Learning to Live with Murder Hornets – Edge Effects
The honeybee (Apis mellifera), which has no natural defense against the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), plays an essential role in North American agriculture today. But that’s only part of the story. Photo from Wikimedia, 2010.
Whether with bees, sheep, or dogs, environmental historians often analyze how human make emotional bonds with animals. And these relationships are essential when learning to mend exploited nature. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway argues that “We need to make kin . . . who and whatever we are, we need to make-with—become-with, compose-with—the earth-bound.” Loving broadly resews broken earth.
Plantation Ecologies and Loss
Interspecies alliances sour when exclusive. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has described how plantations—“simplified ecologies designed to create assets for future investments” by exploiting human and non-human labor alike—endanger our world. Analyzing profit-driven, global ash supply chains, Tsing asks readers to ponder how “fungal pathogens” would encounter industrial ash tree plantations: “imagine the feast for ‘hunter’ fungi: an endless meal of helpless and identical prey.” Plantations create susceptibility; predatory fungi merely perform in a niche.
And these ecologically simplified plantations are everywhere. Midwestern cornfields, Vietnamese rubber forests, African phosphate mines: each produces homogenous commodities—corn, rubber, phosphorus—while suppressing all other growth. In Apis mellifera’s case, this means “artificial hives throughout the United States” that are sustained by “a large and sophisticated beekeeping industry” busy “mass-producing queens and bees for sale to other beekeepers.” And by ensuring that bees, like Tsing’s ash trees, “coordinate only with replicas—and with the time of the market,” vulnerable abundance and abundant vulnerability ensue.
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