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It's crucial.
We need it.
We need to be connected to ourselves,
and to each other,
and to the world around us.
We need it because it brings us strength,
and solace,
and love.
And so, at the same time,
connections make us vulnerable.
It leaves us open to being damaged,
to being hurt by others.
And this makes us strong,
but it also, makes us fragile.
I'm struck by the incredible importance of this.
Back in the spring of 2007,
I became a bee keeper.
And there's nothing like the magic of bees
for changing your world's view.
When I started keeping bees,
I started to see the world through completely different eyes.
Where I used to see a decoration on your dining room table,
now I see bee food. (Laughter)
And where I used to see a bright yellow blemish
in an otherwise pristine green lawn --
again, I see bee food. (Laughter)
Vegetables and gardens, apples on trees,
weeds and wildflowers,
stuff that grows in the highway medians --
all of this is bee food.
The longer I looked at the world this way,
the more connections I saw,
and the deeper, and deeper they got --
Everything was connected to everything!
It was mind blowing!
Now, I'm not from Maine, by the way, whoever had the bet. (Laughter)
but I like living here,
and these guys, MOFGA, are one of the big reasons
because I'm very big on the idea of organic food.
And MOFGA is the biggest and the oldest organic association in the United States.
(Cheers and Applause)
So we're pretty lucky here in Maine,
but you can't really live in this United States
without realizing that there's something a little less than organic
going on with our food system.
So travel back with me in time --
Let's go back to 1971,
Richard Nixon is President,
and Richard Nixon just appointed a man named Earl Butz
to the position of Secretary of Agriculture.
He is the head of the USDA.
And for the next 5 years, from 1971 to 1976,
Earl Butz promoted a policy
and he directed it right at America's farmers.
And Earl's policy was this:
plant fence row to fence row!
Plow every piece of land that you can get your tractor on!
Get big, or get out!
So, Earl brought us Big Ag,
and it began to transform the way we grew food in America.
He brought us industrial agriculture.
And 'big' was suppose to mean 'better'.
Now, it sounds efficient...
And if it's efficient, then that should mean more food,
and that should mean cheaper food,
and that should mean fewer hungry people!
Ergo big... is better!
But buried down beneath all this efficiency is this concept of mono-culture.
That's what you call it when all those big farms
are growing just one crop each.
Thanks to Earl, a lot of people bought into this and decided
that this was truly the best way to farm.
But mono-culture is not how nature does things.
Nature doesn't put all her eggs into one basket like that.
That's way too risky!
Nature insists upon balance and on diversity.
Because diversity works!
It works to control pests,
it works to replenish the soil,
it works to maintain balance ...
Nature creates a whole different kind of efficiency,
and it's sort of a magical outcome, as well.
The magic isn't what's happening in industrial agriculture.
Industrial agriculture creates industrial problems.
A mono-culture farm creates the kind of imbalance
where a single pest that thrives on that single crop
that we're growing on our mono-culture farm
can easily wipe out the entire farm.
And so, to prevent that kind of disaster
our industrial farmer uses pesticides.
And mono-culture farming also depletes the soil very quickly:
we plant the same thing year after year, after year, after year... in the same location.
So to counteract this problem,
our industrial farmer uses fertilizer.
Now, it was one thing for me, as a bee keeper,
back when I though about putting this kind of stuff on the food that we were eating
but then, I made the connection --
Wait a minute, wait a minute, we're putting this stuff on the bee food!
(Laughter) What were we thinking?
And speaking of bees, as we are,
there's another thing that comes into play in mono-culture farming,
for instance, these are almond trees.
In the state of California there are over 750,000 acres of almond trees,
and if you try to picture how big that is,
that's about the size of the state of Rhode Island -- it's a lot.
So here we got this 750,000 plus acres of almonds and, of course,
the almond grower wants his almond trees to make lots, and lots, and lots of almonds.
And so, they hire bee keepers who bring the bees to the trees.
So, bee keepers load their beehives onto pallets,
and those pallets get loaded up on trucks,
and those trucks drive across the United States to California,
and those bees just pollinate the living daylights out of those almond trees.
And in the bee world, this is a really, really big deal!
This is the largest migratory pollination event in the country.
So, three weeks later, there's that bee keeper back there
and he's loading those beehives back on the pallets,
and those pallets are going back onto the truck,
and we got to get those bee back out of there --
You know why?
Because almond trees only bloom for 22 days... 22 days.
So for the other 340 some days out of the year,
there's nothing in those almond grows for a bee to eat: it's a bee desert.
In other words, industrial agriculture
created industrial bee keeping.
And to a bee keeper, that looks like a lot of broken connections.
So now, let's fast forward to the year 2006.
That's when we discovered that we're having a pretty serious problem with bees.
Entire hives were collapsing, they call it.
What it meant was that bees were vanishing, they disappeared,
and no one knew why.
This is the bee problem that became known as CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder.
And here we are, 5 years later,
scientists still don't know the reason for this bee problem,
although we've sure thrown an enormous amount of time and money at it,
and all of that in the hope of finding a single solution
to what we hope was a single problem.
The researchers can see now that CCD doesn't have just a single problem,
or just a single cause, that it's caused by a combination of things acting together.
And this is where things start to get really scary
because the number of possible combinations
and the number of possible connections
is infinite and unknowable.
Now, honeybees are really closely connected to their environment and they're small.
They're small enough that when there's a problem with their environment,
they act as a really good early warning system.
So, it's with good reason that honeybees get called the canary in the coal mine.
But just what is it that the bees are trying to tell us?
What are they warning us about?
I believe that what the bees are saying is this:
our food system is broken.
Mono-culture farming and the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers
are destroying the best and the most important part of nature's magic.
And they're telling us that it's time to stop believing that big is better,
and to start working to restore the balance
and rebuild the connections that we all need so much.
Now, in what I do for a living
I spend a lot of my time talking about bees,
and a lot of worried people have come and asked me,
"Can we turn this thing around?
Do we stand a chance?"
And what I try to say to them is this:
we are all connected.
And so every bad thing, every toxin, every poison, every imbalance,
every negative attitude... all of these affect everyone.
And that's where we're the most fragile.
But hey, we're all connected,
and so the reverse is also true:
that every good thing, every joy,
every pure wonder, every positive intent,
all of these also affect everyone.
And that's where we're the strongest.
But there's something else as well,
because we're not all just connected to each other,
we're also connected to nature,
we're all part of that magical alchemy,
and as subtle and mysterious as that is,
and as difficult to define, and hard to quantify,
and as damaged as it may have gotten,
it's still the strongest part.
And it's the part that makes us able to listen with our heart, and when we do,
to understand that when you tug on one thing in nature -- one thing,
you're going to find that it is attached to everything else... everything else.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheers)