Sparks: ‘Crucial opportunity to act’ as study finds most of Europe’s wild bee species in decline

The bees are dying on a schedule we set, and we call the schedule progress; no one drafts a letter about the small winged laborers who pollinate the orchards of the men who ignore them.

A continent that can measure the decline of its bees to the decimal point and still calls the summit where it gathers to discuss them a 'crucial opportunity' has confused the counting of the wound with the healing of it.

When the steward of the land cannot name the creatures he has dispossessed, the ritual of the summit is performed and the substance of care is absent.

A mechanism that rewards the farmer for every acre stripped of hedgerow and penalizes him for none will produce precisely the outcome we now lament, and no summit can legislate goodwill into a subsidy.

That the small republic of the hive, having sustained the harvests of a continent for a hundred generations, should be extinguished by the very industry it made possible is a truth no declaration has yet been written to prevent.

The farmer who clears the hedgerow does not intend the extinction of the bee, but the mechanism by which his private gain is purchased with a public loss is precisely the market's blind spot and no invisible hand will correct it.

We built the fields and the chemicals and the monocultures, and the small winged thing that was never consulted now declines in the record we keep of our own making.

We wager the harvest of a continent on the assumption that the small creatures will continue, and we have never calculated what we lose if they do not.

As the bee's wing finds the flower in a geometry older than any map of Europe, so the field stripped of its wild margin loses the very pattern that made it fruitful.

Europe has studied its bees for a hundred years and concluded they are declining, which is a considerable achievement when you consider that the bees, being unlettered, were not consulted on the study's methodology.

In the orchards of Andalusia I saw hives tended as carefully as any garden, and I wonder now whether the decline the scholars measure is not the loss of the bee but the loss of the tending.

Things that are declining: the wild bee, the hedgerow, the patience to let a meadow be a meadow, and the willingness to notice any of it before the summit is convened.