The Road to Non-Sustainability is Paved with Good Intentions

Readers of this blog recognize that "Treadmill of Production Theory" underlies many of my ideas on sustainable beekeeping and what I call "social apiculture": the idea that sustainable beekeeping is not simply a matter of how we manage our hives, nor where we locate our hives in the physical environment but also a matter of the very way human beings organize their own societies. The following is an illustration of some of these ideas. Originally, it was written as a comment to a friend's facebook status, but I decided instead to simply share it here.

Let's take a very real, concrete example: commercial migratory beekeeping. Even the largest commercial pollination service is more often than not a small family-run concern. Commercial beekeepers can make a comfortable living but still are just one or two months ahead of their creditors (like most of us). They take pride in the fact that their services help keep a variety of foods on America's dinner table.

Now let's say it's February, the beginning of the migratory beekeeping season and Mr. X is ready to truck his thousands of honeybee colonies into the California almond orchards. He discovers his bees aren't doing all that well. The mite count is high in his hives and they seem to have dysentery. A long-term sustainable approach might be to let Darwinian selection weed out the weak hives and breed from the survivors, however, that would mean losing many hives and possibly going bankrupt. Not only would this threaten his business but also his children's college fund, and next mortgage payment. He, instead, takes the short-term route, using miticides and fungicides on his hives, pumping the colonies with HFCS, trucking them out to the fields and hoping for the best. He knows this solution is not sustainable in that it only creates resistant mites and fungi over the long-term but his family does have to eat. So with all his good intentions he decides in favor of non-sustainability.

Treadmill of Production: A CMAP is Worth a Thousand Words

I created this cmap in order to explain treadmill of production theory to my Public Policy class. I think it is such a thing of of beauty I thought I would share it with my readers. If this theory is empirically valid, what implications might this have for honeybees and sustainable beekeeping?

Link: Honey Laundering

More news from treadmill of production!

Bees and the Enduring Conflict, Part II

If the Treadmill of Production theory is correct, and if the treadmill economy is impacting the health of honeybees, than we are left to find solutions that are not in the current interests of any human being, whether rich or poor, whether an academic sociologist or a migratory beekeeper. All of us in growth economies have an interest in preserving that economy, which increasingly makes environmental withdrawals (e.g. resources, habitat) while increasing waste additions. We may delay the negatives, or ship these negative consequences off to developing countries, but ecological destruction globally will continue.

In a growth economy, social problems are dealt with by expanding the economic pie, rather than in cutting up the pieces more equally (redistribution). Expand the economy and you feed the poor. Expand the economy and you provide more jobs for the unemployed. Expand the economy so that scholarships are provided for education. Corporations can keep their profit with enough surplus so that no one is left out. (At least in theory and in rhetoric!) But increasing growth also means what I've said above-- increasing the amount of withdrawals from the ecosystem, and increasing the additions (i.e. waste) pumped back into it.

All of us might like to jump off the this treadmill but it isn't in our interests. My salary as an academic depends on the tuition of my students, endowments by generous donors, state and private aid to students, student loans, and research and teaching grants which all depend on the expansion of the economy. Migratory beekeepers find themselves stuck on the agribusiness treadmill and the realities of economic growth which, while no doubt negative for the health of the honeybee, is necessary for the economic survival of these relatively small family-run concerns. Hobby and Sideline beekeepers who use standard beekeeping equipment (whether natural beekeepers or their chemical-using brethren) are dependent on the success of commercial beekeepers on the treadmill, since the companies that provide them with equipment and bee packages primarily live off the purchases made by larger treadmill outfits. This demonstrates why pointing the finger at migratory beekeepers, and blaming them for honeybee decline is so unfair and almost hypocritical. If the treadmill of production theory is correct, the "enemy is all of us!."

The question, then, is it possible to stop or slow down the treadmill and what can we do, in the meantime, to save the honeybee? This calls for more than simply scientific/technological solutions, but to some type of social structural, cultural, economic and political changes that are well beyond any one of us to do and totally against our short-term interests.

Bees and the Enduring Conflict I

Schnaiberg and Gould argue that the conflict between the ecological environment and human society has always existed. Environmentally oriented individuals often romanticize pre-industrial societies and their "oneness" with nature. Schnaiberg and Gould state that pre-industrial societies simply didn't have the technological capacity to overcome the short term ecological limits the environment placed on them. (p24)These societies simply collapsed and disappeared (see the Mayans). Industrialism's technological capacities have allowed our growth economies to survive beyond the ecological limits in the short-term and there are many still who argue that it will be science/technology that will allow modern economies to grow still further without environmental degradation. Anyone who questions the desirably of growth economies is labelled as unrealistic or worse.

Now let's consider how bees fair on this growth treadmill, and whether much of the bees problems today might be the result of expecting bees to live beyond the ecological limits placed on them by the natural environment. Are we expecting the science/technology of present day entomology and apiculture to save this creature that is being pushed beyond its environmental parameters? Are we forgetting that our environmental problems are not simply scientific/technical problems with scientific/technical solutions but problems with a social structural, political, economic, and cultural foundation (p 146) as well.

Winter Lists

The semester ended yesterday, and now I have a short break in which I can consider my future bee projects. Here they are in tentative lists!


Things still to buy:

• 1 metal hive entrance
• 1 screen bottom board
• 2 queen excluders
• 2 bee escape boards
• 1 top entrance shim
• 30 shallow Pierco frames
• 2 shallow boxes
• 1 crush and drain bucket
• 1 migratory cover

Things to construct (without Monta's help this will be impossible.):

• 2 top bar hives
• 1 Warre hive
• 1 follower board to replace the one broke in Metpropolis.

Materials to read:

• G.M. Doolittle's book on queen rearing.
• Abbe Warre's Beekeeping for All.
• Any work on the Treadmill of Production theory.

Materials to review:

• Beekeeping in Northern Climates.

Supplies for Beelandia:

• white clover seed
• bird's foot trefoil seed
• sunflower seeds
• borage
• soy beans
• alfalfa seeds
• solar powered water pump for Lake No-Bee Gone.
  

Social Apiculture

A few weeks ago, another uncivil "discussion" "broke out" on Bee-L between a complex array of factions: Commercial vs. non-Commercial beekeepers, chemical vs. non-chemical beekeepers, mechanistic science types vs. holistic science types vs. tradition-based types. All seemed to speak passed each other, accept their own position uncritically, and failed to see the partial realities of their own positions. Again, I will do something that some might see as a bit arrogant, that is, weigh in, as a novice beekeeper (but trained social analyst) on how I see some of the issues.

I am convinced that many of those involved in this debate, on all sides of these issues, fail to really take serious the implications of the global socio-environmental changes that have occurred over the last few decades. The structural and ecological changes brought on by the global 'treadmill' of production may mean that present apicultural techniques, whether based on mechanistic experimental science or "old traditions", may not work, however you understand working. Mechanistic entomological studies that control for extraneous factors may neglect the synergistic effects of multivariate factors produced by a globalized local environment. Other beekeepers who call for more 'natural' approaches are asking us to use 'natural' techniques in a globalized environment that is no longer natural, whatever that means.

What all this is beginning to mean to me is that beekeeping can no longer be an activity strictly focused on hive management techniques and our bees' immediate foraging environment but demands we also stay alert to the larger global environment and the impacts of the political economy. The latter means taking a more activist role as well. Sustainable beekeeping means working toward a sustainable environment, creating political/economic structures where bee survival is more probable, whether the bees be managed by commercial, sideline or hobby beekeepers. But this approach calls on us not to see the political/economic status quo as neither inevitable, nor desirable. Can we create an agribusiness model that makes pesticide and herbicide use, as well as habitat destruction, less necessary? Can we create a global political economy in which economic growth and its negative externalities of unsustainable resource use and waste are not necessities? Can we modify Western culture's belief in 'human exceptionalism'? In sum, how do we manage bees sustainability while "managing" ourselves in an increasingly globalized 'unnatural' environment? The answer is not 'primitivism' but, in my view, an activism based on a critical social apicultural.