| Yes, the subtext of my point is that there's a narrative that the American food supply depends on a natural resource of pollinating insects, and that it is threatened by an unnatural collapse of native pollinating bees. In fact: * the parts of our food supply that are heavily dependent on pollinating agents rely entirely on commercial pollination services, not native ambient pollinating species. * there is strong evidence that no threat exists to commercial pollinators and that standard bee husbandry practices are working just fine. That evidence includes the price of commercial pollination, which would (obviously) rise if collapsing bee populations were making commercial pollinating hives scarce, but which are in fact possibly not even keeping up with inflation, along with the price of new queens (nuc prices have grown over the last 5 years, or at least seemed to be last time I checked, but beekeping has grown immensely in popularity over the last few years as well --- but queen prices haven't really budged at all; granted: my research method here is "find companies that sell queens, follow their prices on archive.org", so I'm ready to be rebutted). * the honey bees that tend to dominate this conversation are a non-native invasive species. There's a pretty widespread and well-documented belief that the US "feral" honey bee population was wiped out in (IIRC) the mid-80s --- not by pesticides but by another invasive species, the Varroa mite --- and that subsequent to that event, every honey bee you've seen "in the wild" since then is technically somebody's property. That may be changing? There may now be a significant number of feral colonies? Nobody's crop depends on them. * the entire reason honey bees exist at all in the US is to support at-scale agriculture. They're livestock. * it is entirely legitimate to worry about things we're doing to threaten native insect species! My objection to the conversation about native pollinators is twofold. First: I think it's disingenuous to imply that threats to native pollinators are the existential threat to our food supply that people claimed CCD was. Second, and much more importantly: neonicotinoid pesticides are not the major threat to native pollinators; they're just a cosmetically appealing villain we insert into this narrative to reassure ourselves that there's a "big pesticide" bad guy we need to organize against. The reality of species loss in the US is that it's a consequence of habitat loss, which implicates all of us, not just some shadowy faceless corporation. |
So the orchards that cultivate a healthy ecosystem through a diversity of species, and care given to soil health, which grow, produce, and sell fruit for only slightly above factory farming rates aren't part of the food supply?
If you only define food supply = factory farming monoculture, then absolutely the "least bad herbicides and pesticides" are the best thing possible.
Eating almost entirely locally costs far less per year than the difference between and entry level vs top of the line laptop. Eating from nearby food producers who take care of the land is not very expensive relative to other luxuries people invest in. Habitat loss may be inevitable, but factory scale, chemical based monoculture does not implicate all of us, and personal action is quite reasonable.
It's probably less effort than changing your diet for other reasons, but people seem to be more motivated to change their diet for body image reasons, or the soylent-esque lifestyle optimization, etc.
It baffles me that more people aren't raging environmentalist lunatics as I am.
FYI if you think this is bullshit, here's a public demonstration of an alternative to factory farming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3riW_yiCN5E There's a free hour long video that's more in depth but I realize even expecting 10 more minutes of anyone's attention is asking a lot.