Imag(in)ing Collapse

Bee Colony Collapse signifies two breakdowns for humans:

1)collapse of a structure crucial to ecosystems responsible for 1/3 of our food production

2)collapse of a classic metaphor/symbol that has functioned reliably as a blueprint for Utopian ideals of a perfect society.

The collapse of beehives–even human perceptions of their failings–shows two profound human energies (I’ll call the first one a drive and the second a desire).  At the disaster’s core is a human drive for productivity at all cost, cold rationality: “form follows function”.  This drive justifies losing/neglecting that which does not further (perceived) gain.  It breads compartmentalization: “let’s build up the things that further our species/society, destroy anything that threatens us, and neglect the rest”.  Upon realizing BCC’s threat to this drive (or the threatening nature of the drive itself), there is a human desire at work in BCC–the desire to deny or neglect that which threatens the ideal vision of society we’ve derived from and invested in the beehive metaphor–the desire to cover up BCC, to (re)produce it as a mystery without a cause.  To suppress the question: “what if collapse of this metaphor, upon which our ideal-productive society is built, is both a symptom of our destructive lifestyles and a sign of our impending collapse as a species?”

While I can’t say that these are the objective/scientific causes of BCC, I am saying/showing that these are the drive/desires that motivate the disaster’s place in contemporary (American) discourse–it is the human component that drives the experience economy’s (non)writing of the disaster.

Bees and Mythology

“In the creation story of the Kalahari Desert’s San people, a bee carries a mantis across a river. The river is wide, and the exhausted bee eventually leaves the mantis on a floating flower. The bee plants a seed in the mantis’s body before dying, and the seed grows into the first human.”

“The San are not the only people to include bees in their myths and stories. According to Egyptian mythology, bees were created when the tears of the sun god Ra landed on the desert sand. The Hindu love god Kamadeva carries a bow with a string made of honeybees. Bees and their hives appear in religious imagery and royal regalia in multiple cultures, and people around the world use honey and pollen in folk medicine and religious observances.”–Tracy V. Wilson

MORE TO COME