Between Bees and Turtles
On any given sunny day outside of Atwater dining hall at Middlebury College, a few uninvited guests float in the mixing place between friends where conversation lingers and food awaits consumption. Around our heads the bees answer the call of sugar. Amidst chatter we give attention, even words to the tiny creatures between us. We swat them away, resign, and sit still in fear, and sometimes speak to them with gentle words, observing their movements. But most often we complain about the nuisance and come up with some creative way to relieve ourselves of their presence. We lock them up in plastic houses, we set up sugar traps paces from the offended table, and most extreme — we flatten them into our plates. This is commonplace, the normal the everyday nuances that roam through our world, our natural spaces, and our free time to sit and enjoy a moment’s pause to eat and be with others.
Meanwhile, the unusual happens not far from campus, only half a mile away as I sit and sip a latte outside of Otter Creek Bakery and watch a plot of snapping turtle drama unfold. One juvenile male has just tried to cross the road twice, with cars stopping respectively both times, their passengers emerging to usher the creature back the way it came. The turtle, determined, came back and found a resting place under a car, I like to imagine, in protest. I watched as a man stands guard by the car asking passer-byes whether it’s their vehicle. Finally, the chef assists me in carrying him across the road in the direction he was determined to go. We all stand around afterwards sharing remarks about the turtle, smiling, with pride over our minor heroism.
Somewhere between the bees and the turtles of the world we draw lines determining how we value different natural things, whether with conscious intention or not. Our values shape our behaviors, which reinforce our values. And even further — other lines are drawn between the bee killer and observer, the chef and those who keep walking. Are their qualifying characteristics such as a mind, a soul, eyes to lock gazes with that raise certain species above others? Structures for judging other species are provided with emerging scientific research on the concepts of empathy, consciousness and the ability to sense pain. It then seems inevitable that we as humans prioritize and draw lines creating hierarchies of creatures and other natural things. I imagine many are built from constructions of what we feel we benefit most from on an individual basis. Though, this is where I admittedly, get lost.
Logically speaking, I could make an argument to care more about the bees, the pollinators we desperately need to fuel our agricultural systems. Pollinators are the forgotten, unpaid worker driving our food production. We could imagine a dark futuristic world without them relying on technology to pollinate every individual plant by drone, but what’s the beauty in that, and what happens before we have developed those technologies? A world without food? I feel we’ve already taken mass agriculture too far with our irrigation, fertilization and domestication systems.
Surely the link between pollinators and our food systems is more direct than the benefits of helping a turtle. But it seems maybe we don’t see the fields of corn and gardens when we swat the bees outside of Atwater. Maybe instead we are more capable of seeing a turtle as a moving, thinking creature with a relatable determination and sizable existence worth pausing for. It is the turtle that pulls from our wells of humility and the pollinator from our assertions of dominance. It seems then that logic doesn’t dictate our action, and that maybe we just live for the instant gratification.
