When Gordon Hull was in town last month with his amazing meads, he also gave me a copy of the book Fruitless Fall: the Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis by Rowan Jacobsen. This book documents the epidemic of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that started a couple years back.

Actually, the book starts by detailing CCD, but in the end places CCD in the context of industrialized agriculture as whole (the honey bee industry, it turns out, is at the center of our food system). “As Kirk Webster wrote in American Bee Journal,” Jacobsen says, “beekeeping has the honor of being the first part of the system to fall apart. But none of the other parts are looking too spiffy right now, either.”

CCD, Jacobsen concludes, “is a symptom of a larger disease — a disease of fossil fuels and chemical shortcuts, of billion-bee slums and the speed of the modern world…Until local agriculture replaces global agriculture, there will always be another parasite, another virus, another mysterious collapse.” [emphasis mine] He continues:

Are there other options? What would it take to reintroduce resilience to our agriculture and ensure that our children’s breakfasts still have cranberries and almonds and cherries? Maybe it’s time we started thinking about what makes a resilient community, whether that community is a bee colony, a town, or a countryside.

If you’re interested in learning about how our industrial food system works at some of its lowest levels, and also in getting insight into what it will look like when more and bigger parts of that system fail, read this book. This book also is enjoyable and optimistic because it takes the time to show the alternative methods that are arising to replace the failing bee system, and it’s then easier to imagine how we’ll cultivate similar alternatives for the rest of the system as it fails. If we’re, you know, lucky and hardworking.