We may be oblivious, and we certainly are indifferent, but honeybees are disappearing at an alarming rate; their population is shrinking all over the world, and no one knows for certain why this is happening or how to stop it. This may not seem like a big deal or something that should concern us, since there are countless species whose populations are shrinking, and some of which are on the verge of extinction, so what is special about the bees? Bees may not have such good PR agents as the polar bear, for example, but their importance to humankind is far greater than probably any species on the planet. Bees, through their function as key pollinators, are responsible for the production of more than a third of the world’s food. Without bees there will be no pollination of numerous plants that feed humans and livestock. In other words, without bees there will be hunger on a scale we’ve never known.
We may not know why bees are disappearing, but we shouldn’t be surprised that this is happening. On every level of nature, we are tearing the threads that connect the ecosystem that is our planet. We are depleting natural resources, cutting off forests the size of entire countries every year, polluting the air and the water, and destroying the habitat of almost every creature on the planet. How can we expect that in such a state, one of the most vital links in Earth’s life cycles will not be broken? Each day, we are tearing more threads, and at the same time becoming more frightened by nature’s collapse. It seems as though there is no way to end our obtuseness, except, perhaps, when we are faced with empty store shelves, when we have money to buy food, but there is no food to buy. Maybe then we will wake up, but it will be too late for many of us.
If we want to rebuild the bee population and guarantee our own survival, we have to solve the cause of our mistreatment of nature, which is, surprisingly, our connections with each other, our human, social ties. We must establish a network with positive connections, so as to learn how to work with all of nature. That is, the correction must begin at home, with the closest people to us, and grow from there to the rest of the world. If we learn how to positively integrate ourselves into our society, we will also know how to positively integrate ourselves into the whole of nature.
In other words, the problem isn’t with our actions or with our minds. It is not that there is some fundamental knowledge that we don’t know. The problem is with our hearts, or more correctly, with the connections between our hearts. Our self-centered disposition breaks the ties between us, and as a result, between us and nature. When we do not feel nature, we feel no remorse abusing it, and no misgivings about demanding it to serve us while we do so.
Self-absorption and exploitation are therefore the biggest pollutants we are creating, and not CO2 emissions or anything of the kind. If we clean ourselves up from self-absorption and exploitation, nature will clean itself up from the rest of the pollutants we have created. These two narcissistic traits, which none possess but humans, are ours to correct. No one can do this for us, and no one will be able to perform any correction until we correct our egoistic nature. But the moment we correct it, all other corrections will be a breeze.
Bees feel each other and support each other. Likewise, we will have to learn the art of feeling one another. However, what the bees do instinctively, we will have to carry out consciously, and our reward will be that we will understand creation not on the instinctive level, but on the conscious level.
In fact, the whole purpose of our overblown egos is to compel us to exert to feel each other the way bees and other animals do. This will not only teach us the intricate network that we are currently destroying through our foul disposition, but it will also teach us how the “mind” that designed the network works. There is no other way to learn these secrets of creation besides building the connections through our own efforts by learning one step at a time which part goes where. In doing so, we will also understand why certain parts were put together, what they do individually, and how they function in the system. But in order to learn all that, the world had to be broken to the point where by correcting it, we would learn how it was built.
Now we’ve come to it. The world is broken to the core. Now is the time to start correcting through connecting, to focus not on the parts, but on how they work together. This is our way to mend society, revive nature, and heal the planet, including our much needed honeybee population.
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