Arts, Faculty of
Geography, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Quinn, Alyssa
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
The migratory beekeeping industry in North America is an integral component of capitalist agriculture due to the pollination services it provides. The industry is rife with problems ranging from the difficulty of maintaining adequate honey bee populations from year to year, to the negative impacts intensified agricultural land use has on wild species. Discussions surrounding the predicaments facing honey bees often occlude historical and ongoing settler colonialism as well as the capitalist economy that drives the pursuit of economies of scale. In order to remediate the aforementioned tendencies, this thesis puts to work Stoler’s (2016) recursive analytics to weave a genealogical account of the imperial formations that inhere in contemporary industrial beekeeping, with a focus on the 1862 Morrill Act and its relationship to the modernization of apiculture. I then take Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign to task to illustrate capitalism’s subsumption of discourse. Using Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering, I argue that a biopolitical analysis of commercial beekeeping necessitates a reading of both symbolic and material currencies towards a more fulsome understanding of trends within the industry. My research seeks to show the entanglements between imaginative structures, power, and relationships to bees and more-than-human worlds more broadly.
RENDERING’S RECURSIONS: INDUSTRIAL BEEKEEPING’S IMPERIAL INHERITANCES by Alyssa Quinn A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2022 © Alyssa Quinn, 2022 The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: Rendering’s Recursions: Industrial Beekeeping’s Imperial Inheritances submitted by Alyssa Quinn in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Geography Examining Committee: Juanita Sundberg, Associate Professor, Geography, UBC Supervisor Mohammed Rafi Arefin, Assistant Professor, Geography, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract The migratory beekeeping industry in North America is an integral component of capitalist agriculture due to the pollination services it provides. The industry is rife with problems ranging from the difficulty of maintaining adequate honey bee populations from year to year, to the negative impacts intensified agricultural land use has on wild species. Discussions surrounding the predicaments facing honey bees often occlude historical and ongoing settler colonialism as well as the capitalist economy that drives the pursuit of economies of scale. In order to remediate the aforementioned tendencies, this thesis puts to work Stoler’s (2016) recursive analytics to weave a genealogical account of the imperial formations that inhere in contemporary industrial beekeeping, with a focus on the 1862 Morrill Act and its relationship to the modernization of apiculture. I then take Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign to task to illustrate capitalism’s subsumption of discourse. Using Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering, I argue that a biopolitical analysis of commercial beekeeping necessitates a reading of both symbolic and material currencies towards a more fulsome understanding of trends within the industry. My research seeks to show the entanglements between imaginative structures, power, and relationships to bees and more-than-human worlds more broadly. iv Lay Summary How are we to understand initiatives to “save the bees” in a context of accelerating climate instability and biodiversity declines? This thesis takes the phrase to task, investigating how both colonialism and capitalism wend their way into the seemingly benign statement. Through weaving together strands of history, I draw attention to the relationships between colonial expropriation and the development of industrial beekeeping. I then examine an environmental non-governmental organization’s (ENGO) campaign to “save the bees” to offer a reading of the implications at work in the circulation of the phrase. I suggest that returning to the institutional histories of economic entomology and material organization of industrial beekeeping can re-orient discussions surrounding the industry to its animating conditions. I suggest that bee declines proceed immanently from the industrial agriculture apparatus, and not as threats from without. v Preface This thesis is the original, unpublished, independent work of the author, A. Quinn. vi Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary .......................................................................................................................... iv Preface ...................................................................................................................................... v Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... viii 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Methods .......................................................................................................................... 3 1.1.1 Recursions ................................................................................................................. 4 1.1.2 Rendering .................................................................................................................. 6 1.2 Settler Agriculture and Ecological Imperialism ............................................................. 9 1.3 Commercial Beekeeping ............................................................................................... 15 1.3.1 History of Scientific Beekeeping ............................................................................ 15 1.3.2 Migratory Beekeeping ............................................................................................ 17 1.3.3 Commodi-faunation and Bees as Lively Commodities .......................................... 19 1.4 Map of the Chapters ...................................................................................................... 21 2 Colonial Imaginaries and the Modernization of Apiculture .......................................... 22 2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 22 2.1.1 Empire and Ecology ................................................................................................ 24 2.1.2 Recursive Analytics ................................................................................................ 26 2.2 Pre-Morrill Act Bees and Colonialism ......................................................................... 28 2.2.1 Early Modern Bees and Imperial Imaginaries ........................................................ 28 2.2.1 Imperial Recursions ................................................................................................ 35 2.3 The Morrill Act ............................................................................................................. 39 2.3.1 Performing Terra Nullius ........................................................................................ 41 2.3.2 Settling the West ..................................................................................................... 43 2.3.3 Accumulation and the Racial Contract ................................................................... 45 2.3.4 Myth, Erasure, Violence ......................................................................................... 47 2.3.5 Institutional Entomology and Apiculture ................................................................ 48 2.3.6 Cornell and Modernizing Apiculture ...................................................................... 50 2.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 53 3 Save the (Honey)Bees! ENGOs and Rendering Life ....................................................... 55 3.1 Save the Bees? .............................................................................................................. 55 3.2 Analytic Framework ..................................................................................................... 58 3.3 Bee-washing and ENGOs ............................................................................................. 61 3.3.1 Greenpeace and Save the Bees ............................................................................... 64 3.4 Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 67 3.4.1 Scientific Beekeeping and the Biopolitical Life of Bees ........................................ 67 3.4.2 Affective Manipulation ........................................................................................... 71 vii 3.4.3 Conflating Agriculture and Wild Space .................................................................. 74 3.5 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 75 4 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................... 77 4.1 Contributions ................................................................................................................ 77 4.2 Strengths and Limitations ............................................................................................. 80 4.3 Future Research Directions ........................................................................................... 80 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 82 viii Acknowledgements I have been an uninvited guest on stolen and occupied Musqueam territories for around a decade now. This thesis has taken shape on these lands just as I have grown into the person I am from my time spent here. Thank you to the caretakers of these lands and waters, and thank you to the lands and waters themselves. Many thanks to my supervisor, Juanita Sundberg. Ever since taking your classes in my undergraduate degree, I have become attuned to the possibility of other worlds. That is a gift I will cherish and work towards throughout my entire life. Thank you for all the care, talks, and walks over the years, especially throughout the process of writing this thesis. I couldn’t have done it without your guidance. Your keen eye for structure was a godsend. And thank you for holding my anxiety when things got rough. You’re the best! I am looking forward to working together more in the PhD. Rafi Arefin, thank you for taking on the role of second reader. Your feedback has been kind, generous, and inspiring. I am also looking forward to working with you in the PhD! Thank you for organizing your wonderful lab, Gossip Corner, and thanks to the members of the lab—Chris Reimer, Micah Hilt, Rachel Stern—for taking the time to read a draft of my first chapter and offering feedback. To the folks at Studio Utopia—Madeleine Reddon, Sheila Giffen, Rusaba Alam, Rebecca Peng, Allen Fulghum, Torin McLachlan—thank you dreaming and building such a generative space. When I felt like I couldn’t write anymore, taking a second to look out the window of the pointy building gave me the strength to keep going. That and the writing vulture. To my friends in the Geography department (M-T-H Cluster, Geographers for Alien) thank you for helping me find a home here. Lily Demet, Corin Parsons, Albina Gibadullina, ix Mollie Holmberg, Daniel Gamez, Bella Pojuner, Gabby Wolf. I am grateful that we could share space and thoughts. Thank you to my wonderful friends Clare Robinson, Keagan Perlette, Riley Holland, Eleanor Hoskins, Prabhi Deol, Leilan Wong, Romi Fischer-Schmidt for always being there for me through this! Thank you to my parents Patrick Quinn and Janette Lew. You don’t always know what I’m up to, but you support me nonetheless. Inarita, you held steadfast with me throughout this project. Thank you for believing in me. Finally, Catman. You will never read this but you are the person who I have seen the most throughout this project. You logged countless hours on my lap as I wrote, harassed me to get out of bed on days when I felt I couldn’t, and gave me companionship when I felt most alone. Thanks for being my cat, I love being your human. “Whether it be mountain top or rolling plain, Making honey means to visit every bloom in sight, To storm the whole terrain. They labor so at whose command, for whose delight?” -Luo Yin (Zhang and Wilson, 2007, p. 91) 1 Introduction This thesis flows from years of thinking about bees, colonialism, capitalism, ecological worlds, and power relations. I place these topics in conversation in order to analyze some of the concurrent movements I have observed. On the one hand, I learned about the ongoing biodiversity crisis and recent trends in declining pollinator populations globally. The crisis in pollination “refers to documented declines in range of key pollinator species and plants that depend on them” (Ellis et. al 2020) propelled by drivers like habitat loss and pathogen spread (Potts 2010). On the other hand, I also noticed popular interest in bee health circulating through the media, popular science, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), and commercial interests. Condensed into the mimetic phrase “save the bees,”1 such initiatives often cluster around the commercial beekeeping industry and a single species, Apis mellifera, the 1 The figure of the bee is highly marketable, and thus, vulnerable to capitalist appropriation. Bee-washing, a form of greenwashing that uses bees to make companies seem bee-friendly when their actions might actually work against goals of sustainability, is an expression of this tendency. An example of bee-washing is the installation of beehives on the roof of CBC stations. At a glance the introduction of hives could seem like an act that contributes positively to the problem of declining bee populations but as de Keyser (n.d, Bee-washing) notes, taking a critical eye to this act shifts the narrative. The CBC suggests that keeping hives works towards initiatives for biodiversity, but de Keyser pushes back, writing”[b]iodiversity is about the variety of life so a biodiversity strategy that focuses on a single non-native, domesticated species totally misses the mark”. 2 European honey bee. Conservation resources and public attention are directed at this honey bee species despite ongoing communication and scientific work from bee ecologists who fight for non-managed species (Colla and McIvor, 2016). Further, the industrial agricultural apparatus that animates commercial beekeeping is driving insect population loss globally (Raven and Wagner, 2021). This project takes the circulation of “save the bees” as a point of entry into thinking about the politics and history of commercial beekeeping2 in the place currently known as the United States. I examine how and why problems related to honey bees circulate in the manner they do and the repercussions this has for both honey bees and native bees. My argument is twofold: First I suggest that re-inserting commercial beekeeping into historical context through the use of recursive analytics reveals the industries “colonial presence” (Stoler, p. 28). This move is meant to interrupt ahistorical discussions of beekeeping that occlude the colonial past and present by illustrating how durable imperial formations genealogically inhere in the practice. Second, I argue that a reading of both the symbolic and material is necessary for understanding concurrent trends in bee life. I will elaborate on this point through an analysis of the symbolic circulation of a campaign to “save the bees” and its relationship to material processes. The fetishistic circulation of “save the bees,” I conclude, works to obscure both colonial history and the colonial capitalist present from which bee deaths immanently proceed. In this chapter, I introduce the analytical and historical frameworks that scaffold my thesis. I situate commercial beekeeping within the lineages of ecological imperialism and settler agriculture. To reckon with the ongoingness of imperial formations, I use Stoler’s (2016) notion 2 I use the terms commercial, industrial, and scientific beekeeping interchangeably to avoid repetition and give texture to my prose. In this thesis, these terms all refer to the industrial large-scale migratory beekeeping. 3 of “recursive analytics” (p. 30), drawing out the “strange continuities” (p. 28) of a past imagined to be over, but which persists through “processes of partial reinscriptions, modified displacements, and amplified recuperations” (p. 27). As I illustrate, recursive imperial imaginaries, including the figure of Man and the imperative of improvement, are recycled at different junctures. The shape these recursions take are not identical through time but can aid in parsing how power inheres in relationships to more-than-human worlds. To analyze the field of power driving “save the bees” narratives I build on Shukin’s framing of biopolitics which addresses colonialism and capitalism in relation to the co-constitution of its material and symbolic components. Biopolitical management is not confined to the human but rather operates across species lines through the insertion of the vital processes of organisms into industrial techno-regimes that aim to maximize productivity through rational administration (Nimmo, 2015, p. 12). I will show how factory farming and industrial monocrop agriculture are examples of biopolitical power over life while identifying the role of symbolic currencies in producing worlds. This chapter also gives a brief history of commercial beekeeping and an overview of the practice today. In particular, I trace the logic of improvement from the colonial era to the present. Finally, I provide an outline of the chapters to follow. 1.1 Methods This thesis was inspired by the work of Lee and Ahtone (2020) whose publication “Land-grab universities” was published the year I began to envision my project. Reading about the Morrill Act of 1862 and the large scale expropriations that went into forming land-grant institutions in the United States sparked my curiosity. I wondered if there was a connection to large-scale apiculture in the present. Through my research I found connections between the 4 Morrill Act and apiculture and so my first chapter proceeds by weaving together strands of history in order to illustrate the colonial inheritances that animate the industry. My second chapter uses discourse analysis to read Greenpeace’s “save the bees” campaign and draw out the implications at play in their mode of communication. 1.1.1 Recursions To examine the durability of ‘imperial formations’—the sedimented imperial effects inscribed upon lands—I take up Stoler’s recursive method. Stoler adopts this approach from Foucault, for whom “history is marked by the uneven, unsettled, contingent quality of histories that fold back on themselves and, in that refolding, reveal new surfaces, and new planes” (p. 26). This approach does not conceive of history as chronological succession but rather “as a history that builds on earlier strategies of governance without rehearsing what became before” (p. 31). Using the notion of “colonial presence” (p. 33), Stoler signals the presence of multiple temporalities in order to “distinguish between a past that is imagined to be over but persists, reactivates, and recurs in transfigured forms” (p. 33). Sundberg (2018) notes that recursive analytics take on increased importance if we recognise US settler colonialism as an imperial formation in our present moment. She writes that, “[s]ettler colonialism in the United States is built on erasing, repudiating or eliminating the existence of other territorialities, other claims to sovereignty, other modes of sociality contained within the bounds of domestic space” (p. 538). A salient example of enduring formations in the settler nations of North America are medievally derived legal principles like terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery which have been key technologies of power for the seizure of Indigenous lands. Terra nullius rendered lands not governed by Christian European sovereigns as up for grabs, open to transposing the 5 conquerors right to the “new” lands. The Doctrine of Discovery emerges from a Papal Bull that rested upon terra nullius as a legal principle which European imperialists utilized to legitimize their claims as having precedence over Indigenous political orders. The United States relied on this centuries old Doctrine for its instantiation and expansion. The Doctrine surfaced numerous times throughout the centuries from the 1787 constitution to the Supreme Courts adoption of the Doctrine in the Johnson v. M’Intosh case of 1823 to the national mythology of Manifest Destiny.3 Underneath the veneer of rationality that inheres in legal doctrines lurks a mish-mash of images, stories, and figures that animated these different scenes in the history of colonization. The figure of Man and his hierarchical relationships to more-than-human beings and dehumanized humans are durable forms that symbolically legitimize violent domination. I will examine how myths are re-worked and animated at different junctures as recursive folds in the imperial will to power. 3 Robert Williams writes: “Perhaps most important, Johnson’s, acceptance of the Doctrine of Discovery into United States law preserved the legacy of 1,000 years of European racism and colonialism directed against non-Western peoples. White society’s exercise of power over Indian tribes received the sanction of the Rule of Law in Johnson v. McIntosh. The Doctrine of Discovery’s underlying medievally derived ideology—that normatively divergent “savage” peoples could be denied rights and status equal to those accorded to the civilized nations of Europe—had become an integral part of the fabric of United States federal Indian law. The architects of an idealized European vision of life in the Indians’ New World had successfully transplanted an Old World form of legal discourse denying all respect to the Indians’ fundamental human rights. While the tasks of conquest and colonization had not yet been fully actualized on the entire American continent, the originary legal rules and principles of federal Indian law set down by Marshall in Johnson v. McIntosh and its discourse of conquest ensured that future acts of genocide would proceed on a rationalized, legal basis” (p. 317). For further reading on terra nullius and the Doctrine of Discovery see Dahl, A. (2018). 6 I work with Stoler’s “occluded histories of empire” (p. 10) to parse “acts of obstruction—of categories, concepts, and ways of knowing that disable linkages to imperial practice and that often go by other names” (p. 10). By weaving together histories of colonial land grabbing and the institutional production of scientific apiculture, I show how commercial beekeeping and its attendant problems in the present can be understood as durable imperial forms propelled by improvement imperatives that legitimized settler claims to Indigenous lands. I also suggest that taking the human as the sole agents of history works to occlude the ways more-than-human beings co-produce history. Highlighting processes of ecological imperialism as a necessary component of colonial history also remediates the occlusion of other-than-humans. 1.1.2 Rendering The second theoretical resource driving this thesis is Nicole Shukin’s examination of animal capital and intervention in conceptualizations of the biopolitical. The philosopher Michel Foucault (1995) conceptualized biopower to parse changes in the field of power relations at the rise of modernity. For Foucault, the seventeenth century prompted a shift as the deductive power of sovereign rule was displaced and incorporated into a new positive “technology of power centered on life” (p. 144). The species body as object came to be framed in two discrete and related forms: “disciplines” or “an anatomo-politics of the human body” and “regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population” (p. 139). Disciplinary power facilitates forms of subjectivation that exceed the overdetermination of the sovereign’s death oriented relation to the legal subject. This form of power optimizes subjects’ investments in the ongoingness of the social body through cascading scales – from the subject, to the family to the military, the police, the medical apparatus. Meanwhile, the development of knowledges related to demography and 7 statistics enabled a fine-tuning of the “circular process” (p. 142) of economic development, agricultural production, and increases in productivity resulting in “a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death” (p. 142). The articulation of these two modes of power form the biopolitical, a figure of saturation “that is emphatic about multiple forms of power operating not sequentially but simultaneously” (Stoler, p.28). Productive power, is “bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,” rather than “impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them” (Foucault, p. 136). This form of power is a key element in the development of capitalism, for “the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” (p. 141). Shukin’s critical reading of biopower suggests an “internal limit at the species line,” (p. 11). In other words, she argues, anthropocentrism constrains biopolitical analyses by missing the role more-than-human beings play in capitalist markets. This more capacious understanding of biopolitics takes the species line to task, asking how techniques of massification and scientific management have been applied to non-human animals at different stages of capitalism. For example, Nimmo (2015) argues that both the factory farm and industrial apiculture can be conceived as “technopolitical apparatus[es] of disciplinary power over vital processes, rather than as system[s] of domination over individual nonhuman subjects” (p. 12). This form of disciplinary power works by “enacting the disciplinary subordination of life to capital accumulation via the systematic application of mechanistic rationality to vital processes” (p. 12). To analyze animal capital in biopolitical times, Shukin elaborates the rubric of rendering. To render can denote representation—for example, to render the likeness of an object. More 8 carnally, rendering implies the industrial boiling of animal remains to recycle material back into the market. This dual sense is important for biopolitical critique because, biopower never operates solely through the power to reproduce life literally, via the biological capital of the specimen or species, nor does it operate solely through the power to reproduce it figuratively via the symbolic capital of the animal sign, but instead operates through the power to hegemonize both the meaning and matter of life. (20) Shukin’s approach to biopolitics takes seriously the ways symbolic and literal commerce co-constitute capitalist reproduction in non-symmetrical ways. This “double entendre of rendering” (p. 21) enables a tracking of animal capital “across the spaces of culture and economy” and illuminates “the supplementarity of discourses and technologies normally held to be unrelated” (p. 20). Rendering is a useful analytic for reading commercial beekeeping because the sign of the honey bee circulates alongside the materiality of industry. By refusing to privilege either symbolic or substantive modes of production, this form of critique seeks to understand how they traffic between one another as coupled sites and effects of power. This tactic is meant to sidestep both symbolic and economic essentialisms by refusing a semiologic reductionism that privileges discourse as constituting the entirety of social space while also rejecting the point of view that signs represent an “ideological smokescreen” (p. 26) that cover over economic realities. This approach suggests “[t]he material rendering of animals is not the empirical “truth” that gives lie to its other, the representational economy of rendering; the two are the immanent shapes mimesis takes in biopolitical times” (p. 51). Attending to figurative and material transits enables a reading of industrial beekeeping that reckons with both to elaborate a clearer understanding of contemporary bee politics. 9 Shukin takes the animal sign4 to task, noting the ways that symbolic circulations of animals easefully slip “[u]nder the universal alibi of species life, proverbially innocent of political designs” (p. 4-5). The charisma of animal signs flows from their association with nature, figured as apolitical and outside the realm of human politics, thus making them “unusually potent discursive alibis of power,” (p.5) with the capacity to fluctuate between rhetorical and literal realms. Further, animal signs have both Marxian and psychoanalytic fetish qualities: they work to efface the social relations necessary in producing the occulted object, the commodity, and “they serve as substitutes or “partial objects” filling in for a lost object of desire or originary wholeness that never did or can exist, save phantasmatically” (p. 3). My analysis will illustrate both fetishistic functions through showing the material and historical obfuscations at work in “save the bees” and by suggesting that the power of the phrase flows from ecological anxieties and accompanying desires for an idyllic, secure wilderness. 1.2 Settler Agriculture and Ecological Imperialism Colonization is necessarily a multi-species project. Crosby (1986) introduced the term ecological imperialism to address transformations that occur in the composition of ecological communities brought forth from colonial contact. Whether the introduction of species from the so-called old world was a deliberate undertaking or an accidental by-product of travel5, the 4 A sign is the basic unit of meaning is a system of signification. Signs are composed of a signifier (expression of the sign) and a signified (associations produced by the sign). The interpretation of signs embeds them within shared interpretative frameworks or codes. Crucially, signs are shifting, unstable, and polysemic, meaning their associations can change in relation to different users. (Foote and Azaryahu, 2009) 5 Mann spins a fantastic story attributing the introduction of the common nightcrawler and red marsh worms to the Americas via John Rolfe’s tobacco side hustle. In this tale, the worms were tucked into soil used as ballast for 10 importation of biota rapidly altered the shape of ecologies in colonized sites. Such transformations were fundamental to establishing settler colonial societies, which are characterized by a “to-stay” quality. Agriculture, which facilitates and maintains settler societies, necessitates the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and subsequent possession of native lands (Wolfe, 2013; Rotz 2017). Virginia Anderson (2004) shows that early English colonization of the Americas was carried out through “an English-style agrarian regime but also the imposition of English cultural expectations” (p. 8). Colonists placed tremendous value on this organization and imaginary of agrarian life. For instance, English colonists enrolled domesticated animals imported from Europe to cultivate lands rendered as terra nullius. In this worldview, the rearing of animal livestock was associated with civilization and improvement. The idea of improvement became an important point of legitimation for English claims to Indigenous lands. Kay Anderson (2003) suggests the proceedings of empire and its practices of agriculture and settlement can be understood as re-citating the myth of humanity’s ascent from nature, reaching back to Antiquity and biblical parable. Anderson’s sketch of this myth reads: The… linking of cultivation and human potentiality [as] problematic turns on the image in Western tradition of the Earth as Garden. This tale privileges a teleological course of agrarian land use and livelihood - one that carries not only a heavy humanist baggage, but an ethnocentric one as well. In this narrative, the movement of history is the march of humanity, which has its ultimate manifestation in the secure enclosure of the City, where voyages across the Atlantic. As the ballast was dumped to empty barrels for tobacco, these critters were set loose, changing ecologies along the Eastern seaboard through their voracious consumption of leaf litter. See 1493, pps. 51-54. 11 the expanse of nature ends or is ‘brought in’ in proudly domesticated forms (Rundell and Mennell 1998; Beilin 1999). Greek writings on husbandry for example, perhaps especially such agricultural manuals as Virgil’s Bucolics and Georgics (see Thirsk 1984) suggest that the human, in transforming the nonhuman world with the arts of animal and plant domestication, was history’s defining agent. (pps. 424-5) To locate the role of agriculture within this fantasy, Anderson situates the agricultural show and the spectacle displayed therein—the panoply of livestock species, crops, machinery—as an inheritor of Western civilizational separation from nature. To demonstrate this point, Anderson shows how contemporary agricultural shows recycle tropes foundational to mapping a colonial worldview. For instance, the Royal Agricultural Show in Sydney has been an annual event since 1890 and features core imaginative structures from the colonial foundation of New South Wales (NSW) at the end of the 18th century. The creation of an agricultural society in NSW in the 1820’s was catalyzed by these myths where, “[a]ccording to the public spirit of agricultural improvement, Aboriginal people, in roaming rather than reaping the land, had yet to realize their full human potential (as civilizing agents)” (p. 430). In other words, by counterposing progressive settler agriculture with the nomadic lifeways of Aboriginal peoples, the shows produce an inherently racialized figure of the human. The show inherits the imperial mentality invested in mastery, improvement, and settlement, an imaginary that articulates “Man’s” trajectory out of so-called nature. In Anderson’s reading, the agricultural show as genre functioned as “the dramatized enactment and re-enactment of the normative tale of civilization” (433). Displays like the disciplined parading of cattle breeds through the city to the showgrounds were meant to illustrate human ingenuity over more-than-human worlds as evinced by the spectacle of mastery. 12 However, instances of bovine rebellion exposed the fragility of this fantasy, revealing cracks of excess in the self-proclaimed rational project. Improvement imperatives in both Kay and Virginia Anderson’s accounts are achieved through particular forms of agriculture. Undergirded by a worldview that rives a specific and contingent production of the human from the natural world, this notion of separation is adorned by a moral quality associated with land use. The coupling of “cultivation and human potentiality” (Anderson, 2003, p. 423) is ensconced within, and productive of, a transhistoric frame where progress is at once parsed on a spectrum of primitive/civilized that takes on different shapes in specific space/times. Belcourt (2014) suggests colonial desires for agricultural improvement and massification operate through a racist and speciesist form of territorialization, which he characterizes as anthropocentric. Anthropocentrism, Belcourt suggests, takes white humanity as its normative reference, making the figure of Man into “the anchor of speciesism, capitalism, and settler colonialism” (p. 4). Anthropocentrism materializes along species lines, but also works to hierarchically separate “the white settler from blackness and indigeneity as animalized sites of tragedy, marginality, poverty, and primitivism” (p. 5). As such, the logic of anthropocentrism authorizes the expropriation of lands deemed as waste and the instrumental use of animals in industrial agriculture that “requires the disappearance of Indigenous bodies from the land” (p. 5). Man as a figure of self-proclaimed mastery is emblematic of colonial projects and their entitlements to lands and “domesticated animal bodies as sites of commodity/food production, eroticism, violence, and/or companionship” (p. 5). Settler colonial claims to land, thrust forward by improvement paradigms, produced the conditions for the eventual development of industrial agriculture. Following Goldstein (2013), 13 lands within a capitalist worldview can be understood as “terra economica” (p. 357) or “the historic production of a whole earth available to be worked upon and made profitable by rational economic actors” (p. 362). Goldstein uses the examples of transforming common wastes in England—lands not used directly for cultivation but key sites for sustaining peasant livelihoods—into wasted commons, deemed as unused or inefficiently used. The process of enclosure seized these “wasted” lands which, under the logic of improvement, were deemed as rife with a potential that was squandered in the hands of peasants6. Goldstein argues that enclosure was part of a broader shift in moral conceptions of value; even as “advocates of enclosure recognized the value that the commons had to the commoners, they considered this to be an inferior form of value, in both an economic and moral sense” (p. 370). Liboiron takes up Goldstein to show that “the logic of maximum extraction was at work not just in Britain, but also in its colonies” (p. 71). In this configuration of improvement, “[c]ivilization …become[s] identified with land use aligned with creating standing reserves to procure maximum economic value” (p. 72) and in the agricultural context, particular forms of “rational and scientific” (Goldstein, p. 363) cultivation. In North American settler colonial societies, capitalist industrial agriculture has become the dominant mode of food production and exemplifies the transformation of lands into terra economica. This form of agriculture “is built on and advanced by features specific to settler 6 Goldstein writes: “Enclosure pivoted on the transformation of wastage, from a political (and particular) to an economic (and general) offense. If wastage was the act of exhausting or diminishing another’s common right claim to a resource, then advocates for enclosure challenged that the entire edifice of common right was itself a wastage of the improvers’ economic right—presented as a natural right—to realize the maximum productive potential of all things, at all times, and in all ways transformed what property was in the first place” (p. 368). 14 colonial domination. Colonial land settlement conditioned capitalization, and specifically, the collaborative deployment of public and private capital in agrifood industrialization” (Rotz, p. 159). Characterized by vast “oceans’ of monocultures and ‘islands’ of factory farms and feedlots” (Weis 2016), industrial agriculture is organized through a growth imperative towards achieving economies of scale. The geographer Tony Weis (2010) writes, “[a] central tenet of capitalist economics is that economies of scale are synonymous with enhanced efficiency,” which generally “depend upon the standardization of production” (p 318). In Weis’s analysis: Agriculture poses particularly difficult problems for industrial-scale production. Though farmers have long wrestled with declining soil fertility and problems posed by insects, weeds, fungi and diseases, the biological simplification and standardization needed for industrial production magnifies these problems and necessitates the chronic use of a range of biophysical overrides, or what amount to perpetual short-term ‘fixes. (319) An emblematic instance of barriers to scale and an overarching threat to ongoing productivity in agriculture is soil degradation. Soil quality is a multi-faceted problem that is exacerbated by common industrial practices such as: “the use of ever larger and faster machines in ploughing, planting, spraying and fertilizing; the over-irrigation of land; the reduction of ground cover between rows; and declines in practices of fallowing” (Weis 319). To override exhausted soil, fossil fuel-soaked nitrogen fertilizers are used. While the application of such fertilizers might restore the productive capacity of the earth, externalities accumulate as toxic run off leaches into waterways (Weis 2016). The case of soil degradation exemplifies what Weis calls the “biophysical contradictions” (p. 316) of capitalist agriculture where limits are 15 overridden via quick fixes, although the fixes themselves mask “the deterioration of the very biophysical foundations of agriculture” (316). In sum, settler colonial claims to land, thrust forward by improvement paradigms, produced the conditions for the eventual development of industrial agriculture, a system that represents itself as the pinnacle of mastery through mass yields, yet which in practice degrades the very conditions that make its modes of production possible. Migratory beekeeping, I suggest, is part and parcel of this system. 1.3 Commercial Beekeeping In this section, I provide a brief history of economic beekeeping and then give an overview of the industry in recent years. As I illustrate, economic entomology and scientific beekeeping both manifest through the improvement imperative. Turning to the institutional formation of these fields, I suggest the precarious state of honeybee health today is not anomalous but one outcome of “the historically established social organization of knowledge production” about bees (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman p. 6). 1.3.1 History of Scientific Beekeeping There are over 20,000 species of bees in the world and honeybees are one of the few eusocial species (Wilson and Carrill, 2015). In other words, while the majority of bees are solitary, honeybees are a social species that live and work together as a “superorganism” (Seeley, 2010, p. 17) where the collective functions as a single unit. Their societies are stratified into various classes with a clear division of labour that work towards the ongoingness of the colony. Honeybees are both effective generalist pollinators and producers of honey, making them alluring to humans for the services they provide. 16 Indeed, honey bees and humans have a long history as companion species. Theories of hominid evolution suggest that the development of larger brains is metabolically expensive and “would have required the consumption of energy-rich foods to fuel the expansion” (Crittenden, p. 166). Crittenden posits that the consumption of honey and larvae from honeybees might have contributed to hominid neural expansion, hinting at an inter-species relationship that exceeds the temporal span of Homo sapiens. Humans and bees came into “semi-domesticated” relations “about 7,000 years ago in Egypt, through the management of colonies in human-created hives, and for thousands of years, small-scale beekeeping was common in northern Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Europe” (Ellis et al., p. 6). Small scale keeping has largely constituted the historical norm in which the thousands of years old interspecies relationship “has often been a mutually beneficial one, though probably benefitting humans to a greater degree” (Ellis et al., p. 6). Economic entomology as a field of study consolidated after the passing of the Morrill Act in 1862. This Act was meant to support the establishment of agricultural and mechanical institutions. As the United States expanded its continental control through suites of legislation like the Morrill Act and the Hatch Act of 1887 which established research stations for each state of the Union, the opening arose for “establishment of entomology as a fully professionalized scientific discipline” (Palladino, 1996, p. 26). Economic entomology concerns itself with agricultural production and since its inception in the United States, the management of species deemed as pests. Palladino shows economic entomology supported the development of a chemical-control based agriculture through the study and production of insecticides. This approach to the study of insects primarily centered on finding the most effective ways to eradicate them. Suryanarayanan and Kleinman write: “[e]ntomological studies of the life 17 histories, biology, and behavior of insects in turn were geared toward identifying ways to enhance the lethal action of various insecticides on pest insects—to find better chemical means to kill” (p. 43). In the United States, apiculture, or honeybee science, developed within this paradigm of economic entomology. Proponents of scientific beekeeping like E.P Thompson advocated for professional, science-propelled, large-scale beekeeping outfits (Andrews, 2020). This form of scientific management was distinguished from small scale keepers; apicultural advocates largely derided amateurs and accredited their poor beekeeping with the spread of pathogens. The professionalization of beekeeping that began in the early 20th century set the stage for the business of pollination in post-world II industrial agricultural landscapes. 1.3.2 Migratory Beekeeping Kosek (2010) writes, “[t]he bee is being remade, both materially and symbolically, creating a crisis in a relationship thousands of years old that has led to a dramatic drop in the population of bees” (p. 669). Honeybee population declines are attributed to a number of factors immanent to the mode of production in which they are enrolled. At the end of World War II there were “between 5 and 6 million” hives “compared to today’s 2.5 million, which is much closer to the 1940 census of 2.3 million” (Kosek, 2019, p. 155). According to Kosek, the doubling of bee populations during the war was facilitated by the state in order to produce wax to coat munitions and supplement sugar rations. After World War II, the United States ushered in “the establishment of an increasingly highly chemically dependent industrial agriculture” (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman, p. 55). The simplification of agriculture through monocropping—”the practice of planting a single variety of crop at high densities on a given piece of land” (p. 55)—increased yields but also exacerbated 18 crop vulnerability to pests and disease. Chemical weapons developed during World War II were adapted into industrial agriculture and the increased use of pesticides reduced populations of wild pollinators. Simultaneously, the cultivation of lucrative pollinator-dependent crops came in vogue (Potts et. al 2010). All of these factors created the conditions for the emergence of large-scale migratory, managed pollination services. In the business of bees, there are two main sources of value—honey production and pollination services. The economic value of pollination services is “about 150 times that of honey and beeswax combined” (Kosek, 2019, p. 156), which means that “all industrial beekeepers rely primarily on pollination to remain in business” (p. 157). Migratory keepers place large numbers of hives onto semi-trailers and travel to varied crops at their bloom times in order provide the pollination necessary for adequate fruit set. Richie Nimmo (2015) dubs the apparatus which enables commercial beekeeping in North America the “apis-industrial complex” (p. 185). The term draws attention to the entwinement of capitalist agribusiness and the state to get at the “web of commodity flows both as input costs (hives, antibiotics, pesticides, feed, new colonies and queens, trucking) and revenue streams (pollination services and bee products)” (Ellis et al., p. 13). In a stark assessment, Ellis et al. (2020) suggest the current state of honeybees in North America is a dramatic departure from “the free gift of pollination” (11) that shaped historic relations between humans and their ecologic worlds. As they write, “the demand for pollination is a barrier to scale for certain crops that has led to the rise of pollination services, which constitutes an unappreciated biophysical override in industrial capitalist agriculture.” Endemic to the subsector itself, barriers to scale include pests, pathogens, and poor nutrition. The “apis-industrial-complex can be seen as a profound betrayal 19 of the age-old interspecies relation between humans and bees” (p. 13) due to the deteriorating health of colonies contributing to declining populations year after year. 1.3.3 Commodi-faunation and Bees as Lively Commodities In the capitalist mode of production, honeybees are enrolled as “lively commodities” or “live commodities whose capitalist value is derived from their status as living beings” (Collard and Dempsey, 2013, p. 2684). The value produced by lively commodities flows from their vitality. With honeybees this worth manifests through their pollinating labour. Collard and Dempsey’s (2017, pps. 78-80) analysis of non-human relationships to capitalism suggests “the production of hierarchical difference is crucial to the production of value”. Utilizing the insights of eco-feminists like Maria Mies, Collard and Dempsey bring to bear the notion of social reproduction as a lens to analyze the devalued yet necessary labour of non-human beings in the generation of value as the basis of capitalist accumulation. The work of Apis mellifera is in constant oscillation between orientations to capitalism, shuttling between officially valued, underground, and threat. As officially valued entities, honeybees are considered commodities, or commodified beings as indicated by the international trade in bees. The underground constitutes the unwaged/undervalued labour that goes into capitalist production such as ecosystem services and social reproduction. Finally, those deemed as threats endanger the production of value. The labour of the lively commodity “does not belong to them the way that labour belongs to the waged labourer who sells it as a commodity but is not a commodity him/herself”, write Collard and Dempsey (p. 86). Yet, while functioning in the frame of commodities, the work of bees also constitutes the underground—the obscured yet foundational context from which capitalism can function. Without pollination services, crop yields would decline severely. Honey 20 bees oscillate between officially valued and underground orientations. They are enrolled in the market as lively commodities able to be bought and sold, their labour highly prized. Simultaneously they provide important ecological services that are used towards the production of crops providing the background for the generating profit. Finally, honeybees enter the orientation of threat when their productive capacity is limited and works against the value production. Sick bees can transmit diseases and pathogens leading to the destruction of entire hives. Excess bees at the end of the pollination season must be culled for overwintering, lest the bees swarm and weaken the original colony, “a stark economical violence that is a necessary part of contemporary industrial agrarian life” (Kosek 2019, 166). Weis (2018, p. 135) offers the figures of “animal ghosts and things” to articulate the conjoined dynamics of commodification and biologic simplification on animal life. The “commodi-faunation” (139) or transformation of animals into commodities is not hermetically sealed from the lives of their wild counterparts but rather points to the relationships between industrial agriculture and its impacts on the life capacities of wild animals through processes of habitat fragmentation and despoliation. For instance, the introduction of commercial honeybees via agriculture may introduce competition and pathogen spillover to native pollinators (Potts et al. 2010; Valido et al. 2019; Colla and McIvor 2016). The re-organization of habitats at work in industrial agriculture coupled with lack of companion forage in monocrop systems can be understood through the lenses of commodi-faunation and its corollary defaunation with the qualifier that commercial honeybee populations are experiencing intensified losses due to a convergence of factors (Kleinman and Suryanarayan 2016). 21 1.4 Map of the Chapters The two chapters to follow engage with different problematics that arise in the realm of industrial bee life. The first chapter offers a historical perspective in order to place industrial beekeeping in the colonial past and present. Structured around the Morrill Act and its role in the modernization of apiculture, I use a recursive analytics to illustrate the historical precedents that inform the ratification of the Act. I also show how cyclical imperial imaginaries of civilization and improvement surface at historical conjunctures to inform the colonial organization of agriculture and legitimize settler claims to land. Honey bees appear in colonizing discourses as both models of a stratified society and justification of imperial expansion as England’s population grew. Simultaneously, the honey bees introduction to the Americas fit into imaginative schema of a land of milk and honey while their presence contributed to the establishment of settler agriculture. While the chapter concerns itself with honey bees, I also provide an account of important conjunctures in the formation of the United States to give flesh to developments from early contact to the establishment of the settler state. The second chapter builds on the foundation laid from the histories I weave to show how industrial agriculture inherits and perpetuates this colonial history. I take Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign to task in order to illustrate some common tendencies in communication work surrounding honey bees and the implications this has for conservation outcomes. I use the rubric of rendering as my analytic approach because it allows me to hold both symbolic and material currencies as coevally producing the field of power. I will also discuss Shukin’s closed loops of animal capital as this allows me to get at the contradictions at work in biopolitical management regimes. The undoing of this mode of production lays immanently within its own closed loops. Discourses to “save the bees” not only obscure the material realities from which bee declines proceed, but may also contribute to the recursive propulsion of capitals interminability. 22 “[T]he historical time that we thought was past turns out to structure the contemporary field with a persistence that gives lie to history as chronology.” -Judith Butler (2006, p. 54) 2 Colonial Imaginaries and the Modernization of Apiculture 2.1 Introduction To understand the shape of industrial beekeeping, turning to historical conjunctures draws into focus disavowed lines of inheritance and brings into relief the ways the past structures the present. In what is now known as North America, the apparatus of industrial agriculture and sub-sector commercial beekeeping emerged from centuries of colonization (Drayton 2000; Weis 2007; Purdy 2016; Rotz 2017). As Belcourt (2015) notes, the production of space is key to colonial territorialization. Societal relations to animal life are a crucial node that facilitates a colonial “mode of relationship” (Karuka, 2019, p. 31) based on the destruction of Indigenous lifeways and a “loss of biodiversity” (p. 31)7 . Empire, Burton and Mawani (2020, p. 6), suggest, is always already a “multi-species project”. This chapter tracks colonial imaginative geographies and material relations to Apis mellifera, the European honeybee. More specifically, I argue that federal economic entomology 7 Karuka notes that territorialization, the inscription of place with lines that mark out a territory, is a key technology of imperialism. He writes: “Territorialization proceeds through terror, inscribing a certain space as a space of violence. Scholars of territory have drawn an etymology for the term not to terra, meaning land or terrain, but to terrēre, to frighten, so that territory and terrorism are profoundly linked in conceptions of imperial sovereignty. The historiography of the settler “nation” has a territorializing function. Territorialization also occurs through military occupation and infrastructure development. Territorialization spans species, involving a direct assault on Indigenous modes of relationship” (P. 32). 23 and the formation of honeybee science must be analyzed within the frame of settler colonialism in order to gain a stronger bearing on the colonial present. Enfolding the modern practice of commercial beekeeping within this lineage draws the colonial past and present into discussion, opening the possibility for a set of questions and speculations to be posited in regards to the ways the contemporary moment of apicultural uncertainty has come to be, and what kinds of responses are warranted. How might thinking about commercial honeybees within the frame of ecological imperialism shift our understanding of the industry? What kinds of responsibilities do we owe towards species whose presence in place is tethered to colonial migration? How has the development of large-scale apiculture benefited from, and contributed to, the colonial project of the United States? Following Belcourt, how do we understand settler colonialism’s relationships to non-human animals, in this case honeybees, as those that “normalize settler modes of political life” (p. 9-10)? To address these questions, this chapter centers on the 1862 Morrill Act to illustrate its relation to the development of industrial apiculture. I take a long view approach in order to contextualize the Act as animated by various imperial formations. First, I offer an account of honeybees and colonialism in the Americas pre-Morrill Act. This section looks at the ways honeybees figured into colonizing discourses and highlights key historical moments that contributed to the formation of the United States. In order to understand transformations in agricultural governance in the shift to industrial paradigms—and how honeybees fit into these changes—I mobilize these histories to show how durable, recursive, and vulgar imaginaries surface at different conjunctures. A throughline will be the ways that value inheres in specific visions of agriculture as a metric to authorize settler claims to land via improvement imperatives. I then provide an overview of the Morrill Act and illustrate how it functioned through colonial 24 expropriation and racial hierarchies. Finally, I connect the Morrill Act to Cornell University, one of its biggest beneficiaries as well as the heart of the modernization of apiculture in the United States. By weaving together these histories, I aim to show that industrial beekeeping is structured by colonial relationships to land. 2.1.1 Empire and Ecology The spread and management of A mellifera in the centuries post-contact are forms of ecological imperialism. European colonization cannot be understood as solely attributed to the actions of colonizing humans but must account for the broad assembly of species brought over from the so-called Old World. Following Maura Capps’ (2017)8 work on the introduction of grass species in New Zealand between 1780-1830, I note that ecological imperialism takes on different characteristics at specific times and places. From the earlier haphazard and incidental forms of biological spread that Crosby (1986) argued were key to the success of early European projects of colonization, to a regime of management painstakingly undertaken by settlers to facilitate burgeoning forms of agricultural modernization, attention to the changing frames of ecological imperialism enables an analysis of imperialism and colonialism that reckons with relationships to the more-than-human world. 8 I bring in Capps’ work here because I find her careful account of fodder crops in New Zealand to be a noteworthy intervention in normative assumptions in discussions of ecological imperialism, and a good reminder to attend to the granularity of history. Capps writes “against an uninterrogated division in the literature on ecological imperialism between a chaotic, unscientific, and apolitical ecological imperialism in the early modern period and a methodical, scientific, politicized ecological imperialism in the modern period” (p. 533). Neither pole can sufficiently capture the historical period she is working in where fodder crops spread prolifically. Rather colonial administrators, naturalists, and pastoralists had a hand in spreading the grasses yet this milieu lacked the institutionalized power of later forms of scientific management. 25 Ecological imperialism is a prerequisite for the establishment of settler agriculture in America because the introduction of species from the ‘Old World’ were necessary to organize English style agrarian regimes. As Anderson (2004) writes, colonists resorted to familiar ideas about animals as a way of imposing order on a strange New World, of making it into a place more like home. An essential part of their strategy was the assertion of dominion over animals, a relationship that the English considered both natural and divinely sanctioned. (p. 45) Particular agricultural practices represented the actualization of Man’s ascent out of nature through the exercise of mastery over non-human beings via sedentary cultivation and livestock husbandry (Anderson 2003). These forms of agrarian life were spurred on by improvement imperatives that saw ‘unused’ or improperly used lands as waste. The claiming of Indigenous lands for settler agriculture was then legitimized through this perception of cultivation and production; the land practices of Indigenous nations were illegible to colonist eyes. Belcourt (2015) argues for a “politics of space” to understand how “settler moves to knowing and/or constructing animal bodies …(re)locates animals within particular geographic and architectural spaces” (p 3). Here “[t]he insertion of animal bodies into specific industrialized, colonized, and vacated spaces is therefore the gesture through which animality is made intelligible and material in the settler imagination” (p 3). Settler relationships to animals are characterized by dominance and instrumentality; animals are valued insofar as they are productive for settler projects. Further, settler agriculture is propelled forward by a multi-faceted anthropocentrism that places white settlers at the top of a hierarchy as inheritors of the figure of Man with entitlements to native lands, racialized labour, and the bodies of non-human animals; this figuration is a driving engine behind state territorialization. 26 2.1.2 Recursive Analytics Through narrating some of the historical, imaginative9, and material contexts that created the political conditions for the Morrill Act to emerge, I read the ways in which the realm of fantasy was put to work in empire’s processes of accumulation and dispossession. From this view, empire must be understood within the frame of ecological contact where colonial articulations to and with lands and beings are refracted through a terrain of mobile power relations. Recursive imaginaries were re-worked and used at different moments in history to legitimize colonial expansion and the development of a rapacious capitalist economic system. Following Stoler, these recursions were not merely recurrences, but rather “strategically altered” in “piecemeal combination” (p. 30). Colonial projects since contact have drawn on a wealth of imaginative resources which inform the material proceedings of empire. Early modern British environmental imaginaries blended Protestant notions of providentiality,10 imperially invigorated categorical sciences, and 9 I use the terms imaginative, fantasy, and symbolic interchangeably in this discussion. 10 The notion of the providential imaginary comes from Purdy (2015). Forms of imagination are key concepts in his book where imagination gets at “how we see and how we learn to see, how we suppose the world works, how we suppose that it matters, and what we feel we have at stake in it” (p. 7). Imagination then, is a basis of relationships to more-than-human worlds. The providential vision imagines the natural world as divinely given: bounty could be had with the correct mixture of labour and settlement. Of course, Purdy notes that the early settlers met a world quite resistant to their efforts to inhabit lands. The possibility of a continental empire centuries later is driven by a renewed providential imagination that becomes available only after the American revolution. Of course, this democracy and urge to expand was underwritten by numerous exclusions and subjugations upon which the wealth of America was dependent on. 27 morally inflected ideas surrounding agriculture.11 Within this realm of fantasy and knowledge production the figure of the honeybee entered colonizing discourses in ways that legitimated the dispersal of colonists to the Americas. Simultaneously, this representation articulated self-referential notions of value and productivity rendering objects outside the episteme as excess or waste. Two centuries later the violent and contested seizure of Indigenous lands coupled with the wealth and politics accumulated through enslavement provided the political conditions for the colonies to break away from England and formed the republic of the United States. American claims to land underpinned and animated by a re-worked providential imaginary were enacted through forms of continental imperialism via railways, agriculture, and the spread of settlers westward. Conjoined with these processes of expansion and industrialization was the modernization of apiculture, in part facilitated by legislation like the 1862 Morrill Act and the Hatch Act of 1887 which expropriated Indigenous lands in the service of creating public institutions for agricultural and mechanical education. 11 Drayton (2000) traces this orientation to the doubled character of Adam in the book of Genesis. Adam the Sovereign whose domain is nature is supplemented by Adam the toiler who must labour in the fallen world to bring draw out its underlying perfection. This story paired well with a society which had felt the nearness of famine and so lent credence to the moralization of an agriculture based on improvement, employment, and the use of lands perceived as idle. Chained to this notion of improvement was private property and processes of enclosure. This “ideology of agrarian improvement” (p. 55) was used to justify the expropriation of lands deemed unoccupied or inefficiently used. Drayton specifically notes that: “In Virginia and Massachusetts, agriculture had a similar importance, as conquest there was also justified by use and Adam right” (p. 55). See Drayton’s Chapter 3 “The Useful Garden: Agriculture and the Science of Government” for a longer account of this ideology as it develops throughout the duration of British empire. 28 2.2 Pre-Morrill Act Bees and Colonialism This section draws out some of the methods through which different manifestations of empire—from the early English colonists to the young American republic—used to understand themselves and authorize their standing as polities. Honeybees figured in colonial discourses throughout encounter, whether as images used to denigrate those designated as surplus, or as emblems of productivity. As well, the materials reaped from beekeeping and honey-hunting contributed to the imperial shape of life as valuable resources. This chapter takes environmental imaginaries as key nodal points in understanding the ways humans and more-than-human beings are tangled up in imperial projects. Attention to the churning citations, iterations, and breaks in the realm of fantasy may assist in understanding the unfolding of historical processes. From myths recovered from antiquity to interpretations of Biblical verse and forms of legislation derived therein, the history from which the United States emerges and the forms of continental imperialism thereafter are shot through with contradictions and reveal the will to empire’s recursive harnessing of imaginative realms. 2.2.1 Early Modern Bees and Imperial Imaginaries Although European honeybees did not make their way to the Americas until around the 1620s, their image and valued productions figured prominently in Elizabethan colonizing discourses. For instance, legal scholar Robert A Williams (1990) draws attention to a passage from naval commander Christopher Carleill’s 1583 pamphlet “A Brief and Summary Discourse upon the Intended Voyage to the Furthermost Parts of America,” which features the bounty of the hive as part and parcel of the paternalistic and land hungry imperial rhetoric of the English. Williams (p. 161) notes the “intentional derivativeness” of Carleill’s pamphlet, which functionally reiterated and reified English justifications for colonization that flowed from figures such as Richard Hakluyt. In this tract, Carleill suggests that the lands of so-called America 29 provided a rich source of commodities, and further, might be coaxed and organized to produce an assembly of valuable goods. He writes: The Countrey people being made to know, that for Wax and honey, we will give them such trifling things as they desire of us, and shewing them the means how to produce the same, the labour thereof being so light, no doubt but in short time they will earnestly care to have the same in good quantities for us. (Carleill qtd. in Quinn, pps. 356-7) As Williams (p. 161) points out, here the “[e]xploitation of the natives was to be the basis of trade” wherein the English ‘gifts’ of civilization would engender a shift in Indigenous lifeways, eventually resulting in an output of materials comparable to trade routes in Europe. Wax and honey, those prized substances, were rich signs of value and productivity in the English worldview. In this colonial fantasy, the enjoined labour of Indigenous peoples and introduced honeybees would induce a shift wherein the wastes of untamed and unused wilderness would become mercantilist hubs for trade, boons to the burgeoning empire. Of course, this egocentric and self-referential vision distributed a particularly English metric of value and legibility, rendering pre-existing Indigenous worlds as illegible excess that required the enlightened knowledge of the English and their particular environmental organizations to become productive and hence, profitable. This imaginary articulated a portent of the ecological imperialism to come, where the Europe’s “portmanteau biota”12 (Crosby 1986, p. 291) would commence the Europeanization of space: transformations in the composition of ecological communities. The introduction of Old World species produced conditions of 12 Portmanteau Biota is Crosby’s term for the assemblage of European non-human animals and the organisms they brought with them in imperial projects. 30 “continual disruption” (p. 292) as European symbolic realms of value crossed with environments, albeit in fragmentary, non-totalizing ways.13 Williams (p. 161) suggests that Carleill’s discourse contained one novel innovation that brought together Protestant anxieties surrounding the expansion of Catholicism—to be curtailed by converting the peoples of the Americas to the true Christian doctrine—with the pressure valve theory of colonization.14 This irruption in the shape of discourse took poverty as its object. Historically, the impoverished and destitute were a matter of the church. Now, they were becoming a matter of societal concern. The nobility at this time was dogged by fear of societal unrest: while riches were had in some parts of the country, famine and poverty also reigned. This upper-class dread of potential revolt dovetailed with Queen Elizabeth’s royal beekeeper Charles Butler’s 1609 publication, The Feminine Monarchie. His hypothesis suggested a tripartite structure of labour in the domain of bees, not only displacing the common notion that a king, not a queen, “ruled the hive” (Horn, 2005, p. 6) but delineating the ‘common’ bees as the female workers, who laboured virtuously, seemingly without rest, whereas the male 13 See Blackhawk (2013) for a brief account of the Columbian exchange’s impact on historiography. Saliently, Blackhawk points out that Crosby’s vision often comes across as totalizing and unidirectional, eliding the ways that imperialism was co-produced through contact with Indigenous peoples throughout the centuries post contact. 14 Williams notes that Carleill’s discourse takes on the “low” form of the pressure-valve theory following Humphrey Gilbert. The Reformation induced societal transformations wherein poverty was no longer considered to be a holy state or the sole responsibility of the eleemosynary Church. The threat of a criminalized and unemployable underclass shuttled questions of poverty into the realm of control and order. One proposal for this problem lay in colonization: shipping off a portion of the swelling lower classes would not only quell the likelihood of rebellion at home, but also secure England’s presence in America, positioning it as a leader in the emerging world trading system. See pgs 43-44. 31 drones were a slothful lot.15 Those viewed as the idle poor were described as drones, a label suggesting immorality flowing from languor, which took its figurative strength from collective images of male honey bees resting lackadaisically on flowers or driven from the hive at summers’ end to perish with the coming lean seasons.16 From the perspective of the English colonizing discourses, imaginaries of America represented aims of the will to empire: the paternal discourse of Protestant conversion that would not only Christianize Indigenous peoples, but in so doing, open a new source of labour and lands; an abundance of natural resources ripe for transforming into commodities and hence sources of wealth; a vast land that could serve as a release valve for the growing population—the burgeoning, criminalized underclass which set fear into the hearts of the nobility. Indeed, the vociferous promoter of colonial expansion, Richard Hakluyt (1582) writes of the swarm in his preface to Divers Voyages, utilizing the honeybees’ habits of propagation to justify imperial expansion. Hakluyt wrote: We reade that the Bees, when they grow too many in their own hive at home, are wont to be led out by their Captaines to swarm abroad, and seek them selves a new dwelling 15 Kupperman’s (1995) work shows that the beehive served as a model for organizing society, and especially colonies, in the early modern period. When each member enacted their role, the commonwealth prospered. Only strong leadership produced the discipline necessary for the societies proper function. Hierarchy, then, played an important role in assuring order. See “The Beehive as a Model for Colonial Design” for an extended discussion. 16 Horn (2005), citing Kishlansky (1997), writes that the royal classes began dividing the poor as either impotent or idle in the 1600s. While the impotent poor—largely consisting of widows, disabled people, orphans—were exempted from moral judgements, the idle poor—classes of people who were unemployed, improperly employed, or who laboured in ways illegible to the authorities—were condemned as immoral. Upper class anxieties regarding rebellion surrounded those deemed the idle poor. 32 place. If the examples of the Grecians and Carthaginians of olde time, and the practice of our age may not move us, let us learn wisdom of these smal wake and unreasonable creatures. (Hakluyt qtd. in Hollingsworth, p. 97) Reading early modern English colonial discourses shows the multi-faceted ways honeybees were used in colonizing schemes whether as a model for a healthy commonwealth or a justification to expel populations deemed excessive and dangerous. Images of honeybees were just one manifestation of broader imperial imaginaries which were entangled with theological and political imperatives to expand. Tammy Horn (p. 5) suggests that visions of America at this time were animated around Cristobal Colon’s notion of the promise of a new Eden,17 a “land of milk and honey”,18 a providential land for those willing to actualize God’s divinity. In the contemporary American imagination, key events become sites of collective memory and function as origin stories for the nation. From this period an obvious point of mythologization lays in the voyage of the Pilgrims. 17 Paul (2014) notes that the Americas became a site for European projections of Utopia. See “Pilgrims and Puritans and the Myth of the Promised Land”. 18 Horne also notes that this pastoral vision of abundance was organized around two key species—cattle and honeybees. Horn suggests that the English nobility inserted Greek and Roman agrarian philosophies into their discourse and writes that the myth of Aristaeus prefigured the biblical imagination of milk and honey. In the myth Aristaeus, the provisioner of the Gods, must atone for the death of Eurydice. He makes a deal with the shape-changing God Proteus who tells him to sacrifice four bulls and four heifers untouched by the yoke and to return in nine days. According to Horn: “Aristaeus returned to find the carcasses of the cows teeming with swarms of bees. This image of cows and bees—so symbiotically connected—embodies the pastoral traditions in Greece and Rome. In other words, once this myth establishes a relationship between bees and cattle, it verifies an agrarian and interdependent civilization promoted as an ideal throughout the centuries.” 33 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2016) argues that the Pilgrim’s re-staging of the scene of the covenant became a focal point in the democratic imagination.19 Further, the national “ritual of memory” (Blee and O’Brien, 2021, p. 159) clustered around 1620—both as origin myth and yearly observance of Thanksgiving20—functions to claim an unbroken line of inheritance to the contemporary United States as if “[t]he Pilgrims were always already Americans, the land always already the United States” (160).21 In the stories the United States tells about itself, Plymouth was always Plymouth, covering over the history of the village of Patuxet—where the colony of Plymouth was built—and disavowing Wampanoag presence on the land. The Pilgrim’s Calvinist derived ideology was partly in response to perceived corruption in England, although as Purdy (2015) notes, the early New England settlers largely thought of themselves as sojourners who would eventually return to England and craft a holy government back home. Their particular providential imagination brought from the shores of England saw expressions of nature as acts of God’s will, and their 19 I like how Dunbar-Ortiz frames this scene, as an origin story. She posits that the United States is founded on a Christian borrowing of the Old Testament. Dunbar-Ortiz also notes the existence of other covenant states: Israel and the now defunct apartheid state South Africa. She writes: “According to the myths, the faithful citizens come together of their own free will and pledge to each other and to their god to form and support a godly society, and their god in turn vouchsafes them prosperity in a promised land” (p. 47). 20 Blee and O’Brien’s (2019) book shows the ways in which public memory is mobilized. The association of ‘the first Thanksgiving’ with the treaty negotiated between the Massasoit and the Pilgrims became ‘common knowledge’ near the middle of the 19th century when textual evidence from William Bradford and Edward Winslow became publicly available. 21 See Blee and O’Brien’s (2021) article for an account of the work Indigenous historians and intellectuals have undertaken in order contest settler memory and emphasize Wampanoag agency through the exhibit “Our” Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History. 34 interpretations of the land were both theological and practical. Settlers in both the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies perished at high rates, and according to Purdy, the hardship of settlement and accompanying death and illness was understood as both physical challenge and spiritual test.22 These juxtaposed environmental ideas of both a place which promised redemption from the fall of Man and an unruly wilderness within which the devil lurked were met with the materiality of “a land that resisted invasion rather than welcome settlement” (Purdy, p. 53). Regardless of the worldview brought to America, Dunbar-Ortiz (p. 49) reminds us that the survival of the early settlers was contingent upon the appropriation of the knowledge, technology, and environmental organizations of Indigenous civilizations.23 Gerald Horne (2018) highlights the importance of the 17th century in parsing developments in the centuries that follow. The British project of colonization, which conjoined the expropriation of Indigenous lands and stolen African labour in the Americas was jump started here and pooled a foundation for the United States to eventually emerge from the thigh of 22 The model of the hive returned at different times in order to diagnosis the failures of the colonies. Kupperman writes that the Virginia Company, in assessing the failure of the Jamestown colony in 1609, came to the conclusion that authority was improperly diffused which enabled the idleness of those categorized as drones to the detriment of the whole. See pg. 278. 23 For example, see Williams discussions on relations between the Jamestown settlement and Powhatan’s empire. Speaking about John Smith’s leadership between 1607-09, Williams writes: “Despite his constant exhortations against the “idleness” of the settlers and his strict military discipline, Smith’s colonists remained dependent on the neighboring tribes for a steady food supply, which they obtained by barter” (p. 208). Also see Jennings (1975) who argues that colonists encountered lands better understood as widowed rather than virgin. Jennings says: “The so-called settlement of America was a resettlement, a reoccupation of a land made waste by the diseases and demoralization introduced by the newcomers” (p. 30). 35 British empire. In this century, two-thirds of total human movement to the Americas were enslaved Africans, the viciously extracted labour and lives of which were utilized to fill coffers in London. Indeed, Horne (p. 193) writes: “[t]he overwhelming majority of the thirteen colonies that seceded from the British Empire to form the United States of America were founded before 1688…the fundamental framework for today’s republic was formed—arguably—as early as 1688, thus underscoring scrutiny of this pivotal century”. The rising power of English merchants who began to take a larger share of the slave trade near the end of the 17th century encapsulates a dynamic that would come to fruition in 1776: the diminishing strength of the crown and a growing republicanism tethered to “free-trade, anti-monarchism, and a racially sharpened and class-based democracy” (p. 9) were key values brought forth in America’s bid for “freedom” and its hungry desires to expand westward. The production of whiteness was indispensable for the young republic as a technology to unify European settlers across ethnic and class divisions while locking in the subjugation of non-whites. This age also saw the growth and rapid transformation of sciences based on collection and categorization like botany, zoology (pertinent for this discussion, entomology), and geology. The development and innovation of these knowledges can only be understood with an eye to empire, even as paradigms shifted from one geography and epoch to others.24 2.2.1 Imperial Recursions Mythic imaginaries of inheriting the idyllic society of the Saxons were mobilized at the time of the American revolution. Settlers were infuriated by the British crown’s dual imposition of taxes and the boundary placed by the 1763 Royal Proclamation which forbade British subjects 24 See Drayton’s (2000) Nature’s Government for a historical account of the relationships between the development of these disciplines and imperial expansion. 36 from taking of or moving to lands west of the Appalachians without permission from London and the undertaking of treaty-making.25 The Americans to-be began to deploy the figure of the Norman Yoke, which posited the Crown as a continuation of the feudal and backwards Norman conquerors who invaded the lands of the freedom-loving Saxons centuries before. The recursive figure of the Saxon surfaces as imaginative fodder for revolutionaries to understand themselves. America’s break from England would represent the instantiation of this Saxon heritage where American territory would be subject to Saxon customary law which pre-existed the Norman Conquest and the feudal laws it brought to England. The figure of the languorous drone was re-purposed at this time by the revolutionaries and directed back at the Crown as a label for government officials enforcing the Stamp Act to signify their status as drains on the hard-earned wealth American settlers had produced.26 Theories of improvement such as John Locke’s treatises on law and property were attractive to the American radicals because they validated a sense of encroachment: the Crown was stamping on their natural rights to seize and work land in America. Williams suggests that Locke’s treatises were taken up so enthusiastically because in many ways they spoke to the revolutionaries’ commonsense values. For the rebels, the Crown’s bid to prevent movement westward was hideous because it blocked the cultivation of valuable property by designating the 25 Williams notes that the proclamation was not made out of benevolence but rather strategic expediency. Britain had just seen the end of a long and expensive war with the French and needed a strategy to maintain peace with and access to Indigenous traders in the Old Northwest. The Royal Proclamation then was a bid to prevent the expansion of Britain’s own land hungry subjects in order to maintain its mercantilist empire where spread westward and autonomy in the colonies represented a threat to British control. See “The Norman Yoke Discourses of Containment: The Old Northwest and the Proclamation of 1763”. 26 See Horn’s chapter “Bees and the Revolution”. 37 Old Northwest as Indigenous lands. Paternalistic views of Indigenous peoples and their relations to lands persisted, and once again European metrics of value—in this case Lockean notions of property—27 rendered these “unused” lands as wastes waiting to be improved through settler labour. Adam Dahl (2018) shows that American revolutionaries claimed their sovereignty “not in opposition to empire, but rather as citizens of the British Empire” (p. 34) through two folded premises. (1) Despite migration, the colonists argued that they retained their rights as Englishmen, which were secured from birth by England’s ancient common law constitution. These transposable rights were de-linked from a specific geographic context and inhered in the citizenry. (2) Settlers advanced a “labour theory of empire” (p. 32) which argued that settler labour in the colonies entitled rights to property and gave settlers equal standing with subjects in England. Dahl argues that American revolutionaries should not be understood as anti-imperial because “they did not reject the legitimacy of empire as a political form, but rather viewed it as consistent with prevailing notions of republican liberty and popular consent” (p. 34). The revolution ushered in a transformation—the frontier of America was seen as an asset that set the United States apart from crowded, tyrannical Europe. A democracy shot through with racial exclusion and a concealed class structure blossomed, refiguring the enterprising settler as 27 Locke’s formulation on the privatization of property begins with the assumption that nature was once held in common. The mixture of man’s labour with nature removed it from its natural state and is transformed into individual property. Simpson (2014) reminds us that this particular formula rests upon a regime of visuality wherein only certain forms of labour are recognized, and imposes a hierarchy which rests upon the civilized/savage dualism. See pps 101-2. 38 individualized boot-strap raising citizen who held the keys to a pre-figurative sovereignty entitled to the continent, waiting to be territorialized. Post-revolution America harnessed a new spin on the providentially God-given land. Democracy at this conjuncture entailed entitlement to the land wherein white claims were activated via development and settlement. Again, Locke’s formula for property was attractive. Ironically, Locke’s theories of government posited that unequal land-holdings and hierarchies of authority in England were legitimate so long as they could be linked to an originary agreement between ancestral Englishmen.28 Of course, the portions of Locke’s work that justified (some forms of) inequality were siphoned out of the American uptake. Instead, key ideas of natural law, property, and consent were conveniently swiped from Locke and woven into the normative political fabric of the republic. On this providential vision, Purdy writes: Early Americans regularly claimed that open land and rational experiments in government made them the pivotal nation in human history, the country whose success could revive Roman freedom; show the proper form of Christian government; or establish once and for all that a people could rule itself by choice and reason, not chance and inheritance. …The continent belonged to those who could make it bloom, who were also the touchstone citizens of the young republic. The justification for these claims was multifarious, but never far from its heart was an idea about nature itself: that it was made to collaborate in human progress, as we were made to develop it for our needs. (p. 78) America, as inheritor of the earlier formations of Rome and the mythic Anglo-Saxons, represents the malleable durability of recursive imaginaries. The mythic cadence of the Bible also figures into this worldview. Adam’s ejection from Eden and subsequent redemption through his 28 See Purdy, p. 77. 39 dominion over the natural world—an expression of God’s intelligence and creative perfection—facilitated abundance, and in the absence of this particular form of labour, the world an unproductive wasteland. Imaginative structures oblige specific forms of relationship and visions of prosperity while backgrounding and obscuring others. While the trajectory of colonists was not identical across time, notions of improvement legitimated practices of settlement and agriculture. In sum, this section provides a brief account of the historical context preceding the ratification of the Morrill Act in order to parse some of the symbolic, theoretical, and material lineaments transfused therein. Tracking configurations of social imaginaries, deployments of law, and, when appropriate, the ways honeybees figured into colonizing discourses and fantasy, I mean to illustrate the ways the realm of fantasy is at once fragile, contingent, and productive of relationships to the more-than-human and the material shapes societies take. Sifting through the past enables us to parse the differences of historical conjunctures while locating residues animated in the present. 2.3 The Morrill Act This section outlines the Morrill Act and its role in the continental expansion of the United States. In so doing so, I contribute to conversations regarding higher education—specifically land grab institutions—and their place in settler colonial processes. Lee and Ahtone (2020) write: The Morrill Act was passed in 1862 to raise seed money for mechanical and agricultural colleges through the distribution of public lands. To raise capital, the act promised states between 90,000 and 990,000 acres, based on the size of their congressional delegation. In order to claim a share, they had to agree to conserve and invest the principal. Eastern 40 states that had no land in the public domain, as well as Southern and some Midwestern states, received vouchers — known at the time as scrip — for the selection of Western land. Western states chose parcels inside their borders, as did territories when they achieved statehood. States were meant to sell the lands bequeathed to them and use the profits towards supporting public colleges and universities. Land-grant institutions have been lauded for democratizing education, but this romantic depiction obscures the colonial processes that underpin their emergence and the ways these institutions continue to advance settler colonialism. Paolo Palladino’s (1996) sketch of the 1862 Morrill Act and its significance for the development of economic entomology suggests that the creation of the act was one of expediency: to suture western and eastern states in the midst of the Civil War under the guise of promoting the agricultural sciences. According to Palladino, federal involvement in agricultural education came to a halt for decades due to suspicion directed at federal regulations in economic affairs, a claim which underplays the significance of the act. In this version, it is not until the 1870’s and 1880’s when the effects of the Homestead Act facilitate another agricultural agenda more conducive to federal regulation. Yet accounts of the Morrill Act—and indeed, of the history of the United States—which scrub processes of land accumulation and policies of extermination against Indigenous peoples from the record effectively perform a politics of terra nullius: emptying lands of their inhabitants and reinscribing settler fantasies of entitlement and private property. Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s work of investigative journalism, “Land-grab universities”, demonstrates how legacies of land-grant institutions often efface histories of Indigenous dispossession and occlude the ways that settler accumulation of wealth and nation building rests on sequential acts of violent colonization, theft, and genocide. The authors write: 41 The Morrill Act worked by turning land expropriated from tribal nations into seed money for higher education. In all, the act redistributed nearly 11 million acres — an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. But with a footprint broken up into almost 80,000 parcels of land, scattered mostly across 24 Western states, its place in the violent history of North America’s colonization has remained comfortably inaccessible. (2020) 2.3.1 Performing Terra Nullius The bill was proposed by Vermont’s Senator Justin Morrill in 1857 and, while initially vetoed by then-president Buchanan, it would come to be signed by Abraham Lincoln on July 2nd, 1862. While a history of offering land-grants for institutions existed prior to the Morrill Act, the Act’s “scale and scope were unprecedented” (Stein, 2020, p. 216). According to Nathan Sorber (2019), Morrill suggested that promoting applied science and offering education to a broader swathe of the population would support the centralization of state power and contribute to the modernization of the economy. An excerpt from the Act reads: That all moneys derived from the sale of the lands aforesaid by the States to which the lands are apportioned, and from the sales of land scrip herein before provided for, shall be invested in stocks of the United States, or of the States, or some other safe stocks, yielding not less than five per centum upon the par value of said stocks; and that the moneys so invested shall constitute a perpetual fund, the capital of which shall remain forever undiminished… and the interest, of which shall be inviolably appropriated, by each State which may take and claim the benefit of this act, to the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach 42 such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. (Morrill, 1862) The capaciousness of the act, marked by a notably “broad and paradoxical” (Sorber and Geiger, 2014, p. 385) character, meant that the emergence of institutions was largely contingent upon local circumstances. Sorber and Geiger note that a romantic literature characterizing land-grant institutions as sites of democracy and egalitarianism has blossomed, representing a “traditional canon” (p. 387) that has influenced the social imaginary of the role of land-grant institutions in higher education (e.g Eddy 1957; Edmonds 1978). While romantic historiographies contribute to a discourse of equitable access and national pride, reinscribing the fantasy of a “Jacksonian Democracy” (387),29 revisionist historians critique these rosy-tinged accounts, pointing to processes of “industrialization, the rise of science, international competition, nation-building and bureaucratization, academic professionalization, agricultural modernization, the rise of professionalization in fields like engineering, and an emerging middle class” (Sorber and Geiger, 388) as motive currents undergirding the system of higher education. Sorber (2019), for instance, disrupts narratives of national unity and points to the ways that land-grant institutions developed heterogeneously. In some cases local contexts were at odds 29 An appellation which shows the anti-Indigenous bent of the Act, and its associates. Andrew Jackson is infamous for the brutal wars he waged against Indigenous nations, especially the 1830 policy of forced removal of nations east of the Mississippi. Jackson’s democracy was white supremacist to the core. See Dunbar-Ortiz’s chapter “The Last of the Mahicans and Andrew Jackson’s White Republic”. 43 with Morrill’s vision of national development, which was characterized by a broad understanding of relevant knowledge, whereas regional communities sought out instruction in applied and practical skills. While these preceding historiographies might puncture the romantic myths that cohere around land-grant institutions, what continues to be backgrounded are the way that these diverse processes and outcomes intersect with colonization. 2.3.2 Settling the West The year 1862 was a significant marker in the history of real estate in the United States (Lee and Ahtone). The Morrill Act was just one piece of a complex of legislation—Fanshel has dubbed these the “Settler-colonial Acts of 1862” (p. 6)—that had weight on the western expansion of the United States, all propelled forward by expropriation. To encourage western migration, the Homestead Act offered 160 acres to settlers in exchange for working the land for five years. Weeks after the passing of the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act was declared, incorporating the Union Pacific Railway Company. Karuka (2019) argues that the land grants the Act bestowed were based upon property claims which abrogated Indigenous land rights enshrined through treaties. The legal renaming of Indigenous lands as “public lands” were “sovereignty as a provisional declaration” (Karuka p. 67)—a self-referential authorization to claim lands not already held by the state in which territory was to be made through expropriation. Karuka’s analysis of the law is as follows: The law was itself a speculative enterprise to remake Indigenous lands, and Indigenous modes of relationship in and with those lands. The capital relationship is inextricable from processes of invasion and occupation, but the capital claim actually preceded any functional colonial occupation of the region. (p. 67-8) 44 Karuka calls this practice “countersovereignty” (p. 2) to draw attention to the ways that settler claims to sovereignty already must recognize Indigenous modes of relationship, regardless of attempts to background these pre-existing lifeways.30 Aligned with Karuka’s critique, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark (2016) frames the imperial projects of the United States and Canada as criminal empires that re-cast Indigenous resistance as criminality, a tactic to occlude their own illegality while simultaneously producing the settler state and legitimating its judicial narratives. Stark points to transformations in treaty relationships as following the logic of elimination of settler colonialism. Tracking the shape of treaties over time, Stark shows how the Royal Proclamation of 1763 made treaties constitutive contracts for the creation of the United States. She then illustrates how treaties in the nineteenth century became vehicles for settler nation building where Indigenous title to lands were extinguished in the state’s bid to expand. The transformation of treaties from living relationships between autonomous nations to contractual events was meant to crystallize the state and its bounds. Nash (2019) argues that a key objective of the Morrill Act was the settling of the west. Indigenous dispossession from, and of, lands enabled the production of so-called “public lands” to then be sold and invested into stocks. The selling of western lands functioned as territorial claims to the lands, not only providing eastern schools with scrip, but creating the means for schools in the west to establish themselves as parts of a broader process of settlement. For 30 Karuka associates countersovereignty with “counterintelligence, counterinsurgency, and counterrevolution” all of which are “modes of reactive anxiety, fragile modes of power that can take overwhelmingly violent form” (p, xii). Countersovereignty is predicated on the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, however muted or displaced, in order to find coherency—colonial sovereignty is always a reactive claim. 45 instance, Fanshel (2020) notes that the United States enacted brutal attempts to eliminate Indigenous peoples in its acquired state of California throughout the 1850-60s. The area known as California provided the largest amount of scrip of any land base, springing from genocidal policies, and notably, not one cent of the lands sold went to Indigenous peoples.31 2.3.3 Accumulation and the Racial Contract Underscoring the relations between colonial land grabbing and wealth accrual, Sharon Stein (2020, p. 214) writes that “land-grant legislation illustrates how from their very beginnings, US public goods like higher education have both depended on and been vulnerable to the demands of perpetual accumulation”. An entwined process of acquiring lands and investing, selling, and speculating upon them unfolded in order to generate funds that would provide a foundation for the growth of land-grab institutions. Lee and Ahtone note that, while formally, the United States paid less than $400,000 for lands siphoned through the Morrill Act, in many cases it paid nothing. “Not a single dollar was paid for more than a quarter of the parcels that supplied the grants — land confiscated through outright seizure or by treaties that were never ratified by the federal government”. Further, Nash’s study of the University of Nebraska and the dispossession of the Otoe and Missouria tribes shows an instance of land grabs prior to the Morrill Act, which provided the conditions for land grab institutions to establish themselves after the ratification of the Act.32 31 I am not suggesting that lands accumulated through the misconstrual of treaties are more legitimate. Further, with the violence enacted against Indigenous peoples in California, the complete lack of renumeration isn’t surprising. That being said, the complete absence of any kind of exchange for the lands speaks to the swelling entitlement of the state at this juncture. 32 Nash, pps 453-457. This is not an isolated incident, but a pattern that might be traced at different institutions as well. 46 Following Fanshel (2020), land grant institutions may be understood as expressions and consolidations of Charles Mills’ (1997) Racial Contract framework. Mills’ intervention argues that normative social contract theory—whether flowing from older figures like Hobbes, Locke, or Rousseau, to newer instantiations like Rawls—is underwritten by the Racial Contract, “a set of formal and informal agreements among whites” (Fanshel, p.3) to their collective benefit, driven by racial hierarchy through the domination, exploitation, and exclusion of non-whites.33 Mills (p.16) argues that contractarianism is self-consciously posed in opposition to feudal hierarchies; [i]t is this language of equality which echoes in the American and French Revolutions, the Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. And it is this egalitarianism that must be retained in the allocation of rights and liberties in civil society (p.16). These notions of rights and freedom, pertinently in the case of America, could only emerge alongside dispossession. Or, as Dahl puts it: “[d]ispossession was not an unfortunate by-product of modern democracy, nor was settler colonial ideology an entirely separate political tradition from democratic thought. The two surged alongside each other in their historical development” (p. 5). Land grant institutions were and are keys sites of settler subjectivation, both directly or proximately. Whether in producing subjects who can participate in agricultural projects or 33 Mills (1997, p. 3) gives the following gloss of social contract theory in his book: “We all understand the idea of a “contract, an agreement between two or more people to do something. The “social contract” just extends this idea. If we think of human beings as starting off in a “state of nature/, it suggests that they then decide to establish civil society and a government. What we have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of individuals taken as equals”. 47 feeding a hungry and growing nation, agricultural subjectivities and the fruits of these labourers are a key site of environmental governance and state territorialization. Constitutive to the production of settler subjects in this context are processes that can be understood through the Racial Contract: the material and epistemological emptying and claiming of lands and the production and maintenance of mobile racial hierarchies which are constantly shifting and co-producing the Racial Contract as much as they are produced by it. Elaborating on land grabbing, which has been called the “foreignization of space” (p 146), Kertész and Gonzales describe a process of large-scale expropriation without the prior, informed, and willing consent of those with title to the lands. Through the state’s sleight of hand legally and morally suspect practices are represented as lawful, justified through an imposition and citation of law that works to obscure and legitimize violent dispossession. Through the settler colonial Acts of 1862 hundreds of millions of acres of land were seized. Returning to Mills’ Racial Contract, the workings of the subsidiary expropriation contract are clear—the Doctrine of Discovery is cyclically revived in order to legitimize American claims to Indigenous lands where legality is chained to self-referential visions of productivity. 2.3.4 Myth, Erasure, Violence Brayboy and Tachine (2020) offer a critical assessment of the Act using the analytic triad of myth, erasure, and violence. They critique the repetition of romantic land-grant narratives, which, through each re-telling, reify mythological beginnings and as such function to legitimize the state(s), the forms of Indigenous erasure that accompany land-grant institutions, as well as physical and epistemological registers of violence. A key insight the authors raise regards the transformation of land into a commodity through economic calculus as a violence at odds with “relational aspects of land for Indigenous peoples” (p. 142). 48 Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman (p. 2014, 72), critiques this process and in unpacking the significance of land to Indigenous studies, writes, “[a] consequence of colonialism has meant a translation or too easy collapsing of land to property, a move that perpetuates the logics of containment”. Many accounts of land-grant institutions, and of the United States more broadly, tend to enact colonial productions of space that impose legal discourses of colonial capitalist ownership and “order time and space in hierarchies that erase and bury indigenous connections to place and anesthetize settler-colonial histories” (p. 73). Goeman contends that Indigenous place-making—tended relationships to place, passed down and generationally carried into the present and future—has defied some of the linear aspects of Western private property making where the “imperial geographer’s sense of space” (p. 80) articulates an instrumental relationship to land based on forms of accumulation. Goeman writes that these settler relationships to land and the legal powers that legitimate the nation-state “obfuscates the power of land to possess us” (p. 80). Settler state claims to land were and are mobilized in part through technologies of containment and dislocation—attempts to disrupt Indigenous place-making practices through institutions like boarding and residential schools, and the creation of reservations. While historically contingent, notions of private property—whether from the point of view of British colonists or Americans—were key to producing settler territoriality through the carving up and acquisition of Indigenous lands. 2.3.5 Institutional Entomology and Apiculture Geographer Eleanor Andrews (2019, p. 81) traces the history of beekeeping in the United States from the mid to late 19th century using a suite of archival materials and with an eye to envirotechnical regimes. Her research shows growing tensions in the practice of keeping wherein 49 forms of innovation and modernization bifurcate beekeepers along lines of expertise and industriousness, creating and in some ways solidifying a hierarchy of regard of the professional and the hobbyist. Agriculture underwent significant transformations in the 19th and 20th centuries as industrialization gained steam, predicated on economies of scale that functioned through “standardization, routinization, and specialization” (p. 82). While beekeeping was a bit out of step with other forms of agriculture undergoing processes of modernization that utilized technologies at odds with the health of bees such as intensified pesticide use and forms of standardization detrimental to honeybee health, the era of industrialization in the United States saw drastic transformations in human relations to honeybees. In 1852, Reverend Lorenzo Langstroth published his new patented design, an insight into “bee space” (Oertel, 1967, 3), a space about three-eighths of an inch that allows bees passage between sections of comb. A space larger or smaller would be filled by the bees with wax or propolis. Bee space gave keepers an intimacy with their hives not seen before and “allowed Langstroth to design a hive with regular frames of honeycomb that would not be stuck together by wax or propolis and could therefore be removed without cutting or destroying them” (Andrews, 2019, 84). This was a hefty innovation in terms of productive capacities, as prior forms of beekeeping—whether in wooden boxes, straw skeps, clay vessels or otherwise—necessitated a significant destruction of the colony in order to harvest honey, or the use of supers or caps which would yield minimal harvest. The Langstroth hive would become one of the foundations for industrial beekeeping, an innovation that enabled keepers to have ever more intimate and managerial relationships to their bees. The proliferation of apicultural technologies facilitated the means for larger scale processes of industrialization, the heart of which was located in upstate New York. The numbers 50 of hives rose exponentially and, coupled with growing availability of vehicles, beekeepers were able to shift around their colonies like never before.34 Productive output boomed as honey harvests doubled a decade after the Civil War, and eventually peaked at 3 million pounds in 1910, an amount similar to the contemporary state of New York’s output. Yet the standardization and industrial scale-making of the hive was not immune to the biophysical challenges that accompany these forms of environmental management. The bees were beset by sickness caused by European foulbrood which, due to the higher mobility and larger apiaries of commercial keepers, was easily transmitted between colonies. The technologies that enabled scale making practices invited contradictions, like foulbrood, which would pose as intense barriers to scale. Keepers associations, the USDA, extension services, and apicultural scientists formed an expert management regime to attend to the mounting problems with the federal government first setting aside money specifically for apicultural research in 1885 through the Bureau of Entomology. 2.3.6 Cornell and Modernizing Apiculture One of the epicentres of the New York state apicultural regime was Cornell university—the land grant institution that has raised the largest endowment from the acquisition and sale of Indigenous lands (Lee and Ahtone). Kertész and Gonzales (2020, p. 145) point to the shared worldview of Justin Morrill and Ezra Cornell, a belief in “man’s mastery over the earth” with the farmer and his skills transforming “wild” lands into the domesticated space of the nation. Indeed, the farmers relationship to the land was also a necessary aspect of the Lockean notion of property, which, as Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson (2014) points out, was only legible 34 Andrews writes: “In just a few decades, the upstate operations of some individual beekeepers grew from dozens to hundreds to thousands of hives” (p. 59). 51 to itself. Locke utilized the figure of “the Wild Indian” (Locke qtd in Simpson, p. 111) as foil to the legitimating labour “in the fields, labor in gardens—labor in a manner that moved these spaces out of ‘the commons’ and into the realm of the private” (p. 101). The figure of the farmer coincided with a national mythology of peaceful expansion and entitlement to land because of his transformative capacities to put land “to higher use”, to improve it. Yet Kertész and Gonzales as well as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) argue that the farmer and the soldier cannot be so easily separated throughout the fragmented history of the United States as they both play a role in processes of settlement. Kertész and Gonzales suggest that reading land-grant institutions within the frame of war is necessary, both historically and in the present and they highlight that education regarding “military tactics” (p. 144) is contained in the Act. The Morrill Act was one expression of sustained wars the United States waged against Indigenous people “between 1830-1875” (p. 147) in order to make territory. Kertész and Gonzale write: “In the wake of war came treaty making, the abrogation of Indigenous territorial control due to loss or in the attempt to prevent further losses, eventual outright annexation, and, finally, the conversion of Indigenous territories into public lands” (p. 147). Further, the land grabs enacted through the act not only worked to entrench colonialism on the continent, but also contributed to the growth of technological infrastructure in the United States, informing American imperialism outside of its borders. Cornell offered apicultural courses with one beekeeping magazine lauding the “progressive and scientific apiculture” (Andrews, p. 88) taught at select institutions in the States. In 1919 the school began providing free courses for commercial beekeepers—with a range of instruction including disease management, marketing techniques, overwintering—offered nearly yearly until 1931. With the hiring of E.F Phillips, the head of the Bee Culture division of the 52 USDA Bureau of Entomology, Cornell was placed at the cutting edge of apicultural research. Philips advocated for modern and scientific beekeeping practices, establishing a world-renowned beekeeping library and setting up demonstration apiaries where extension agents contrasted traditional and modern beekeeping methods with the latter unequivocally standing as the superior practice in their eyes. For Philips, the ideal beekeeper was a professional committed to scientific principles rather than the hobbyist. The professionalization of commercial keepers was largely successful as the scale of individual apiaries blossomed. Honeybee science has intellectual kinship with economic entomology—a field that formed in intimate relation to land grant institutions. Palladino’s account of the field shows that entomology in the United States developed along bifurcated lines: broader life sciences based education in institutions like Harvard and application based approaches that grew in the land-grant colleges. With the passing of the Hatch Act of 1887, agricultural research centres were established to which the burgeoning economic entomologists were situated, bound to the demands of local agricultural communities. The developing curriculum for economic entomologists—those working with practical approaches related to controlling pests—required training in chemistry over areas deemed too theoretical, such as evolutionary biology and genetics. The honeybee’s status as a valued agricultural animal aligned the developing science alongside the more instrumental, “control-centric science of insecticides” (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman 2017) economic entomology. The modernization of apiculture was co-produced within a chemically laden entomology of simplification and control and was a lineament in the state’s agriculture apparatus. The binding of war and agriculture is clear in both the example of the upsurge of beekeepers intensified production of wax and honey during World War 1 and the 53 numerous wars waged against Indigenous peoples to claim lands for agricultural production, including the numerous hives to come decades later. Cornell is situated on Cayuga lands and was able to establish itself as power house institution through lands grabbed all around the continent. Kertész and Gonzales offer this sketch of Cornell’s land speculations: Cornell used more than half of New York’s scrip to invest in and then sell the white pine lands of the Anishinaabe in Wisconsin.16 Cornell then redeemed 273,570 acres in California’s San Joaquin Valley, scrip that represented the traditional lands of the Miwok and Yokuts; 52,647 Great Lakes acres of the Dakota; and another 140,232 acres seized from Indigenous peoples in the present-day states of Michigan, Nebraska, Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Washington, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, and Missouri. (pps. 147-8) Through the wealth accrued by extensive land grabs an Ivy league institution arose. Part of the story of the modernization of apiculture, scientific beekeeping, is co-located in and around Cornell and upstate New York. Historical tellings must account for the constitutive violence at hand in the makings of the state, its agricultural apparatus, and disciplinary fields within lest they perform a colonial disavowal of that which enabled their formation. 2.4 Conclusion Ensconced within the frame of ecological imperialism, I outlined some of the ways honeybees have been enrolled in colonial projects in America. Improvement wends a genealogical line through various imperial formations, flowing back to mythic figures like the Edenic land of milk and honey. Animal husbandry and beekeeping are key practices that actualize the story of the civilizational ascent of Man out of nature by showing in practice his 54 mastery over the more-than-human. Colonists recursively cited civilizational tropes throughout the settlement of the Americas to legitimize their own presence and claims to land as well as the dispossession of Indigenous nations whose land relationships were rendered illegible and ‘wasting’ of potential productivity to be had. Agricultural practices play a driving role in facilitating settlement manifested in both the symbolic and material realms. Initial acts of ecological imperialism set the stage for the establishment of settler agriculture. Propelled by improvement paradigms and supported by land hungry legislation like the Morrill Act, settler agriculture evolved into a rationally managed industrial mode of production oriented towards economies of scale and maximum yield. This form of management is distinctly biopolitical because it is characterized by the “subordination of living processes to the instrumental calculus of productivity” (p. 12). Biopolitics here is animated by earlier processes of colonialism; as a mode of power, it can be understood as a recursive recycling of “reactivations and traces” that “are rarely isomorphic with what came before” (Stoler, p. 30). A contribution of this chapter has been to show biopower’s relationship to colonialism through examining honeybee life. The historical and theoretical account given here offers a foundation for the analysis unravelled in chapter two. 55 3 Save the (Honey)Bees! ENGOs and Rendering Life 3.1 Save the Bees? Surveys suggest the Canadian public demonstrates a growing concern for the health of pollinators (Trip et al. 2020). The now familiar slogan “save the bees” seems to respond to these concerns. Within the pantheon of iconic environmental sentiments, this mimetic phrase is easily encountered in arenas like the news, your local climate march, or plastered ostentatiously on a vast array of commodities. An example of this is the (now infamous) Cheerios “Bring Back the Bees” campaign, which advertises itself as concerned with declining (honey)bee populations. Organized around the disappearance of the cereal’s mascot, Buzz, the first years of this campaign consisted of sending out wildflower mix to Cheerios consumers. The problem with this tactic is that the seed mix contained species “known to be invasive in parts of Canada and the US” (de Keyser, bad). Further, as Charlotte de Keyser points out, it is industrial agricultural landscapes that drive bee declines more so than the city ecologies where most of Cheerios’ customer base is located. The cry to “save the bees” allegedly attends to the plight of declining pollinator populations in a context of advanced ecologic degradation and climate instability. Yet complexities proliferate with consideration of the ways capitalism has shaped collective and popular imaginative geographies of pollination. For instance, some ecologists understand honey bees not as environmental protagonists, but as potentially detrimental for the coexistence of a plurality of pollinators (Potts et. al 2010; Valido et. al 2019; Ford et. al 2021). A tendency in the contemporary circulation of bee signs is what McIvor and Packer (2015) have coined “bee-washing” (p. 10). In its original usage, bee-washing was used to question potentially green-washed claims from bee hotel retailers regarding their efficacy in boosting native bee populations. de Keyser expands the scope of bee-washing to signify: “A 56 form of green-washing where a product, service, or organization is advertised as being more ‘bee-friendly’ than it actually is. …Bee-washing is also used to improve the public image of companies and has become an increasingly common marketing spin” (n.d, bad). An example of bee-washing is the commercial campaign of the urban beekeeping company Alvéole. Their promotion of urban beekeeping is mobilized under the guise of conservation and “saving the bees”. Yet this claim actually obscures the harms honey bees can induce in urban native bee populations including through spreading pathogens (Graystock et. al, 2016) and increasing competition for floral resources (Cane and Tepedino, 2017). Companies like Alvéole operate by exploiting affective desires for environmental stewardship to capitalize on a slippage where honey bees are rendered as conservation subjects at the expense of non-managed species. The capacious signifier of the bee acts as a synecdoche standing in for all of nature, effacing the particular history that produces managed honeybees, whether in the industrial context or stock from urban beekeeping companies. “Save the bees” succinctly discloses a social sphere saturated by the machinations of capital; it is a speech act at once productive of hope, yet vacuous when it comes to the transformations necessary to accomplish the intention contained in language. In a context where the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America recently published a collection of studies suggesting insect populations are plummeting due to “death by a thousand cuts” (Wagner 2021, p. 2). How are we to understand a collective imagination of pollination that is hyper-focussed on the well-being of a single managed species? How might we understand the historical production of a phrase like “save the bees” and its entanglements with a mode of agriculture that is seemingly at odds with the sentiment contained therein? 57 This chapter investigates recent “save the bees” campaigns from the well-known environmental non-governmental organization (ENGO) Greenpeace to offer an analysis of the moves and claims it makes. The inspiration to write this chapter comes from ecologists like Sheila Colla who do public communications work around bee conservation. In a Twitter thread about World Bee Day, a day dedicated to spreading awareness on the importance of bees, Colla wrote: “I can already see the status quo (i.e. pro-capitalist, pro-colonial, overly simplified and just plain wrong) narratives are going to dominate” (2021). In the second tweet of her thread she said, “I’m ok with the day being used to discuss managed bees, their use in intensive ag., the struggles the industry faces etc. But to conflate this as a wildlife conservation issue is just wrong” (2021). Crucial to Colla’s analysis is the role ENGO’s play in communication around pollinators and their propensity to highlight struggles in the management of species like honeybees at the expense of wild pollinators. Centering honey bees in campaigns to save bees can obscure the political ecological conditions that lead to honey bee and wild bee declines. To remediate this tendency, I argue that bee declines must be understood as an immanent production emerging from the biophysical contradictions of settler colonialism and industrial agriculture. I do this by drawing attention to settler colonial expropriation and the institutional histories of scientific beekeeping, which emerges with industrial, capitalist agriculture. From this point of view the charismatic symbolic dissemination of the honey bee through the phrase “save the bees” works to efface the conditions that contribute to honey bee population loss while operating as a fetish to reap value from pollination services. To elaborate my argument, I build on Shukin’s (2009) concept rendering which emphasizes symbolic and material circulations as constitutive to the biopolitical management of 58 life. Here the circulation of the sign of the bee dovetails with the material reality of large-scale commercial beekeeping—the almost tautological ring of Shukin’s animal capital—embedded within a broader context of colonial land relations. This chapter proceeds by first giving an account of the framing analytics I employ in my discussion. I briefly outline Shukin’s animal capital and the rubric of rendering as a method to read both literal and figural flows in a biopolitical terrain of power. I highlight Shukin’s move to expand biopolitics across the species line by invoking the technological apparatus involved in factory farming and industrial monocultures. I then touch on the nearly closed loop of animal capital from which the unbecoming of the system might arise as immanent threat from its own mode of production; I will use this idea later to discuss industrial beekeeping. Next, I frame Greenpeace’s campaign as emblematic of bee-washing tendencies enacted by various ENGOs, and give a gloss of Greenpeace’s “Save the Bees” campaign. Following that I unfurl my analysis through invoking historical and political precedents, the campaign’s use of affective manipulation, and the slippage between agriculture and conservation. I conclude with a reflection on saving bees and what a biopolitical approach to the predicament can provide. 3.2 Analytic Framework This chapter draws on Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering as a theoretical resource in order to perform an analysis of industrial beekeeping that accounts for both material and symbolic circulations of bee life. In this section I will flesh out the concept of rendering and give a short account of the context that animates it. Shukin’s analytic of rendering pivots on its dual quality. To render can denote the act of making a representation, like “the practice of rendering an object’s likeness in this or that medium” (p. 50), while also signifying the industrial boiling and recycling of animal remains to 59 give the retrieved matter another go on the market. The doubled character of rendering enables an analysis of the biopolitical, that is, a form of critique that refuses to privilege either literal or rhetorical currencies and instead takes them both as co-constitutive, though not symmetrical, to capitalist economies. Shukin’s intervention in biopolitical theorizing attends to the production of the species line by asserting that capitalist production is a multi-species affair; to miss the role of the non-human is to perform an anthropocentrism that impoverishes critique. Factory farming and industrial monocultures are emblematic examples of the biopolitical ordering of life along species lines. Following Nimmo (2015), these agricultural practices can be understood as “technopolitical apparatus[es] of disciplinary power over vital processes, rather than as a system of domination over individual non-human subjects as such” (p. 12). To analyze the biopolitical ordering of species, Shukin uses the coupling of animal and capital to suggest the intimate relationship between the two. The juxtaposition of animal and capital is meant to stage the fetishistic quality of each word; both easily slip into the generic, obscuring their historical contingency. For capital this abstraction takes shape when it is assumed to have intrinsic qualities, a mystification that Marx critiques through drawing attention to the specific relations of labour and exchange that give capital substance. Similarly, the seemingly self-evident meaning of animal is revealed to be unstable as it moves through historical and cultural conjunctures. Even the assumed species line of human/non-human animal is disturbed through the animalization of human beings (Kim 2015).35 35 Kim argues that race in the United States can be understood as a taxonomy of power that strategically organizes humans along a spectrum with whites seen as fully human while negatively racialized people are placed in “a borderlands between human and animal” (p. 25), a “fraught zone of ambiguity, menace, and transgression” (p. 24). 60 For Shukin, animal capital is meant to sound a tautological ring, albeit evoking a “partial rather than perfect symmetry”, suggestive of both the “threat of totality posed by the global hegemony of capital” and the impossibility of “a perfect tautology of capital and nature” (p. 16). For, as Foucault insists, “[i]t is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them” (p. 143). In this formulation, animal and capital’s symbolic and material circulations are generated within a closed loop of production, as illustrated by the example of industrial rendering: the practice of recycling animal remains back into usable products. An engagement with animal capital suggests the system’s undoing is immanent to its modes of production. For Shukin, this is emblematized through global outbreaks of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) at the cusp of the twenty-first century. The desire to seamlessly weld shut the loop of animal capital came to a head in the rendering industry with the practice of feeding back animal remains into animal fodder. The recycled bone meal of cows and sheep infected with BSE was fed to living animals in a perverse instance of coercive cannibalism driven by a capitalist logic of waste recovery. Noting that “biosecurity” becomes a buzz-word for the rendering industry at the turn of the century, Shukin writes: The connotation is that traffics in biological capital must be secured against pathological agents that threaten it from without, when in fact the pathological agent that poses the greatest threat, BSE, is an immanent product of its own closed loops. …the pathological is but another name for nature as an immanent materiality that proves to be far from passive. (p. 85) The immanent materiality that emerges as hazard from within the loops of animal capital is an outcome of biopower’s relation life. As Nimmo puts it, “while biopower is totalizing it never 61 achieves totality, for if discipline is endlessly innovative, then life is irrepressibly recalcitrant; wherever there is biopower, there is bio-resistance” (p. 13). The friction between the insertion of “living organisms and vital systems with their own complex rhythms and systems of bodily, behavioral, and ecological self-regulation” into industrial systems, understood as the “systematic application of instrumental and calculative rationality to the organization of production in order to maximize productivity” (Nimmo, p. 12), creates a “spiralling technocultural arms race” (p. 13). Ellis et al. (2021) frame this arms race as the necessity of using overrides to overcome persistent biophysical barriers to scale or the use of short-term fixes through inputs like fertilizer to maximize productivity. The use of overrides inevitably produces externalized costs that break down productive capacities in the long term (p. 4). 3.3 Bee-washing and ENGOs Upon searching the term “save the bees” in Google, I am met with images adorned with hexagons emblematic of Apis mellifera’s waxen cells and numerous pages clustered around the problem of bee population declines—most of which conspicuously center the European honeybee. In discussing the algorithm Google employs, Pasquinelli (2009) notes that the PageRank system—“the sophisticated algorithm that determines the importance of a webpage and its hierarchical position within the search engine results” (p. 3)—is informed by a metric of value that is determined by the quantity and quality of incoming links. PageRank describes pages in accordance with their popularity and results are displayed in relation to this ranking. This algorithmic sorting illustrates that within the attention economy, “the value of a commodity is produced today via a media-driven accumulation of social desire and intelligence” (p. 6).36 36Atchley and Lane (2021) write that in the notion of attention economy enables an analysis of the ways “that information technology (IT) is purposely designed to attract and hold attention, a valuable and limited resource. We 62 Within the realm of bee-course, this value feeds off fears surrounding bee declines and environmental collapse. Greenpeace USA’s “Save the Bees” campaign is the second result I encounter through my Google search. Centered around a critique of neonicotinoids and systemic pesticides, the campaign is riddled with questionable facts about bee declines in the United States. The page performs a sleight of hand, conflating honeybees with all bees (Greenpeace Web). The popularity of this page, as evinced by its high ranking, speaks to the power of honeybee rhetoric to colonize discourse. Trip et. al (2020) observed growing public concern for the health of pollinators in their study of Canadian public perceptions of bee conservation. In their survey, they found that general levels of bee knowledge among respondents to be low with “11.8 of respondents could not name a single wild native bee species and 51.4% named the non-native European honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) as a native wild bee” (p. 4). Despite an overall low level of knowledge, the majority said that bees should be protected and largely attributing their importance to ecosystem services. So, what are ENGOs like Greenpeace doing to inform the public about something they appear to care about? Greenpeace’s campaign is emblematic of bee-washing trends taking root in ENGO discourses, which conflate honeybee declines with conservation efforts for wild bees. This conflation occurs because the figure of the honeybee dominates circulations of hymenopteran life in the broader public sphere. While bee-washing is often committed by companies with commercial interests or the desire to represent themselves as “green” or environmentally must understand how this “attention economy” interacts with attending to technological devices to affect how we think, feel, and behave in both positive and negative ways” (p. 4). 63 friendly, it is also committed by various ENGOs. Further, these communications materials are often packaged in doomsday rhetoric and coupled with donation solicitations as well as the sale of products. A particularly egregious example of this mode comes from the Sierra Club, which is notorious for their misinformed, panic generating messaging and the practice of sending non-native seed packets to “save bees”. A tweet from May 9th, 2017 reads: “Honey bees are endangered! USDA blames the dramatic loss on many things including viruses, habitat loss, & pesticides. #EndangeredSpeciesDay”. (Sierra Club) Regarding this campaign, de Keyser aptly quips “[t]he Sierra Club requires donations to stay afloat and perhaps apocalyptic messaging about honeybees is a good way to bring in cash?” (de Keyser, Bad) Circulating bee signs turn out to be a lucrative enterprise because of the ways they tap into fears of environmental declines. Of course, this is a truncated version of the story that obscures the capitalist driven momentum behind communication tactics. The Plan Bee Foundation is a non-profit organization that also draws upon public consciousness of waning bees. Their vision centres environmental education towards building capacities so that “all students feel empowered to take action for their planet, regardless of race, gender, class or location” (Our Mission, n.d). They offer science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) training for students in K-9 alongside corporate team workshops, honey tastings, and beekeeping programs. The team workshop advertises itself by saying, “[w]hether you’re looking to strengthen workplace culture through team building, reach philanthropic goals, or improve public relations, we’ve got you covered” (corporate team building, n.d). The website makes note of the fact that “native bees are struggling just as much as honeybees” (n.d), yet curiously does not attend to the fact that native bee declines are in part driven by the introduction 64 of managed species like honey bees (Geslin et al., 2017). While the critical work of native bee ecologists seems to be shifting the terrain of common knowledge related to bees and the problems that affect them—for example, the Honey Bee Conservancy changed its name to the Bee Conservancy in 2021—organizations still tend to pay lip service to the plight of native bees as a muted add-on when contrasted with bloated honey bee programming and resources. 3.3.1 Greenpeace and Save the Bees I focus on Greenpeace because it is one of the most well-known ENGOs in the world. Founded in 1969 as an offshoot of the Sierra Club concerned with anti-nuclear politics, they found their name, Greenpeace, in 1971. Blending anti-war and environmental politics, the group’s first action was against nuclear testing on Amchitka Island in Alaska. Formed in 1979, Greenpeace International today is a global, multi-million dollar organization (Eden, 2004). In their organization description, they write: Greenpeace is a global network of independent campaigning organizations that use peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future. (Greenpeace, Website) Crucial for the discussion at hand, Greenpeace is known for its effective use of media and communications as a “producer and distributor of information” (Eden, 603). In an eco- linguistic analysis of Greenpeace videos, Abbamonte (2021) writes that through its “declared aim of ‘making the world a better place’, Gp uses active protests and media-savvy communication to expose environmental threats, thus raising public awareness” (p. 145). 65 The analysis here is concerned with the politics of communication and what is at stake in circulations of the figure of the honeybee. I outline Greenpeace’s campaign and then perform a reading of some of the moves it makes to pull out the implications for pollination politics. The campaign begins its case with the following: “Be the solution to help protect bees in crisis / Believe it or not, you have a bee to thank for every one in three bites of food you eat” (n.d). This “one in three” statistic is charismatic and immediately performs an affective pull to the reader signifying the importance of bees. Greenpeace’s campaign then goes on to state: Honey bees — wild and domestic — perform about 80 percent of all pollination worldwide. A single bee colony can pollinate 300 million flowers each day. Grains are primarily pollinated by the wind, but fruits, nuts and vegetables are pollinated by bees. Seventy out of the top 100 human food crops — which supply about 90 percent of the world’s nutrition — are pollinated by bees (Greenpeace, Save the Bees). Here the sleight of hand that conflates honey bees with all bees is apparent. The role non-honeybees play in pollination is obscured. The site then goes on to state, “[w]orldwide bee colony collapse is not as big a mystery as the chemical industry claims” and subsequently provides a gloss of the complex drivers of honeybee loss. Two causes are listed as the most prominent: “pesticides and habitat loss”. Offering a scathing critique of pesticide firms and their investments in the chemical status quo, the page says, Biologists have found more than 150 different chemical residues in bee pollen, a deadly “pesticide cocktail” according to University of California apiculturist Eric Mussen. The chemical companies Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, Dow, DuPont and Monsanto shrug their shoulders at the systemic complexity, as if the mystery were too complicated. They 66 advocate no change in pesticide policy. After all, selling poisons to the world’s farmers is profitable. Furthermore, wild bee habitat shrinks every year as industrial agribusiness converts grasslands and forest into mono-culture farms, which are then contaminated with pesticides. To reverse the world bee decline, we need to fix our dysfunctional and destructive agricultural system. (Greenpeace, Web) In response to these predicaments, the page lists three “[c]ommon sense actions” that can “restore and protect the world’s bees,” including banning the most dangerous pesticides, preserving wild habitat, and restoring ecological agriculture. Ecological agriculture is defined as “nothing new.” It is the way most farming has been done throughout human history. Ecological farming resists insect damage by avoiding large monocrops and preserving ecosystem diversity. Ecological farming restores soil nutrients with natural composting systems, avoids soil loss from wind and water erosion, and avoids pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Organic farming is posited as a cure that will restore bee populations, in turn improving pollination and subsequently crop yields. The final section gives an account of American responses to pesticide use as compared to the European context. Noting that the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has identified three common pesticides—“nicotine-based clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiametoxam”—as posing risks for bees, they go onto cite a Greenpeace report which also emphasizes the role neonicotinoids play in disrupting honeybee health. While the European Commission is shown to have banned neonicotinoids for two years in order for scientists to measure the rate of bee 67 recovery, the U.S “dithers” and refuses to change regulatory regimes which uphold the rights of major corporations against the health of ecosystems. The world without bees that Greenpeace presents is stark and hungry. The rhetorical moves play on the commonsense knowledge that the ongoingness of human life is bound to the well-being of pollinators, for which honey bees become a substitute. Clicking the “take action” button opens to a page with a short paragraph recounting the state of bee declines in the United States and a ready-made e-mail form, raring to be sent to your “Elected official”. The campaign has no publication date but I surmise it is a relic from the Trump era because the first line on the page reads, “[t]he rusty patched bumblebee’s [Bombus affinis] endangered species listing was just put on hold by the Trump administration”. The rusty patched bumblebee won endangered status in January of 2017 (Xerxes, web), yet the Trump administration placed its status designation on hold in a regulatory freeze on February 10th, 2017 as part of a broader trend of weakening the Endangered Species Act (ESA). In March of 2017, the rusty patched bumblebee acquired endangered status (Fish and Wildlife Services, Web). The actionables of Greenpeace’s “save the bees” campaign are sending an e-mail to your elected representative and asking them to oppose attempts to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and ESA respectively. It is worth noting that this campaign is dated with an ask that is no longer topical and rife with misinformation, yet due to the PageRank system, this is one of the top hits in a search for information about saving the bees. 3.4 Analysis 3.4.1 Scientific Beekeeping and the Biopolitical Life of Bees The biopolitical life of commercial honeybees is an outcome and continuation of the colonial history elaborated in the previous chapter entitled “Colonial Imaginaries and the 68 Modernization of Apiculture”. For Liboiron (2021), “[c]olonialism is a way to describe relationships characterized by conquest and genocide that grant colonialists and settlers” (p. 9) state sanctioned access and entitlement to Indigenous lands. The enactment of colonialism is not contingent upon intent but rather “assume[d] access to Indigenous Land and its ability to produce value for settler and colonial desires and futures” (Liboiron p. 11).37 Colonial relationships to land are predicated on improvement imperatives towards the production of value. Processes of ecological imperialism and its corollary, settler agriculture, were intensified through legislation like the Morrill Act which expropriated millions of acres of Indigenous lands to raise funds for the establishment of agricultural research institutions. The creation of sites of knowledge production enabled innovations in enviro-technical regimes, eventually providing the conditions for the industrial management of life. Industrial agriculture, is then as Liboiron argues, “an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land” (p. 6). Liboiron outlines the historical emergence of the “threshold theory of pollution” (p. 5) 38—the idea that ecosystems can absorb a scientifically designated amount of contaminants before harm is enacted. This concept is relevant to understanding research norms in honey bee science because it opens up questions regarding how epistemologies work to relationally produce objects, specifically how and why bodies are made pollutable. In honey bee science, control-oriented field studies are the dominant research paradigm and can be traced back to the 37 Liboiron intentionally capitalizes Land in reference to “the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communities” (p. 7). They counterpose Land with land as emerging from the colonial worldview where “landscapes are common, universal, and everywhere” (p. 7). 38 This is Liboiron’s name for this phenomena. It is otherwise known as assimilative capacity. 69 formation of “entomology as a science of insecticide development in the United States” (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman 2017 p. 42). Economic entomology’s intimate relationship with experimental stations, formed from legislation like the Hatch Act of 1887, led entomologists to advocate for their labour by arguing that insect pests were a prevailing agricultural problem to local agricultural communities. Chemical based controls were posited as a solution and entomologists “demonstrated their success through a causal experimental approach that emphasized relatively rapid and easily quantifiable lethal effects of individual chemicals on target insects” (p. 43). Honey bee science developed as a branch of economic entomology and ensconced within the framework of economic entomology, little thought was given to eliminating chemicals from the mix of environmental factors to which bees were exposed. Instead, the goal came to be to reduce the deleterious effects of chemical exposure on bees by developing newer insecticides that were supposedly more specific with regards to the kinds of insects they killed. (p. 45) In the 1960s, interest in the damages caused by pesticides expanded and the question of how pesticides impacted honeybee health blossomed. However, the same control-oriented experimental approaches were still employed. This orientation obliges researchers to craft studies that “seek to capture unambiguous connections, and complex interactions and low-level effects are underemphasized” (p. 47). As a dominant paradigm, control-oriented approaches have constrained discussion regarding the drivers of colony collapse disorder (CCD) and honey bee population declines because the preference for definitive findings expels alternative approaches that analyze the interactive, stacked effects of many factors as “‘yet to be validated”, “anecdotal”, and “not scientific” (p. 47). Bijker, as cited by Liboiron, argues that scientific 70 consensus can close off “interpretive flexibility” and that “[s]uch a closure is not gratuitous but has far-reaching consequences: it restructures the participants’ world” (p. 60). In the science of honey bee health, the control-oriented paradigm can close off studies that look at complex multi-causal interactions. Honey bee science as a metric for evaluating honey bee health seems at times at odds with the flourishing of honey bees because of its animating assumptions and institutional history. The taken for granted idea that bee bodies are pollutable if only at a sub-lethal dose of neonicotinoids is engrained in the broader context of industrial capitalist agriculture because the application of pesticides itself constitutes an override against the biophysical barriers so-called pest insects represent to monocrops. Causes of bee decline within industrial beekeeping arise from contradictions immanent to the paradigm of industrial capitalist agriculture. Predicated upon imperatives to generate surplus value, economies of scale are achieved through the biological simplification and standardization of agricultural lands (Weis, 2010). The pursuit of scale is confounded by biophysical barriers that must be overridden through the application of short-term fixes. An example of this pattern is the ongoing need to maintain soil fertility which must be indefinitely managed through fertilizing inputs that produce externalities like waste runoffs. Arising immanently from the system, “externalized costs… are deeply contradictory in that they mask the deterioration of the very biophysical foundations of agriculture” (Weis, p. 316). Commercial beekeeping is ensconced in industrial agriculture as an override for pollination barriers to scale because many monocrops that require pollination depend on migratory honey bees for adequate fruit set (Ellis et. al 2020). As Ellis et al. suggest, “the nature of production—biologically standardized landscapes, pervasive pesticides, unprecedented concentrations, and movement of hives—is inducing a series of chronic health 71 problems” (p. 15) in honey bee populations. Drawing attention back to modes of production illuminates that bee die offs cannot be understood as random occurrences or threats from without, but rather, must be understood as effects created within the system itself. Returning to the institutional history of scientific beekeeping reveals its allegiance to chemical-based agriculture since its inception. Further, this history shows economic entomology’s durable research norm of control-oriented experiments and the honey bee sciences propensity to permit and even facilitate the pollution of bee bodies through sub-lethal doses of pesticides. Greenpeace’s campaign effaces this institutional formation and represents the plight of honey bees in an ahistorical manner harkening back to an bucolic agrarian past, that of organic farming, where bees and crops flourished. While the campaign draws attention to the impacts of industrial agriculture on honey bees, severing the institutional allegiance between scientific beekeeping and industrial monocultures not only obfuscates their historical entwinement, but also works to conceal large-scale beekeeping’s role in contributing to wild bee declines. The Greenpeace campaign can be understood as representing another aspect of colonial relations, which is the capacity of environmental politics to reinscribe colonialism through an entitlement to Land. I largely support the critique of neonicotinoids mobilized by the campaign, misinformation aside. However, without a broader critique of the colonial nature of the United States, and how Greenpeace is implicated in this context, I read this erasure as a potential manifestation of securing settler futures. 3.4.2 Affective Manipulation The Greenpeace campaign begins its pitch with the much circulated one in three bites of food statistic as a hook for visitors to their page. Not confined to the Greenpeace campaign, this ‘fact’ has been mimetically cited in a panoply of mediums for decades in different permutations, 72 sometimes attributed to honey bees, bees in general, or the broader category of pollinators. Berenbaum (2018) plugged the phrase into Google and it yielded more than 70 million results illustrating its popularity. Yet here is the rub, the phrase has no basis in peer-reviewed study. Berenbaum tracks the chain of citations back to as early as 1976 in McGregor’s study which says: More than half of the world’s diet of fats and oils comes from oilseeds— coconuts, cotton, oil palm, olives, peanuts, rape, soybeans, and sunflower (Guidry 1964). Many of these plants are dependent upon or benefited by insect pollination. When these sources, the animal and plant products, are considered, it appears that perhaps one-third of our total diet is dependent, directly or indirectly, upon insect-pollinated plants. (McGregor qtd in Berenbaum, 2018, p. 135) McGregor’s study is centered on oils and doesn’t mention honeybees but the one in third aspect has been taken up, distorted, and insistently disseminated. The mimetic circulation of the phrase shows its fetish quality which produces value by preying upon sentiment while effacing the material context of pollination and agriculture. Berenbaum writes, “as many have pointed out, the phrase, while colorful, catchy, and memorable, is vague to the point of being essentially meaningless” (p. 136). I suggest this vacuity is fuel for the engine of animal capital where symbolic commerce circulates in relation to substantive economies in disjunctive regimes of value production. Much of the campaign is animated through appeals to the health of the environment which tracks with “Gp’s declared drives for social action and change” that “are meant to influence how people both think about and treat our ‘beautiful and fragile planet’” 73 (Abbamonte, p. 159). In Abbamonte’s (2021) ecolinguistic analysis of Greenpeace’s video campaigns on YouTube, she notes that the rhetoric employed tends to more closely mirror “Greta Thunberg’s fiery speeches” (p. 158) than less charismatic forms of scientific communication. This mode of address can find itself at odds with scientific assessment and further, often “the voices of scientists are not foregrounded” (p. 159). For Abbamonte, media platforms like YouTube help facilitate “disintermediation” a process where “as more information has been migrated online, many traditional, credible intermediaries (experts, scientists, opinion leaders and information arbiters) have been removed, which forces individuals to evaluate vast amounts of online information for themselves” (p. 159). Google’s PageRank system places Greenpeace’s campaign high in the results when one searches for saving bees meaning that internet users have a heightened likelihood of clicking through to their page. The use of empathic communication is “meant to engage volunteers and donors” (p. 159) through verbal cues like the “use of inclusive pronouns” and “direct address” (p. 159). The language of “save the bees” fits in perfectly with this tactic because as an enclosed statement, “save the bees” seems to exude benevolence at first brush. The chain of associations produced by the circulation of bee signs—notions surrounding the environment and bees utility to humans and our food systems—are especially pressing in the present context of ecological degradation and climate crisis. Yet while the campaign draws attention to some of the problem with industrial agriculture and its impacts on bees, it does so in a misleading manner. Further, as I will elaborate on in the next section, this misinformation has real impacts on wild pollinator conservation. 74 3.4.3 Conflating Agriculture and Wild Space In Greenpeace’s campaign, phrases like “[t]he die-off leaves fewer bees and weaker bees, who must work harder to produce honey in depleted wild habitats” show the persistent conflation between agricultural and wild spaces. While agricultural land use cannot be hermetically sealed away from wild and non-agricultural landscapes—habitat fragmentation represents just one of a panoply of drivers of insect biodiversity loss (Raven and Wagner, 2020)—this slippage is problematic because the introduction of honey bees beyond the cultivated fields of agricultural space might produce negative outcomes in native pollinators (Hudewenz and Klein, 2013). Further, Geldmann and Varo (2018) note that research centered on honey bee declines and loss of agrarian pollination services has steeply increased in the past decade, “heavily supported by the private sector and governments, particularly in Europe and the United States, which have invested millions to reverse the loss of managed honey bees. Comparatively little research has been undertaken to understand wild native pollinator declines, including the potential negative role of managed honey bees” (p. 3939). The authors argue for the necessity of conservation strategies that engage with the drivers of wild pollinator decline rather than agrarian activities like beekeeping. ENGOs like Greenpeace can spread misinformation that represents honey bees as native pollinators, negatively influencing public perception and influencing decision makers to create policies that can be detrimental to native bee populations. Ford et al. (2020) coined the term “misplaced conservation” (p. 253) in order to assess the role polarization and misinformation play in negatively affecting conservation projects. Misplaced conservation “focuses on activities where conservation resources are expended on an improper, unsuitable, or unworthy activity” (p. 253). One driver of misplaced conservation flows from the misinforming of public stakeholders. Ford et al.’s paper lists desires to “save the bees” as potentially harmful for bee conservation 75 because the centering of honey bees can misplace public concern and shape policy in ways that are beneficial for managed bees to the detriment of wild pollinators. This tendency becomes apparent in Trip et al. (2020) survey of public perceptions around pollinators. When questioned about drivers in bee declines, many respondents cited neonicotinoids as the cause. While neonicotinoids are a threat to bees in particular settings, “they are not the primary to bees or to other pollinators. Threats to bees differ between species and…can include pathogen spillover from managed bees, climate change, and land-use change” (p. 33). Rather than focussing solely on neonicotinoids, Trip et al. note the necessity of a robust multi-faceted conservation strategy that attends to a range of anthropogenic threats. 3.5 Conclusion When propelled by the figure of the honey bee, the circulation of “save the bees” produces material effects; it not only shapes imaginations of pollination, but also has implications for policy and for the organization of agriculture. I have taken Greenpeace’s campaign to task as my analysis takes seriously symbolic currencies and the role they play within capitalisms modes of production. Even organizations that purport an environmental ethic can be captured by, and reproduce, contradictory discourses that might work to harm biodiversity. Campaigns like Greenpeace’s are missed opportunities. Instead of offering education, they offer misinformation. This tendency is rooted in the neglect to address settler colonialism and industrial agriculture. Shukin ends her book on a somewhat bleak note writing, “the sinister prospect accruing to the double logic that rendering describes is that of capitalism’s potential interminability, a perpetual existence supported by the ability to materially and semiotically recycle its conditions of possibility ad nauseum” (p. 231, emphasis in original). Perhaps we can read the imperative to 76 save as a rhetorical tool in capitalism’s recursive loops. The notion of saving in some ways reinscribes the narrative of Man’s mastery over nature, the fantasy of techno-fixing our way out of the climate crisis. A reading of the fetishistic circulation of “save the bees” then calls for a different orientation, a different way of being with bees. 77 4 Conclusion I began this thesis by introducing two concurrent trends in the realm of bees: a literature documenting the pollination crisis (Potts 2010; Wagner et al. 2021) and burgeoning popular interest in bee health condensed into the phrase “save the bees”. This project has worked to illustrate the relationships between the two through an analysis of the commercial beekeeping industry. Using an entwined historical and theoretical approach, I situated honey bee life in the United States within a regime of industrial settler agriculture. This framing, I have argued, enables a deeper understanding of the problems that plague bee life in the present. By placing honey bees within this lineage, my work disenchants the promiscuous circulation of bee signs that propose to “save the bees”, yet actually works to extend the cyclical loops of animal capital, a primary driver of bee loss. I located the role ENGOs like Greenpeace play in disseminating misinformation to show capitalism’s subsumption of discourse and accompanying material effects. Finally, I suggested that the orientation of saving might actually work against the aim of remediating bee loss; the terms ease of appropriation back into capitals machinery signals the role ‘saving’ plays in maintaining the threat of interminability in this mode of production. 4.1 Contributions My thesis models the application of recursive analytics towards reading the relationship between continuities and displacements in colonial history (Stoler 2016). Using the figure of recursion to parse the surfacing of imperial figures, I illustrated how the durable imperial imaginary of civilization and its ethic of improvement were recycled at different moments to legitimate settler claims to land. I bring this method to bear on the literature of ecological imperialism (Crosby, 1986; Capps, 2017) to show how imaginative realms animated the introduction of the portmanteau biota of Europe to the so-called New World. I note ecological imperialism as a precedent for the establishment of settler agriculture, an organization of 78 relationships to more-than-human beings that cites Man’s ascent out of nature as an animating trope (Anderson 2003; Anderson 2004). While the modes of organization change across time, one enduring feature of settler agriculture is the value placed on productivity. What is understood as productive emerges within a self-referential European worldview that renders other environmental relationships, both Indigenous and peasant use of common wastes, as illegible excess (Goldstein 2013; Simpson 2014). Honey bees figured into settler agriculture as a highly valued species as honey and wax contributed to the colonial shape of life while the symbolic currency of the bee provided a resource that figuratively authorized imperial expansion. This project builds on the emerging literatures on land-grant institutions as colonial entities (Nash 2019; Lee and Ahtone 2020; Stein 2020) by weaving together histories of the Morrill Act and economic entomology. My approach reveals the importance of considering how land-grabbing relates to the development of agricultural institutions and the durable epistemological forms that persist today. The Morrill Act was mobilized to raise funds towards the creation of mechanical and agricultural colleges; it did so through expropriating Indigenous lands. Establishing agricultural colleges enabled the development of a pesticide laden, control-oriented entomology that concerned itself with optimizing agricultural outputs (Palladino, 1996) with honey bee science emerging from within this paradigm (Suryanarayanan and Kleinman 2017; Andrews 2020). Cornell University, the heart of the modernization of apiculture, has one of the highest endowments reaped from the Morrill Act. By integrating these historical developments I have shown apiculture’s direct relationship to settler colonialism. Colonial expropriation was a necessary prerequisite for the emergence of industrial agriculture, a form of land management driven by rationalization and the attainment of economies of scale (Weis, 2013; Belcourt 2015). To integrate my discussion, I identified 79 industrial monocrop agriculture and commercial beekeeping outfits as forms of biopolitical management (Shukin 2009; Nimmo, 2015). My use of recursive analytics enrolls biopower into a long history of imperial formations to show how the emergence of biotechnical regimes depended on and contributed to the settler state. The years post World War II saw the shape of agriculture change and expand as large-scale monocrops came in vogue. Along with this transformation was the increased planting of lucrative crops that depended on pollination for fruit set. Migratory commercial beekeeping consolidated to fill this role. The industry today is rife with problems as keepers find maintaining populations difficult (Kosek 2019; Ellis et al. 2020). Honey bees are accosted by multiple factors that contribute to health problems including pathogen exposure, disruption of natural cycles, poor nutrition, and stress (VanEngelsdorp and Meixner, 2010). However, drawing political ecology into the equation illustrates that these drivers of loss emerge as immanent to industrial agricultures modes of production. Recent calls to “save the bees” can obfuscate the material conditions of industrial agricultural apparatuses and the place of honey bees within them. Following the work of bee ecologists, I took public perceptions and the role of communications and the material effects that proceed from them to task (Colla and McIvor 2017; Trip et al. 2020; Ford et al. 2021). I utilized Shukin’s (2009) rubric of rendering in order to advance an argument that privileges both material and semiotic currencies of animal capital in order to attend to the doubled tendencies I observed in bee politics. In my analysis of Greenpeace’s campaign, I have shown the role that ENGOs can play in advancing the fetishistic circulation of “save the bees”, a move that I argue is at odds with the reckoning with industry necessary to preserve and facilitate the flourishing of bee life. “Save the bees” can not only obscure the industrial nature of commercial beekeeping, but also the colonial genealogies that animate the practice. 80 4.2 Strengths and Limitations My project is speculative and aimed at identifying imperial recursions in order to understand how and why relationships with bees take the shape they do. As such, no clear pathways forward for pollinator policy emerge. I do think there is value in critiquing the communication works of ENGOs because these entities influence policy decisions through their engagement with the public. I also insist that understanding the industry within the long history of colonialism shifts the terms of discussion. Yet I offer no proscriptions and did not engage with decolonization in this discussion. This is a key site of conversation for future work. The textual basis for this research is both a strength and a limitation. I hold that discourse has productive powers in the shaping of worlds, yet I also have the suspicion that supplementing my discussion through engaging with the material present might have yielded different results or analyses. If I could go back and do it again, I might have enrolled other methods like interviews or participant observation with honey bee scientists, beekeepers, bee ecologists, social scientists, and the public. A stronger understanding of some of the more pragmatic approaches to shaping pollinator policy could have offered important counter-points to my work. 4.3 Future Research Directions This research lays historical and theoretical groundwork for future projects on the politics of pollination. As a researcher, I hope to continue building the skills necessary to work across disciplinary bounds and produce interdisciplinary work that listens to scientific insights while bringing the tools of critical analysis to bear on socio-ecological worlds. My interest in the relationship between fantasy and global insect declines continues to burn, with the research I conducted here offering approaches to draw upon for tackling this question. Taking up other pollination paradigms such as the use of species like Bombus impatiens, the common Eastern bumblebee which is commercially reared to pollinate nightshade crops, could offer a more 81 fulsome image of pollination politics in the present. I also see the possibility of thinking about pollination from the perspective of labour. Capitalism is able to reproduce itself through extracting the devalued labour of human workers, but I also see devaluation at work in instrumental use of agricultural animals. Thinking about the potential alignments between human and more-than-human labourers is a pathway I would like to consider in the future. My research has also illustrated the necessity of informed publics in order to attend to the crisis in the biodiversity. I have shown that to understand the ecological present, we need to turn to imperial histories. To hold these kinds of discussions with the larger population is a daunting yet necessary task for our collective ecological futures. Transforming some of the insights here into public scholarship might be a venue forward. Finally, future directions for research could include an analysis of Cornell University’s present apicultural endeavors in conversation with ongoing discussions about land-grant universities. Since the publication of “Land-gran universitiea” (Lee and Ahtone, 2020), scholarship in this area has proliferated. How are institutions and fields of study responding to demands made for reparations? 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Geography
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Sundberg, Juanita
Rendering's recursions : industrial beekeeping's imperial inheritances
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