I’m an average person, just trying to do what’s best for myself and those around me. Some things are easy to figure out, some less so. TV is easy: I don’t watch it and haven’t in years. Alcohol, street drugs, and weed were easily stopped decades ago, and in the last several years no more pharmaceuticals or allopathic medicines. These things I have control over, but food is a little more problematic.

I’m not talking about the personal choices that I make or anyone else can about eating  in a vegetarian, vegan, or omnivore manner. That’s still mine to decide like TV, drugs, or doctors. Seeking to eat mostly organic, willing to search it out, pay for and support it, and sign petitions to further the cause are the things that any intelligent person would do. (Organic food with food stamps, yes! And seeds to plant too, did you know that?)  No, it’s the interconnectedness that is the issue.

Six years ago I took this picture of honey bees on a “honey” mum at Spirit Fire. Two years later, there wasn’t one. I cried. It took two years for one to appear again, and I cried with joyous quiet applause when that happened. What is it that we don’t get? Pesticides kill bugs and then we expect bug pollinators to pollinate our food. There is  a province in China where human beings with feathers on a poles have to pollinate acre upon acre of pear trees by hand because there are no bees left.

The continued collapsing of honey bee colonies is as major as coastal flooding from global warming, but it we can do something about. Plant flowers in window boxes, veggies in pots, gardens, and fields. Give honey bees food that is not poisoned. Help them survive because if they don’t, most of the land-based natural world will change radically, including the food sources for almost everything that lives on the land including mammals, humans, birds, and other insects. Add beauty, grow something, and save a bee.