Wednesday, March 14, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
March Madness
“Bald eagle’s back in the
cottonwood tree,
The old brown hills are
just about bare,
Springtime’s sighing all
along the creek,
Magpies ganging up
everywhere,
Sunshine’s warm on the
eastern slope,
March came in like a lamb
for a change…”
— Ian Tyson, Springtime
March did not come in
like a lamb, not really, but
it’s finally here and with it
we begin another promis-
ing round of spring work on
the Figure 8. As usual, I’m
entertaining big dreams of
an extraordinary harvest —
500 pounds, you may recall,
remains the gold standard
— and to that end I’m ripping
the guts out of the greenhouse,
turning over the garden beds,
building a new turkey run for
a crop of fall gobblers, and
making sacrifices to whatever
gods I can find to spare us all
from the anxieties of summer
wildfire.
And this year we are going
to raise bees. I’m doing this
for two reasons: first, there
aren’t enough bees. You may
have read or heard about
CCD, or Colony Collapse
Disorder, which has killed off,
by one estimate, ten million
beehives, collectively worth
two billion dollars, over the
last six years or more.
Blame for CCD has been
swatted back and forth —
predictably — but we can say
with reasonable assurance
that the problem resides in
the use of agricultural chemi-
cals. What often happens in
CCD is that the chemicals are
dumped on pollinating crops,
the bees get covered in them
(one study showed pollens
contaminated “on average
with nine different pesticides
and fungicides though sci-
entists discovered 21 agri-
cultural chemicals in ONE
sample”) which weakens the
bees’ ability to resist infection
by a parasite, which eventu-
ally kills them.
But it gets worse, naturally.
The same study found
that “U.S. honey bees, which
are descendants of European
bees, do not bring home
pollen from native North
American crops but collect
bee chow from nearby weeds
and wildflowers. That pollen,
however, was also contami-
nated with pesticides even
though those plants were not
the target of spraying.”
All of this is reason enough
for us to raise bees, even if I
did not harbor an enormously
selfish and insatiable appetite
for honey.
But there is a third rea-
son too, which has more to
do with our commitment
to becoming what agrarian
Wendell Berry describes as a
“responsible consumer.” The
responsible consumer, Berry
writes, “must also be in some
way a producer. Out of his
own resources and skill, he
must be equal to some of his
own needs.”
Which only makes good
sense. A responsible con-
sumer lightens the load for
everyone because a respon-
sible consumer is also a dis-
criminating consumer, which
would be a delightful world-
wide development — should
such a thing ever catch on
— against the questionable
sustainability of our current
vision for living on the planet
in the long term.
Because handing our
great, great, great grandchil-
dren the rich inheritance of a
sustainable way of life seems
important.
I’m convinced that rais-
ing bees, and gardening, and
hunting responsibly for our
protein, is also precisely the
kind of radicalism I appreci-
ate the most. It’s a personal,
mostly quiet, sort of state-
ment against the general trend
toward ecological destruction,
and as Berry writes in “The
Unsettling of America,” “one
must begin in one’s own life
the private solutions that can
only in turn become public
solutions.”
So, bees.
I am seeing this process,
which is always underwritten
by the natural human desire
for self-reliance and indepen-
dence, as the very best kind
of active resistance against
the spiritual, physical, and
mental fragmentation increas-
ingly imposed on, and even
demanded from, the modern
citizen in our wildly consum-
erist and hip-hop culture.
I’ve been warned by sev-
eral folks that my bees are
likely to fly away in a giant
swarm, that they will all die
off, that it’s too much work
for too little reward, and so on
and so on, but I maintain far
too positive a bent to be easily
dissuaded.
Because what’s at work
here is a drive to arm our-
selves with private solutions,
to better invest in the intimate
particulars of our lives, and so
finally to present to the world
“one improved unit.”
T h a t ’s w h a t B e r r y
describes as moving “from
the universal to the particu-
lar,” from “protest or public
advocacy to work and to good
work.”
Good work, the kind
focused on sustainability,
comes in all shapes and
sizes. Mostly it requires us
to embrace a little sacrifice,
and to put our money where
our mouths are, which isn’t
always easy to do.
But we can stand a few
sacrifices of ease and conve-
nience to create the kind of
life and culture that will have
long-lasting, sustainable, and
positive impacts on the world
at our feet.
In the meantime, it’s
March, and we can be reason-
ably certain that it will tease
us with another Arctic blast
before it’s all said and done.
But the red-winged black-
birds are back at Indian Ford
Meadow, the Golden Eagles
are in their nest in Whychus
Creek Canyon, the green-
house is warming up, we’ve
got six new chicks in the
brooder, and I’ve got a brand
new notebook I’m taking to
Bee School.
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