Comments
Hmm, if everybody stopped eating honey and wild bees are not picking up the slack, then presumably farmers would instead pay for commercial beekeeping to pollinate their fields?
Curated and popular this week
Michael Nielsen has a beautiful new essay on moral imagination: the ability humans have to 'develop and transmit new notions of good action, indeed, even new kinds of good'.
As examples, he gives:
* Hammurabi's creation of a code of laws (in 1754 BCE) and his justification of his rule not in terms of divine or hereditary right, but by the delivery of justice to his citizens.
* St Gregory of Nyssa's...
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Epistemic status: Speculation from two decently informed advocates armed with anecdata.
Note on process: After having some version of this conversation several times and saying, “we should probably write about this publicly,” we took the less heroic route: we recorded one of our conversations, fed the transcript into an LLM, and then substantially revised the structure, substance, and framing ourselves. We will not be sharing the transcript, as it is in...
This personal post is not part of the competition, as my intent is not to produce an original constructive response to cluelessness. However, Toby Tremlett encouraged me to share it insofar as it contributes to this week's conversation.
TL; DR: I work in animal welfare and am clueless....
Recent opportunities to take action
Beekeepers in the U.S. earn about half their revenue from pollination services so even if demand for honey were reduced, commercial crop pollination would not cease (though it would probably get more expensive). I discuss ways to reduce demand for managed honey bee pollination here, including self-fertile varieties of pollinator-dependent crops, mechanical pollination, and local wild pollination.