From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity: Bees, pollination services, and industrial agriculture
Rebecca Ellis, Tony Weis, Sainath Suryanarayanan, Katarzyna Olga Beilin
Abstract
Abstract The growing crisis of bee health has shone a spotlight on the problems facing pollinator populations in many parts of the world, the worrying implications for agriculture and ecosystems, and some of the risks of pesticides. Although this attention is important and can open a range of critical vistas, the threats to bees, other pollinators, and the future of pollination are too often framed in narrow ways. The goal of this paper is to provide a systematic way of thinking about the crisis of bee populations by examining the changing dynamics of pollination within industrial agriculture, drawing heavily on transformations in the United States and Canada. We set out a case for understanding pollination as a biophysical barrier to industrial organization and the rise of pollination services as a response that temporarily fixes (or overrides) this barrier, while containing an internal set of contradictions and overrides. We argue that these dialectic relations are continually generating further problems and hope that this lens can help inform critical education, outreach, and movement building with respect to the urgent problems of bee and pollinator health. In particular, we stress the need to connect growing bee‐related advocacy with struggles to confront industrial capitalist agriculture.