Editor’s Desk: Buzzkill episode 3—Back to the future

By Brent Cunningham

Episode 3 of Buzzkill, our new podcast series on the pollinator crisis, traces the roots of the exploitative and environmentally disastrous practices of modern industrial agriculture to the colonization of the Americas by Europeans. As Buzzkill host Teresa Cotsirilos explains: 

[T]he whole point of their colonies was to extract as much wealth from them as possible. They did that by exploiting the land. Not to mention the people who lived there. And agriculture was one of their main tools. Colonizers destroyed forests, wetlands, and other habitats, then planted cash crops like rice and sugar.

The native tribes lost land and were given little choice but to assimilate, and over time the industrial way of farming became their way, too. In this episode, reporter Bridget Huber tells the story of how some dead bees convinced the leaders of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska to abandon their corn and soy monocultures and rediscover the ways their ancestors farmed:

Typically, the Ioway and other Indigenous farmers in the Midwest planted crops in the fertile bottomlands near rivers. They improved the soil using things like muck from river bottoms and fish carcasses. They planted sunflower fences and rotated crops. They let fields go fallow so they could become fertile again after harvest. They hunted the buffalo that lived on the prairie. And the buffalo, in turn, fertilized the prairies and created habitat for pollinators by scuffing up the ground and making wallows where flowering plants grew.

It was a process that acknowledged the tribe’s symbiotic relationship with the land, water, plants, and animals. They started restoring native prairie, reducing their use of chemicals, and rehabilitating the soil. There is a plan in the works to bring buffalo back to the reservation. 

This whole-ecosystem approach to agriculture is the best tool available for restoring pollinator habitat and resurrecting these crucial species. It has gained some traction in recent years, among native and non-native farmers alike, and goes by various names: regenerative agriculture, agroforestry, agroecology. But no matter what it’s called, it is a profound retort, if not yet a counterweight, to industrial agriculture, one that is thousands of years old.
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