Who does the work? Normally we think that workers work, and consumers consume. We want to reconsider this distinction. We think of ‘production’ as a shared responsibility between the bees flowers and people. In fact, it is not production at all. It is ‘reproduction’ of the conditions that allow all life to thrive. This is also something we learn from the bees. You can experience pollination and honey-making in the park, on your balcony and as you move through the city. It is the reproduction of life itself in a language of touch, smell, taste and movement. You are also a part of it.
This is why we insist on the rule: Plant a flower to thank the bees. That turns each person that tastes the honey into a co-creator of next year’s batch.
It’s not just a slogan. There is a logic and a philosophy behind this use of words. We try to stick to this language to emphasise the shared responsibility we have with the bees and the flowers.
There is also a final level. Today we take the word ‘environment’ for granted. But it was invented in its modern usage by the Victorian public intellectual Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a white supremacist whose other great contribution to the lexicon was the phrase “survival of the fittest”. ‘The Environment’ was quickly and widely adopted to mean ‘all the stuff that doesn’t include people’. It is why we have ‘environmental science’; ‘environmental law’; ‘environmental economics’ and so on today. It was convenient, because it allowed the industrialists and colonisers of the time to separate the devastation of the worlds water, forests and indigenous peoples from their own policies which sat within the more rational realm of ‘economics’.
A better word is ‘the conditions’. The conditions are created by our own collective actions and shared by all living things. All policy, all action, influences ‘the conditions’. Therefor it is all ‘environmental’. So what we are reproducing when we make honey together, is not ‘the environment’ alone, but the conditions for all life to thrive.