Most Westerners born during and after World War II have seen their food coming out of large farms. The idea of small farms slowly faded away among people living or moving to large cities. But the removal of small farms from our consciousness took place during decades of unrelenting propaganda and not minor violence against small family farmers.
The rising large farmers funded politicians and media to keep telling Americans that large farms, not small, were science-based, modern, efficient, and productive.
These large farmers won the domestic war as the state won the foreign war. The federal government through the US Department of Agriculture sided with the large farmers. The cold war was an excuse for adding farming to the national strategy of steering the country to the demands and appetites of an empire.
Becoming an empire, however, is a violent process.
About two thousand years ago, the Romans had Virgil who wrote the “Aeneid” to legitimize the origins of Rome and the founding of the Roman Empire. The first Roman emperor, Augustus, liked Virgil. On his turn, Virgil was grateful to the man who brought peace to the Roman world. “Let the Greeks make perfect statues,” Virgil said, “but you Romans are the rulers of the world. Be lenient to those who accept our rule, but crush those who resist Rome.”
I don’t know if America had a Virgil-like prophet and legitimizer of imperial rule. But America has had lots of cold warriors that supported the hot war in Vietnam. This was a sure sign the American empire was here to stay.
The 1950s and 1960s was an era of wars and incredible domestic racial upheavals. A cabal of assassins killed President John Kennedy and the leaders of black Americans striving for “civil” rights.
This violence sped up the exodus from the countryside, turning over rural America to a handful of corporations and a few thousand large farmers.
From that position of power, owners of large farms do what they please. They bought the brains of the land grant universities, using their purchased science to dress both crop seeds with poisons and rural America with farm factories in order to extract from the land the largest profit.
One such a technology of profit was in the DNA of those who cooked up pesticides from straightforward chemical weapons. They pushed the false idea that dosage makes the poison. They also convinced legislators to allow them the “testing” of their own poisons. Then they gave farm sprays complicated names, and hushed up their neurotoxic war origins.
The regulators, flushed with the power, modernity, complexity and ambiguity of chemistry, thought these chemicals might be able to control insects and weeds and diseases that, for eons, have bothered farmers.
Americans and Europeans welcomed pesticides, asking few questions. The rapid adoption of pesticides precipitated specialization in farming. Large farmers have been growing just one crop on very large tracks of land. However, observers noticed larger and larger fish kills, bird kills and the decimation of insects and wildlife. Rachel Carson summarized in 1962 the scientific evidence of the harm of pesticides in her “Silent Spring.”
The other canaries in the mine of industrialized agriculture are beekeepers. Honeybees are not just any insects. They pollinate valuable crops and wildflowers. They have been part of civilization for millennia. Aristotle thought honeybees were divine. He included them among 500 animals he studied.
But pesticide designers care less about honeybees or other insects. Their petrochemicals are biocides, killing them all. Air blows and brings with it clouds of poisons from one farm or lawn to another farm and lawn or deposits its deadly cargo on a biological preserve or spreads the nerve gas on top of a beekeeper’s hives.
Spray drift has been causing chaos for decades. I remember Environmental Protection Agency officials getting reports of spray drift damaging crops or public health. But the result of those reports was temporary regulatory activity, usually pasting over the harm but not resolving the threat.
In the case of honeybees, pesticides are by far their worst enemies. The brutal reality of the last forty years is that a series of neurotoxins have been close to wiping them out. The latest version of nerve poisons masquerading as crop protection chemicals come out of Germany and are identified as neonicotinoids.
These neurotoxins are used all over the world and, as a result, they are crippling honeybees everywhere. They damage the bee brain so the foraging bee cannot find its way back to its hive. In most instances such an effect is equivalent to death. Honeybees starve. Or, if they return home, they contaminate honey with one or more neurotoxins.
A research team in Switzerland analyzed 198 honey samples from all over the world for any of the 5 neonicotinoid compounds. Seventy-five percent of the honey samples had at least one of the neurotoxic compounds.
Ironically, a study in environmentally protected areas in Germany found that in over 27 years there has been more than 75 percent decline “in total flying insect biomass.”
Dramatic and dangerous as these results are, they are not moving Germany manufacturing the honeybee neurotoxins or other countries to ban neonicotinoids or, better yet, phase out most pesticides and return to sustainable farming. These countries are determined to see the extirpation of honeybees and, along with them, most other insects.
Has power completely corrupted the leaders of the world? Business as usual is profitable, but for how long? Kill honeybees and insects and you diminish our food and destroy ecosystems at the foundation of all life. Spring and the other seasons will be silent but very toxic.
I urge environmentalists, beekeepers, organic / biological farmers to organize massive global resistance to this war against the natural world. Universities should also join the fight against the emerging dark ages of poisons and power.
As Tom Theobald, a beekeeper from Colorado, put it, “profiteering with weaponized agriculture” must cease. No more bee-killing pesticides.