Book Reviews
July 2007
 Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture, by Ross Conrad, 2007. Chelsea Green Publishing, $35.00, paper.
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook: 77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change - or Live Through It, by David de Rothschild, 2007. Rodale, Inc., $14.95 paper.
A Darkling Plain, by Philip Reeve, 2007. Eos/HarperCollins, $18.99 hardcover (the fourth and final volume of Reeves's Hungry City Chronicles; the first three were previously reviewed here at:http://www.deptplanetearth.com/book_reeve1.html)
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Natural Beekeeping: Organic Approaches to Modern Apiculture
by Ross Conrad, 2007. Chelsea Green Publishing, $35.00, paper.
by Carol Van Strum
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"They are remarkably adaptable - perhaps the most adaptable of all social insects…. We find them from Norway to the burning wastes of the Sahara….There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining room."
-- Dr. Stephen Maturin, in Patrick O'Brian's Post Captain
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 Even the most adaptable of creatures has limits, as Dr. Maturin discovered trying to keep a hive aboard a British Man of War on the high seas. Concerned that modern bees might be unable to adapt to cumulative threats of pesticides, antibiotics, toxic wastes, exotic parasites, and forced relocation, Beekeeper Ross Conrad compiled this handbook for healthy, ecologically sound beekeeping, based largely on his own extensive experience. Just as his excellent manual for the dedicated bee-keeper went to the printer, the sudden, mysterious disappearance of honey bees nationwide hit the headlines. Overnight, Conrad's concerns about the health of honey bee populations took on an aura of prophesy.
Apiary Inspectors of America estimates that during the winter of 2006-2007 between 651,000 and 987,000 of the nation's honey bee colonies were lost. Some of these were excess losses to starvation, weather, pests, weakness, genetic defects, or other "normal" problems. The great majority of losses, however, were to a new phenomenon known now as Colony Collapse Disorder, in which adult bees simply fly away from their hives and are never seen again, leaving their larvae and queen to starve.1
From media hype about the vanishing honey bee, many of us learned for the first time how much of our food supply depends on bees for pollination -- and also learned how very little most of us know about these amazing insects. "All too often," Conrad writes, "about the only thing the average person knows about bees is that they sting and they produce honey." Natural Beekeeping is a delightful place to find out more.
Reviewing the literature on Colony Collapse Disorder, for example, Conrad finds that as of his writing, all of the affected hives were from large industrial colonies that had been trucked around the country to pollinate crops in regions where pesticides had killed off native pollinators; all had been routinely treated with antibiotics during the 2006 season; all but one had been treated with pesticides for mite control; and all had suffered "some form of extraordinary stress" at least nine weeks before the hives died. "It is interesting to note that nowhere in the preliminary investigative report, or from anecdotal sources, is there any hint so far that those beekeepers practicing natural or organic apicultural techniques have been targeted by this terrible condition."
Even defining "organic" as applied to honey or other bee products is difficult, however. As Conrad notes, it's relatively easy to ensure that a cow or sheep or pig consumes only organic, toxin-free feed and water, but bees roam up to eight miles to collect nectar and pollen, making it impossible to guarantee the purity of their diet. He can therefore only recommend organic approaches to beekeeping, suggesting hive management alternatives to routine applications of antibiotics and pesticides, as well as methods for enhancing the health, immune systems, and genetic diversity of the bees.
Beyond the importance of bees to our economy and our palates, what distinguishes even his most technical discussions of hive architecture and management is Conrad's passionate devotion to the bees themselves. The devotion runs both ways, as illustrated by the cover photo of the author in shirtsleeves, lifting a frame of bees with bare hands. Like Frank Stockton's classic Bee-man of Orn, "He had lived with the bees so long, they had become so accustomed to him…that the bees no more thought of stinging him than they would of stinging a tree or a stone."2
Natural Beekeeping is an informative and highly entertaining resource for all ages and professions. Far more than a primer on bee-keeping; it's also an education in ecological agriculture.
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook:
77 Essential Skills to Stop Climate Change - or Live Through It
by David de Rothschild, 2007. Rodale, Inc., $14.95 paper.
by Carol Van Strum
With rare sensibility, five percent of Amazon.com customers who viewed the page on this "Official Companion to the Live Earth Concerts" proceeded to order Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead. Those five percent, at least, could be reasonably certain their purchase would be readable, entertaining, and thought-provoking without insulting their intelligence.3
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, regrettably, is at best a Dick-and-Jane primer on saving energy and reducing carbon emissions. Its tone and format seem designed to appeal to first graders or semiliterate adolescents. Each page presents colorful graphics, illustrating how to change a light bulb and put on a sweater, or extolling the joys of communal bathing and carpooling.4 Such simplistic advice is leavened throughout with humorous quips and witty suggestions (e.g., buy a camel, move to Stockholm) that utterly belie the book's purpose; potentially useful information, such as the page urging train travel, contradicts itself and is lost in the fluff.
A more dangerous problem the Handbook shares with similar publications is its extensive focus on individual actions to prevent climate change. This focus is as grievously misleading as advising passengers on the Titanic to throw their watches and rings overboard to keep the sinking ship afloat. The illusion of making a difference creates false complacency even as the waters rise. Worse yet, the book encourages guilt-free indulgences for those who can afford to buy carbon offsets - rather like Dow Chemical or Hannibal Lecter donating to United Way.
Placing the burden of averting global disaster on the individual lets corporations and governments - the primary sources and abettors of global warming - off the hook. A far more fitting "official companion" to the Live Earth concerts would have been Robert F. Kennedy's impassioned Live Earth speech calling on us all to man the barricades:
"Now you've heard today a lot of people say that there are many little things that you all can do today to avert climate change on your own. But I will tell you this, [and] it is more important than buying compact fluorescent light bulbs or than buying a fuel efficient automobile. The most important thing you can do is to get involved in the political process and get rid of all of these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, D.C. - who are nothing more than corporate toadies for companies like Exxon and Southern Company ….This is treason and we need to start treating them now as traitors."5
A Darkling Plain
by Philip Reeve, 2007. Eos/HarperCollins, $18.99 hardcover
(the fourth and final volume of Reeves's Hungry City Chronicles; the first three were previously reviewed here at: http://www.deptplanetearth.com/book_reeve1.html)
by Carol Van Strum
 A Darkling Plain completes a cycle of tales that speak truth to the present from a future far, far removed from our own. The series follows the adventures of Tom Natsworthy from his boyhood in the Historians' Guild and his narrow escape from the destruction of London, through the turbulent years of his marriage to the fierce, disfigured Hester, and their wretched separation in order to rescue their teenaged daughter, Wren. In this fourth and final volume, Tom and Hester rejoin each other in a desperate struggle for Wren's life that becomes a battle to save humanity itself.
Thousands of years from now, as perpetual wars between mobile cities reach a crescendo of Municipal Darwinism, a renegade humanoid robot, Stalker Fang, finds the codes to activate orbiting nuclear and laser weapons, relics of a legendary 21st Century civilization that destroyed itself in a single battle with such devices.
"It's human beings that are the problem," Stalker Fang tells the captive Tom, who is forced to watch her efforts to decode the weapons activator. "If we are really to protect the good earth, we must first cleanse it of human beings….I understand that humanity is a plague; a swarm of clever monkeys that the good earth cannot support. All human civilizations fail, Tom, and all for the same reason: Humans are too greedy. It is time to put an end to them forever."
This implacable logic applies as much to current orgies of over-consumption as to a fictional future. With humor, thrilling action, and rare tenderness, Philip Reeve has created a true fable for our time.
1Dennis Vanengelsdorp et al, "An Estimate of Managed Colony Losses in the Winter of 2006-2007: A Report Commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America." American Bee Journal, July 2007.
2Frank Stockton, The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales, 1887: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/2/0/6/12067/12067.txt
3Interestingly enough, J.K. Rowling's magical universe is largely independent of fossil fuel, though even her fanciful utopia is perpetually threatened by greed, stupidity, and lust for power.
4As with Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, text printed on colored papers and overprinted on pictures is consistently difficult to read, especially in compact fluorescent light.
5Robert F. Kennedy Jr. comments at Live Earth. http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/071107H.shtml
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