I have enjoyed reading the thread. I was glad to see so many people on the List express the importance of moving towards more sustainable agricultural practices. It is an important issue. I think the struggle on the list with defining sustainabiliity is symptomatic of how poorly defined the category is. I would suggest that rather than dump the category, we need to define it better. The lack of definition, however, is not for lack of underlying science. Below is a quote from a recent journal article that defines the contours of what I believe are the actual problems. "Although targets and policy tools are now widely used, the chosen targets often are not biophysically meaningful, or they lack an effective mechanism for linking to policy action. Furthermore, most existing sustainability initiatives fail to reflect on foundational issues, and do not adequately confront potentially uncomfortable ethical questions. Instead, most sustainability initiatives are firmly situated within the jurisdictional and political context of the present, where pragmatism reduces the set of potential actions to a relatively narrow range that is deemed politically feasible. Often, the resulting short-term responses are only minor perturbations (positive or negative) to the dominant trajectory of increasing un-sustainability. The Kyoto Protocol is an example of a pragmatic, politically mediated compromise that falls far short of what climate scientists believe is needed to avoid 'dangerous' climate change with serious consequences for human well being . Although short-term pragmatism is valuable, small uncoordinated steps, by themselves, are unlikely ever to lead to sustainability. Political pressure frequently decouples policy actions from credible sustainability targets, and sustainability is falsely treated as a relativistic concept. This decoupling is responsible for an ever-widening gap between what needs to be done to reach sustainability and what is actually being done". Fischer, J. et al. 2007. Mind the sustainability gap. TRENDS in Ecology and Evolution Vol.22 No.12: 621-624 Beekeeping is a big part of a sustainable future. Pollination enables higher yields among many crops for very little ecological cost (energetically, materially, in terms of chemical inputs). While most of our staples are not animal pollinated, the elements of our diet that our linked to healthy living are largely pollinated... reduced yields from these crops, or yields that come from more unsustainable inputs, might not affect out intake of calories, but will most certainly result in a more impovershed diet than we currently eat (the average American only eats one fruit serving per day and this comes, by in large, in the form of orange juice). Current estimates from the USDA suggest that should American eat the minimum fruit and vegetable servings from the Food Pyramid, there would need to grow an additional 4.1 million acres of fruit and 8.9 million acres of vegetables (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err31/err31.pdf). Should policy/enterpraneurs move US agriculture in a way that meets this shortfall, we need to be able to increase colony numbers and maintain them to contribute to the sustainable production of this currently neglected part of our diet. Adony ****************************************************** * Full guidelines for BEE-L posting are at: * * http://www.honeybeeworld.com/bee-l/guidelines.htm * ******************************************************