Presentation Transcript

1. Invisible Worker ….Bees: The Living ‘Absent Referents’ and Intersectionality

   Dr. Phoebe Godfrey, UCONN
2. Imagine society without… Kiwi fruit Oil seed rape Runner beans Cranberry Turnip rape Lima beans Blueberry Sunflowers Broad beans Gooseberry Cotton Soya bean Currants Vetches Aubergine Tomato Cherry Lucerne (alfalfa) Almonds Pear Peppers Plum Cucumber Apple Buckwheat Squash Blackberry   Pumpkin Orange   Gourds Lemon   Celery Melon   Coriander Watermelon   Fennel Raspberry   Gherkin Peach   Marrow Strawberry   Mustard
3. Theory: Carol Adams in her 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat politicized the concept of the “absent referent”. As she states; “Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The ‘absent referent’ is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our "meat" separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the "moo" or "cluck" or "baa" away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone “ p. 13
4. Goal: “Living Absent Referents”? Bees ? To investigate what degree living beings can also be considered “absent referents” in terms of their social invisibility and to theorize a connection between their ‘living absence’ within our social frameworks and their increasing actual ‘absence’ due to colony collapse / death linked to industrial agricultural practices and other invasive/destructive practices
5. Method: Casual conversations asking participants to name all the ‘work’ that goes into the production of select food item from apples, to almonds, to blueberries, to watermelon…etc as I have wanted to see first if the question produces the anticipated results, as in the “living absent referent” This will be expanded upon using a written listing process but the goal is to keep the engagement very informal so as to get more authentic responses
6. Conversations: Overall the perceptions of about 50 people that I know who are mostly foodies is that the “work” involved in food production is a human affair. Only four have recognized the role of pollinators- two bee keepers, one Natural Resources major and one person who lived next to an apple orchard in England. She recalled a story where one spring it rained non-stop as so the bees couldn’t pollinate and there were as a result no apples. When given the “answer” some have replied: “Nature doesn’t work” “Bees are like the rain” “Work involves wages” “We work for them” “Its instinct and therefore isn’t work”
7. Conceptions of Work? In Spaces of Hope (2000), David Harvey quotes Marx from Capital who states: “We presuppose labor in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality…” (Harvey, 200) However, as Harvey goes on to say now we know that bees are very communicative and intentional in their dances and that any comparison “seriously dents the idea that humans are somehow at the ‘summit’ of living things in all or even most respects.”(201-2)
8. Stats for Animal Pollinators: 90% of all flowering plants rely on animals, (which includes insects) rather than the wind, for pollination 200,000 species of animals act as pollinators. The vast majority of animal pollinators are insects such as beetles, bees, ants, wasps, butterflies and moths; of these, bees pollinate the largest number of plant species. About 1,000 species of pollinators are hummingbirds, bats, and other small mammals. Generally pollination happens inadvertently as a result of the animal/insect feeding on the nectar, although some bees do eat pollen. Honey Bees share out jobs based on their age.  For instance, worker bees that are 1-2 days old spend their time cleaning cells, starting with the one they were born in, and keeping the brood warm; from 3-5 days old they feed older larvae;  from 6-11 days old they feed the youngest larvae; from 12-17 days old they produce wax, build combs, carry food, and perform undertaker duties; from 18-21 days old they get guard duty, protecting the hive entrance;  from 22 days on until their death at around 40-45 days, they get to fly from the hive collecting pollen, nectar, water, pollinating plants, and things like that.
9. Role of Pollinators in Human Food Production: About one third of what humans eat depends directly or indirectly on pollinators (Kearns et al. as cited in Ghazoul, 2005: 387; Kluser and Peduzzi, 2007: 354). Although production volumes of the 115 principal world crops amount to only 35% of total crop production, the number of crops dependent (to different degrees) on animal pollination is 87 out of 115 (Willmer, 2011: 606). Klein et al. (2007) found that 20% of world crop production accounts for crops with increased production of fruit and vegetables when animal-pollinated, and approximately 15% accounts for crops whose seed production increases with pollination (Klein et al., 2007: 306). Eilers et al. (2011) found that pollinator-dependent crops hold most of the lipids, vitamins and minerals that are necessary to prevent nutritional deficiency. For example, 98% of the available vitamin C is present in pollinator-dependent plants, and 58% of calcium comes from plants that have an increased yield due to animal pollination.
10. Living Absent Referents Dying In the U.S. and throughout the world, there is disturbing evidence that many species of wild and ‘stock’ bee pollinators have decreased in numbers because of loss of habitat, monocultures, misuse of pesticides, introduced and invasive plants and animals, climate change and diseases and parasites. For example, the U.S. has lost more than 50% of its managed honey bee colonies during the past 10 years. Research by Aizen et al. (2009) suggests that in case of complete pollinator absence, total agricultural production is expected to decline by 3-8%, [ on the order of 5% (developed world) to 8% (developing world)] which means that current demands for animal-pollinated food crops could not be met any more. Even the limited direct reduction in agricultural production expected under increasing pollinator shortages may impose a disproportionate demand for agricultural land to meet growing global consumption, which will accelerate habitat destruction and may cause further pollinator losses.
11. Case Study: Hand Pollination in China China's indigenous honeybee (Apiscerana) previously survived under varied geographical conditions. Recently, however, their population has decreased due to environmental pollution ad competition from Italian bees (Apismelliferaligustica) that were introduced to China 1900’s With the demise of bees, pollination relies increasingly on the wind and human intervention. Pears are a specialty of Hanyuan county, Sichuan province. Farmers here can usually harvest about 5 tons of pears a year, but this depends on artificial pollination rather than honeybees. Each April, the farmers collect flowers, brush and male anthers to obtain pollen, which will be dried for two days. Farmers tie a handful of feathers on a long bamboo pole, to imitate the hairy bodies of bees, and the feathers are lightly dipped in pollen and then applied to flowers so they are  pollinated. Each spring, hundreds of farmers climb up trees to pollinate flowers, one by one. A hive of bees can pollinate 3 million flowers a day, but a person can pollinate only 30 trees.
12. “Isolationality” ? My made-up word to describe a form of ‘ideological psychosis’ …which has us act under the false assumption that identities are not fluid, that they are not co-constructing in relation to each other and to time and place and that humans are not dependent on other beings, that we are not part of nature and that society is separate from ecology… The 45 people that I have spoken to who have not recognized the work of bees demonstrate examples of isolationality…..
13. Intersectionality? Making the ‘Absent Referents’ Present-Living and Dead: Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989; Collins, 2000) seeks to examine how—various biological, social and cultural categories such as sex, gender, race, class ability, sexual orientation, SPECIES [from wikipedia!] and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, including the social context / environment ….contributing to social inequalities….but also to interdependency, synergy and pollination
14. Interbeing? This is a term used by the Buddhist Monk, TichNhatHanh to describe the Buddhist concept of “codependent arising” (Keaton, 2002), which I see as allowing the dynamic concept of intersectionality to come into stasis, into being…before being transformed again and then back to a new form of stasis…and so on in a never ending transformational cycle …
15. What You-We-Can Do? Don’t use pesticides- seek policy changes Buy organic- create farmer / food co-operatives Grow your own food- grow other people’s food with other people Keep bees- get your towns/cities to allow bee keeping in schools/communities Buy local- sell local, buy in bulk, sell in bulk Educate yourself-educate others Recover from ‘ideological psychosis’ by changing thinking / action from being based on isolationality, to being based on intersectionality/ inter-bee-ing!
16. Present Referents!
17. Quote: “The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” Oscar Wilde
18. Bibliography Aizen, MA, Garibaldi, LA, Cunningham, SA, Klein, AM (2008) Long-Term Global Trends in Crop Yield and Production Reveal No Current Pollination Shortage but Increasing Pollinator Dependency. Current Biology, 18, pp. 1572-1575. Crenshaw, Kimberlé (1989).  Demarginalizing the intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal ForumEilers, EJ, Collins, P.H. (2000). Gender, Black Feminism, and Black Political Economy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568. 41–53. Demise of the bees disrupts pollination (2012) http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2012-02/27/content_14696871.htm Harvey, David (2000). Spaces of Hope, Oxford: New York Keating, Analouise & Gloria Andeluza. (2002). This Bridge Called Home. Routledge: New York Kremen, C, Greenleaf, SS, Garber, AK, Klein, AM (2011) Contribution of Pollinator-Mediated Crops to Nutrients in the Human Food Supply. PLoS ONE, 6(6), pp.e21363. Ghazoul, J (2005) Buzziness as usual? Questioning the global pollination crisis. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 20(7), pp. 367-373. Klein, AM, Vaissière, BE, Cane, JH, Steffan-Dewenter, I, Cunningham, SA, Kremen, C, Tscharntke, T (2007) Importance of pollinators in changing landscapes for world crops.Proc. R. Soc. B, 274, pp. 303-313. Kluser, S, Peduzzi, P (2007) Global Pollinator Decline: A Literature Review. UNEP/GRIDEurope. Marcelo A. Aizen1,*, Lucas A. Garibaldi1,2, Saul A. Cunningham3 and Alexandra M. Klein4,5 (2008) “How much does agriculture depend on pollinators? Lessons from long-term trends in crop production.” Annals of Botany Maria Pinke (2012) “How far is world agricultural production likely to be threatened by pollinator declines?” Sustainable Development Willmer, P (2011) Pollination and Floral Ecology, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. http://www.pollinator.org/Resources/facts.Primer.pdf