Tag: Bees

Anti-Capitalist Meetup: 31 March 2013 an ACM Introduction by Annieli

I have been thinking about how to introduce some of the methodologies we use in DK to augment the basic liberalism and progressivism necessary to produce more and better Democrats. This piece is intended to introduce some basic texts which for many might seem too simplistic and even heretical but are hopefully useful for those wanting to consider that many of the perspectives often reflected in DK have a sincere and authentic theoretical foundation.

I chose a recent diary by Kos on conservative understanding of the decline in bee populations to serve as an example of how an understanding of Marx can add to the interpretive strength of an already strong argument. The “light comes on” is not enlightenment in any earth-shaking sense but it is a reflection on the need to consider that there are preexisting social analysis methodologies that have made progressives more effective in guiding action and organizing resistance to the rise of RW power.

Buried way at the bottom of this piece on the increasing death rate of honey bees:

But Mr. Adee (the South Dakota owner of the nation’s largest beekeeping company), who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about (pesticide use in crops), said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme – a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.'”

I’m going to do some stereotyping and assume that a South Dakota farmer who scorns “extremist” environmentalist is a Republican. It’s not much of a stretch. So like Sen. Rob Portman’s conversion on marriage equality because of his gay son, or Sen. Mark Kirk’s conversion on health care services to the less-wealthy because of his debilitating stroke, Adee decides that maybe the dirty fucking hippies are onto something when he, himself, is directly affected by unfettered degradation of our environment.

I emphasize the expression directly affected because it is important for acting in a way to understand Anti-Capitalism  This point of view recognizes that there are changes in consciousness, the understanding that a tension between beliefs and reality has been heightened and proven transformative. In this diary Kos discusses the contradiction of GOP ideology in confronting the complex yet revelatory incidence of bee death as a sign of impending ecological disaster. This serves as a useful way to provide a foundation to discuss the theories necessary to understand a Marxist position on the need to transform the present relations of production.

But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests. While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths. The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths. Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

This suspicion is the simple result of an economy driven by capitalist desire to systematically maximize profit that also ignores the externalities connected to the use of technologies that also harm the environment and in the long-run destroy even the industry itself. American beekeeping and honey production is both hobby-farm, small scale cottage industry and large-scale agribusiness. In other countries it can be even barely organized gathering. Ultimately change comes from knowledge and its productive application, but a knowledge that is crucially aware of direct effects as critical practices.

I have chosen two elementary texts on Marx to give readers an introduction that is often distorted by cold-war anti-communist reactionaries that one finds in the Marx 101 search on the internet, although Brad DeLong’s Understanding Marx lecture is a good one. I have chosen Peter Singer’s. Marx: A Very Short Introduction (2000) and Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right (2011). This is not a book review, although I would hope that these two accessible texts might appeal even to the less doctrinaire Kossack. Please come below the squiggle to contribute to the discussion of the basics.

The bees are dropping like flies

The bees come up from the apple orchard next door to die on our porch, as if they were simply exhausted from being whisked around from farm to farm as slaves to our surplus feeding habits.  Animals without choice sometimes simply choose to die.  I’d bet bees have “feelings” somewhere inside their little buzzing mammillary bodies.  Maybe they just can’t hack it anymore.

My understanding is that they’re eusocial, but vote individually on where to feed based on who makes the best sexy waggle dance symbolizing food direction and quality, and have bee quorums concerning when and where to move the hive.  Elections have consequences, as they say, so they are rather “picky” in their own little individual and species-specific manners.

We humans feel a need to enslave everything, from ourselves to mackerel to feed the formerly-wild salmon now bred in large ocean nets to friggin’ anti-biotic-resistant bacterial plasmids to run off our hot RNA strands for in situ sense and non-sense, and other sexy gene-jock what-not.  Yes, we purposely create anti-biotic resistant bacteria as slaves.  Please don’t forget to flame the lip of that beaker when you’re finished with that batch!  Thanks!  Wouldn’t want those little E. coli republicans to escape just any non-containment facility.

The Green Desert: Field Trip to New York City

This is a continuation of The Green Desert and The Green Paradox.  The quick update is:  more flowers; still many bees; growing number of moths and butterflies.  Still no bees on flowering plants around the Roundup Ready corn and soybean fields.  

This story starts about a week ago with a phone accounting of all this to a friend in NYC, who I had called to tell we were coming to the city for a few days.

Specifically, I told him not only about the bees, but the complexities of mass production and paying the bills on a family farm, ala how my father works alone the amount of ground that would have been 3 families’ work just 50 years ago, and grew much more than they did then as well-all while using (at minimum) poisons that (at minimum) bees don’t like and seem obviously to be out of balance with nature.

So my friend said, “Well, what’s wrong is the feeling that you have to grow that much.”  Which got me to thinking.

The Green Paradox

I’ve sat down to write a followup of “The Green Desert” many times now.  My apologies that my schedule has prevented me from devoting the proper time needed to organize my thoughts.  

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But a good thing has happened as a result of this delay – time has passed and our overgrown lawn is even more beautiful and/or unruly, depending on your point of view.  Many many more flowers (and weeds) have bloomed.  And most germane to the discussion, many many more honeybees have arrived.

The Green Desert

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While looking out my window in the middle of farmland in SE Indiana, I see woods at various distances from approximately a quarter to three-quarters of a mile away.  In between me and those woods are soybean and corn fields, scattered houses, their lawns, a few roads and lanes, the margins of those fields and roads, and (closest to me) our yard, that we decided not to mow this year.  It is mid-July, and in all of this very green, rural scene, the only substantial group of flowers of any kind is our yard.  A little island of “proper” flowers, and flowering “weeds”.  And it is full of bugs, namely BEES.

Across countless acres, I see nothing but fields and lawns.  

Giraffes, and Camels and Bee’s…..Oh MY!

The Wildlife is fighting back!

Due to global warming, high oil prices, food shortages, lack of clean drinking water, droughts across the planet and other various doomsday stuff, Mother Nature is on a rampage and may be coming to a town near you soon.

The whole thing started when a Giraffe and his Posse decided to make a break for freedom in Amsterdam.

From The Peoples Republic of CNN:

Giraffe gathers troops, leads great escape from circus

Fifteen camels, several llamas and a potbellied pig broke out of a circus near Amsterdam on Monday. The ringleader? A giraffe who bolted, too.

Police said the giraffe kicked open a fence and walked out.

“The other animals walked out with him,” said Amsterdam police spokesman Rob Van Der Veen.

The animals were part of a traveling circus that had set up its tents in the city of Amstelveen, six miles outside the Dutch capital.

They made their break about 5:45 a.m., wandering about a residential street and riling up a neighborhood dog, police said.

Officers and circus employees rounded them up before they could get too far and returned them to their pens.

What they didn’t tell you in this story is that the “Wild Thang Gang” almost made it to the shipyards and were planning on boarding a ship bound for Madagascar!  

Too bad it didn’t work.  That would have made quite a movie, someday…..