Michael Schacker
Editor's Note: Today, we are running an excerpt from Chapter 3 of "A Spring Without Bees" by Michael Schacker (The Lyons Press, Guilford, CT; © 2008). Visit the PlanBeeCentral site for more information about research and solutions.
Could CCD Help Cause a Depression?
Calling the fragile honey bee the "workhorse" of our agricultural system, and thus our civilization, the Pulitzer Prize-winning entomologist E. O. Wilson warned, "We have hung our future upon a thread." The number of large-scale commercial pollination operations in the U.S. can be numbered in the dozens. This is a slender thread indeed, as we depend on these top operators to stay in business and pollinate much of the fruit, nut, and vegetable crops. With little in the way of proper funding for bee research or any kind of planning, the U.S. and the world are suddenly vulnerable to economic catastrophe.
Middle-class families would suffer a knockout blow-food bills that suddenly triple and quadruple would be the straw that broke the camel's back. After years of inflation, huge mortgage bills, high oil prices, big electric bills, and the ever-rising cost of healthcare, taxes, and housing, many could go under. Every family would have to tighten its belt. And as family nutritional needs are not met, healthcare costs would presumably rise even further. It would be the "perfect storm" for the middle class.
People would be forced to bring a bag lunch to work and to eat in. Restaurants, delis, and food stores of all kinds would then see a marked drop in their business. Large parts of the leisure sector would also go under. Stocks based on cheap food, tourism, and conspicuous consumerism would plunge in value.
The giant consumer locomotive that is the United States would then not only slow down, but likely slip into reverse, causing a global economic pileup of shrinking markets and ruinous overcapacity of stores and inventory. U.S. exports, based on cheap food product, would meanwhile plunge (excepting grains), creating a much bigger trade deficit than the horrendous one we have today. The U.S., for example, supplies 80% of the world's almonds.5 There wouldn't be enough almonds in this future to ship hardly any of them overseas. Many almond orchards would go bankrupt. All the while, food production is falling, as the human population in an already hungry, sometimes even starving world is exploding.
At the same time, drought and extreme weather from global warming might affect the bees, farmers, and the economy even further. Drought will make colony collapse disorder worse, by weakening the bees and empowering the varroa mites. Bees need enough rain in their local region so there are abundant flowers to feed upon, and drought is already affecting bee populations in France and Australia.
As in the 1930s Dust Bowl, the collapse of this much agriculture could help lead to a world depression. This would leave less and less money to address impending needs such as the climate crisis, global poverty, healthcare, infrastructure, and education. It is not a pretty picture. Economically, after the sub-prime meltdown and a looming recession, the loss of the bees is the last thing the world needs right now.
The global economy, and thus our modern civilization, has an Achilles' heel: the loss of the simple honey bee could cause it all to unravel. For in the final analysis, the strength of a civilization depends upon its ability to produce enough food for its population.
Environmental Catastrophe?
There's more. The further depopulation of bees would have a huge impact on the environment, which is reliant on insects for pollination. There are other pollinators, such as bats, hummingbirds, and butterflies, but these species have been disappearing as well. We have already seen that 98% of the wild Apis colonies in the U.S. were wiped out by 1994, from mites, pesticides, and habitat loss, and that 130,000 flowering wild plants need bees or other pollinators to reproduce.7
As most pollinator species disappear, entire ecosystems could themselves collapse, like a set of dominoes. Break a link in the chain of the ecosystem, and whole bioregions will degrade. Loss of native plants would lead to wide-scale spread of noxious alien weeds, further degenerating our environment. Add drought again to the picture, and some regions could become like deserts.
Before these unwelcome future scenarios come to pass, we need to find out-what is killing the bees? If it is a new disease, there may be little humanity can do to save our little friends. If it is a man-made cause, however, society can change, solve the problem, and we can perhaps avoid the "Beepocalypse." As soon as humanly possible, before it gets any worse, we must know-why do the bees die?
Further Reading:
This is an excellent book. I have read and reviewed it... very important!
Written in August 2008