engine grinds to a halt.

I've noticed a trend among practical/engineering minded people to dismiss
organic foods as wa-wa nonsense, but buying them over slightly cheaper,
industrially farmed alternatives is actually one of the best things you can do
as a consumer to help the situation. "Organic" as a term is USDA certified and
includes things like not using pesticides/antibiotics, including buffer zones
around farms to prevent runoff, etc.

The ongoing shift is driven by market forces; people want more food, cheaper,
and so industrial agriculture adapts to the market, producing huge volumes of
monocultured crops with all the tenuous methods described in the article. The
only way to reverse the trend is to change the market - by a conscious
decision on the part of consumers to spend more than the absolute minimum
possible, for food that is better on every level - environmentally,
nutritionally, and subjectively (seriously, pasture raised eggs are
delicious).

~~~
brd
For the conscientious observer I think this is the best approach to take. I
lived in VT for a while where it was very easy to support local, organic farms
and where I am now I frequent the small organic food shop for my needs.

For those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford to spend a bit more on
food, I think its a wonderful means of helping move the needle in the right
direction.

For me personally, its just nowhere near enough. I've gone so far as offering
to invest in farm land for friends who were interested in trying out
sustainable farming practices (they ended up not finding land convenient
enough and moved on to other endeavors) .

------
warble
"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-b...](http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/06/20/what-is-killing-bees)

and I heard this a while back:
[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/12/wally_thurman_o.html)

After reading about these and other related articles I had assumed CCD was
mostly a non-issue. Maybe I'm wrong?

------
mijoharas
> 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.

------
baq
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
And all the tasty fruits that require pollination would become a lot more
expensive.

~~~
fixedd
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.

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

