Pete / Randy and others interested:
In the geography field, Jake Kosek is pretty widely seen as a well
respected political ecologist at UC Berkeley.
I just reviewed an article that will similarly ruffle your feathers, Pete.
I suggested major revisions, but alas, the other reviewer for the journal
was not as harsh, and the piece is moving towards publication with the
journal, which is the Journal of Agrarian Change. I'll pass the reference
on to the list when I finally see it in print. You may then be rolling your
eyes, again, very deeply.

 I'm working as a social scientist (full disclosure: also from the field of
political ecology) on the topic of bees too, and I think there's a larger
theoretical issue undergirding your critique that Kosek's work  - and the
Darwinian beekeeping discussion itself - which will be a provocative one to
chew on: has modern beekeeping itself become a victim of its own success?
That is do the folks on this list think that the issues of varroa and other
diseases the the larger "new improved" bees of today are experiencing
derive from modern beekeeping? The idea being floated by some of the new
Seeley devotees (and, I think, also a lot of the 'natural beekeeping' and
some of the social science world)  is that perhaps beekeeping has become so
'technologized' or dominated by a sort of allopathic medicine approach such
that we have more problems now than we did in the past.

Personally, I am no deep believer in homeopathy (sarcastically: another
great Rudolph Steiner contribution to humanity) - but there are arguments
being made to try to link together the viewpoints that promote pesticide
reduction, critique monocrop agriculture and genetic engineering, and that
similarly begin arguing that to get out of our current battles against the
stronger-crazier-ever-more genetically improved beekeeping race, we must
undo the entire practice of how beekeeping is done and how industrial
pollination-dependent agriculture is practiced, concomitant with addressing
how mites are treated (or ignored!). It begs the question of to what extent
we need wholly different approaches to agriculture and toward healing the
natural world. And also, to what extent we can get off the current roller
coaster ride we're on as far as meddling / coping with the Earth's
ecosystems and agricultural production as we now know it. Those questions,
I believe, are at least worth asking, and trying to find some answers to in
terms of what makes the most sense for society.
I hope this discussion continues - I'm finding it to be a rich one.

Best,
Eve Bratman
(Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall
College in Lancaster PA, 5th year beekeeper. Maybe also considered a
newcomer here, I don't know... In any case, see you at Apimondia!)

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