Someone Else Will Save the Bees

Recently a potential client made a statement that got my educator mind whirling away.  They said, “I care about the bees, but I’m still spraying everything, and they will figure out how to save them so we can still have our lawns.

I hear versions of this more often than you might think, and I believe it is time we have an uncomfortable conversation about convenience versus stewardship, especially as we enter the fall and winter months when food scarcity for our pollinators is a concern.

We say we care about bees, butterflies, birds, and healthy ecosystems, but when nature becomes inconvenient, messy or interferes with the picture we have of a “perfect” landscape, our priorities can quickly change. Somewhere along the way, convenience began to outweigh responsibility.

We want healthy food on our tables, clean water, thriving pollinators, beautiful landscapes, and functioning ecosystems, but we do not always want to accept the small inconveniences that come with protecting the natural systems that provide them.

And that raises a difficult question: Can we really say we care about nature if we only care about it when it is convenient?

We want butterflies, but not caterpillars eating our plants. We want birds, but we do not want insects. We want inexpensive fruits, vegetables, and nuts at the grocery store, but we would prefer that the messy work of supporting the ecosystem happen somewhere else. Someone else will plant the flowers. Someone else will leave the seed heads. Someone else will tolerate a few chewed leaves. Someone else will worry about the bees. The problem is, we are all someone else.

This does not mean we stop managing our landscapes. There are invasive plants, damaging pests and situations where intervention is necessary. Stewardship is not about doing nothing. It is about questioning whether everything that inconveniences us needs to be eliminated.

Maybe every weed does not require herbicide. Maybe every insect is not a pest. Maybe a chewed leaf is not a landscape emergency. We spend a lot of time asking what we want our landscapes to look like. Maybe we should spend a little more time asking what we need them to do. Because if every one of us decides somebody else will take care of nature, eventually we run out of somebody else’s.