The Wild Bee Chronicles

Operational Assumptions Derail Arguments for EE Failure

2012-02-15T08:37:00.001-05:00

Kermit the Green sits idle in our old packing house down at the orchard. The environmental movement passed us by long ago. EE has done little to help us address rural poverty and lack of access to resources needed to restore and repair our toxic soils and poisoned water.

What parent or grandparent could wish for a more toxic world for their children? And yet, even as environmental education continues the decades-long march through American schools and communities, our most vulnerable children become more so, their communities overlooked and forgotten. My recent comments and questions in a large environmental education conference, directed towards two environmental education writers were meant to test assumptions and challenge our thinking about the reality that EE is failing, but not, as the authors claim in the book The Failure of Environmental Education and What We Can Do to Fix it.

I introduced myself to the authors and a large audience as an agricultural educator, and not as an environmental educator, a dual role I've held since 1986. From my perspective as an AEr I've come to learn that growing and eating food is an environmental act of the most intimate and most global scale. My argument that food systems are the most accessible and repairable of social-ecological systems from which to embed environmental work, seemed to glance off the authors like a poorly thrown rotten tomato. How tightly the environmental movement clings to the rhetoric of wilderness preservation, megafauna conservation and the operational perspective of a privileged group with mobility, money and access. As one conference goer commented from his seat after I raised my concerns - "We've got to stop showing the polar bear."

In the book, the authors promote a very risky and outdated theory of population and resource decline as justification for intensifying the message of environmental education. The Malthusian Theory, now referred to as the Malthusian Falacy, is based upon the idea of consumption and prosperity. It is not, as the authors suggest in their book, a call for resource conservation and (gulp) population control. This outdated and controversial theory contains elements of privileged assumption that, in today's world, assume the world's poor are overwhelming the earth, depleting resources for the rest of us.

Henry George refuted this theory long ago, stating that the misery of the world's poor are in fact products of the world's rich. It is not a matter of food shortage, but of distribution, bad politics, racism and unjust policy, economic law and lack of access. Agriculturalist and economist Esther Rosebup did likewise, elegantly laying out the argument that food systems and population are products of innovation and resource conservation when examined apart from capitalist frameworks. Both critics suggest that the misery of the world's poor, and thus the earth, operates at the global scale, guided from the level of policy maker, CEOs at their board tables, the floors of Wall Street, the pundit's diatribe in popular media.

The authors, unable or unwilling to critically examine a main tenet (and driving assumption) of the environmental movement - that human population is outstripping the carrying capacity of the planet - may be innocent in its delivery, but but irrelevant in its message to those who do not have access to basic resources, healthy environmental assets and economic opportunities. As educators we have failed in that we carry forward the rhetorical banners of our work while missing the message of audiences we claim to serve. We do not know the child who's only meal may be his free lunch at school, or who's experience of a river is anything but pristine and worthy of his conservation dollar. Instead, the author's claim that a wilderness experience will ensure a future voter for wilderness conservation. A teacher attending the conference mentioned to me later that her teachers send students home each Friday afternoon with backpacks of donated food, because they know that some of these kids will not eat until Monday morning at school. "How will a week-long trip to Yosemite solve her hunger problems?" she asked.

The authors suggest that we as EErs need to teach students, with an invigorated sense of urgency, how to spend their dollars in environmentally wise ways, to purchase Green products, to send the environmental message and vote with their money for a cleaner environment. If it were that easy. Were it so, we would not have the stark realities of food deserts, widespread lack of basic health care and access to healthy alternatives, entire communities living downstream of industrial waste, toxic water, soils and air. Additionally, this is not an urban issue alone. Our rural areas, including my own, suffer from toxic well water and dead soils, the legacy of a chemical culture of production and consumption and profit. Our landscapes are sacrificed to the new wild frontier of domestic energy extraction while the promise of a living wage is a distant dream for many of my neighbors, the mineral profits of the land siphoned off to enrich people and companies far from where we live.

The issue of relevance will make or break the stride of environmental education. From where I work and serve as an agroecologist and ag educator, the message is not ours to preach, but must come from our communities and students. Let's re-examine our strategies and methods and assumptions. With all due respect to polar bears, my community wants to eat well, reduce heavy metals in our soils so we can grow a community garden, drink water that is not laced with Atrazine and hormones, and reduce environmental illness in our families. These are not our assumptions. These are our realities. The environmental movement must decide to join the rest of us as partners, not preachers. Put Mathus to rest once and for all.

Mule

2012-01-27T22:03:00.002-05:00

We are surrounded by the Amish, our small cabin community. We are nestled in a valley that forks to meet two other valleys and then joins a main river lowland that bends to the mighty Ssquehanna. The Amish farms occupy the ridges and the hollows and on damp rainy days like this, the smell of mule, percheron, belgians and brown swiss wafts up through the woods. My dogs perk their tails, as coonhounds do, and whimper, expecting to see a mule saunter through the field where they run.

The sound of mule feet on the narrow lanes thunders as teams of seven or nine or twelve well-muscled animals pull the haywagons, threshers and cultivators. Winter air is best to carry this sound that is felt more than heard, and when the teams march past our place on the high road, the dogs go crazy with delight, baying and face-fighting and flying along. The mules barely give them a glance, though their giant husks of ears pivot towards them.

Mule - the oldest draft animal on the farm, welcomed everyone who stopped at the farm stand.

My neighbors on the high hill run a farm stand at the end of the dairy lane. Susan stocks her stand with all manner of homemade goods. John sells raw milk and cheeses. The girls offer fresh eggs and potted plants. The stand is open all year. One old mule, who goes by the name of Mule, stands watch everyday behind the stand and brays when a customer pulls in. John cannot bear to part with this old draft animal. "Mule was the first working animal I owned some thirty five years back" he says, almost out of habit. Many people ask about Mule, face whitened with age. One day I saw Small John riding Mule bareback on the high hill road. His tiny body looked more like a bird perched on the spine of an enormous beast. Mule walked wanderingly along the shoulder, tasting greens and nibbling twigs, enjoying his long retirement. Small John appeared to be nodding off.

Today I drove into the dairy lane to pick up my raw milk. The morning rain carried mule perfume thick in the air. Susan greeted me and naturally I looked to the paddock. Mule was not there, standing guard nor greeting. I knew before she said it, that the old boy had passed. She explained how they buried him down in the valley and how upset the children were. "It's part of having a farm. Animals are born, animals die. Sometimes we take them so we can eat and feed others. Sometimes they go of their own accord. Either way, there's a sorrow in the house for Mule."

Standing on the high hill, one can't see but the tops of barns that fan out in the valleys below. The smell of mule, percheron, belgian and brown swiss drift up on the damp air. In the distance, the thunder of mule feet on the road.

Hunger This

2012-01-15T18:43:00.002-05:00

Crooked Run Orchard in Purcellviile, Virgina, participates in an annual Glean for the City to help fill food pantry shelves with long-storing apples and fresh fruit preserves prepared by a local church in D.C.

While giving an audience a sense of Farm Bill priorityprograms, Brian Synder, ExecutiveDirector of PASA, used the term ‘hunger programs” to describe the largest pieceof the USDA pie: school free and reduced cost lunches and the supplementalnutrition assistance program (SNAP). I traditionally sit in the very back oflarge audiences, panel discussions and keynotes in order to watch audiencereaction to what the speakers say. I am an educator and I always watch theresponse of my audience to what and how I am teaching, what catches theirattention, body language, hands waving for a chance to speak.

When Brianmentioned that nearly 80% of USDA Farm Bill funding went to address hunger – inthis, one of the richest nations on earth – the audience collectivelystraightened its shoulders, heads turned towards one another, a hum of hushedcomments filled the lecture hall. Theaudience, maybe a hundred or more in number, were mostly farmers.

The jobless, homeless, underemployed, elderly, and children in poverty of this country know hunger intimately. SNAP is a safety net, some would call‘social welfare’, which offers those who enter the program the opportunity tobuy necessary food items, approved by the USDA -no alcohol, junk food, smokes,hot food, take-out. In addition,participants may also purchase garden seeds and vegetable plants. SNAP is also accepted at most farmers marketsfor fresh, local foods. Despite therhetoric and political pandering to ‘pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,' the SNAP program serves so many people in so difficult a time, that toeven consider cuts or reductions in this program, in my opinion, is nothingless than an act of violence of a government against it own people.

Sitting in the back of the hall, I thought of my clients andfriends of Maryland Agricultural Education Foundation (MAEF). A teacher who works with autistic students at the Kennedy Krieger School,oversees an ag program where crops are raised for a local women’s shelter. A community activist in D.C. encourages herneighborhood gardeners to grow extra everything for the hungry in their area. Alocal farmer opens her orchard and crop fields for free gleaning at the end ofharvest. A church nearby calls my officeevery fall to find out which area farmers may want to offer gleanings for theirkitchen. Local hunters (myself included) participate in Share the Harvest.

One of my best friends, an Extension educator, has moresummer youth than she can handle for her community farm camps, all of themunderserved youth in a nearby military town. Another Extension educator, a nutritionist, teaches college students tocan and preserve foods over the summer. I know of several college campuses that operate student food pantries. 'Putting by’ is a major summer activity for them as they stock the shelvesfor the fall semester. The faces andstories of hunger are plentiful in The Land of Plenty.

A young city gardener Imet the following day at the Future Harvest conference mentioned at lunch howthe neighborhood kids who live in her extremely impoverished community inBaltimore come daily to help at the garden. In many ways, these people (and I know so very many more) are also asafety net, a community of growers who do more than the SNAP program canaccomplish on its own. They throw out a rope for neighbors to grab, to climbtheir way up like beans on a trellis, to learn skills and share talents andfood that is reminiscent of “teach a man to fish.”

I suggest that SNAP approach food assistance not onlyprovide allowances for seed and food plants, but to offer vouchers for gardeningand new farming training in and around where people live. I suggest too thatUSDA help to re-establish agriculture programs in schools, open to all studentsthroughout the year. We can become again a nation of farmers. As a society can again know self-sufficiency and interdependence that is honorable and proud. Finally, I suggestnew dialogue between farmers and the hungry in their area.

Ancient Jewish agricultural law teaches thatour land is not really our own, that to set aside a portion of one’s fields forgleaning by the poor and hungry is to know stewardship not only of land but of community. Knownas “leaving the corners” the law of Pe’ah states "When you reap the harvest of your land,you shall not reap all the way to the edges of your field . . . you shall leavethem for the poor and the stranger" (Leviticus 23:22).

For those of us with land, growing food and markets to tend, weshould hunger as well. We should hunger to help those who know too well theuncertainties of where the next meal may or may not come from. As farmers, weshould hunger after the meaning of Right Livelihood in our work, if our work asfarmers does not depend on government subsidy checks. No child, no family, inour midst, near our farms and establishments, should go hungry for want of foodand opportunity. Reject "Feed The World" and return to feeding our neighbors.

Long Live (or Die) The Farm Bill!

2012-01-14T06:40:00.002-05:00

I am sitting in a very small cell of a room a the National Convention Center in northern Virginia. My desk chair is wedged against my bed. The bed is wedged almost against the bathroom door. There's very little room in this very little room, but in a few hours I will be back down at the conference hall, a spacious cavern of a space that will soon fill with farmers. At 5:30am I am up, writing and reflecting on yesterday's experiences which seem now to have been one long loud conversation from sun-up to way past bed time on the Farm Bill, agriculture education, sustainable agriculture and local markets.

I sat in on a panel discussion that lasted until after 9pm. The conversation was about advocacy for the 2012 Farm Bill, but I realized from my perch in the back, that many of the attendees were not quite sure what Farm Bill was and even less sure how all encompassing its policies are in regard to our food system. Brian Synder (Executive, Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture) gave a quick run down: 70% of the FB funds hunger programs (school free and reduced lunches, SNAP, etc.), 18% funds conventional subsidy-based farming, 7% funds conservation agriculture and sustainable agriculture us barely on the radar at something like 0.0001% of the funding. The audience sat a little higher in their chairs. What? The Farm Bill isn't for all us farmers? No, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore.

The degree of public ignorance about Farm Bill issues, funding and legislation is understandable - I doubt anyone can know everything there is to know about it. The idea of a lay-readers guide to the Farm Bill is on my list of books to write. I follow FB very closely, not just because of the implications it has for the future of our food system, but because it is fascinating history. It is, a one of the panelists suggested, a huge river of money, that flows like a Mississippi, only ten times the volume in cash rather than water.

The FB is second only to the DoD's massive spending bill in terms of size of legislation and complexity. There are thirteen different titles under the current 2007 FB. These include Commodities, Conservation, Food Aid, Nutrition, Farm Credit, Rural Development, Forestry, Research, Energy, Livestock, Horticulture, Organic Ag, Commdity Futures and Trade, Ag Tax. It is a cyclical event, coming 'round every five years, but has daily impact on every facet of life and living in the U.S. including food aid and trade in global markets. Those grapes from Chile you get for cheap in the market are courtesy of the FB. Market trade is courtesy of the FB as is the price of the grapes themselves.

The FB benefits the some conventional farmers handsomely, some of whom scream and pound the table about government regulations, hand-outs and 'welfare' programs, but who eagerly watch their mailboxes for their subsidy checks from the USDA. One of the panelists, a sustainable farmer from Maryland who farms 18 acres and feeds over 10,000 people a year with her 1,900 member CSA (yes, 1,900) was asked once by a conventional grain farmer how much money she got from the government. None, she replied. He seemed surprised. "You don't get any money from the government?" No, she said, and she didn't want it.When FB issues arise that may affect her business and the food choices of her clients, she mobilizes her 10,000 customers as constituents to call their politicians. Eaters are voters.

I wanted to drill down to what advocacy meant - How can we teach advocacy, I thought, when the issue is so enormous, complex and politically charged? In a culture that prides itself on Free Speech, shouldn't we know what it is we are speaking about? I wonder where we are to start as advocates if the issues we advocate for are so poorly understood. If I learned anything at this discussion, it was that advocacy requires - no, demands - that we as citizens,farmers, eaters, understand the implications of both our ignorance and our perceived knowledge of Farm Bill process and impact. We have a long, long way to go before we can even suggest advocacy. We need to educate ourselves, our students and our customers.

Agriculture education includes educating for advocacy. Corporate ag lobbyists do their (well paid) jobs in the halls of Congress, but sustainable farmers are rarely beholden to large multinationals to do their political bidding in D.C. (Oh, how very close we are to D.C. !) Our lobbyists are us. We are responsible for self-educating and understanding the FB as it impacts our daily lives. How we go about gaining that education is personal for sustainable farmers. How we use what we learn is key.

The number of sustainable farmers in this country is very small, like this room, but it is growing and gaining political credibility more along the lines of the Populist Movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s when mid-western farmers began to organize politically and push back against corporate greed (sounds familiar to this crowd!). Maybe what I am seeing is a a resurgence in a small way of a group becoming aware of its own ignorance, the beginnings of a movement grounding itself in advocacy. We must strive to understand personally and act collectively on our own behalf and for the interests of the land, the people we feed and employ, and the health of our nation.

A Bee and Complex Systems Analysis

2011-12-14T21:08:00.001-05:00

Bombus terricola - what is causing her rapid decline? Stepping back to look at a very complex picture.

The time has finally come to shed the trappings of just being a graduate student and to focus down on the work of my dissertation research, proposal and defense. My topic is an endangered bee, once very common not all that long ago in the Northeast, now declining so fast that it only exists in small pockets at altitude and in isolation. My question goes beyond the "why" and seeks to look at the issues of complex interactions across landscapes and regions, social practices and environmental change. Maybe by looking at the big picture of a small being, I'll discover connections, conversations, shifts and trends that reductionist science hasn't detected yet. Maybe I'll discover the language of systems decline.

I started this blog many years ago as I entered my PhD program at Antioch University New England to study wild bees. The intent of Wild Bee Chronicles was to document my scholarly journey for family, friends and most importantly, my advisors and mentors. John Adams once counseled his son Quincey that to become a scholar is a solitary endeavor, and in most ways, he is right. But my research into complex social-ecological-systems dynamics, with a red-listed bumble bee at the center of it all, has taken me to some incredible places, literally and conceptually - so fascinating, that I would rather like to just stay out there and keep exploring. But there's work to be done and it involves a different kind of exploration, the kind that Adams knew well.

Theoretical and applied complexity science - and a bee.

There's the writing, two to four hours a day - sometimes early before work, sometime late at night. I am publishing now, with articles in the pipeline and one in print. Two books underway, writing up my summer field work, exploring large ecosystem interactions, rivers, forests, agricultural landscapes, tundra and alpine while bee hums along, too.

Save for this blog, my social presence will diminish while I probe the fields and summits for B. terricola, draft my articles and reports, build storyboards, read, read, read, write, write, write. A colleague or two will come to stay to conduct their botanical research in my area, using the spare room in the cabin as their own hibernarium - desk, paper, light, boom scope and plant press and a bed with a reading light. Who needs anything else?

For those of you who have added this blog to your RSS feed or joined as a follower, you'll know what's up and we can certainly engage in discussion here. For those not connected - I hope to see you all again on the far side of this work in 2013-14 when the Doctor, I pray, is in the house! Good luck to all my colleagues walking their own dissertation paths. A very very heartfelt thank you to my mentors, advisors, professors and research partners for the journey so far - I can see a tiny light in the distance. It has wings and hums.

Cresting the Hill of Sustainable Ag

2011-11-09T19:21:00.001-05:00

Young farmers on a pasture walk: the soils of WVF only a decade ago were thin, nutrient poor and stone-studded. Employing rotational grazing and multi-species on the land, topsoils are now over a foot thick and growing.

My agroecology class ventured out on to the pastures of Walpole Valley Farm in southern New Hampshire as the fog, rolling in from the nearby Connecticut River, was beginning to burn away. As they topped a hill, the gentle cattle, grazing below emerged from the fog. Everyone stopped and smiled. Here was a farm, that only ten years ago, was exhausted and used up. Two young people, having made the choice to leave behind the 9 to 5 life, secure jobs, benefits and to them, meaninglessness, arrived to restore it. Here were my students, seeing for the first time, what a truly sustainable farm looks like - what closing the loop smells like, feels like, tastes and sounds like. Six species of very happy animals on rich, beautiful soils. High tunnels, berries, vegetables, grass - a sea of beautiful grass. Early summer hay banked in the historic barn. A thriving farm business, store, B&B, loyal customers and statewide recognition as a NH Farm of Distinction. No waste. No inputs. No vet bills. No debt. High customer loyalty, growing support from community and county.

I attended a curriculum work group meeting over the weekend where the group leader said she was going to wait to see if the idea of agroecology would "stick" whether it was just a passing fad. I wish she had been with us. Young minds, crossing disciplinary boundaries, knowing that they cannot accept the world their parents and grandparents are handing them, are at the frontline of changing the very way we think about food systems. Seeing the problem of agriculture as a needed paradigm shift, is the first step in restoring balance, health and sanity to a system that is brutalizing the planet. Offering students these wonderful role models who farm sustainably and happily, who encourage their participation and education: the gift they received today.

The science of sustainable agriculture, agroecology, is not only an applied science but proving to be one that will help us transition from carbon-based agriculture to farming with nature as a partner. My young agroecologists, representing majors in architecture (agricultural building design), media (ag marketing), ecology (agroecology), political science (ag policy), business (ag entrepreneurship), entomology (IPM), education (ag education) and biology (animal science and husbandry) are the future of ag, the future of the transition.

Conventional ag cannot survive. There is no "business as usual" in a world that is heating up faster than ever predicted; using more drastic measures to drill, blast and fracture the earth to get at declining supplies of fossil fuels. "Business as usual" agriculture is incredibly wasteful and destructive. It is time the adults in the room admit that no amount of corporate lobbying, closed door and back door deal-making in D.C. and spinning the story of chemical/fossil fuel dependent practices as "all American" and something to be proud of, can change the future of food for our students, our children.

My students climbed the hill in a fogbank, only to see the future of farming revealed in hopeful rays of sunlight when they reached the crest. Touring the 100 acre farm took nearly three hours. Every system was interlocked with another, every process was part of a cycle. Compassion for the land, the animals - especially since they were to become our food - and the community was evident in every springy step across the fields. I am reminded of Dr. Temple Grandin who said "These are the animals we will eat. We owe them respect and compassion." My students felt that today. In our wrap up I heard words like "humbled" "peaceful" "hard work, satisfying work" and "it means something." When everyone saw the beautiful huge pile of year old compost and jumped in - digging with hands and lifting the black earth to their noses and breathing in the scent of life itself - I can be certain that agroecology is the future of ag science, and with this class, the future has arrived.

Eistein Never Said That

2011-09-15T20:35:00.000-04:00

Albert Einstein - A really quotable guy when you need him!

I read a lot of research papers. No, really, a lot. Usually about bees, honey bees, not honey bees, decline, food systems, bee illness, bee competition. The literature, however, is nothing like the word on the street, which usually goes something like this:

"Bees are dying off! We're next!"
"The poor honey bee! We're doomed!"
"Where will our food come from if bees become extinct?"
and my favorite....
"Einstein said "If bees go extinct, then man has maybe four years left." (or something to that effect)"

As a native bee researcher aligned more with agroecology and landscape ecology, I'd like to admit first off that I am not an Einstein. But this statement, attributed to him in its various forms, simply isn't true. It is, however, red meat for alarmists and folks with other agendas or who don't know any better. Despite all the digging for any shred of evidence that Einstein said a single word about bees, all the Einstein researchers - and there are a lot of them - have not found anything to prove he actually said this. Why would someone say he did?

The story goes back to 1994 and the huge protests against cheap, imported honey that threatened to collapse the domestic honey industry in France. This misquote actually shows up on a pamphlet that was distributed to passers by at a large union rally (yes, French beekeepers are unionzed). From there, it lay quietly smoldering until Colony Collapse Disorder became the greater threat about 2004. The misquote was re-hydrated and and now circles around conversations, some of them in professional and academic settings, as if - well - as if "them's the facts."

The beekeepers and later, people concerned that we are all going to die without them, had found a great sound byte that justified all of their concerns from the decline in honey prices to the well-being of mankind. Having somebody really important with name recognition to have uttered it gives credibility and authority. Who will argue with Einstein?

Why am I hovering over this? Why the sting? A student asked me recently in class if it was true. I'd already done the homework, years ago on the quote, and explained neither the quote nor the "fact" were true. He seemed satisfied with my lengthy explanation of species of bees, native and non-native, economic and non-valuated cost of pollination and yes, there is a problem, but no, we are not going to starve in four years. My student said he would follow our conversation up with some research of his own, and went on his way.

Two weeks later in class the student shared with me that his biology teacher had recited the quote to make a point in class about how dire the bee decline is and well....he had to say something? Right? So he did. He then described his biology teacher turning bright red and demanding to know how he knew these things. He first mentioned that he'd done some reading (Landscape Ecology, Conservation Biology, Agriculture Ecology & Environment, Economic Entomology, Ecology Letters) and shared with his teacher why he had been inspired to do so. He mentioned my name. The response? "She's a damned liar!"

Oh. My.

I relate this story for two reasons. Public scholarship often challenges public belief systems. We are obligated as scientists to make our work available and meaningful to non-scientists, especially the tax paying ones who fund most of the large research grants we get. Setting something straight, smoothing ruffled feathers, even turning a Titanic sized misconception such as this, is what we should be doing. But what we, as scientists and educators, should not be doing is neglecting the most critical part of jobs - question. question. question.

The second reason I post this tale is to lament upon the sound-byte culture science has become, especially in classrooms. At university I have walked past many a room where great scientist-educators are pushing their students to think, examine, investigate, explore - not to buy into the "word on the street." This can go for all manner of public beliefs about science - you pick - there are lots. I love these educators and was inspired by many like them to enter university teaching in the first place.

Then there are those who may be or may be not adhere or understand the code of critical thinking and inspired research. Blasting a student for challenging a privately held belief is not critical examination. Calling a colleague a liar is not playing well with others. Using "word on the street" factoids and sound-byte science is not science at all. So, I look forward to my meeting with this biology teacher.

Einstein did say this. "I never teach my students. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn." You can check me on that ( The Einstein Archivists in Jerusalem would love to help you!). Therefore, it is fitting that this episode in the life of a teacher-researcher should come round to this actual quote. As a student, Einstein did not do well in the highly structured environment of rote learning, memorizing facts and formulas, rules and laws. He questioned. As a teacher-researcher himself, he maintained that though books were useful, their over-use in the classroom was not an effective platform from which to teach or learn. As a life-long student was a creative, experimental, experiential learner. He loved books and read voraciously throughout his life, this is true. But repeating only what you have been told to be true or that which you have read to be exact, was not education but a form of propaganda (consider the times in which he lived). In 1921 when asked about the quality of teaching and learning at university, he claimed a disdain for books in the classroom, especially when used as means of control and to quell imagination, and that, he said, extended to the teacher. He scorned teachers who defended and preached common beliefs as fact - especially those beliefs that held political and economic power over students and citizens.

I applaud my young undergrad for taking me on - doing his own research and thinking for himself what the data revealed concerning honey bee decline and the fall of mankind. I also applaud him for challenging a teacher - me and his biology teacher - respectfully and with a sense of adventure and good humor. He'll go far I have no doubt.

"Einstein sometimes lamented the stupidity of particular contemporaries, be it because they took at face value every press blabber, or because they did not debunk their political leaders’ cheap slogans as simple bragging." said Anonymous.

In Need of Weeks

2011-08-27T17:52:00.000-04:00

The Weeks Act made the White Mountain National Forest possible 100 years ago. Do we have the foresight and courage to do the same for the East's other great watersheds?

I spent the better part of every weekend this summer on some high mountain bald and in forest openings, farms and fields. My objective was to conduct an informal, but valuable site assessment to determine if and where a single bumble bee species might turn up. Bombus terricola, once common throughout the Eastern U.S. and southern Canada has, in the last twenty years, declined so rapidly that it now resides on the “Red List” – a listing of rare or endangered invertebrates. Happily I found my bee in several locations including the windswept balds of Mt. Washingon, Mt. Monadnock, along the granite slides of Webster Mountain and on cleared summits of local peaks near where I presently live in Bennington, NH.

As I traversed slopes in the White Mountain National Forest I thought about how lucky I have been to have had this time in the mountains I dearly love. It was one hundred years ago this year that the Weeks Act passed which gave the green light to conserve the great landscapes of the East. It was a tough decade-long ordeal, but when passed it truly represented the wishes of outdoorsmen, loggers, conservationists, paper mill owners and residents. Nowhere was support as strong as it was for the establishment of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire. People recognized, long before their elected officials did (hence ten years to enact this legislation), that a healthy environment means good jobs, clean water, enduring protection of land and resources that made their lives, and in so doing, our lives, healthy and productive. Too bad today’s climate in DC doesn’t include the voices of people on the land, just the voices corporations-turned-people that can pay high sums to win votes for their special interests.

In the Whites, people live and work as they do everywhere. They log, farm, operate businesses for the tourists, teach school, go to school, maintain roads, bag groceries, care for the sick and manufacture goods. The economy is strong here, and though not booming, people have homes and jobs. Though the National Forest Service provides management and carries out policy, the residents of the Whites, their parents, grandparents, protects the land and great grandparents did and do the real work of stewarding and caring for this immense space. The Weeks Act enabled conservation, economics, communities and landscape to work together through generations to ensure that watersheds of northern NH are protected for the good of all now and beyond.

I compare this scenario to what is happening in my home watershed of the Susquehanna, headwaters to the Chesapeake Bay. Forests are vast, mountains are high and rugged and working lands, mostly farms, occupy the valleys of many tributaries that feed the river. In Pennsylvania, farmers and forest owners are working so very hard to conserve resources and protect their watersheds, for the good of their own landscapes and the good of the Chesapeake. They understand that we all live upstream and we all live downstream from someone else, and that humans are having a huge impact on the way ecological systems work, or don’t.

It has been twenty five years of conservation farming, ecological forestry practices and sound environmental policy - a lot of hard work to bring the Susquehanna back from the brink of near death. You see, in 1972 it was declared dead, one of America’s most polluted rivers. That designation rallied almost the entire watershed, the entire center region of Pennsylvania - politicians, farmers, business people, students, factory owners and forest workers, to take action. It took foresight and vision to see ahead a generation and picture this mighty and historic river flowing clean again, and, they did it. They continue to improve its lands and waters from the Maryland line to New York State.

Amazingly, despite the optimistic future of our beloved river, a new designation has been bestowed upon the Susquehanna, that of “imminently threatened by pollution yet to come”. American Rivers, a highly respected and national watchdog group, declared this just last month. Despite the work of farmers, business people and citizens of the Commonwealth, hydrofracking, which is not required to meet the same standards of protection to groundwater and surface waters as farmers and small businesses are, has entered the scene quickly and aggressively.

Now I can hear my pro-fossil fuel friends grumping something about America’s energy independence and yada yada (it’s such an old song it needs to be retired) but this defense of an untested, potentially deadly technology, unleashed on farmlands and forests throughout the state in essence silences our concerns and ignores the obvious through sheer industrial and political arrogance. Our own groundwater, the waters of the Chesapeake and the livelihoods and landscapes we love are at stake. Water – you know – the stuff of life?

Farmers I know, who have worked for a generation to soften the impact agricultural practices have on natural resources, at their own expense in most cases, are stunned. Sure, the sale of mineral rights might make a farmer (especially a poor one – the ones targeted by fracking companies) happy for a few years, but the long term disruption, destruction and pollution of his/our/your groundwater? I wish a Weeks Act could be enacted for this watershed. The people want protection for themselves, their land, their water and their futures. But natural gas industry has a comfy nest in the back pocket of most elected officials. It will be interesting, if not a bit unnerving, to see what happens next. Sure we can all crow about America's energy independence but at what cost?

Unlike the expanse of the White Mountain National Forest, the Susquehanna watershed has no sweeping policy or legislation to protect it for our grandchildren. Having grandchildren of my own, I would be ashamed to die, to paraphrase Horace Mann, if one day they asked me “Grandmom, what did you do to help the river? To help the forest? To help the Bay?” Saving a little bee from extinction is a noble start, but ensuring my grandkids and great grandkids have beautiful forests, clean water, abundant fisheries and productive, healthy farms (and farmers) means so much more for them.

Our shortsightedness will be our downfall, to the detriment of future generations. The answer to our energy woes are simple and at hand, but greed, marching to the tune of the same old song at volumes beyond the reach of our own voices, presently has the ear of Washington.

Be ashamed to die, said Horace.

Calling Lawrence

2011-08-12T20:07:00.000-04:00

Lawrence - not his real name- collected many of these bees

Boring, dry, dull and utterly out-of-touch, the “sage-on-stage” pontificated to the huddled researchers the importance of interdisciplinary work, preaching the academic-level gospel of “Let’s all get along and share.” Heads nodded including mine, but this conference gathering included a smattering of egos who would rather not, thank you.

I pondered this for some time and tried to figure out, why on earth would a researcher, clearly embedded in a field that is nothing without its disciplinary neighbors and kin, prefer not to show his hand, share his ideas or otherwise help to advance the horizons of science. Oh how naïve I have been.

Not having been able to do the figuring for myself, I emailed a colleague, who in attendance with me at the conference this spring, gave her take on things. “He’s been burned, of course.” How would I know that? I asked. How would anyone know that and not see it as simply ego? “Call him and ask,” she suggested. So I did.

“Hello, this is Lawrence.”

I gave my graduate student introduction. Lawrence has been at this a long, long time and in ecological research there is such a thing as respect for seniority – one of the last bastions of that old tradition. He seemed polite enough, but I caught a throaty little growl between “Nice of you - - to call.”

Putting my ego detector on sleep mode, I proceeded with my carefully crafted question. He wasted no time. “Look, you are too much a rookie to know what poaching is, but it will happen to you on some level. Sometimes it happens when we have an idea, not well thought out, just that, an idea. We would like some time to put meat on its bones, to flesh it out. Then it flies off a page we did not intend eyes to see, and next thing you know, some former colleague or lunch guest puts out a few articles, or God forbid, a book. After a while, you get tired of it. Even suspicious. Even paranoid. Some take that as egotistical, whatever that means."

I was stunned. My colleague had been right. This was not a scientist full of himself, but full of hurt. Yes, he said, he agrees that interdisciplinary science is what we all should be doing, but who writes the rules? Who follows them? When does interdisciplinary become “free lunch?”Lawrence went silent. Then he asked me not to use his real name if I decided to report on this. So, his name is not Lawrence, but this is why it is Lawrence:

Lawrence went on to describe a few researchers who may not agree with his ideas or who may, and who by any stretch of the imagination would never consider poaching them. He mentioned several names, one of them being the name I am using for him now in this post (last name withheld) and said softly, that if they disagree or agree and it’s okay, there is still respect and mutual “affection for the craft of thinking original thoughts.”

Now it was my turn to go silent.

“Are you there?”

“Hello?”

I snapped to, put down my next question and said yes, I was there. I apologized for my sudden leave-taking and explained I had never heard the word “affection” used to describe scientific thinking, nor had I considered research a “craft.”

“Few do,” he answered, “And that is my lesson to you, young graduate student.” I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d just turned fifty one, but considering Lawrence was in his late seventies, it could stand.

“All this talk of transdisciplinary this and interdisciplinary that – it’s enough to make one roll their eyes. Isn’t that what science is supposed to be? Competitions, publishing advances, awards and rewards. When science became monetized after World War Two, chemists stopped talking to mathematicians and engineers stopped talking among themselves and ‘originality’ became equated with incentive.”

We talked a good while, and the growl became a hearty laugh. We’ll both be attending the same conference again next year, and asked if he would mind sharing lunch at some point during the week. “Oh, lunches. I dread lunches. Promise me you won’t run out and publish a book afterwards?”

I promised, and assured him we could just talk about my bee research and what he thinks of it. “Good idea, lessons then? You offer your work for criticism and I’ll flay it like a fish. Good practice for peer review. Tell me about your bees now, what have you found this summer.”

I told Lawrence of finding bees where others said they wouldn’t or shouldn’t be. “Typical,” he said, “They’re testing you.”

I told him about climbing a very high mountain, just to dangle off a highway retaining wall I didn’t know would be there (otherwise I would have driven). “Good,” he said, “You’ve been to Madagascar.”

I told him about hail storms and bees popping up as soon as the rain and wind and hail stopped. “We’ve got a lot to learn from them, eh? (yes, he’s Canadian)”

Then he asked me what my methodology was, how I was framing my work and what theories were guiding my perspectives. I stumbled and tried to sound like I knew what I was talking about. It didn’t work.

“Try again,” he said, “In fact, think a long while on that and when we meet for lunch next year, you can give me the right answers.” Spoken like a someone with fifty years of research under his belt, a lesson gratefully received by this young graduate student.

Hail Bees

2011-08-05T19:33:00.000-04:00

Bombus terricola after a summer storm in the White Mts.

“What are you looking for?” called the woman in a bright yellow vinyl rain coat from the edge of the overlook. The steep hillside fell away beyond my line of vision as I leaned into the stone retaining wall that held the highway tight against the mountain, but I continued down the slope to an enticing patch of fireweed growing a hundred feet below.

“Bees!” I called back into gusts of hot wind sweeping up the valley wall. Her curious smile turned to disinterested disappointment. The wind whipped her coat up over her elbows, exposing a dramatically patterned blue and white blouse, the colors of the early August mountain flower patch of Queen Anne’s lace, goldenrod and fireweed surrounding me. She turned and disappeared beyond the wall. Another woman, in a hooded raincoat, peered over. The idea of raincoats on this picture perfect mountain summer day seemed odd to me.

“Aren’t there safer places to look for bees?” she hollered. Ah, I thought, someone who might be willing to start a conversation. And then I saw the black. The black that raised up over her hood, over the tops of spruce, the black that blotted out the picture perfect blue sky and snuffed out the sun. The black of a storm, like some beast standing on its hind legs to peer down at me, small and unprotected on the slope, began to grumble, then snarl and finally it let loose a howl so spectacular that I dropped to my knees and huddled below the flowers. I cradled my camera equipment in my lap and bent completely around it, exposing my bare neck and shoulders to the pummeling hail that followed. Ah, the life of a beek.

Twenty minutes later the sun shone and a light breeze sifted through the flowers. I was growing welts the size of marbles on my back and neck. The bees came back out and there, to my delight, was Bombus terricola, the object of my hundred foot slide into the flower patch. Lots of them! I snapped away, oblivious to the glare of the ranger above me. “Lady – what on earth are you doing?!” Clearly the raincoats had squealed on me.

I explained how this bee, once abundant throughout New England, the Mid-Atlantic and southern Canada was now only locally found in the White Mountain region. I’d also found a few small isolated colonies in the southern part of the state but I wanted to experience what ‘abundant’ felt like, I explained. The ranger just stared. I made my way slipping and kick-stepping up to the wall. I showed him my card, my academic credentials, my university ID, my passport. He seemed unimpressed. “Researchers. You all are a different breed.” And he walked away.

A man stood shaking his fists at the blue sky. “Damn nature!” he shouted. His windshield was shattered, spider-webbed and dented from the hail. Another man seemed to be sobbing as he ran his hands over the dimpled hood of his brand new Honda Crosstour. I skipped back to my truck, stinging from hailstones, but joyful that I had stood in a field of hundreds of terricola. My truck, parked under a shady tree, suffered no harm. There were no raincoats to be seen, just glistening black pavement and drifts of melting hailstones.

The ranger came back. Oh no, I thought. A ticket for being a researcher. Instead he asked to see pictures of the bees. We stood behind the truck in as dark a place as I could make it to be and scanned through the better shots on the back of my Cannon Rebel. He seemed impressed, even slightly interested. “Was it worth it?” he asked. “Worth what?” I answered. “Looking like you’ve been peppered by a few rounds of bird shot,” he explained. Now that I thought about it, I was feeling a little abused. But I assured him it was worth it. He smiled and shook my hand and went about helping the angry-at-nature man.

Heat Wave

2011-07-23T16:48:00.000-04:00


"Within the Rim" 11 x 14 acrylic and illustration ink

A summer heat wave fires up my barn apartment like a commercial greenhouse, it's double floor-to-ceiling church windows capturing and magnifying light to heat so that by 8am I am dripping in sweat, unable to read or write or study. The wall of window glass works like a charm 11 months out of the year, but for the past several days I cringe and wait it out. Checking on my specimens, I find that the heat has loosened the glue holding them to their pins and several bees have dropped like flies to the bottom of their collection boxes. The only cool air to be found is the truck with the AC turned on, so I go for a drive.

I visit a farm where I will run transects for next year's bloom period survey. The cows are in the creek and the goats are shaded up. I walk along the pasture edge and my breath is taken away not by the excessive heat but by the goldenrod coming to bloom along the wide pollinator strip this farmer maintains. The farmer received technical and cost share help from the local Extension office to plant over 30 acres in bee resource plants, but the wild goldenrod has smothered the wildflowers paid for and seeded by the USDA. A sea of bright green and outlandish yellow shimmers in the humidity, alive with wings and buzzing and whistles and clicking and humming. Who cannot resist the urge to wade in and lie down on a rock in the shade of silver maples? Not me and that's what I do. The gentle grunting and splashing of cows rises behind me and they come to gather around me in the water.

This farm is a wonderful example of a voluntary program participant in one of the many pollinator programs offered by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Drivers on the main road pull over to gawk at the wildflowers along the pasture edge, safely out of reach of cattle and goats. Seed savers sometimes venture in to gather seeds for their own gardens. Fishermen make excuses to fish here for the view of the pasture. I have observed (though not yet formally caught) a wide variety of wild bees here, and when the farmer asks how I think the program is working, I say by the looks of it just fine. But that's not an answer I am comfortable giving. We should know a whole lot more than "fine."

One of the flaws of the voluntary conservation programs for pollinators is the lack of monitoring and analysis. Without these tools, how do we know whether a conservation practice is benefiting pollinators, and thus sustainable agriculture, or not? Taxonomists are few and far between, citizen scientists need training and guidance, resources must be publicly accessible (it's our tax money you know), and results should be shared and used to guide adaptive management. But NRCS, at last count, had less that 150 biologists on staff, and none with a background in wild bees. With tens of thousands of acres enrolled in pollinator habitat programs, who's to say whether these efforts are paying off. I would like to say they are - but the last and most costly and important step - monitoring and analysis, has been left out.

In this day and age of budget slashing and demands for fiscal accountability, the numbers are not there for pollinator conservation programs. Seeing a few different bees is nice, but nice isn't practiced in Congress when someone asks "What are we getting for our money?"

Things get mighty hot in Washington when it comes to the reallocation of funds for the Farm Bill.

Bees at Sea

2011-07-15T21:36:00.000-04:00


Herbaceous meadows of Star Island, partially the result of seabird activity and full of blossoms and bees!

On a recent trip to the Isle of Shoals six miles off Rye, NH in the Atlantic Ocean I was able to roam freely, if only for a short time, over the granite vistas of these historic and ecologically fragile islets. In the hour we had to explore (we were visiting with one of the packet boats that shuttle visitors to the Star Island facility) I was struck by the profusion of flowering plants that bedecked the rocky crags and rimmed the lawns between the seaweed-covered cove and the historic buildings. And here were bees at sea!

It would be worth a longer stay to take a sample of the bees of the Shoals but for this afternoon I wondered about climate change and the ability of small creatures to adapt. As the past has taught us, life adapts beautifully to change, though not in ways that make us comfortable or speak of stability the way humans prefer. The evolutionary potential, especially of insects, to adapt to change is astounding and we have seen this potential repeated in studies of moths and beetles responding to rapid environmental change incurred by human interference. “Hibernating” genes hidden as recessive traits and kept safely in reserve in DNA of creatures over the long term, may be triggered by certain environmental trends to emerge in response to selective pressures to adapt. These adaptations resolve themselves in many ways, such as rapid dispersal, individual species response, community disbandment and novel community reassembly.

On this island bumble bees hurried from blossom to blossom among raspberry thickets. Sweat bees and hover flies, almost invisible to the eye in the bright glare of the sun, alighted on asters and goldenrods in the herbaceous meadows that swept across the nesting areas and roosting shelves of seabirds. A broad mix of native and non-native vegetation ranging from black cherry to yarrow to poison ivy provide island bees and other pollinators with floral resources that are constrained by the sea. Wash-over during storms, constant salt spray and winds, intense heat in summer and damp, cold fogs make life a challenge for plants, so I can only wonder how the bees survive as well.

The islands can be thought of as model in miniature of the implications for conservation biology as global climate change bears down on regions and biomes. Dynamics of change and the mechanisms of biological response apply to entire landscapes across multiple scales. The potential for life to adapt is affected by availability of habitat for range dispersal. Fragmented or reduced and degraded landscapes provide limited range options. Like a bees on an island, rapid response to dynamic change in the environment is greatly reduced, especially when combined with isolated gene pools of restricted populations. The idea of widely spaced parks and nature reserves serving as cradles of biodiversity is basically a false hope. Entire landscapes must be linked and managed to facilitate response to change. The human dominated landscape fractures natural communities into island-like fragments. Without connectivity, these pockets of “nature” are no more than rocky crags in an ocean of change.

Adornment and Fashion.

2011-06-25T18:13:00.000-04:00

Dan and I model appropriate attire for after-chores coffee at the cafe in town.

My favorite place to shop for clothes? Tractor Supply and Agway.

How nice that I can purchase a pair of muck boots in the same store as my favorite work denims with the double reinforced knee and pockets to hold my phone, ruler, flashlight, pliers, collecting bottle, index cards and pencil. And while I’m thinking about that fleece-lined hoodie with the red tractor on the front I can swing through and pick up another roll of electric fence and rat wire. Not that I wear electric fence or rat wire, but I certainly wouldn’t wear blouses and shorts while working with that stuff either.

So it was a bit of shock when my colleagues at graduate school decided to go to a fancy restaurant dressed as they were for classes, and I dressed as I do for my work. We stood looking at each other. “Well, it’s too far a drive to go get changed,” I said, “So I’ll pass this time.” Heals clicking, jewelry clinking and skirts flowing, out the door they went. Honestly, I do not like ‘going out’ and, more importantly, I have nothing other than Carhartts, muck boots and very ragged long-sleeve T-shirts to wear. I usually ‘pass’ when any matters of fashion or good taste arise, not having developed either skill set.

Time in my family was spent in the woods, fields, barn, sheds, orchard, under the hood of a persnickety International ¾ ton truck and sometimes in the kitchen, but we were all more accustomed to outdoor pursuits than stalking malls and clothing stores for ‘deals’ and accessories. Though I do confess, I own a pair of honey bee earrings. I actually wore them once to a conference. I also own a dress jacket I wore for the first day of teaching school in 1986. I still have it, just in case I do something official like graduate from my PhD program. Yes, it still fits.

Therefore, I was relieved when my friend Dan suggested that we go out for coffee in town after playing with cows (I tallying up numbers of flies in the paddock, he inspecting character traits for his developing breed of New Hampshire cattle), to be joined by his wife Ruth and my doctoral advisor Charles.

We stared at each other. Dan’s pants were sporting triple patches, literally shredding from his legs, his muck boots gooey with manure and mud. Ruth wore straw-flected work jeans, and a frumpy sweatshirt. Charles was the best dressed, but not by much. I, in my too-long legged green Carhartts that scuffed when I walked, my Bean boots covered in cow-poo bedding.

“Perfect!” said Dan. Off to town we went, smelling of cows and grass and sheep and dogs. The café, tucked into the corner of the most-amazing-ever local bookstore happened to have a table for four amidst the crowd of after-chores farmers who were coming in for morning tea and coffee. Another entomologist I know was sitting alone at a table for two, reading his notes from his morning in the marshes.

“Hi, Greg!” I said cheerily, noticing his rain-soaked Boston Red Socks sweatshirt and his mud-covered Smiths farmhand work pants. We chatted about dragonflies, stable flies, hover flies and solitary bees while my friends were in line for coffee and tea. My job was to hold the open table for four.

Suddenly, a summer tourist walked in. She literally swept into the crowded café, overflowing with people coming in off the land for mid-morning break. The café fell silent to stare at this woman, dressed to the nines, joined by her boyfriend in his shiny khakis and shinier loafers. Ah, the tables were turned, I thought. Besides, this was not as much about going out as coming in, requiring a far different set of fashion rules in rural New Hampshire. The woman took her place in line and laughed out loud as she caught the silliness of it all. “You can buy a pair of Dickies down the road, miss,” said Greg, “You’ll fit right in!”

The Dissertation Hen

2011-06-21T17:01:00.000-04:00

Playful cows remind me not to take myself to seriously!

The doctoral intensive is especially so this time 'round as I try to balance teaching at a neighboring university (agroecology) with attending my own university's required week-long slog through the next phase of our doctoral adventure. Never mind the daily migraines brought on by my sensitivity to indoor lighting and the mind-numbing swirl of desk work, advisor meetings, group meetings and computer glare (the sun is my only tolerable light source), I am half-way through. I can say this happily because of two dear sets of friends who have provided me with the space and place to stomp in the mud, shovel manure, milk my favorite cows and snuggle my goatlings.

Ruth and Dan's farm in Peterborough is my port in the doctoral storm and having Sunday dinner with them (and bringing a faculty member along who needed the break as much as I did) was not only restorative but celebratory. Dan, sitting at the head of the table, Ruth at the other end, both poking gentle fun at my (I think) love of academia helped me to NOT take myself so seriously and to hear their wonderful stories of farm-as-university.

Up the road in Bennington are cousins Peter and Molly who have graciously offered me the use of the barn's apartment not just for this edition of doctoral intensive, but for as long as I need, through the summer and fall and beyond, as Peter frequently says. This spacious room, lit by enormous church windows on the east wall, sits atop the chicken house and its many occupants who murmur happily through the night and cheer me awake each morning at sunrise when Molly comes 'round to let them out to forage for the day.

I muddle at each farm, wandering the pasture or stroking some animal for comfort, for me as much as for them. The books and papers and notes-to-self pile high in the truck, at my desk, at the edges of the floor and climb the walls, it seems everywhere I plant myself to work. But these farms, and someday I hope (not too far distant I pray), my own place in the woods of Bennington NH, are my sanctuaries, my sacred places where animal, mineral, plant, sky and barns come together to make space for my realignment with myself.

Dan, his handle-bar mustache twitching as he tries to hide a smile, states his cows might make more sense (as I try to explain a theory of landscape ecology and scale models) and prods me to eat more homegrown chicken, a variety Ruth has developed and is very proud of. "What will you name your chickens?" I ask at dinner. "Oh," says Ruth, "They are so good! Maybe something like the Dissertation Hen?" Dan's laughter booms across the room, Alesia giggles outloud, I blush and Ruth piles more sweet baked chicken on my plate, passes the homemade butter and adds a fat hunk of delicious cornbread.

Dissertation Hen it is.

Make All Farms Go Away

2011-06-16T09:38:00.000-04:00


Bombus on a tomato plant - a main ingredient of salsa.

I walked into her office, cluttered with stacks of paper, boxes of specimens, bookshelves overstuffed with all manner of taxonomy, research, biology and research/statistics manual texts, and somehow plopped into the visitor’s chair without tripping over anything. She turned and gave me a look, shook my hand and proceeded to tell me what she thought of anything to do with on-farm research, and turned back around to her computer screen.

“All this talk of food systems and farming, I really don’t see the point. It’s not pure science, has nothing to do with conservation and if it were up to me I just make all farms go away.”

I had been granted an hour with this esteemed scientist, who admittedly, was bitter about the shift her university’s department was taking towards sustainability science and systems redesign. “All this talk of sustainability – I am a real scientist. This means nothing to me.” I tried not to show any emotion when I pointed to her plastic container full of salsa. “How will you eat if all farms just went away?”

And she took that as I expected her to. I received forty five minutes of rant about conservation dogma: how people should be punished for their crimes against birds and big cats and the oceans. All valid points, I suppose. “If it were up to me I would FORCE everyone to obey the laws this country has established to protect endangered species and if they didn’t then go the hell to jail!” Clearly she was in need of a soothing cup of tea – but wait – if farms would to just go away, who would grow the tea plants, pick them, process them and ship them? Oh. Sorry. Farms. Don’t. Matter. In. Conservation.

My remaining fifteen minutes were left to me to convince her that wild bee research on farms was a valid exercise worthy of a PhD. She said “Oh, yes honey bees are important I suppose.” Calmly, again trying not to show any emotion but maintaining a professional demeanor, I explained that there are plenty of people looking a honey bee issues. I was talking about wild bees, like say, the forty or so species of bumble bees in New England that play a part in making the vegetables in her salsa and the blueberries in our pancakes. “Oh, forty different species you say? I had no idea.”

Ten minutes left. I explained that I’d come to her to ask her opinion and advice on research design for a four-farm survey, my dissertation research. I explained further that I’d been trained by none other than Sam Droege at the National Wild Bee Lab (USGS/USDA Beltsville). She sat a little straighter. “You said you were a farmer.” Yes, but my interests in wild bees stem from my interests as a beekeeper who has thought about and studied wild bees for over fifteen years. “Oh.” I am a trained taxonomist, ecologist and agroecologist with a research agenda and teaching schedule. Yes, I am also a farmer. “Hmmm.”

Five minutes left. I rattled off the Latin names of the major Hymenoptera groups likely to be found in this area: Anthophora, Habropoda, Holcopasites, Nomada, Xylocopa,Ceratina, Peponapis, Bombus, Eucera, Mellsiodes, Triepeolus, Epeolus, Svastra, Anthidiellum, Anthidium…”Oh.” I reminded her, again pointing to her salsa, that if honeybees were to disappear tomorrow we probably wouldn’t notice around here. Maybe the industrial outfits would in California, but we have plenty of wild bees that already shoulder 99% of our pollination needs for food production. “Oh.”

Two minutes left. The problem was, I explained, the New England landscape today is working against the wild bees. The matrix of northern forest has returned in less than a century eliminating suitable habitat for many of these taxa. It is the farm patches, as irregular and sparse as they are in an area that was once dominated by small farms a century ago, that serve today as refugia for these animals.

She turned in her chair, facing me for the second time. “This is interesting. I like bees. I did a whole research project in Brazil on them. Hmm…yes, I would be happy to serve as your research design advisor. And, if you want, I would be happy to serve as an outside committee member on your dissertation committee.”

Time’s up. She offered me some salsa and we sat a while longer, snacking and talking about fragmented landscapes and conservation of insects. Dissertation committee = 3 (!)

P.S. Funny thing about this encounter - it just happened (like fifteen minutes ago) and I never asked her to serve on my committee. I just had a question about survey design and whether to include forest matrix for comparison to 'empty space.' Saturday I sit with yet another esteemed scientist. It should be interesting to see how the two compare.

Draining the Pond

2011-06-12T21:22:00.000-04:00

I made my way to a vast meadow down an old woods road, passing stonewalls and a very old cellar hole that some folks say is all that remains of the farmhouse that stood here before we became a nation. Artifacts of people were all around me even though the forest appeared ancient and wild. The woods road itself was an artifact of Colonial era travel which itself more than likely followed Indian paths thousands of years old. Old orchard trees, gnarled and shade-bound, survived in the darkness of hemlocks and in the shadows of immense white pines. The woods road opened on the meadow, an artifact not of people, but of the industrious beaver.

In the distance two beaver ponds were glimmering in the half light of this dreary day, the dead trees at their centers standing testament to the flooding of the low woods. I had hoped for bees today, my one day off from teaching and studying, but the weather was not in my favor, nor the bees. Yet the meadow sparkled with orange and yellow hawkweed, vetch, clover, blue flag and daisy. Here too had been a beaver pond, now drained and thick with field flowers and black cherry saplings. I walked across the wet meadow looking for the old dam and quickly came upon it standing low and thick with young trees to form a wild raised hedge. Beyond another beaver meadow, and another! The whole valley, constrained by the presence and activity of beavers and the inflow of water from the hills, was a scene of constant change.

The old vocabulary of ecology will not work here. There are no ‘niches,’ though there is habitat. The idea of physical spaces for specialized species are left as high and dry as a drained beaver pond. Definitions are simply human constructs, like stonewalls that no longer define pasture or fields found in the changed landscape of the northwoods. Niche is too restrictive a concept for a place such as this. The concept of species, even, stands on its ear in this landscape of living soils, interwoven plant matts and tree roots, feeding and living from each other below the surface.

The beaver, a discrete organism, having an integrity all its own, in a larger sense is an ecological mechanism for the flooding of this place, playing an integral role in the frequency of pond-meadow-shrub forest – pond. Yet beaver meadows are not communities in the sense of a collective of individuals but of multiple, interdependent populations of diverse organisms that respond to and reflect the frequency of change that is the beaver valley. There is no separation of plant from soil from water from beaver from tree and shrub from bee and blossom and bird and the millions of other organisms that make up this living material of the meadow across time and space. The very concept of ecosystem comes into question, so much so that I wonder whether the Old Ecological Paradigm Pond might need to be drained.

When I most despaired of a working vocabulary to capture the scene, I sat near a rambling briar to puzzle it all out, and look – a wild bee was contentedly working! No matter the human struggle to frame process and pattern for understanding with language and definition, the cycle of change defies our ability to define it.

The Boys Are Back!

2011-04-22T16:17:00.000-04:00

300 sounds like a lot of bees until you realize how big 3 acres is compared to a 60 meter transect!

I recently set out a bee trap line in a restored Piedmont meadow, now absent of honeybees. I removed the test hives last year after comparing competition between honeybees (non-native to North America) and bumble bees (native). Now the meadow is on its own - dependent its own range of native bees to provide pollination services.

I wanted to see what emerged in the early season cool with only the tiniest patches of flowers, mostly violets, blooming below the withered, winter-weary stalks of goldenrod. I left the trap line for the day and returned at sundown to strain the soapy water in every cup, collecting the insects that were caught. I doubted I'd caught many, thinking honeybee thoughts. "Nastiness! Who would fly in this? Better to stay home, clustered up and warm, sipping sweet syrup our beekeeper drips on our heads."

I walked up on the first trap expecting blue soapy water. It was overflowing with bees. As was the second, and the third. All thirty traps, stretched across three acres, were black with bees.

Full disclosure - they were all drowned and quite dead. This is what we do as field beeks. The taxonomy comes later, huddled around scopes with our collections freshly pinned in their temporary storage boxes, until ID's can be made.

At home I cleaned and dried my catch, filled out a new data label for their box, and began to pin. 300 bees. A tiny fraction of what must have been flying on the blustery meadow. Most looked the same, save for one large bumble bee queen - a beauty, Bombus bimaculatus. Lots of male Adrena viola. The boys were back in town.

Adrena viola is found early, and as this day proved, they were determined to stake out territories and wait for the females to emerge, no matter what. Wind, rain, cold cannot stop these intrepid boys from getting a jump, literally, on the females who have yet to emerge from their underground nests. Both males and females have been lying in wait, in the dark, each to their cells all winter long. Feeding on ample pollen patties fashioned for them by their mothers last summer, the eggs hatched into larvae that morphed and hatched as flying adults just in time for early spring flowers. Though many insects can lay thoudsands of eggs at a time, the solitary bee mothers, like Adrena violae, will only lay a few dozen, concentrating her energy on amassing large quantities of pollen to feed her young through the cold. This 'maternal investment' seems to pay off for A. viola in the sheer numbers of emergent males and females that will flood this meadow.

Clearly my trap line intersected the territpories of these three hundred bee-boys, which they laid out with glandular scent tags in and around early spring flower patches they know the females will soon investigate. My trap line was sixty meters long, strung with thirty bowls, running through the heart of the meadow. That's a lot of bee boys, marking a lot of turf in a three acre meadow, in a cold north wind and drizzle.

Makes honeybees look like wimps. Well, compared to A. viola they sorta are.

Wanted: Wild Bees and Their People

2011-04-17T13:04:00.003-04:00

Sara (Maine) and Mike (Vermont) sort and pin after a trap line collection comes in from the field.

While pinning and identifying bees in the lab, recently trapped in a nearby meadow, my partners and I got into a spirited debate on the value of agricultural landscapes as key to biodiversity. It sounded like this:

"There is so little conservation funding for - oh, hey, here's a Certina - edges and boundary buffers. It seems to me that bees play a much larger - oh look - Bombus perplexus, queen - part in maintaining a healthy and robust food ecosystem than a top-of-the-line predator, like oh a wolf maybe or a - hey! Check out this great stylopped Adrena!"

"You have a teddy bear? I want it! I'll take all stylopped bees for the Smithsonian - and yes, I agree with you entirely. But who are we to influence where conservation dollars go? We are just taxonomists, and those policy people, well - oooo - look how many Osmia males there are today! They are just waiting for the females to emerge. This trap was overflowing with males. Anyway - really - how do taxonomists have any influence over policy makers?"

"Especially when policy makers are the kind of people who are influenced by the folks who don't understand the real dimensions of biodiversity. You almost have to be a taxonomist-ecologist to even come close to understanding it. Hey! Did you see my perplexus? Who took my perplexus?"

"I have it here, pinning it. Calm down."

Despite the multi-tasking of preparing a collection for ID work, which can be tedious and time consuming, our discussion was a familiar one. Reconciling agricultural lands with conservation is just beginning to influence conservation policy, but the input from those in the field, especially beekeepers, farmers and wild bee taxonomists is rarely considered.

Yes, butterflies are easier to identify and thus monitor, but bees do a whole lot more. But there are so few people paying attention to wild bees that we consider ourselves, wild bee folks and beekeepers combined, rather overlooked. Public involvement in bee conservation only goes so far, mostly towards issues of the media-laden discussions of honey bee (Apis mellifera) decline and some concern for bumble bees (Bombus) mainly because these bees are furry, cute and cuddly. Dollars flow into honey bee research like water. Butterflies and birds get heaping helpings of conservation dollars compared to wild bees.

But wild bees, which do the heavy lifting of agricultural pollination (excluding industrial agriculture like almonds and citrus) get so little attention as to be shameful. Rachel Winfree (2007) at Rutgers, determined that honey bees, even when in abundance on production lands still only cover 30% of the pollination services, while wild bees dominate the balance. In some instances, even with honey bees present, wild bees will cover 90% or more of the pollination of blueberries, orchards, melon and squash, according to Claire Kremen (2004) in California. Sara, working in blueberry production in Maine, states that farmers and local beekeepers are well aware of the contribution of wild bees, but so few people are actually collecting hard data that the scientific contribution is a slow dribble that may or usually may not make it across disciplinary lines to those who design conservation programs and dole out the funding.

The shortage of wild bee taxonomists is hurting the conservation potential of these wild bees, hard-working and little known agriculturalists, thus creating a bottle-neck of work for the us humans who identify and analyze them. Funding for taxonomy is all but gone in most institutions, with inordinate amounts of funding going to cellular-level, DNA and genetic scientists. "But you still need someone to look at the bee in the field and say "Oh, this is Bombus impatiens - and compare collections to years past - to say that this species is in rapid decline and that we should be scurrying to find what factors are causing the drop," says Rob, one of our instructors at a recent taxonomy intensive. Peter Kevan (1999) suggests that not only are more taxonomists and wild bee naturalists needed in the field but that we should be looking at wild bees as bio-indicators of the environment as a whole. Bees are the drivers of terrestrial systems, food systems and all.

The conversation at this point usually shifts to the decline of natural history and the importance of field research. There are plenty of bird watchers and people who belong to Audubon and ornithology groups. Birding tours and eco-tourism are hot money makers and that money talks in conservation circles. Lots of other taxa have their fans in both science and public, hence funding for conservation through activism, legislation and policy. But to state in a job interview that you aspire to wild bee taxonomy is to get the most quizzical looks. "Oh, isn't that boring?" I was asked once while interviewing for a teaching position, "What kind of research program would that bring to the school? I can't imagine our students getting anything out of counting legs on a bug." Needless to say, I wasn't hired. They wanted someone to work with fish, wolves or hawks. But don't these people eat?

"Hey - Adrena viola really took the top spot on this trap line, no? I saw them all over the herb garden the other day. Maybe we should build in a price increase in the herb sales this year to add some nesting sites to the field?" asked a local beekeeper this week who helps me with trap lines. I left the pricing up to the her, but she did discuss making her conservation work with wild bees a selling point at the farmers market this year. Ground up activism never hurt anyone, farmer or beek, and it seems it's what's needed to get the word out about wild bees and their importance to our food systems.

Kevan, Peter (1999) "Pollinators as bioindicators of the environment: species, activity and diversity." Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment 74: 373-393.

Kremen, Claire et al (2004) "The area requirements of an ecosystem service: crop pollination by native bee communities in California." Ecology Letters 7: 1109 - 1119.

Winfree, Rachel et al (2007) "Native bees provide insurance against honey bee losses." Ecology Letters 10: 1105-1113.

Naming of Parts: An Appalachian Bee Taxonomy Intensive

2011-04-08T19:32:00.001-04:00

Naming of Parts

"Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
Et militavi non sine glori"

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easily
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have naming of parts.
-- Henry Reed

Early spring feeding - the starving time for winter weary honey bees. For those too cold to break cluster, I also feed from inside the hive using an empty honey super and inner cover to drip syrup directly down in to the shivering colony.

I have studied my binders until even they, stiff cardboard and plastic affairs, are dog-eared and bent.

The cherry trees are blooming outside my office window but the heavy cold rains wash away any attempt by bee or bee watcher to visit them. This spring has been slow and cold that way. My honey bees have been on syrup and pollen patties since March, their reserves gone, possibilities of foraging slim to none. Feed them, or starve them. Our responsibility as beekeepers is to our bees. But how do the wild ones fare in this mud, rain and cold?

My net is packed, my boom scope packed safely into two heavy boxes, books, papers, binders, boxes and pins, all assembled on the kitchen table for my Appalachian week-long intensive. There I will meet with dozens of bee folk like me - ah, to among others who sleep, dream, live for bees!

Sunday nite we'll play a little mountain music before the intensive begins. My mentor, one of the countries top bee taxonomists, will lead. Bee people are also musicians, poets, artists and writers. So my mandolin in its gigbag, my art supplies in their backpack, my journal and pens in my shoulder bag - all going as well, to this intensive of bee scientists who marvel and gasp at the beauty of bees and music and prose.

Are we Punctuating Our Own Equilibrium?

2011-03-21T12:07:00.000-04:00


Baltic amber is revealing amazing stories of bee evolution

Darwin gave us the modern theory of evolution based on his ideas of natural selection. Natural selection surmises that evolution occurs over great spans of time and incorporates slow, steady change in an organism. Thus we are forever looking for the missing links in our own and in other species' evolutionary stories. But what if that story were not true for all species, or for that matter, any species? Niles Eldridge's work with trilobites stood evolutionary story still for a while, when he came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium.

Eldridge posits that things stay pretty much the same over long period of time until some rapid event or series of events occurs, forcing a split in a long steady-state line of a species' history. It doesn't take long, he says, for this splitting to occur - on the order of just a few hundred thousand years rather than the millions of years suggested by Darwinian theory. Splitting can occur during this events, as can rapid extinction. Steven Jay Gould and Eldridge worked together on this new theory of evolution in the 1970s causing quite a stir among the scientists who had long held gradualism dear.

And what of bees? As I peer into the literature to understand the branching and speciation of bees I see the theory of punctuated equilibrium at work especially when scientists began to explore numbers of chromosome numbers and combination, host-specific plants, correlating pollen types, ancestral origins and rapid environmental change chronicled in rock layers. We know that bees branched from spheciform wasps sometime during the mid-Cretaceous as did the angiosperms, the flowering plants. As angiosperms radiated, so did the bees and by the late-Cretaceous all the major bee families were established: Halictidae, Megachilidae, Mellitidae. The Baltic ambers continue to reveal this exciting and rapidly changing story (Engle, 2001). It seems if anything has happened gradually over time, that bees have become incredibly complex, to say nothing of their plant hosts, and that specialization carries with it certain risks such as the inability to adapt to rapidly resulting in decline or extinction.

A wealth of recent evidence for bee decline across Europe and North America may indicate environmental change is occurring quickly ( for whatever reasons your political/religious/scientific ideology suggests). Bee specialists and their specific plant hosts are fading, as generalists are increasing. Wildflowers requiring specific pollination partners are disappearing across the UK, with some estimates as high as 70%. Wind pollinated plants however, are increasing in the same region. This finding strongly suggests plant and bee diversity are linked and that rapid change, no matter the cause, is a significant actor in evolution.

Like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) event which triggered a rapid response in angiosperm range during a lightening-fast shift in global climate 55.8 million years ago. Within the span of 20,000 years, carbon levels skyrocketed, oceans experienced thermal expansions, and mass extinctions occurred. Some families of flowering plants shifted ranges to the north and today fossils of sassafras, poplar and magnolia can be found in the Beartooth Range of Wyoming. A few years ago I accompanied a field crew as an intern to this amazing dig site. There was no question among paleobotanists that we are experiencing a similar event now, and that understanding the PETM would be essential to coping with and if possible, reversing, the current trend.

"To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around. Surely our innocent pleasures are not so abundant in this life, that we can afford to despise this or any other source of them."

Thomas Henry Huxley, On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences (1854).
From Collected Essays (1893). Vol. 3, 63.

Engle, Michael S. (2001) A Monograph of the Baltic Amber Bees and Evolution of the Apoidea. Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. # 259 :1-192.

Blossoms and No Bees

2011-03-16T15:48:00.000-04:00

A tiny Halicitid nestled in her desert bloom required a macro lens.

I recently had the opportunity to visit Phoenix, Arizona to attend the Resilience 2011 International Conference. Apart from the mind-blowingly amazing line-up of speakers and presenters, I did spend as much time as I could roaming ASU in search of blossoms and bees. As the largest university in the U.S., with an extraordinarly large city-like campus, I found only an occassional honey bee despite most of this urban landscape in full bloom. I contrasted this experience with a morning spent with my colleague Kayla, who dutifully suffered through hours in the hot sun, mostly on hands and knees at the Desert Botanical Gardens, as I shot a hundred pics of native desert bees (1,200 species known so far to beeks!) on a wide variety of native desert plants.

The contrast between how these two sites manage and maintain their horticultural collections could not have been more stark. Despite the ASU campus sparkling with flowers, these were not native plants. Despite the Arizona desert region being a favorite hotspot of fellow beeks, there were no native bees attending this university simply because they do not recognize the flowers. The Desert Botanical Gardens, small and concentrated admist the urban Phoenix landscape, was literally humming with bees on their partner plants. And, according to one museum docent, we were early! "Come back in two weeks," she said, "when everything is abloom and ablaze across the entire natural desert, and you will be speechless!" Funny thing - I already was!

Interesting to this beek, the urban/suburban pollinator desert created by unenlightened landscape designers at ASU was truly impoverished compared to the wild deserts beyond the city limits.

The time is coming when home owners will be flocking to their favorite garden centers or home improvement stores to snap up the latest showy plants for their surburban or city gardens. I would ask that we all consider the origin of these plants and if our dollars could be spent doubly wise - not only to beautify our environs, but to make our places bee friendly. One easy way to tell how bee friendly a plant selection is, is to spend a few minutes observing the shelves and tables of our favorite garden stores, observing who is visiting what. A flower that has been bred to espeically showy for human eyes is probably absent of nectar, and no matter how hard you wish for there to be a butterfly or bee, if there's no food, there's no pollinator. On the otherhand, a plant that attracts the furry bumblebee or any of the hundreds of local native bees, is one to consider.

A more intense foray into the world of native plant beeks, is to meet, read or listen to Dr. Doug Tallamy of University of Delaware. I've done all three and consider myself a Tallamized gardener. This time of year he is busy traveling the heavily populated East, pleading the native case. Unlike the wide open spaces of the West, our Eastern landscape is heavily built and the fractured suburban land cover offers little in terms habitat or corridors for native bees. Tallamy stresses to us Easterners - buy native when at all possible as the suburban landscape is really all the space many of our bees have left. After converting my one acre in southern Pennsylvania to a native bee haven, I have recorded over 55 species of bees. I am not counting honey bees - they are neither native nor all that effective as pollinators of native plants anyway. (Remember they originated in the Middle East!).

Some early spring reading should include Bringing Nature Home by Doug. You and your native bees will look at things in an entirely different way. Then head out to a gardening or horticultural center that features native plants for sale. Chances are the staff will really know their stuff and will welcome your enthusiasm for native planting. My favorite place to find native nurseries is on the Maryland Native Plant Resource page, listed below.

http://www.localactionpa.org/events/dr.-doug-tallamy-pa-native-plant-society-annual-1

http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Nature-Home-Wildlife-Expanded/dp/0881929921/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1300304374&sr=1-1

http://www.mdflora.org/publications/nurseries.html

Restless Discontinuity

2011-03-12T07:38:00.000-05:00

A long winter has passed, important human time filled with busy-work of work and the work of this passion called "higher education." In this time I've attended uncountable meetings for agricultural education, made a few classroom visits for work, sat for hours reading and writing my way towards my dissertation, and watched the seasons change. The last of the winter storms is passed, and for beekeepers the busy season is about to burst open, including the possibility that some of the hives will swarm and leave after all the hard, often frustrating work of seeing them safely through the winter.

My honeybees are restless, as am I. I put them on feed almost six weeks ago when they became active long before there were blossoms to forage. The cruelest part of the year for beekeepers and their bees is now. Regional effects of climate change make our jobs that much more challenging. The loss of synchronicity between temperature and light period is costing us dearly. I've lost a few hives recently because I've not been able to keep them on feed consistently. It gets expensive and depressing. One hive has already swarmed, surely to die without food - we are still a few weeks distant from the willow bloom.

My surviving hives are heavily dependent on me providing them with pollen patties and syrup, for there is nothing abloom, even though temperatures shot into the fifties this February. Were it not for the human demands of making a paycheck, I would spend more-maybe all of my time-nursing my bees through the late winter. But I cannot and two hives starve before I can return to the yards from meetings, travel, school....I am sick with frustration. Oh, to have a job to pay the bills and put food on the table that allows me to care for and husband my apiary properly! I have little synchronicty in my life, and like the growing disparity between temperature and light, discontinuity has costs.

And it gets better - or worse - depending upon how you look at it. As I prepare to move north to begin teaching at the University of New Hampshire, I must leave a lot behind. My beeyards are one part of life in the Mid-Atlantic that I must sell off. I know it will be a year or more before I will be able to afford to reestablish my apiary at my new home - when I am able to afford a new home - again, time and money will be the greatest challenge. I will be living in limbo, small paycheck to paycheck, hoping to make bills while helping to start a new program at UNH Keene in agroecology. It won't be familiar territory, and it won't be easy. My big hope is that the University will allow, maybe fund, a student apiary on campus - fingers crossed!

So I continue to help my bees survive this confusing time, only to sell them off in April and leave in May. Only a beekeeper knows the significance of leaving beeyards in the busiest season of the year. It means you've either died or quit or have damn good reason to leave them behind. "I don't want to buy your hives if this means you are leaving us," says an old beekeeper whom I love like a father, "But it must be a good reason to go after all this work building your yards. It's just your time to swarm I suppose."

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

I Am An Endangered Species

2011-02-14T13:13:00.002-05:00

B. auricomus, male and female, Baltimore MD - also found in boreal Canada!

Sitting with one of my doctoral advisors this weekend I realized there aren't many of us left. Despite the fact that we were surrounded by almost 700 people attending a conference on environmental education near D.C., we were one-and-a-half taxonomists in attendance. I am the half because I am just learning. Sam is the one.

We'd just finished discussing research questions for my wild bee survey project in New Hampshire and were sitting back enjoying the hustle and bustle of teachers and presenters, vendors and various agency staff as they stampeded from one end of the conference hall to the other inbetween sessions. "You know," said Sam, "There aren't many of us here."

In the mid-1990s universities and museums the world over were concerned that taxonomists of all stripes and colors were in serious decline. The National Science Foundation responded with the PEET grant: Partnerships for Enhancing Expertise in Taxonomy. Thus my $2,000 boom scope, intensive wild bee taxonomy training and now, my class in Apoidia taxonomy technique in April, and some support for my Contoocook Valley survey. Thank you NFS! But, save maybe twenty people would know that Bombus auricomus has disappeared, because no one would know to look for her. (She hasn't - yet). And maybe fifty people would know the habitat, range, richness and population of this beautiful bumble bee, as taxonomists who combine metadata into inventories on bees (or any other life form for that matter) have the know-how to key and interpret taxonomic indexes, most of which are online and available for anyone to study.

University of Kansas states in their Natural History blog:

"A look at the natural history museums of the world illustrates the imbalance between the world’s biodiversity and the taxonomists employed to deal with it. In the animal realm, all major museums employ taxonomists of fishes, birds, mammals, reptiles and/or amphibians, and insects; commonly the vertebrates and insects are in separate departments, and in many museums there are three or four departments for the vertebrates. All the other kinds of animals that exist, excluding single-celled organisms – something around 30 major groups (phyla) – are typically dealt with by taxonomists in one department. So at any time, there may be a few taxonomists in the entire world employed to study animals of any major group that might have thousands of species, not to mention crucial ecological importance." http://biodiversity.ku.edu/blog/science-life/taxonomy-trouble

It may not be glamorous work, but it's important work, this business of taxonomy. In a time and place where so many people are now attuned to biodiversity and the decline of bees in particular, we should be worried too that there are declining numbers of people who are able to identify and interpret what it all means.

The Dew-Tasters—Drosophila melanogaster

i
On black-veined wings
she tries the air

The small hairs
on her foot
taste papaya
find it sweet

She slides into it
egg egg egg

ii

Under the microscope
the ether has not
quite taken
Teased upside down
she waves translucent
legs

I edge her upright
She struggles against
the brush
I poke at her ovaries
I, voyeur,
so flushed

iii

I cup my hands around
the rubber guards
to focus a male
nudged to
the center of the tile

His transformed eyes
glow blue
His pointed thorax
is a red smear

The new colors float
against the dark
beautiful as space dust

What have we done?

- Lola Haskins

Left Behind Honey

2011-02-01T10:50:00.002-05:00

I was visiting with my old friend and beekeeping mentor Dennis Miller yesterday. I was making a delivery of several crates of boxed honey. Before he inspected the crates, we sat at his shop table for an hour talking about our wintering bees, the business, upcoming meetings and one of our favorite subjects, woodworking. I haven't yet told him of my move to New Hampshire. In fact I am dreading it. I know it will break his 75 year-old heart. But he does enjoy my tales of graduate school and knows that I make the trek monthly to attend classes and to conduct wild bee research in the Contoocook River Valley.

It has been through the old beekeepers like Dennis, Jerry, Ralph, Lloyd and Walter, all from Appalachia, that I have developed a great love of traditional beekeeper's knowledge. My dissertation will involve blending the beekeepers knowledge of landscape, belief and practice with the more technical-scientific methods of bee research such as taxonomy, GIS/GPS and landscape ecology. Dennis knows I am sharing what he knows and believes about bees with traditional beekeepers in southern New Hampshire. I am a sort of telegram service since many of these elders do not email or travel such distances to meetings in other regions. They often send honey for each other to try.

Recently there was a funeral for an old beekeeper in southern Berks County, PA, and the old men, their wives and some tag-alongs went to see him off. The tradition of 'telling the bees' was performed and the deceased beekeeper's hives were transferred to the care of another keeper. Meanwhile, we had a class back home for new beekeepers, and with so many elders on the road at once, several decided to stop by on their way home to meet the newbies. Another tradition, 'leaving behind', was dutifully performed as they left the classroom, saying good-bye and good luck to the new keepers. They "forgot" crates of their best product, left to share anong the students and instructors. Several crates were marked for Dennis alone, with "sourwood" written on the side of the boxes.

I took the crates to Dennis yesterday. He grinned from ear to ear. "Oh yeah! I know who done this! I know who done this! This is Boyd, from Marion NC. He's left behind agin!" Dennis opened the boxes and almost squealed. "I heared the sourwood bloomed heavy this year down in Pisgah, yeah? This is fine, fine honey! The best Boyd has, I'm sure of that."

Inside the crates were dozens of clear plastic boxes crammed full of beautiful pale blossom honey-on-the-comb. Dennis popped one of the boxes open and asked for two spoons. "We gots to have this right here and now!" We cut into the comb and brought up dripping hunks of comb, popping them right into our mouths. Oh My God.

Mr. Dennis has been in a wheelchair since he was injured in a quarry accident at age nineteen. His hands are of little use, but over the years he has relearned how to run shop equipment, tend hives, build furniture and beekeeping wooden ware and to process his own honey. Digging into the sourwood comb he was as nimble and precise as anyone, his spoon perfectly carving out another square, holding the handle between his wrists. "Oh my Lord, this is good!"

"What will you do with all this?" The crates of sourwood honey filled his shop counter.

Dennis looked at me and said, "Well...once it's been left behind, I can sell it, or keep it for myself, or give it away. But this is sourwood honey! Them trees are unpredictable, and when they blossom them bees make the finest honey of all. I could use the money, yeah, but I tell you what. You take it with you to New Hampshire and see if you can get a few dollars for it. I'll keep some crates to sell at the next meeting and to sell from here in the shop. But you take a few crates to your school and them beekeepers up north. Let them taste what real Appalachian gold is!"

Dan Mills of North Carolina in 1940. He's got traditional bee gums (not the "hives" we use today) situated in a sourwood grove near the Smokey Mountains. Though the trees hadn't blossomed yet, he knew based on snowfalls and temperatures the previous winter, that this would be a great year for sourwood honey!
Notice, no smoker, no suit, no veil!

Sourwood blossoms in late July and August in the Appalachian hills. Traditional beekeepers are keen naturalists. They seem to know when the rains, snows and temperatures of the previus winter will trigger a blossoming in the mountains and they will move some hives to where they know the sourwood trees are. The tradtional beekeepers are a repositories of how to read and predict bloom periods based on weather. Most of them know the forests intimately: some of this knowledge passed down through generations of hill folks, and some is new, adaptive and innovative. Beekeeping is anything but traditional - it is always changing by the year, by the decade, according to environnental patterns. Unlike industrial beekeeping which involves the transport of tens of thousands of hives across the country to service monocultures of almond trees and citrus groves, the traditional beekeeper is a keeper of the natural wisdom of his or her place.

"What do you want for it? $12 a pound? $15?"

Mr. Dennis smiled and said, no, that he would 'gift' it for $8 a pound. I asked what Boyd would charge for it in North Carolina. "Oh, I guess about $15 a pound." I reminded him he could use the money. "No, let's share this with the folks in New Hampshire. If you kin git $8 a box that'll cover your gas money. End of story."

Beekeepers do not argue about gifts and what to do with gifts, he said. "Just bring some of them folks home with you so's I can get to meet them. They cain't all be old like me, yeah? They's kin travel, right?"

So now the truck is loaded with sourwood honey-on-the-comb destined for NH. An enormous blizzard is expected to preceed me by a day, so it may be an adventure. If I get stuck, I'll have plenty to eat!

Beeking

2011-01-28T20:12:00.000-05:00


Eucerini Mellissodes - you have lovely hairy legs!

Of the thousands of stars that bedazzle the winter night sky, I can name maybe a dozen constellations and even fewer individual stars, but I happy to know they are all there to brighten the winter night after a lovely snowfall. The wild bees are like stars. There are thousands of them and I know only a few, but am thankful they are all there working the meadow, the prairie, the forest, the garden. Sixty percent of all terrestrial plants rely on the pollination services of wild bees. But bees are certainly not the only creatures that perform this service in return for nectar or pollen rewards.

Bats, hummingbirds and some mammals transfer pollen from blossom to blossom, and to be sure, beetles and ants contribute mightily. The bees, however, have won my heart, even though they trick and taunt me with identification. "Know your bees to the genus level at the very least!" says my taxonomy mentor, as he preps us for an upcoming intensive in West Virgina. All of them I wonder? Oh...

My two best friends through this process are the Internet and a thousand pages of Bees of the World by Charles Michener. The Discover Life site is our working guide, and I am slowly acclimating to its process and procedure. My drawing boards are papered and outlined with my favorites, the hairy legged bee genus Mellissodes and all of her sisters and the in-your-face metallic sweat bees Halictids - too many to tease apart at my stage in taxonomy. In any case, I am excited to have made the cut for the next USGS/USDA bee ID class. Seating is limited but the stars of the show are numberless.

Wing venation, clypeus protruding or not, malar area, glossa and galea. A poetry of bees. Bee speak. And, if I pass my week-long intensive I will join a growing legion of 'beeks.' I have a month to learn as many genus as I can appropriate for my study areas of New England and the Prairie states. Never mind there are hundreds to know. Tonite - Mellisodes with a sprinkle of halictid genus Lasioglossum -beeking till the wee hours!

No sweat - you are just one of hundreds of Halictid I need to get to know!

Part Three: Nose-To-Nose with an Under-Secretary

2011-01-28T09:24:00.000-05:00

True, the position this public servant holds is appointed, and not a farmer in this state will disagree with the fact that it's who you know in these parts to get high ranking policy positions. But the U-S's statements regarding hunger, the hungry, joblessness and the state of rural communities across the nation astounded me. I was too quick to shoot back a smart retort about his job, though. The circle of listeners (and still no sign of my boss, thank god) leaned in to hear his response. He bantered a bit, as good ole' boys are apt to do, giving me the time to squeak out an apology for what I'd just said. "Oh, that's okay," he said, graciously, "if we can't openly talk about these things then we have no democracy. And all that about Wal-Mart - I crossed the line, too. I don't believe all that, but I am reflecting a very misplaced frustration with the current situation in this state and many, many others. I'm trying to understand sustainability, I really am - and maybe you all can help me do that."

The room exhaled all at once. A food activist spoke first.

"What is your opinion, Mr. Under Secretary? What can we do about our struggling rural communities? Wal-Mart, in their defense is trying to change the situation by making fresh foods more affordable, but this doesn't address the question of sustainable communities. It creates more dependence upon a very large and very unstable system."

I turned and asked he if she's ever worked with new and beginning farmer programs. She had no idea what these were. An extension educator explained to the group that these very popular programs fill beyond capacity, that any number of them exists, offered through extension or other venues. He mentioned Stone Barns' New Farmer's Institute. The U-S seemed genuinely interested, but skeptical. "How do these start-up's think they are going to feed everyone - get decent jobs?"

An ag marketing director took the lead. "I think, sir, if we can concentrate on feeding our communities first, the jobs will come to support the small farm industries. It's like a do-over for rural America. We have to rethink our ideas of abundance and wealth. We need to redefine 'work' as not drudgery but honorable and appropriate." He still wasn't totally convinced.

It's happening right now, I explained, in small rural communities across the country. There are plenty of examples from New England to California. Slow Food, Transition Towns, Farm-to-School and other revolutionary movements place farms and farmers high on their lists of needs and wants for rural community revival. Schools, universities, towns and even cities are examining what sustainability means for them - there are no hard and fast definitions. It's very local, very appropriate. Look at Detroit. Detroit? The U-S said, yes he'd heard about the farms of Detroit. And the Intervale of Vermont, Buy-Local in PA and Wisconsin, the Small Farm Alliance...the group began naming the dozens of programs that they knew of. He was amazed.

"It's not the answer to feeding the starving millions, but it's feeding our own for a start, sir," the ag marketer said. " I think it's very exciting and we're watching it with lots of enthusiasm. Anything we can do to promote and support our small and mid-size farmers, we're there for them."

The director the Farm-to-School program spoke next. "Our programs are connecting our local farms to schools and hospitals, universities and institutions. The problems we face, with all due respect, are with our own agencies and embedded beliefs that are no longer, if they ever were, valid. These same beliefs support a version of agriculture that harms our local farmers and creates hunger and poverty in our communities, large and small."

The lady with the nasty attitude wrinkled her nose again and wagged her head. "It'll never work. Farm-to-school day or week is all we can do. Do you really think we can afford to feed our kids year-round like this. It's a lot of work! And - who's going to prepare all this food? Our staff are not trained to prepare food! They heat and serve!"

Her boss, a food procurement officer for a large county system, turned to her and said "Well, let's talk about finding ways to re-skill them. We can start with snipping green beans. Like - here's how not to cut yourself. Or shucking corn - the kids can all help." I have never seen a person make such a nasty face! She wrinkled her nose until it almost touched her chin. "What? Are you serious?!"

The Under-Secretary answered. "I'm beginning to see something here. I want to know why our kitchen staffs can't snip green beans! I am seeing that your attitude needs adjusting - as does mine." Another group exhale. From the corner of my eye I saw a familiar face peeking around the door. The boss squared his shoulders and came back into the room. "Hey!" called the U-S. " I think this is someone who should work for you!" The boss smiled sheepishly and admitted that I already did. The circle started to laugh, and the U-S grabbed me by the shoulder. "Keep me on my toes! I like this!" I promised I would as long as everyone else in the room promised as well. Nods all around.

This experience taught me that we all need to speak truth to power more often - even if the boss runs from the room.And we need to do so respectfully. Openly. In friendship. We need to be making connections, networking, talking plainly about the issues we face as society and communities. The U-S was correct - it is more an attitude shift - a willingness to let go of cherished assumptions and unwavering allegiance to myth.

When the President of the American Farm Bureau publicly derided the small and mid-size farmer last year in an address to the national membership, the sting and anger was palatable across rural America. He snarkily described sustainable farmers as a group "going back to 40 acres as and a mule." If he had known the history of that prized Big Ag phrase he may have had second thoughts about using it. African American farmers know too well the power and pain of those words.

We've known for some time that AFB represents big industry and Big Ag and that us small farmers don't even show up on FB radar. I personally dropped my PA FB membership because of our state president's unabashed bias for huge commodity ag and disdain for the small farmer. But then membership in Grange has been growing, reflecting a desire among agriculturalists in their rural communities, to revisit the concepts of environmental sustainability and socio-economic vibrancy.

We need to invest not just money and resources in rural communities, but to approach such work as restoration ecology - restore the process of sustainability rather than just restoring the parts. Grow new farmers yes, but also teach the cafeteria staff how to prepare fresh food, teach kids how to shuck corn and the value of healthy soil. Encourage small businesses to support local agriculture, but be willing to explore alternate forms of economy - barter, trade in skills, local currency. Engage in conversation with people who believe differently. To restore a rural community is a huge undertaking, but cannot happen with a top-down approach. It must happen, and is happening, from the ground up.

Part Two: Nose-to-Nose in Forty Minutes

2011-01-26T21:48:00.000-05:00

What about starving people, I asked the Under Secretary. Explain why you think technology and industrial food systems will feed the hungry?

This question launched a whole new direction for our debate. He considered his position for a moment, long enough for me to see that a circle of people had gathered around. One woman, an assistant to the food procuremet director of a large public school system (county), wrinkled her nose in disgust. "I can't believe he is even standing there answering such ridiculous questions!"  The U-S turned and looked at her briefly and she stepped back.

"It's a good question," the U-S began. True to the paradigm in which he is embedded, he explained that efficiency creates more of a product, and that efficiency extended to food safety, distrubution and nutrition. I broke his answer down into three more questions, using the system's approach - "And then?"

Your are right, I said, efficiency does allow us to make more of a thing in less time, with more quality control, to a point. And more of a thing often lowers its price. But what about cost to the consumer in terms of health and food safety. You know food recalls are disproportionally high these past five years? Surely mass production of food cannot ensure a sterile product any more than I can in my hen house. There are problems - lack of inspectors, lack enforcement, lack of knowledge about the bacterial world we live in. Then what?

The Under Secretary paused again. "Where you from? Around here? Were you born here?" I didn't see how that framed my question nor how he framed his answer. "I work in Maryland and I attend a doctoral program in New England." Figures, he grumbled. New England is so full of poor people who can't feed themselves. In fact, he suggested, it's where the demon of all egg recalls was born - Jack DeCoster. "He's an arrogant SOB. He's caused so many problems in the egg industry." Before I knew it, I'd learned Jack's entire life story, a self made man who pulled himself up by his peasant's bootsraps and turned a 15,000 broiler operation in Maine into a multi-million dollar industrial giant. "But he never followed the rules. Always giving us trouble. I guess becasue he started out poor he knew how to cut corners to get rich quicker."

Good point. Same could be said of other self-made millionaire farmers. Frank Perdue, the Henry Ford of poultry. So back to my question. Is it possible to produce a sterile product that can be made 100% safe through technology and mass production. Well, no. But it wasn't all Jack's fault, Pat said. "Eggs have to be cooked well to destroy the Salmonella bacteria. It was the cooks who should shoulder some of the blame. They didn't cook the food correctly!" I didn't want to touch that one so I moved on to distribution. The circle was growing around us.

Explain how efficiency in distribution feeds more people? Easy, said Pat, these big grocery stores can order more product at a lower cost which also reduces cost of transportation. "All those poor people in New England ought to be thankful for Wal-Mart!" ( a gasp in the room among the organics-will-save-the world-folks) Yes, I agreed, we now have a wider selection of foods than ever before in history, but isn't there a cost associated with this as well? Mangoes from Peru and strawberries in December mean that we continue to rely on an unstable energy source many times removed from local and solar.  Fossil fuels drive all of modern agriculture. And then, doesn't the cost to the hungry man return to him as higher fuel bills as a resource is depleted by a concentration of specialized users? That mango costs him a whole lot more than a trip to WalMart.

In his defence, the Under Secretary, began to take a bit longer between answers from this point on. I almost felt sorry for Jack DeCosta and the stigma he carried in the industry as a poor Mainer. But not too much.

"Hey, you know, I gave a talk the other day to a private school - all girls K through 12. I had a lot of fun, but I gotta tell ya, they scared me. They were ready with all kinds of questions that I thought I should have been better prepared to answer. Girls! Can you imagine?" (Ummm.....someone check my gender please...)
I asked the Under Secretary what his topic had been and how it came   that he took this time to speak to a small school for of girls. "Oh - they voted to have me there. They want to start a school garden and wanted someone in policy to talk about sustainable agriculture. But - you know....I didn't want to talk about all that touchy-feely stuff, so I changed the topic for them. I talked about the American Farmer and how proud they should be that our farmers in America feed so many people."

Well, obviously don't reach the hungry ones, I said. We have an incredibly efficient food system yes, but a terribly inefficient delivery and access system. Let's get back to your question of all those starving people. You know many rural communities, that once boasted many many farms and hundreds of farmers and their families? They've been disappearing as we've become more efficient. "True, he said, but hey! They can get jobs at Wa-Mart!' I wasn't sure if he was kidding.... Besides, he argued, efficiency has reduced the drudgery of the farm. Whoa....this was a very old Green Revolution bit of rhetoric. Yes, I said, we've reduced the complexity of farming to a few essential procedures. Very prescriptive. As long as you can read labels and memorize a mechanical routine. Then what?

Then, he said...pause....we can make more food!

Maybe so, I said, but even with cheap labor, abundant food choices, and efficiency, there's still the question of nutrition. Certainly not every food item offered at WalMart is healthy nor affordable. "No, I guess not - but people can make their own choices and decide for themselves where to spend their money - hey - this is America!" Uh-oh.

"With all due respect Mr. Under Secretary, I have to strongly disagree with you here. Hungry people don't have as much choice as you think they may have. A $3 bag of chips or a $5 bag of potatoes when all I have is $4?" "I think you are a liberal." "That has nothing to do with the argument." "You are from Vermont right?" "That has nothing to do with this conversation." "C'mon - you sound like those gals from that school - you went to a private school right." "Sir...."

Don;t you think you are using efficiency as an excuse to defend an old position? Marketing, scales of economy, distant markets dictating the very existence of a local community? C'mon Pat. Work with me here. Long pause. Don't you think vibrant communities trump the problems of agriculture. You know, farming, despite the work, used to be considered one of America's greatest assets. Now it's considered (by much of the world, I added) one of its biggest problems. I don't think you can use efficiency as a defence anymore.

"It's all about free trade!" he said, "Get Big or Get Out! Competition is what drives our markets! If a farmer can't make it, then he's doing something wrong! If a person can't afford good food then get a better job! And for those people in entitlement programs - they should thank their stars for efficient agriculture and government commodity subsidies!" (another HUGE gasp from the circle of people around us). "With all due respect, sir, I believe that if you were to keep your position as Under Secretary based on a democratic election and not a high level appointment, you'd be out a job."

"You know, I really like you! Keep me on my toes. Who do you work for?" I'd rather not say right now. You were scared of kindergarten girls with good questions?

End of Part Two.

Part One: Forty Minutes of Farm Debate Nose-To-Nose with an Under Secretary

2011-01-26T12:18:00.004-05:00

Annapolis, Maryland

After a Department of Agriculture meeting in Annapolis yesterday I had the opportunity to engage an Under Secretary in a bit of debate. He's good. Very good. But also very predictactable. Game on.
Before I describe our friendly discussion, I should state that the conference room became hushed and all eyes were on us. My boss left the room - out of embarassment for which party I am unsure, but to be sure, he knows my stance on sustainable agriculture. His stance is nothing like mine and we disagree frequently. That said..

"To be a successful farmer in this state you must be big! All this sustainability talk is just that. We can't feed the world with all this garbage about sustainability and I tell you, the world is getting more crowded and we've got to feed all these new mouths! It'll take bigger farms and higher yields to do that, and there's no room for the small or mid-size farmer when it comes to accomplishing this feat!"

Them's fighting words...

....so I walked up to the Under Secretary and said "I disagree!"

Uh-oh. Out walks my boss.

Before I proceed, let me explain an often overlooked tension in and among agriculturalists. This tension stems from the perspective one maintains regarding agriculture's role in society. The myths told to ourselves as farmers and businessmen are simply that, and they exist on both sides of the debate between industrial (high yield- technology driven) and sustainable (ecological-human scaled) agriculture. Under Secretary Macmillian is definitely a believer in a technology-will-save-the-world perspective, which affects many of his perspectives thereafter. Many in the room were believers in organic-will-save-the-world. Both perspectives are flawed.

The U-S's insistence that we Feed The World was my opening. I asked him if feeding the world is even our job? Who said so? Why? There are starving people - he insisted. There are more starving people now than ever before.

So, I asked, then the wonders of technology-driven agriculture have been a failure. There are an estimated 800 million starving people in the world today and sadly many of them live in the same cities, counties and country as we do. Feed The World has been a battle cry of indtrial agriculture for decades, a moral imperative that farmers are told is theirs. When we unpack it, however, we find a different situation exists, especially when we look at starvation through the eyes of the hungry. All the technology in the universe will not feed the world if the food is either too expensive or exported entirely. One need not look far from the Eastern Shore of Maryland where industrial poultry certainly can't even feed the farmers-turned-laborers who work for the industrial giants Perdue and Tyson. It's not yield, my friend, it's access.

The "Get Big or Get Out" mythology. He may be able to debate this point successfully using the huge milk and poultry conglomerates that have overtaken our state's agricultural landscapes, but this flawed argument is not considered from the perspective of the small and mid-sized farmers who have been sacrificed as a result of policy-mythology from USDA on down. I asked the Under Secretary whether he would make that argument in a room full of sustainable farmers who farm five acres or less and who (in MD and PA) are actually doing really well for themselves. What, I asked, is the operational definition of success? Ummmm......I waited.

Well, he said, are they really farmers? Define farmer, I asked.

Definitions. Our business and academic world turns on a few phrases and half-truths we tell ourselves are definitions. Success is one of them. Farmer is another. The U-S quoted the very debateable definition of the US Census Bureau as "a person who earn's $1,000 or more a year from a farming operation" Then he backed away from that as being vague and probably not all that true, if it ever was. I asked it the definition of farmer can be hypened, say, for instance farnmer-philospher or farmer-educator or farmer-researcher. Silence. Really long silence.

"You know, I like you!" he said. Thank you, I like you too!

Now lets talk about sustainability as one of those words, like farmer or sucessful, that may have multiple meanings depending on perspective or worldview. Let's talk eggs.

I raise chickens, just a small flock (which I do) that free ranges and produces, even in winter, the brightest yolked yummy delicious eggs you have ever tasted. I watch what my birds eat and we have morning conversations about their health and happiness. Macmillian is starting to frown. These eggs are so good, I offer them for sale to my co-workers and neighbors who gladly pay $4 a dozen. I cannot keep them in stock and sell out every week. I make a good bit of pocket change with my chickens. Good for you, said the Under Secretary. I ask, am I a farmer? Well.....? Am I successful? Welllll....I guess so, yes. What, I ask the Under Secretary, would you do? Reinvest in your chicken business and grow it larger to be more successful? That's your choice, he said. True but not true. If I chose to stay small I am not a farmer. But according to your definition of successful I must be big in this state if I am to be successful. If I grow my business with only the thought of making profit for myself, I run the risk of overtaxing my resources, natural and capital. Worse yet, I will have very unhappy chickens.
What? He frowned again.

Sustainability involves lots of moving parts and pieces. There is no one truth or answer to the concept, but may I add, the concept does include a sense of satisfaction, happiness if you will, as a farmer to who can take pride in making some money, treating the land well, and having very happy animals. If this makes me and my birds happy, then it's worth it. Perdue's birds and workers (former farmers) aren't too thrilled, and neither is the land, the Bay, the community that never gets to see, eat or purchase the products of this industry because? Because all the grain grown on the shore on all the land that once held sucessful truck farms, orchards and small livestock operations, goes to feed all these unhappy birds that are slaughtered and sent to...wait for it....China and Cuba! How is that successful farming or sustainable farming, except for the guy at the very tippy top of the industrial ag ladder?

Sadder still - this has been policy for the past forty years. The destruction of the American agricultural landscape to meet a definition of successful. Silly, eh? True, he says, you have a point. But! What about all those starving people!

End Part I of my debate with the Under Secretary.

Pilgrimage to a Barnyard

2011-01-20T21:11:00.001-05:00

Excerpts from Fred Kirschenmann's essay "Pilgrimage to a Barnyard"

It's hard to be sure now, and it was hard to be sure then. Part of the struggle has always been not being sure. The beginning was lonely. No one else was doing what I was doing. No neighbor had left a budding career in higher education to undertake the task of managing a farm in an isolated area under difficult economic conditions. Converting a farm from accepted, conventional, chemical, agribusiness management practices to an organic farm was unheard of in the area....

...Was I crazy? Was I off on an insane journey, deluded by boyhood fanatsies of playing in my old sand pit? Was I running home to Daddy's farm to escape the challenges of urban life? Or was I responding to an unknown and unrecognized ministry that even I didn't understand? There was no way to know the answers and no one with whom to share the questions.

...I had to let go of fear. That was perhaps the most difficult. There was the fear of the unknown and the fear of failure. Where would all this end? Would I join the ranks of bankrupt farmers, too old to pursue meaningful alternative careers, too broke to start over, too poor to provide basic health care for themselves in their senior years?

...Then came the long night of nothing. We made the move and started farming. We made mistakes. We were isolated. We started settling into mundane routines shared by most of our neighbors. We got up early in the morning, worked hard all day, and went to bed tired late at night. Yet nothing was happening. What kind of calling was this?

Slowly, out of night's lonliness, boredom and fear, a small light began to shine. We discovered other farmers in the state with similar passion for caring for the earth. We met farmers who saw "vocaion" in the work, a calling to be responsible stewards of the land...

Amish tobacco barn and dairy farm, Lancaster Co. PA

I understand now that there is no way of knowing in advance if one is called or deluded. The only way to find out is to jump in and see what happens. I've learned too that when the gospel says over and over again, "Don't be afraid," it means it. There is always new life waiting to push its way into our lives and we really don't need to be afraid; if we let in new life, no matter how painful or strange it may seem, everything we are afraid of doesn't matter. I now know more fully what it means to seek first the kingdom, and what was once worrisome is no more.

...I have experienced Martin Luther's Christmas sermon, in which he reminds us that on Christmas Eve, God was in a cold, smelly barn where a couple of frightened teenagers were having their first baby without so much a pail of warm water.

And finally there is the peace. A sense of centeredness has crept upon us almost unnoticed. It is a silent part of the praiirie that surrounds us. It truly doesn't matter anymore if we fail, if we don't meet others' expectations, if others think us wierd, or even if pain and disillusionment fill our days and nights. The peace passes understanding. It's just there, the world, even with its injustice and violence, is gentle and good and is a garden of sustenace, and hope and quietude.

An editied version of a paper that was originally published in the Spring 1989 issue of Peniel, a local newspare serving both South and North Dakota. From the collected essays of Frederick L. Kirschenmann Cultivaring an ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher (2010) University of Kentucky Press.

Trifecta!

2011-01-20T18:31:00.001-05:00

Fred Kirschenmann and me! Trifecta!
Future Harvest Conference 2011

It started as a bet. Millie said "Betcha can't get your picture with all three in one year." Betcha I did! Score!
No matter that Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Fred Kirschenmann are the elder statesmen of sustainable agriculture and I have every book that every one of them has ever written. Never mind these books are dog-eared and written in, highlighted, stickied up and that there was a day I could only dream about actually meeting any one of them, much less all three in the same year. These three have done more in their generation to turn the Titanic of industrial ag than the other 100,000 of us combined. And now, Millie must pay up - two dozen maple sugar muffins, please. And, add icing because I did it in under four months.

Wes Jackson - Scientist-Farmer-Writer-Activist
Wendell Berry - Farmer-Philosopher-Historian-Writer-Activist
Fred Kirschenmann - Farmer-Theologian-Educator-Writer -Activist
Maple muffins with icing please.

I posted my reflections on Wes and Wendell back in October on this blog, and even though I met and chatted with Fred out at the Prairie Festival, I waited until the Future Harvest Conference in Baltimore to really spend some time with my favorite of the three greats. We talked about agricultural education, sustainable ag ed models and the theories that underpin how teaching and learning about agriculture developed. Well, after two minutes, I stopped talking and just listened for the next hour.

With a PhD in theology Fred left divinty school teaching to return to his boyhood home in North Dakota, his father's farm, in the 1970s. As his father's health steadily declined, Fred took on more and more of the farm management, honoring his father's style of farming, which at the time, only Aldo Leopold and a few back-to-the-lander's would have understood. Managing an organic sustainable beef cattle ranch of 3,000 acres taught Fred a lot about farming but, as he told our group, he learned more about spirituality and love than he did at univeristy. "You have to have conversations with the land and the animals to truly know love of the land," he said, "and you have to have these conversations every day, every hour. These become prayers, these conversations. Then, after many years, you discover love."

Fred now serves as the director of the Stonebarns Center in Upstate NY, overseeing a dynamic program of public education, beautifully blended relationships of people, the land, their food and good health. He spoke admiringly of the chefs at Stonebarns who work day in, day out, alongside the farmers to grow and prepare good food for the center's thousands of visitors every year. But my interest was in the new farmers school. "Yes," he said. "we have more registered every year than we can serve! It has come full circle - farming is an honorable a profession - a calling - as one can find in these times. The numbers - the sheer numbers - of young and old who apply to the Growing Farmers Initiative astounds me. It's about love of neighbors, community, the animals, the soil, the food, and the Holy Earth and learning how to literally dig in."

I had a special opportunity to talk privately with Fred about my work in NH to start an agroecology program at Keene State College. "Please visit me at Stonebarns, this is a conversation we should continue!" Oy! I called Dr. Allen right away, and emailed Dr. John Gerber, my new boss and my old mentor. They were thrilled to have Fred Kirschenmann as advisor to our new start-up. And I promise Fred a tray of those muffins, Millie. Okay?

A Brilliant Poem For a Dreary Day

2011-01-18T12:00:00.003-05:00

A brilliant summer day in Moose Bog, VT

The day is dark, icy and dreary. I am buried to my ears in Michener, wondering outloud "Halictidae Almghty!" Then my email goes "Bing!" and I see the Wild Bee Lab is hard at work hovering over problems of systemmatics and taxonomy. No snow day for Beltsville. Then I read the title The Summer Day and know, with a smile spreading across my face, that Dr. Droege is reading poetry again and is sending his taxonomists (his worker bees) and researchers a sweet diversion from the chill and half-light that is our Mid-Atlantic winter. I take a break from sweat bees and open the email. Who else but my favorite poet could turn this dull day into a buzzing, warm, dancing and humming cacophany of inverts, verts and grass? I give thanks for my one wild and precious life indeed.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver

How Do We Value Visions of Sustainability?

2011-01-17T18:26:00.004-05:00

Farmers talk about ourselves as teachers and visionaries
Future Harvest Conference 2011

I was part of a circle of visionaries with dirt under their nails and shit on their boots. The room was filled with such circles at the Future Harvest Sustainable Agriculture Conference this past weekend. Among my circle were farmers of goats, crops, hay, orchards, vineyards and soup kitchen gardens. We tried to picture a world, a place, a hometown or a community filled with people who took shared responsibilty for their food, their environment and the health of their communities. The image could only materialize, however, when we all acknowledged ourselves as teachers. Interestingly, one of the points we brought up and unpacked as a group, was the difficulty of the larger institutions of agriculture (dominating instutions that currently drive our food systems, hunger and poverty, and entire economies) to grasp and support the idea of a system whereby farmers repair and interconnect various systems at the local level, thsi creating on a larger scale, a more sustainable food system. Farmers, to most large institutional systems, were simply small cogs in a giant wheel of progress, technology and profit.

What we discussed beyond our circles, as groups spilled out into the conference center hallways, break-out sessions and cafeteria is large instutional resistance at even having a vision of a better world. Instead, said one goat farmer from Virginia, large agricultural institutions and the academic institutions such as land grant colleges that support them, resist visioning. "Big Ag would rather keep pointing at problems and how to solve them through technology and growth rather than redesiging faulty systems. It's a cultural thing we have here in the North. Look what we've done to shamanism. We've eliminated the ability to have dreams of what could be, and focus instead on the problems of what we have." Wise man, Kevin of Capricorn Farms.

"What we've avoided for the past 60 years, " said a farm manager who operates an inner city farm in D.C. "has been the reality of the price of seduction the larger ag systems have historically presented us. We are limiting our options and the possibility of imagining a better world. I can't blame the industrial farmers, they did what the government told them to do back in the 60s and 70s. But following the lead that promised huge yields and huge profits, turned out to be the wrong path for the 80% of farmers who tried but failed. " Wise words, Kacey.

The problem as I see it, is that our large instutions can't put a price on a sustainable future for agriculture. Vision has no empirical value. Yet down here, standing on the ground, farmers-as-educators have a social obligation and deep passion for a sustainable agriculture. Clearly, the 250 farmers who attended the conference, place value on visions of a sustainable future. Yet the value does not involve commodities, leveraged farms or negative push-back from government-corporate conglomerates. No one of the several dozen farmers I spoke to was discouraged to envision their farms and their communities as operationally sustainable. But the negativity did emerge when conversations included the larger systems in which they were once forced, coerced or seduced to participate in.

"It's painful to see the world as it is, and the role we all play in creating such pain the world over." said an extension worker from New Jersey. "I can't seem to get from here to there given the system I work in." We explored her dilemma. She decided the relationship she maintains to her community farmers is very different than her relationship to her employer, a large land grant. Right relationship was a term she used frequently. Wise woman, Bess.

I wonder if correcting the courses of larger agricultural systems begins here, however. It is clear that these mega-systems are no longer sustainable and that the harm being done as a result, emerges from the descrepencies between input, and output production and the wider affects of these products, creating harm in other systems such as social capital, environmental health and regional economies. Correcting the course, however, implies our systems are faulty which doesn't sit well with those who make decisions for larger institutional systems. It is easier to focus on an immediate problem that needs fixing - an outbreak of pests requiring a new pesticide, water shortages increasing irrigation demands, for instance. Correcting a course requires vision and that requires visions be honored and valued beyond currency and commodity and profit.

These farmers have their work cut out for them, but it is work freely shared. As Fred Kirchenmann said during his ketnote (and again to me afterwards) "All it takes is 20% of the whole to begin and facilitate a change. Picture the system the way you would love it, then keep that vision in mind as you work together to change the relationships between the elements in the system. It'll take time. It has taken a long time to get to this point. But don't lose the vision and be patient."

The Ox and the Bee

2011-01-15T08:43:00.002-05:00

Lefty gets a pat despite the bumble bee on his rump

While most folks think of the Colonial-agrarian period of American history as horse powered, it was great teams of oxen that transformed the New England countryside. Attending the Deerfield Fair this fall with cousins Peter and Molly, we stood in awe as breeders of heritage cattle explained to the visiting crowds how important these mighty beasts were to the expansion and health of Colonial agriculture. The Blue Ox, America's own giant of breed of oxen, was the star for, dare I say, horsepower. And in no small way was the clearing of the forest by these enormous animals also clearing the way for an abundance and diversity of wild bees.

Charles Michener (2007) credits early agrarians for creating a landscape from the forest in which hundreds of species of native bees now flourish. Even though today's wilderness advocate looks upon the returning northern forest as a spectacular come-back of wild lands, it has only been a century since New England's landscapes looked quite different. Prior to the industrial revolution and the great migration west, New England farmers dominated the countryside with diverse farm operations from sheep, crops, wheat, orchards and dairy - most of it quite sustainable according to Donahue (2004). But as technology and economics challenged the New England farmer to compete (he could not), the scale of agriculture shifted in favor of the high yield industrial model practiced in the Mid-West and West. Today, agriculture in New England is just a shadow of it's former self, in New Hamphire, a very faint shadow. As the forests blanket stonewalls and former pastures, the old places fade.

The once-thriving farmlands of Pomfret now holds two farms, development and encroaching forest.

I watched Lefty the Blue Ox enjoy the patting and scratches his fans gave him as I spoke to his owners from Swanzey. Bill was justifiably proud of his ribbon-winning ox and everyone was looking forward to the highly competitive ox pulls later that day. "It's a pity," he said, "more people don't get into this, let alone understand it. Our roots in farming go back to the 1400s and came across the pond with the earliest settlers. It was a style and pattern of farming that matched well with New England until technology ruined it. But the Blue Ox? He's an American original that is slowly being forgotten. Not many people keep them anymore or even know about them. That's why we love our boys so much - it's living history."

According to Michener:

"Temperate forests were presumably never good places for most bees since they consist largely of trees that do not produce flowers visited by bees. There were probably fewer bees in primeval forests than now inhabit the same areas. Now with pastures, fields, waste places and road margins, an forests that have been open by cutting, once scarce species of bees have become abundant and now play important roles as pollinators of the vegetation."

Patterns of fall foliage indicate where cleared land once supported farms.

Today the forest again blankets the hills and valleys of New England and in my small corner of it, the Contoocook River Valley of New Hampshire, the forest dominates what had been a rich tapestry of farms, orchards, woods and pastures. As I prepare to begin the first wild bee survey for New Hampshire, I wonder what I may have found here a century ago, and wonder what I will find now. Like the Blue Ox, will there be animals important to the historic agrarian landscape but have since disappeared, either forgotten or never known as the forests return?

Donahue, Brian (2004) The Great Meadow: Farmers and the Land in Colonial Concord. Yale University Press.

Michener, Charles D. (2007) The Bees of the World. Johns Hopkins Press.

How Do I Learn Sustainable Agriculture?

2011-01-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

Moosha asks "How's the grass, lately?"

     Asking the question is the answer: How do we learn sustainable agriculture?
     The conventional and dominant model of agricultural education is to "release" knowledge and technology from the halls of research and technology development via the extension educator to the farmer. Sustainable agriculture, in contrast, generates knowledge literally from the ground up.Tending to its roots in traditional and indigenous agriculture, sustainable agriculture features the sharing of stories, telling of experience and questioning as tools for exploration in and about creating sustainable food systems that benefit human and ecological communities.
     Sharing stories and experience, farmers, researchers, economists, community members and purchasers of food (I refuse to use the industrial term 'consumer') are regarded as equals. There are few 'experts' or 'masters' and these terms are usually reserved for elders who've spend a lifetime of practice in the art and craft of farming.
     Questioning expertise is a highly valued feature. In fact, questioning in and of itself is a form of conversation among farmers. To have a conversation with an agrarian is to engage in a give and take of inquiries about one's soils, the health of their hives, the weather, family. I asked my neighbor about this style of interaction as education, he replied:
     "When you come to my farm and ask how the family is doing, I'm happy to share my news, and I will ask you about your chickens and your bees, and you are happy to share your news. These environmental people come on the farm to buy their cheese or milk or whatnot, and the first thing I hear is a proclamation about 'organic agriculture' and I don't know what they mean by that." (John Miller, Amish Farmer, York Co. PA) In fact John and many small-scale sustainable farmers tend to avoid trendy terms which often harbor deceptive meanings such as 'all natural', 'organic', 'certified' and 'pure.' These terms are rarely used in conversation with sustainable farmers even if they do not use chemical inputs and practice environmentally sound farming.
    Teaching and learning sustainable agriculture is truly transformational, participatory and dare I say, democratic. Now that's a novel idea. What say we make some sugar-on-snow?

Rolling Up Their Sleeves

2010-11-10T15:33:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me yesterday during a meeting with a former congressman who is trying to bring to life a legacy project in environmental and agriculture, that we can't expect much, if anything, from Washington. Call me a slow learner.

The discussion of sustainable agriculture seems to fall flat in D.C. circles which are populated mostly with lobbyists from powerful industries. What is happening is coming from the ground up, from backyard gardeners, student farmers, farmers who are fed up, consumer groups who have grown impatient, grass-roots groups and the like. Even the big conservation/foodie/green groups can't quite get a handle on the change happening from below. Unlike the folks in power, be they corporate or political ( in my mind there is no difference), the people rolling up their sleeves are the ones actually in the dirt - not the ones slinging it.

We are 'feeding the world' in word only - seeing that the number of hungry people in the US is skyrocketing. People want to help. People want access to land, build local food systems, good health. Working with my bees and the people who love them has taught me this. Mr. Dennis, a friend and fellow beekeeper, grew up in Appalchia at a time when food preparation was done at home. Nowadays, he says, there are 5,000 cases of food poisoning a year because people aren't responsible for their own food, don't know how to preserve it, cook it, store it and eat it. We outsourced our diets. "Some good that's done!" he says.

Rolling up our sleeves to get the hard work done - that's what's happening down here on the ground. Redesigning communities, food systems, economies and priorities - reflecting a society that is tired of waiting for those "above" to respond to our concerns and requests. Dennis commented that whenever someone in government gets around to actually rolling up their sleeves, it's for a photo shoot with a shovel....with a rush order to some intern to get ready for a new dry cleaning order - oh - the wrinkles of rolling up one's sleeves!

Marion's Standing O!

2010-11-06T09:15:00.004-04:00

I attended a conference in mid-October at Delaware Valley College, a small agricultural school north of Philadelphia and the title, Precarious Alliance, was a great fit. The speakers assembled there represented a broad spectrum of people from the food industry, and I emphasize the word industry. Sprinkled among them were speakers who represented the craft of food systems. Farmers, CSA managers, small farm advocates. The tension between Big Food and Little Food was, no pun intended, palatable.

Big Food decried the follies of their competitors, seeming at once to be heroes of the rational food movement, yet deftly avoiding pointed questions from their audience regarding labor issues overseas, climate change, land use, distribution and health. The Little Food speakers were looked upon as peasantry, and when our turn to speak came up, many Big Food people in their coats and ties and polished black shoes walked out of the conference room to "do business" elsewhere. So the peasants chatted it up. Among us was Marion Nestle (no relation to the #1 Worst Company on Earth).

Marion had spoken earlier in the morning, wedged in between a representative of the Bush 2 Era, now a policy analyst at JHU who acted as an apologist and promoter of past misdeeds - and followed by Marion, who was then followed by a major representative from Pepsi. Oy. The tension was vibrational! But Marion, graceful as always, took advantage of her position in the line-up and received the only standing ovation of the morning - why? Her blog www.foodpolitics.com is a great place to "hear her voice" when she isn't sharing the stage with Big Food, but the moment was, umm...delicious!

The Bush Guy had gone over his time limit, by nearly 30 minutes. When the Timer Man began to wave her off the stage, not even into the good part about corn and subsidies and sugar and the FDA, she tried her best to look over him. She tried to look around him. She looked at us - sitting in the back in our Carhartts and baseball caps. But to no avail. The Timer Man kept tapping his watch and waving at her.

Marion stopped speaking - just for a moment - to look directly at him.

"Sir - I wish you would stop doing that. My predecessor recieved his allotted time and then some, and you didn't wave at him! Stop waving at me! I have important things to say and I will say them. I will not go one for another thirty minutes, however, because I know we need to hear from Pepsi - really - I want to hear Pepsi! Now, stop waving at me. I will finish in time and I will take questions. You are annoying."

The audience broke apart, laughing, clapping, standing. And, she went on, un-fluttered, un-flappable and un-phased. Oh, to stand up to Big Anybody like that and just go about your business. A skill I wish to learn. We need more Marion Nestles to stand up to Big Food, Big Ag, Big FDA and Big Shots. I had her sign my conference booklet. She signed it "To Peggy - It IS a BIG DEAL! - Marion"

Standing O! Standing O!

Books by Marion Nestle (from her blog):

2010: Nestle M. SAFE FOOD: THE POLITICS OF FOOD SAFETY, revised and expanded edition, University of California Press.
2010: Nestle M, Nesheim MC. FEED YOUR PET RIGHT, Free Press/Simon & Schuster.
2008: Nestle M. PET FOOD POLITICS: THE CHIHUAHUA IN THE COAL MINE, University of California Press. Paperback, 2010.
2007: Nestle M. FOOD POLITICS: HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY INFLUENCES NUTRITION AND HEALTH, revised and expanded edition, University of California Press.
2006: Nestle M. WHAT TO EAT, North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Paperback, 2007. Hebrew edition, 2007.
2004: Nestle M, Dixon LB, eds. TAKING SIDES: CLASHING VIEWS ON CONTROVERSIAL ISSUES IN NUTRITION AND FOOD, McGraw Hill/Dushkin.
2003: Nestle M. SAFE FOOD: BACTERIA, BIOTECHNOLOGY, AND BIOTERRORISM. University of California Press. Paperback, 2004. Chinese edition, 2004. Japanese edition, 2009. Revised edition, 2010 (see above).
2002: Nestle M. FOOD POLITICS: HOW THE FOOD INDUSTRY INFLUENCES NUTRITION AND HEALTH, University of California Press. Paperback, 2003. Chinese edition, 2004. Japanese edition, 2005. Revised edition, 2007 (see above).
1985: Nestle M. NUTRITION IN CLINICAL PRACTICE. Greenbrae CA: Jones Medical Publications. Asian edition, 1986. Greek edition, 1987.

The Dance on the Land

2010-10-19T20:00:00.000-04:00

Bluegrass, barn dances, front porch pickin', now - our own rural radio station out of the next town over - and the occasional gospel sings (tho Quakers aren't supposed to sing in public - give us some gospel and we'll belt it out anywhere!) music of the land is the flow of life - ebb and tide of our comings and goings, swirling around like those favorite tunes that carry us from day to day, weekend to weekend, year to year.

Following the bees from flower to flower, listening to their songs and watching their dances, I find myself humming along with them, adding, if they don't mind, a few words like "Uncle Pen played the fiddle - oh how't ring- you can hear it talk you can hear it sing!" They don't seem to mind it, and my assistants have learned the words so we all sing together, bees and people tending them.

I attended a big barn dance out in Kansas a month ago and the caller's voice is still fresh in my mind "Swing! Stroll and Sway!" "Double out - bow to your neighbor!" "Coyote to the Bee - Everyone In!" And all we were, so much so that the barn couldn't hold all of us and we were dancing on the field, at the prairie's edge.
The dance of life hums, strolls, sways, hollers and whispers, all in time and all in tune. Following the bees over the landscape is much like the barn dance, although I can't hear the caller and I can don't know the pickers, I can follow the steps enough to know there is pattern and rustic beauty in their relation to the land.

The pattern of the land, like the caller, dictates the foraging flights for many of these bees. The language of landscape ecology is much like the caller's directions. There is some predictability in the numbers and richness of bees where soft edges line the corridors and patches, as there is along the hard man-made edges of the human landscape structure: as expected, numbers drop as edges harden. Crowded bees in a shrinking patch, like too many bumping dancers in a barn, will spill out into areas not normally used for foraging and there can be some spectacular surprises.Corridors and linkages between passages carry the plants from source to sink, and so go the bees. The beautiful metallic sweat bee (Halictid) can be followed in all her darting, bowing and swaying from patch to patch along these pathways, with us humming and singing along for the dance. Watching this annual dance between plant partners, bees and the landscape has me wondering if bees can be indexed as a way to measure the function and health of the land? Sort of like aquatic insects in streams and rivers. Can a correlation be established between bees, plant partners, landscape and the effects of human manipulation?

We'll have have to study the music much more closely, learn it by ear and heart, for it does not come prepackaged in books or laid out on pages. This is the best of bluegrass - learning by ear - and humming along until you find just that right harmony and swing when the caller says to. Listening to our rural radio station, Bill Monroe belts out "I Saw the Light" and I am thinking if I could just see the dance that goes with that song, I could see the land the way the bees do.

The Centaur of the Plains - Wes Jackson

2010-10-13T19:41:00.001-04:00


Wes Jackson - cross between a bison and the Prophet Isaiah

"Their land is full of idols: they worship the work of their own hands."
Isaiah 2:8

Technology, according to Wes, will not save us from the mess we've made of things. He has good reason to believe this and better reason to proclaim it. One need look no further than the work of technology upon our most precious gift - the land. Wes spoke to me for a full ten minutes, despite the circle of farmers and Plain Folk who waited patiently to ask his opinion or advice. He's a scientist, a farmer and a visionary whose opinions matter a lot to folks like me, so having a few minutes with him one on one was a lot like leaning on the corner post with my neighbor who knows a lot more than me about these things. "Technology has become the religion of the capitalist," he said. The Plain Folk all nodded in agreement.

It was a familiar theme, one that he's written and spoken about frequently, a theme with increasing resonance for those of us exploring the concepts of sustainability in food systems. "It doesn't matter what the tragedy," he said, "deep ocean oil spills, melting glaciers, starving people in a land of plenty, children who at age twelve weigh in at 250 pounds, polluted rivers, social injustice on farms and in factories...it doesn't matter because what we're told, and what we've come to believe as non-thinking, uncritical people (sheep), is that our cleverness, our thinking minds, will get us out of this mess. Well...has it worked or gotten worse?"

The belief in technology as religion has been with us since about 1500, the Age of Enlightenment. The power of the human mind and imagination to invent our way forward - progress- innovation- a higher perch from which to view the most base of earthly processes. But in our arrogance and greed, he said, we've made a huge mistake. We've turned away from humility. The Plain Folk nod in agreement again. The whole circle nods.

There are serious cracks in our world-view and the cracks are becoming chasms, disconnecting us from our true home. And what is the study of home but ecology? Where is home but in the chimney corner, warm and snug and humble? Allowing that we might not be as smart as we thought, could open some creative space, to join Leopold's community of the land.

"Robert Root-Bernstein emailed me a while back about this topic, one we've talked about for thirty years now - the Holy Grail of technology. If I recall he said something like 'The building of more and more knowledge will reveal new forms of ignorance, which is like the yin and yang of understanding.' Yeah, I couldn't argue you with him there. You can't have knowledge without ignorance. One without the other and you will have problems, especially when we try to run from ignorance. We doom ourselves to failure again and again."

I thanked him for his time. He asked me about my program at school. Well, I said, there's no formal agroecology program. I'm building one. "Yup. Good. Good. Don't follow that greenwash they call agroecology at the land grants - conventional agronomy through green glasses." No sir, not me. "Yup, yup. Good." He huffed as he said this, like a bison rooting in the tallgrass.

Yup. Yup. Good. Now them's the words of a Wise Man.

(recorded interview from the 2010 Prairie Festival, The Land Institute, Kansas)

Who Owns Knowledge, Wisdom?

2010-10-11T12:20:00.000-04:00

My three days at the Land Institute, surrounded by mostly older farmers and the elder writers of the sustainable agriculture movement, had me thinking. Listening to Lars, my aisle-neighbor from South Dakota, 75 years old and not an inch under 6'8", had me second guessing the very path I had chosen, thinking that the pursuit of a doctoral degree was "honorable but misguided if you are trying to learn about how to eat and care for the Earth at the same time." The row of farmers beyond him all nodded in agreement.

I asked as many of the older farmers as could, in between speakers, dancing, food, trips to the book store and tours of the new seed vault and research center, who they thought held the knowledge for transforming an industrial, unsustainable food system. May answers are to the word:

"Well, it aint' Monsanto."

"Anyone who's managed a sustainable farm, fed his neighbors and family, and done well by the land is the smarter one."

"Changing our food system will take the knowledge of all of us and those of us before all of us. We need to look back in order to look forward. It's like a slow motion world war. Who owns knowledge is not the question, it's who's the wiser."

"Transformation means ditching the current economic system. Free trade isn't all bad, if that's what it really is. But in the industrial ag world, it isn't that at all. It's colonialism of our own people and people in other lands. They export everything from food, to labor, to cash, to raw materials. Until people wise up to that, industrial agriculture owns not only the knowledge but us too."

Then I asked the scientists who work at the Land Institute. They simply, almost to a person, told me to ask the farmers.

Except one who said "I thought by getting my PhD I would be granted permission to be smart, to have earned my stripes - do a little teaching, publish some papers - you know - get cooshie and be smart. I was so wrong. I could have saved myself $100K and still worked here in traditional crop breeding. The wisdom is 10,000 years old and being passed down by people not in universities. So, I make less than some of those farmers out there, and I miss the cooshiness, but they are the teachers. They hold it all - and they are getting old and older - which concerns me. No university will allow a farmer to teach a graduate class because they don't have the credential. I say bullshit. If we want to really know what wisdom is, it's the sustainable farmers who walk the talk who have it, and all we have to do is ask for it. No tuition required."

(from recorded interviews)

So here I was. Just starting Phase Two of a very expensive (in other words - my employer is not paying for it) graduate program. I am leveraging my ability to pay back the U.S. government on the premise that getting a PhD will enable me to make more money, write better books, speak with more conviction at presentations, and oh - be smarter. I kept searching for Lars in the crowds during breaks, and I realized his 6'8" slender frame was hidden in the tall frames of dozens of Scandinavian and Norwegian farmers like him. They stood in circles talking about manure, soil dressing, seeds and planting schedules. They spoke of ground cover, willow versus cottonwood for carbon reserves, heritage livestock and auctions. They had dirt under their nails and palms as leathery as ox hide. Seventy and eighty year old farmers stood in circles and laughed, told jokes, danced when the caller invited them to swing their wives to the music as it drifted across the meadow.

Suddenly, I was pulled into the twirling circle of farmers by Lars. The band had started up and his wife waved me in, as she stooped low over her walker. "C'mon! He's not been able to dance with me for a while - you tale a twirl!" And I was off. Mean dancer, that Swede! He knew all the steps while I could do nothing but stumble and wonder - what does my doctoral program have to do with this? Here was a teacher no university could claim - even if they could - he and a hundred like him, with dirt under their nails.

Now I sit in my kitchen and the scent of freshly thrown manure drifts in from the John Miller's place. Draft horses whinny on the hill as they pass the donkeys in a neighbors paddock. A young boy, all of ten or twelve, is perched on the driver's bench, reining the team of two enormous Percherons up to the donkeys to visit. Smart kid. Wise horses. Letting his team rest and visit, I am surrounded my books, papers, notes and forms. I wonder, is this it?

Talking to a friend about the time constraints of having to work full time, manage some land, study and commute for classes and travel a lot for work, I wondered aloud - something had to give. Something has to go on hold. The friend suggested that giving up the land would be the logical choice. I wonder though - is it the wiser?

Reflections on Prairie Winds

2010-10-09T11:11:00.000-04:00

A week has flown by since my visit to the tallgrass prairie of central Kansas, a region known as the Flint Hills. Inspired once again by my favorite authors and ecologists who spoke at the 2010 Prairie Festival in Salina, I set out to meet the prairie on my own terms, however it wanted to present itself to me and however my mind and heart would receive it. The winds - incessant and noisy - accompanied me on two days of exploring backroads, remnant (this does not mean small!) native prairie-lands and people.

As a restoration ecologist interested in landscapes and agriculture, the lens through which I explored the tallgrasses was through the compound eye of the bee. There was no shortage of insect life - bug noise was everywhere, sometimes overwhelming and outshouting the Kansas winds. A small bison herd wandered parallel to me on a nearby ridge, snuffling and huffing, and though I was a tad nervous by their proximity (I had been told they'd recently given birth to 8 calves - the first born on this prairie since the late 1800s) I was startled every few moments by the constant jumping, whirring-by, and collisions of the thousands of insects combing through and flying over the grasses. Of course there were flowers, millions, uncountable sunflowers and herbs, all being tended to by their bees.

I looked up into the blazing sun and saw what at first I thought must have been an illusion of having not enough water. But after a sit-down break, and a long cool drink, they were still above me. An aeroplankton ocean of millions of tiny spiders flying by single strands of delicate silks, so many in fact, that they seemed to encircle the sun with webs, stitching the sky together like spiders at a quilting bee.

News was soon to be released about a possible cause of CCD, something I'd been asked to keep to myself, and I was wondering how the media and the public would respond. I have come to view Colony Collapse Disorder as a socio-ecological malady, more than a disorder that affects one species, one small insect we have become dangerously dependent on. CCD we should claim for ourselves - the symptoms of which are showing up with increasing frequency in the natural world: habitat loss, chemical exposure, genetic brittleness, loss of complexity.

Would the world take the news as "cure!" or "technology saves the day!" or would they ignore it, after a thirty second news bite in a week or so? Here on the prairie, the true meaning of Colony was clear - we must maintain the complexity, we must be okay with uncertainty and messiness. My trip back East would shock my system to the core as I looked down from the plane coming into Baltimore, how little is left of what was once vibrant pollinator habitat. But here on thousands of acres of deep topsoils, wandering bison and millions of insects, spiders and plants, the system was in order - reliant instead on what we've come to abhor - fire, instability and ferocious winds.

My two days in the tallgrass will always be with me. One small, insignificant human in the midst of oceans of life, above me, below me, and blowing through me. The wind scours as well as restores. The wind pollinates as the bees. It removes debris and returns minerals to the soil by fueling and moving flames. And it carries the sound of untold, indescribable life, filling me with the sound of the most simple of miracles - the partnership of plant and insect and sun and soil.

The Worst Thing that Ever Happened

2010-09-04T08:18:00.001-04:00

Just finished reading Richard Manning's essay "The Oil We Eat" which led me to his other essays and books. Richard lives in Missoula, MT and has a front row seat to industrial agriculture, mostly livestock and grains. He is a passionate writer, no doubt, and a member of the Land Institute Writer's Circle, which makes me smile, as this is my destination for my Kansas trip later this month. His opinion piece written for the news site Counter Punch, sums up the reality of the modern food system, here and abroad:

"Hunger in America is no longer a matter of falling through the cracks, of happenstance and misfortune. Hunger has been institutionalized as a part of the economic fabric, including especially the business of selling food." http://www.counterpunch.org/manning02222005.html

Manning's writing represents a growing body of work, some say scholarship, which turns our thinking about the development of agriculture completely inside-out. These writers point to the earliest beginnings of agriculture as the beginnings of the down fall of human society. Reaching out on a theoretical limb, they contend that agriculture was the origin of war. I have to do some mulling on that one (translation - more reading). I think many of his points are valid and testable, if we are viewing the matters through the same theoretical lense, but these arguments quickly fall apart when tested against other perspectives. His statement "The Green Revolution was the worst thing to ever happen to this planet" may be a tad to knee-jerk-emotional-screechy for me.

Would humans be better off we we went back to eating from the seas and meat from the wild?

Would war end if agriculture were to simply stop? He makes no distinction really between industrial, sustainable and organic and avoids traditional agriculture altogether.

He really lets his anger show through in the essay "The Oil We Eat" and while I agree than modern agriculture on the industrial scale is terrifyingly addicted to oil at every turn, and that in our current policy world in D.C. food is politics, I do not support his contention that all to do with the Green Revoloution was evil and the worse thing that ever happened to this planet. In fact, I thank the Green Revolution and its proponents for bringing agriculture to where we are today in that some of us can look critically at its failings and flaws, of which there is no end, and begin to envision a new agriculture, one that will take us forward as a more compassionate species. The old saying "you must hit rock bottom before you can climb up and out" is true in every sense when one considers the remarkable sea-change in approaches to growing food and caring for each other and the planet.

Maybe my work as a restoration ecologist on agricultural lands has made me a little more hopeful than most, as I do work with farmers and citizens who are eager to change a system for the better. By restoring right relationship with the land from which we derive our sustenance, we are also restoring our home, the Mothership. It's a slow movement, this business of ag-lands restoration. And, I work on just a small piece of the puzzle: restoring landscape features that conserve natural systems services, emphasizing pollinators, but it is hopeful, even joyful work.

A generations old hedgerow in Kent County - a rarity in the Mid Atlantic!

I encountered a hedgerow today, a real hedgerow, lining miles of rural road in Kent County,Maryland. It's original row of trees had grown straggly and sparse and the farmer over
the past few years, planted a new row of trees just ahead of it. The old European traditions of maintaining one's hedgerows as a neighborly obligation were evident in the care and pride the farmer took in his work.

"Wish more farmers would grow them," he said, "But they want access to their fields from any point along the road, and increasing tillage by wiping out the old hedgerows was supposed to increase our yield and income - according to the Extension folks some years back. So everybody just ripped them out. Except me - I couldn't do it. My grandfather planted that old bank of trees on his grandfather's bank and I repaired widened it after him. We've zero loss of topsoils in this field and the benefits for IPM, pollinators, wildlife, outweigh the loss of that acreage." Here is a farmer who cares deeply about things like tradition, soils, wildlife and the future.

The most remarkable thing about this hedgerow is the sea-change it represents in a region of the state where factory farming and livestock grains are the norm. Many farmers, disillusioned with the faults of contract farming and the loss of farmland integrity that goes with it, have making a slow turn towards more sustainable strategies and this is something I wonder if Manning has not detected. I know that in Montana, there is a growing movement of sustainable farmers and in Kansas, Iowa and other industrial ag states which are considered by many to be "sacrifice zones" there is not only a growing movement, but efforts by these farmers are having an impact on politics. The amazing group Practical Farmers of Iowa is one example.

I don't know if Manning can move beyond his obvious outrage at all things agriculture, and if he can survive on wild meat and foraged ground nuts, but in the sphere of restoration agroecology, there is room to reverse the wrongs of industrial agriculture. This slow turn may not be happening fast enough for Manning, but it is happening - and in places unexpected and surprising. The worst thing to ever happen to the planet? I disagree. I think capitalism may take that top honor for me, but that's another topic.

Foresight, Hindsight, Insight

2010-09-01T23:11:00.000-04:00


Bob Betz, mid-west grazier and farmer, beekeeper and educator. His passion was restoring native tall grass prairie for future generations of humans, cattle, wild bees and other insects. He passed in 2007 at age 84.

Like honey bees and bumble bees, those who would love the land tend to see beyond their time. To ensure the survival of future generations, forward-thinking societies prepare their place to endure, and offer those who will come after the opportunity to claim a chance at life and living. Exploitative societies chance it, lay odds that when and if their needs are met, those who follow may find a few tables scraps, a bit of land, a honey pot or two. Sure, our modern society thinks it has visions of bright futures for our children. The word sustainable is often over-used, over-rated. But as we are learning the hard way, our grandparents and parents had visions too, only the wrong ones.

Do the social insects see the future? Doubtful, but adaptation has endowed them with social structures and behaviors to ensure that seven generations hence (even if these seven generations occur all in one year!) there is a good chance that their kind will carry on. Humans do see the future. We have awareness that we have an end, individually and as a species. And, we have awareness of future generations inheriting what we leave to them, the souls yet to be born, children of our children's children who will scarcely know our names. Yet we've either forgotten our gift of future vision, or chose to ignore it. Our social structures and behaviors, especially over the past century, have ensured less a vision on endurance and more question of survival should we continue to work the plan our forefathers described and celebrated. "Better living through chemistry." "More is better." "Technology will save the planet."

As a restoration ecologist who focuses on agricultural landscapes, I wonder what, if any hope there is for the vast majority of humans in this land who have not a clue of where their food comes from, how it was grown, what the true costs of its production would be and the toll our current food systems are taking seven generations distant. Like the bumble bee and honey bee, whose workers live only a few short weeks, we tend to live our self-absorbed lives for the duration, giving precious little thought - like bees - to our future. It is our obligation, however, endowed as we are with the gift of foresight, hindsight and insight, that we use our precious brains for that very purpose.The past visions of agriculture are no longer valid, no longer workable, brittle and rather ragged around the edges. Like bees, we are hard-wired to survive, however, and these may be the folks who see ahead, who see a bountiful earth, productive soils, healthy forests, prairie seas of grass, abundant fish and agriculture at an appropriate scale. May I add that most of the people I know who fit this description are farmers.

Bob Betz, a prairie restoration specialist was somewhat suspicious of "university types" because they had no practical experience on the land. He loved to burn, however, and recognized that prairies were made to do just that - at a time when wildfire was (and in many places still is) thought to be destructive. Instead, he saw fire as restorative. He restored prairie most everywhere he walked, with fire and plugs and seed drills. And to prove his point to those "university types" he did so on the grounds of the Fermilab, site of particle acceleration development, where as it happens, my cousin works in deep underground particle physics. "Funny," said Cousin Eppig. "He was a university man himself, a biologist, but he had a farmer's vision when it came to this restoration project." Bob turned vast acres of exhausted, worn-out industrial ag lands into vibrant oceans of prairie.

"If you had the patience to listen, he had the patience to teach."

Farmer Philosopher and Prophet

2010-08-21T09:23:00.002-04:00

Wendell Berry wrote:

Social fashion, delusion, and propaganda have combined to persuade the public that our agriculture is for the best of reasons the envy of the Modern World. American citizens are now ready to believe without question that is is entirely good, a grand accomplishment, that each American farmer "feeds himself and 56 others." They are willing to hear that "96 percent of America's manpower is freed from food production" - without asking what it may have been "freed" from, or how many as a consequence have been "freed" from employment of any kind. The climate of opinion is now is now such that a recent assistant secretary of agriculture could condemn the principle of crop rotation without even an ackowledgment of probable costs in soil depletion and erosion...

What these men were praising - what such men have been praising for so long that the praise can be uttered without thought - is a disaster that is both agricultral and cultural: the gneraliszation of the relationshiop between people and the land. That one American farmer can feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodlogy for care, of technology for morality.

The essay "The Ecological Crisis as a Crisis of Agriculture" from his book The Unsettling of America was one of the first to address the hollow rhetoric of the industrial agricultural complex, a toxic mix of the petroleum industry, military technology, modern enslavement, international trade whereby food was (and still is) being used as a weapon, the decay of local economies and the giveaway of individual rights and freedoms in the name of "modernizing" agriculture. This was 1977.

Today we have massive recalls of food grown not on farms but produced in factories, sickening and killing consumers, workers and poisoning the land and its waters. Eggs, beef, sausage, chicken, bagged salad greens - all have experienced massive problems in contamination. Nevermind the working conditions of packing houses, the filfth and horror of feedlots and CAFOs , the utter dependence on oil in order to produce, package and transport food, and the dimished quality of the food we eat - that a nation so disconnected from comprehension of an industrial food system we are willing to defend it without questioning the true costs (yes, there is even industrial organic with much the same effect). We also have Haiti - a graphic, incredibly poignant example of what industrial agriculture has done to an entire nation while we cheered on the successes of modern agriculture.

Haiti, to the left of the river and the Domincan Republic to the right. DR has resisted attempts of industrial agriculture to exploit its people and natural resources. Haiti sacrificed both its land and its people, exporting food to rcher nations while her population starved, lost their small holdings and fled to the cities to live in slums.

But there are glimmers of awakening. Homeflocks of chickens, community gardening, media productions (which rankles the Big Ag complex to no end) and a return - small yet steady - to local foods grown by local folks. The list of farmers willing to stand up to Big Ag and do what is right for their families, communities and most importantly, their land, is reaching critical mass, especially in regions of the country where Big Ag is King. The Practical Farmers of Iowa are a case in point. The numbers of consumers becoming small scale producers is growing. Schools are delving into roof-top farming, high tunnels, city school farms and teaching sustainable agriculture. This also rankles Big Ag which so generously supports a scripted, industrialized agricultural spoof on educational curriculum. By, by saying that I could lose my job, and I'll stop right there.

My plans for a week in Kansas are coming together. There at the Prairie Festival hosted by the Land Institute in Salina, I will meet Wendell Berry and hear him speak. How will 1977 compare to 2010, I wonder? Will he sign my dog-eared copy of The Unsettling of America I wonder. I hear the tallgrass prairies are making a comeback and I count the days until I can stand in a sea of wild, native grass and catch some bees!

Arguing with My Selves

2010-08-18T22:31:00.001-04:00

Nearly losing a hive to my own neglectful behavior has made me realize I represent multiple players on a stage of resource exploitation, all of whom I play, and all of whom are not minding the beeyard.

As an agrarian, an ecologist, and a conservationist I guard the asumption that the land and its gifts will always provide for us. I hope there will always be interesting wild bees to catch, observe, collect and follow. I pray I am healthy and strong enough to tend my hives, raise, house and care for our homeflock, and sub-acre farm. I know there will always be old meadows to restore. But I also buy gas, food from the store (occassionally), items to repair and fix my cabin, books for school, clothes and use electricity.

Therefore, I am also a consumer, and assume, incorrectly, that I will always find what I need when I need it. In essence I am supporting, with my hard-won dollars, an economic system that has industrialized and exploits the very landscapes I cherish. I am all of these players and I am often at odds with myself.

The world's rural landscapes, natural resources and agrarian people are being exploited so that I can buy a cheap computer on which to write this blog or lunch out with a friend or stacks of T-111 to repair the barn. The farmers, conservationists and scientists are too busy disagreeing with each other to notice the fourth player, ourselves again, as consumers. The decades-long argument over wild lands vs farm lands rages on, especially in this politically charged atmosphere of "government mandated Chesapeake Bay clean-up efforts." While sides wage idealogical battles with each other, we are neglecting the very system that feeds, shelters and clothes us.

Just twenty miles north of home is the site of the only nuclear melt-down to have occurred on U.S. soil. Three Mile Island is a constant reminder for York Countians of just how close to wiping ourselves off the map we came - because we neglected to give attention to a critical situation. Never mind the neighborhood nuke plant at Peach Bottom just five miles away - they were asleep at the controls three years ago!

While listening to a farmer berate a conservationist outside my office (and the conservationist returning the jabs, handily, I might add) I pictured myself arguing with myself. Thinking about my loyalities to one or the other side of the argument, I decided to think instead about my weak hive and the bigger picture this event represents.

In our busy-ness to seperate and put at odds the domestic from the wild, the planet stumbles and weakens. We, the aggressive exploitative meadow ants, are raiding the bounty of our ecosystem.Who will realize, if not too late, that our lands and rivers and bays need critical care? Who will turn to the other and unite the conversation, rather than prolong its intensity? Who will blink first - to discover that while our dollars have been supporting massive exploitation of the planet's natural and social resources, we might want to think about finding a way to rescue and restore the very processes that give us life?

It's time to pull that hive off the anthill and nurse it back to health.

Ants and Neglect and the Critical Care Yard

2010-08-16T19:24:00.000-04:00


A beeyard of 17th century Europe: swarm boxes, a large mead skep and a small nursery skep.

With all due respect to E.O. Wilson, I have tried my best to kill ants, thousands if not millions of them invading my hives in a restored meadow not far from home. Because I must drive ten miles to tend to this outyard, and because I have only so many hours left in the day after my full time job and studying for hours in my doctoral program, I have neglected them.

Last year Penny and I fought long and hard to site this out yard so that the big meadow ants wouldn't bother our girls. We tried every suggestion short of poisoning - the same chemicals that kill ants also kills bees - they are of the same Order Hymenoptera. Through a laundry list of old timer's advice we slowly made progress.And we thought we'd had them beat. As a team, we took turns checking on this yard and reported to each other regularly.

Then Penny took a new job, I started grad school and our schedules completely flip-flopped. I struggled with trying to tend four yards, leaving the outyard last on my list. I usually didn't get to it during my pre-dawn forays before demands of my job and grad work took over. I checked only twice on this yard before August. In the bite of a Mid-Atlantic heat wave I finally got to the outyard and was heart broken.

The large meadow ants had again invaded the hives, building thick fortress mounds under the brood chambers and flowing easily in and out of the lightly guarded entrance. So weakened were these bees that their colony numbered only a few frames in each hive. The ants and had robbed them of honey and eaten their brood. No amount of old timer's advice would offer the reason for this catastrophe - I had simply neglected this yard. And now I had to save the surviving bees and nurse them back to strength.

So, Sunday I began to build a Critical Care Yard on the side of the barn, visible from the cabin and the window to my study. I'll call Dennis, my old friend from North Carolina, bee-wrangler and woodenware builder and confess my sins to seek his advice. It's best not to ask questions with Dennis, just let him talk. The advice is in the story. It may take a few days to tease the advice out of the tale, so I need to give it time.

I'll bring the weakened colony home on a rainy night, their hive wrapped in light netting and carried gently to the CCY. I'll let the ants have the meadow. Then I'll take the old timer's advice and apply it gently but consistently and hope I can nurse these bees back to a small but strong colony by winter's due.

The lesson in all of this is the relationship we have developed with our bees. They depend on us as we depend on them. We provide them housing and they can leave at any time if they choose, but this colony chose to stay. I failed them in their choice and gave them to the ants. I'll document the CCY here on my blog, and hope I can make up for my neglect, explained mostly as excuses that reading, writing, taxonomy and work were more important. Husbandry is a hard lesson to learn when it seems the rest of life is more pressing.

Nearing A Summer's Rest End

2010-08-14T16:32:00.000-04:00

Large bumblebee queen forages next to a tiny metallic sweat bee.
Summer bee garden slowed down a little during the very hot days.

The end of summer doldrums is almost here. Soon, the autumn flowers will blossom and the bees will be busy gathering and putting up for the winter. Come fall, the wild bees are different than the wild bees of spring. My trapping has been slow but steady this summer as I try to get a feel for what wild ones visit my yard, but I've made some collections. Mostly this has been a summer of deep reading and rest, preparing for a busy fall semester of writing, traveling and intense reading. But, soon the fall flowers will bloom, and the bees and me will be busier than we can imagine.

Inner City Sixth Grade Pollination Ecologists

2010-05-21T15:18:00.000-04:00

I spent the morning with two classes of sixth graders from an inner-city school who boggled my mind with questions so reaching and beautifully considered, I imagined myself sitting among colleagues in our doctoral program. Their teacher looked on, pleased but not satisfied. "Ask again," he urged, "Think it through and ask it a different way."

We started with pollination basics - bees, stamens, ovary, seeds. Bright minds began to flicker on. The sought parallels between human and animal reproduction and the reproduction strategies of plants. The flickering became flames. Evolution. Creation stories. Universal laws. Chaos. Yes - even chaos. Sixth graders. Thomas Berry's The Great Story unfolded before us. The librarian sat enthralled. The teacher and the principal stood, amazed. I was flumoxed. How could I answer these questions?

"Then if bees help plants make seeds in exchange for nectar and pollen, how would the world work if the rains stopped?"

"Bees make plants that make the planet that make us. Simple really. So why don't grown-ups get that?"

"Solitary bees are more like people. We think we are social like honeybees, but do you really think we could all live together like that in the dark. Umm...no. So why aren't we called solitary animals since we are more like the solitary bees? My space - your space. Respect that, thank you."

"Can we set up a beeyard here at school? Then we can plant a landscape for the solitary bees. Then we can count and identify them. Is that a plan?"

These students were positioning their new-found knowledge into their world, making sense not only in a horizontal linear way but vertically, across boundaries and levels. All this without me saying much of anything. The questions begged more questions and they began discussing among themselves the very nature of pollination not as a biological or even ecological process in nature but as a story. Seriousness. Laughter. Furrowed brows. The teacher stepped back. The kids talked close in, all wearing their bee veils and gloves and pumping empty smokers while others fingered burr comb.

One student sat listening intently. The teacher walked up and asked "Kevin, what do you think about all of this? What are your questions?"

Kevin, rolling a plastic bee around in his hand, looked straight at me and said:

"I like spiders."