Happy Earth Day!
Let’s celebrate, invest in the future, and offset our carbon emissions by doing something completely radical! Let’s plant trees! In the last two weeks we’ve planted nine Osage orange trees, nine Northern pecans, five black locust, three heritage apple varieties, and, as of yesterday, three cherry trees. Well, actually, Ed did all the planting—he’s a monster when it comes to putting plants in the ground, and it was hours of work. I was just support staff.
Anyway, my favorite season is Spring. I am so happy to have another dark, cold winter behind me and the warm, bright, outdoor part of the year unfolding out in front of me. But the best part is witnessing the rate at which plant, insect, and bird life spring into action. American Robins have arrived, set up territories, built nests, and I think some birds are even sitting on eggs already. What have I done in the last three weeks???
This year marks the third Spring of my family’s permaculture efforts. That means we are managing our land (and light and water) in such a way as to cultivate as much biodiversity and food products in as sustainable a way as possible—that is, independent from our own inputs and interventions. It is waaay fun: fascinating things to learn and observe, lots of time reading and planning, working outdoors, lots of stuff the kids can do and learn, lots of satisfying active physical work, and crazy healthy and beautiful things to eat in the kitchen.
Last year we explored what sugar resilience would look like. We made our first maple syrup ever (six gallons), and I tried my hand at beekeeping. To that end we bought a fancy, expensive bee hive set-up from Australia called a Flow Hive because we fell in love with the idea of it. For several reasons, we didn’t get any honey last year, but my despite my mismanagement, my girls made it through the winter, and we’ve hit the ground running this year. Barring unforeseen disasters, I am hopeful we will harvest a years-worth of honey for our morning tea (40ish pounds?) from our colony this year. I’ll let you know how that goes :)
Now, I am learning that keeping bees can be both anxiety-inducing and extremely interesting. It is still hard for me not to be nervous about disturbing them and incurring their wrath, and the sense of responsibility is a bit weighty too. But, on the other hand, it is pretty cool to open up a hive and poke around inside there and mostly have the bees just ignoring you and going about their business. It is cool to feel the super (hive box body) go from light and empty to so full you can barely lift it. What I am discovering is that it is also really fun to have those first warmer days in the spring and see your bees start to emerge, do their own spring cleaning, and start visiting each set of flowers that bloom as the season progresses: snowdrops, crocus, hellebore, lungwort, and who knows what else. All I know is the girls start coming back to the hive loaded with pollen and I am having trouble imagining where they are getting it all from. Seeing Spring through the lens of bee eyes is pretty illuminating, and just makes the whole process seem even more magical and deep than ever.
So all this is to say, I have bees in my head right now, and I can’t help but notice that honeybees have some very concrete things to teach us. Specifically: Want to see what individuals can do together that is demonstrably much greater than what they can do alone? Look at honeybees. No individual bee can achieve what 10,000 do when they work in a coordinated fashion. Miniature contributions taken by individuals from individual flowers, processed by 1,000 of workers, adds up to this massive healthy, golden, sweet, useful, product—the honey stores—that is their protection against harsh circumstances they know inevitably come. Turns out, they don’t even prefer their stored honey! They’d rather make and consume fresh food from plants. But once their day-to-day needs have been met they steadfastly invest in buffering themselves from the vagaries of the future. Through their shared vested interest in the future, and by working together, the bees increase their changes of surviving live-threatening conditions, and rebounding fast when the good ones return. It is a pretty robust strategy.
We definitely could take a page out of the book of honeybees. Maybe a couple of pages. They offer a good example about setting priorities and the power of working together. But, bees have their own system—founded on, and coded in, genetic materials—and it works. Our system is a bit sloppier, so we can’t just hope some regulatory hormones from some Queen bee will keep us doing the right things. Instead, we have to observe and think and strategize and make explicit plans if we want what we do to add up to more than what we can do by ourselves.
So if you haven’t already guessed, we are now shifting from the Story of Me to the Story of Us, the second piece necessary to develop a robust response that underlies major social movements, like the one we need to mitigate Climate Change.
The Story of Us includes the parts of the stories of ourselves that we share with one another, and/or those parts that of others that compliment our own. So, if the Story of Me is about one’s identity, the story of us is about our shared identity. If the Story of Me is about discovering our values, the Story of Us is about discovering our shared values. Just like we all have a path we are traveling down as individuals through our lives, we also have a place “we” are with our attitudes and values and motivations, and a path we are going along. So, the question is, exactly where are we? What path are we on? Where do we want to get to? In the next 7ish (?) posts I examine what our “hive” is doing to respond to the pressures of Climate Change.
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