Pollinator Writing
Pollinator Writing
Matthew Newcomb
SUNY New Paltz
As the trio of bees emerged from their small nest under the eaves of our house, I stepped off the ladder and prepared to attack. Paintbrush in hand, I flicked white splatters at them as they swerved around me, defending their home attached to mine. Despite covering a rhododendron with flicked paint spots, my aiming skills that had been honed during school sports let me hit all three bees, which lay on the ground, unable to fly from the weight and stickiness of the paint that grayed out their black and yellow bodies. My heart raced from my frantic movements: flinging paint and backing away from the bees when they approached me too closely. The fungicides in the paint had no time to harm the bees as sheer paint volume did most of the work to kill those three pollinators.
Why such violence? Why react wildly against such a small troop of helpful creatures? It was the summer I turned fifteen, and my parents had hired me to paint the entire outside of our house. It was a brush-only job to get inside all the wooden ridges on the siding. I’d put a cassette in my knock-off Walkman each morning and taken the ladder out to the next section of house. The day before I attacked those bees, I’d been stung twice and it hurt. I tried to scrape the stinger off and out in order to prevent more venom from going in and then applied a baking soda poultice to the red, swollen area. Pain wasn’t the only issue. The real fear was our growing understanding of my bee venom allergy. A few years earlier I had been stung twice while visiting relatives in Montana. Nothing like anaphylactic shock, but most of my right arm turned red, and I spent the next two days in a blurry haze. A call to a nurse line led to Benadryl and more fuzzy-brain feelings. So, when I saw more bees coming out of their nest that July day, I went into a self-defense mode, even as I felt bits of shame and sympathy. Human-pollinator relations are a tension between humans and our necessary allies and occasional enemies, between the not wholly similar and not wholly other.
For those of you unaware of bee bites, a bee quickly inserts its stinger through the outer layer of skin, injecting venom into the system” (“Bee Sting”). The peptide melittin is considered to be the main cause of pain in most stings (Chen). The stronger the reaction by the immune system against the venom, the more serious the allergy. As my family likes to tell me, I usually underreact about things that happen, so my skin and immune system try to make up for it by overreacting. Honeybees, bumble bees, and sweat bees are three main stinging varieties in my region of the United States. Honeybees release a pheromone when they sting which functions to encourage nearby bees to protect the hive and become more aggressive too (Wilson-Rich 28, 64-65). The idea that bees can only sting once applies most to the honeybee, which has a heavily barbed stinger. The barbs hold the stinger in the skin of large animals (like humans), pulling part of the bee’s abdomen away as it flies off, killing the bee shortly thereafter. Non-barbed stingers don’t have the same detachment problem or feature.
Stinging is making a mark with a significant possible effect on both the recipient and the giver. For many years now, I have carried an EpiPen or bee sting kit, at least in the non-winter months when I remember it. Age and children have perhaps made me more cautious as I rarely fail to bring it on hikes or bike rides now. The counter-sting of the EpiPen’s needle would deliver a dose of epinephrine to enhance breathing and increase blood flow to help swelling go down and airway muscles to relax. It is a later stage of defense against bee venom than the paintbrush I wielded, and a chemical response to the idea that pollinators are vital to us, but sometimes dangerous too.
The quick violence of a sting or swat at a bee is in sharp contrast to the “slow violence” Rob Nixon considers when environmental degradation harms the poor over many years (2-4). Yet, his exploration of long-term environmental violence, whose effects continue long after present-day attention has shifted, is true of pollinators as well, whose loss is often felt many crops or years down the road. At the same time, the act of pollination is an investment in slow life. The immediate effect might be fruit and seeds, but the real benefits are often for the ecosystem over many years. Here the slow life is gained or lost, depending on the health and work of pollinators. Nixon’s theorizing calls for literary and journalistic writing that shows violence without becoming a form of quick media consumption or spectacle (Nixon 5-6). Making processes central to the content, not just act, of writing can further that work. In this vein, I am interested in pollinator writing—a genre that considers writing and pollination as a mix of processes that sometimes focus on the short term (finding nectar today) but have long term impacts for new growth or violence or both and more.
Pollinator writing considers less the literature of animals or plants and more the processes, repetitions, and activities that matter in natureculture systems. It is less about being, and not even becoming, and more about doing. Marilyn Cooper asserts, “Instead of a world made up of bounded individual entities, enchantment ontology envisions individuals as entangled in intra-active phenomena from which they co-emerge contingently in an ongoing process of becoming” (9). Pollinator writing gives this idea a further ecological spin and considers the process itself as central. Like the processes of democracy are more important for sustaining a nation than any particular candidate, maybe the bees are just a symbol of the real sustainability issue—the process of pollination.
My story about my paint attack on bees describes more than just a dramatic interaction between individuals; it is a tale about impacts on micro-local pollination—about larger processes of personal and cultural impacts on pollination. This project is related to Laurie Gries’s notion of new materialist ontobiography (NMO). Gries defines NMO as “an in situ, experiential practice that draws attention to our sensorial, embodied encounters with entities in our local environment,” as an effort to “tap into rhetoricity in order to phenomenologically account for how affect and persuasion emerge through deep relationality,” and as “a composing practice for channeling such affective-persuasive experiences into critical-creative rhetorical productions. In this latter sense, it may be understood as creative nonfiction writing with a new materialist twist” (302). In pollinator writing, embodied and affective encounters within ecosystems matter, and pollinator writing emphasizes the interactive processes and practices that impact the ecosystem over the experiences of particular individuals—even as individual stories can still be a way in to exploring those processes. In other words, the pollinating work of the hive is as important as the individual bee.
Pollination is a model for a type of writing that jumps from one source or text to another to grow a set of connections (or a meadow), but it is also potentially a sort of natural writing itself, composed by a mix of creatures and geographical features. This writing moves across the land and participates in symbolic language about pollination, just as those traditional texts can reshape plants as they affect land use or responses to pollinators. In this essay, I convey an experience of pollinator writing as a genre through both examining and enacting pollinator writing. Each section contains a narrative that flows into and out of a genre insight about how pollinator writing unfolds in both fiction and non-fiction through a description and analysis of common themes, pollinator roles, and an emphasis on multi-party ecological actions over individuals. In terms of structure, like pollinator writing itself, the sections in this essay move across different themes and interactions, all connected to the process of pollination. The sections begin with a focus on living together with pollinators, move to the function of creatures in pollinator writing, consider the act of nonfiction writing as part of pollination processes, analyze consumption as part of pollination, and then present a consideration of beauty as key to pollination. The goal of this network of topics is to nurture a set of connections that help readers better understand pollinator writing as a genre that is not just about pollinators as content but as a form that mixes elements to prioritize ecological processes. Pollinator writing (and analysis) places material processes and all the complicated interactions with those processes at the center.
Pollinator writing, I want to suggest, may be a start at being postcreature rather than posthuman, where the ecological acts of pollination or erosion or predation are the central concern and animals, plants, geographical features and others together are simply players in those actions. It is postcreature in the sense that processes in an ecosystem, like pollination, move to the foreground and creaturely motives are shaped by that process as much as they shape it. The idea of postcreature is that it doesn’t do away with questions of identity or subjectivity but prioritizes the ways those factors are always parts of webs of relationships or mini-ecosystems. In pollinator writing, the process writes the creature, and in many cases, plants, non-human animals, personal experience, theory, and literature are all mixed together for the hope of new fruitfulness and ecological health.
Despite my lack of carpentry skills, I sawed and hammered a small bee hotel out of scraps from fence slats and a downed branch. I power-sawed the one-and-a-half-inch diameter branch into approximately a dozen eight-inch-long segments. I might like bees now, but I also needed a creative outlet and a sense of doing something valuable (however small) with my hands. After a search for tiny drill bits, my drill burrowed out two or three small holes as deeply as I could into one end of each segment. My older daughter picked an adolescent maple with good sun exposure and helped me hang the fence-slat box, with the branch segments stacked inside it, on the side of the tree. Teaching my daughter and connecting with her certainly served as another ulterior motive. The holes faced outward for nesting use, theoretically giving a few native bees in the area a place to safely store their next generation. Processes of education, construction, pollination, and reproduction all influence each other, and I became a creaturely tool of those processes. Even the work on writing about pollinators pushed me towards this tiny building project, with its small link to supporting pollination processes.
Not all pollinators are insects, but some of the most discussed and important are. Eric Brown’s work in Insect Poetics notes that “the insect has become a kind of Other not only for human beings, but for animals and animal studies as well” (ix). In pollinator writing, insects become less “unsettling” (Brown xx) and bring to the fore a wider range of visceral responses and relationships entangled within processes. These relationships become less about one creature identifying with another and more about multiple entities joining in a process together—even as colleagues in pollination. Donna Haraway writes about this togetherness in her work on human/nonhuman animal companionship. She defines humans and horses working together as “isopraxis” (229). She explains that “nonmimetic attunement of each to each resonates with the molecular scores of mind and flesh and makes someone out of them both who was not there before” (229). Haraway uses isopraxis to show a new entity out of multiple beings, but in pollinator writing, the focus is on the process or activity itself, especially in ecological contexts.
In other words, to think about pollination is to not just consider new entities of multiple creatures working together as Haraway does. Pollinator writing makes the process the primary “new entity,” so it is not just humans and bees (for example) that matter in a story, but the houses, hives, weather, and other elements as well. Maja Lunde’s The History of Bees, for instance, moves between three stories: the development of a new type of beehive in the 1800s, an early 2000s bee farmer in Pennsylvania, and a bee-less future in China where humans have to serve as direct pollinators for food crops. In the novel, pollination processes return in multiple ways that drive human decisions, with George in the early 2000s story driving his hives around to pollinate regional farms, and Tao in the bee-less future narrative putting in long hours carefully and manually adding pollen to flowers to be able to financially support her son, Wei-Wen. When Wei-Wen disappears from a picnic on one of the few days off, Tao goes on a journey to find him (1-7, 65-73). In the dangerous and semi-empty big city, where food is difficult to come by, Tao’s investigations lead her to realize that Wei-Wen had an allergic response to a bee sting, going into anaphylactic shock (246-48). In their high-surveillance society, Wei-Wen had been whisked away, secondarily for his own health, but primarily to be studied to see if a bee was responsible. The bees were back, in some small way and number, and a huge forest project is set up in the area to search for and nurture any found bees.
It’s a classic conflict: the individual and the society, but more in terms of the individual and the ecosystem. The relationship of Wei-Wen to the bee is one of strife and pain and likely death for the bee with possible death for the boy. But bees as a whole are of supreme value to the society. Their loss, foreshadowed in George the U.S. beekeeper’s narrative, where he loses bees to colony collapse disorder (206-08), has reshaped human society to the point of emptying cities and creating new primary labor markets. The presence of one bee can cause fear and occasional physically dangerous forms of shock in stories like Wei-Wen’s or in my fear and assault on bees when painting. But the lack of bees in general can cause fear and a sort of anaphylactic shock for larger societies, indicating the precariousness of food production and living-working practices built on easy food access in many locations.
Colony-collapse disorder is currently understood as all about stressed out bees and hives. Worker bees take off and leave the queen and nursery behind after disease or mites or pesticides weaken them. If insects are an other to humans, as Brown argues (ix), pollinating insects, especially bees, are also familiar. That otherness is countered by the familiarity of metaphors that describe bees in social terms and as workers crafting products (honey). Stress makes that seeming similarity even closer. If we humans identify with anything, it is how stress can make us break down, fall apart, binge on video streaming services, increase consumption of mind-altering substances, and harm our communal relationships. Just like bees. But pesticide use and its effect on solitary and native bee species is perhaps an even bigger issue (Pearson). The species-focused work of humans growing food for ourselves on large farms damages larger processes of pollination in a way that insect pollinators usually avoid.
Work for food is central to Richard Grinnell’s exploration of bees in Shakespeare’s writing, where Grinnell points out “labor and order” as two primary attributes assigned to bees. Individual bees work for the hive or other larger body in ways that serve as direct metaphors for humans and the state. The relationship between bees and humans is one of analogy, but labor can be co-participation (in beneficial or harmful ways) in the same processes of making food like honey or in pollination. Importantly, the selfish or instinctual work of bees furthers beneficial processes for flowering plants and fruit-eating animals. The hidden bee ethic is to care for the colony in a way that keeps ecosystem processes moving and promotes possibilities for growth in many creatures.
The ethic in Lunde’s story eventually suggests a move away from cultivating bees (and certainly away from using pesticides) in favor of supporting their survival and work. Don’t take the honey and don’t treat bees as a crop on their own (Lunde 334-36). Hummingbirds may be fed in backyards, but most pollinators besides the honeybee are not part of a farm or major commercial venture. The relationship turns to one of supporting an important, local non-profit, with the bees as the non-profit that doesn’t work directly for you in any way, but whose work is vital to the success of your community. Humans become pollinator patrons, but patrons that are ultimately dependent on the work of the patronized. The homes and places and processes that are part of living together push priorities past individual creatures toward this mutual dwelling.
Plants and animals have both moved to center stage in some literary studies. Following Cheryll Glotfelty’s definition of ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (xviii), a major branch of ecocriticism has emphasized animal studies (although not primarily pollinators), while work like Jeff Nealon’s Plant Theory suggests that animals “have from the beginning been the privileged figures for understanding human life within the regime of biopower” (x). But plants and animals need not be opposed in study. Pollination reminds us that they are together in many processes and ecological actions. There is no animal studies without plants, whose life is furthered by animals and supports the animals. Nealon argues in terms of valuing plants, too, in biopower relationships (111), so going vegan is not a simple thing and prioritizes one sort of life over another. Again, living things are considered primary over processes together, even when it is at the “aggregate or species level” as a kind of posthuman thought (Nealon 120). Moving out of the individual versus species divide toward consideration of multi-species roles and ecological activities like pollination makes theory more postcreature. Do individuals or an endangered species matter? Certainly. But the cultural and theoretical bias is already with those categories, and a reframing of analysis around an activity like pollination can give a new perspective on values and biopower.
As identified earlier, Haraway prioritizes this combining activity, focusing on one thing emerging out of a former pair working together (like a horse and rider, or butterfly and flower) (229), but pollination tweaks the emphasis to changing pairings and relationships with the action itself (riding, or pollination) as primary. Put another way, the creature is a function or result of the roles it plays and processes it partakes in within a habitat. Theorists can prioritize the roles, like pollinator, in analyzing literature and even in understanding writing as connected to ecological functions like pollination. Insects and humans are both shaped by those functions.
Sometimes I insist on reading Laura Amy Schlitz’s The Night Fairy to my children, where plants, animals, weather, and even fairies all have to work within their roles in ecological processes. My children like the fairy protagonist and the animals, but this quietly magical story of a fairy stuck in a garden after a bat misidentifies her and bites off her wings immerses the reader in a familiar-yet-not backyard ecosystem. The bat itself may or may not be a pollinator (the species is not identified) as it makes its nightly journey. But Flory, the titular fairy, becomes obsessed with the beauty of a hummingbird and her desire to ride one in flight. The hummingbird utterly ignores Flory in its own drive to drink nectar, flitting from flower to flower. The hunger of pollinators makes their life-creating work a beneficial side effect to a self-oriented need. The animal characters in The Night Fairy don’t do favors. There is no altruism. They help Flory and flowers by taking what they want or responding to direct threats or bargains.
Despite the centrality of Flory, the creaturely interactions give the feel of magic in the story. Every creature’s need to eat drives almost all the conflict, from the initial bat bite to the moment a spider catches Flory’s desired hummingbird in a web. “Who do you think you are?” (79), the spider asks Flory, as Flory tries to bargain for the caught hummingbird’s life. “Telling me what to eat! I’ll eat what I choose, missy! It’s no business of yours” (79). The process of pollination is also eating, and it also ties into predation—another eating-oriented process. A short time earlier in the story, in a “voice as soft as a lullaby” the praying mantis asks, “Night fairy, will you be my prey?” (70). There is a sort of magical mutuality to these interactions. No creature can fight the rules of the ecosystem for long. Its processes constitute who they are.
While The Night Fairy is an ecosystem story, its supporting actors are pollinators; their work to do their ecological roles pushes the narrative forward and teaches Flory that she is not the center of the backyard, and that flowers and eggs are much more important to any hummingbird than Flory’s wishes are. While bees may be used to depict a community-spirit or work ethic, Schlitz’s hummingbird’s pollination work is more desire and necessity and obsessive drive than labor. The community of Schlitz’s backyard emerges from the self-preservation work of all the creatures together. The processes decenter even Flora the protagonist fairy, giving a postcreature tendency to the story.
Rhetoric scholar Debra Hawhee focuses on affect and desire in her description of “zoostylistics” as “a vital, sensuous style energized by animals. If animals help to animate language, they also help style theorists convey how words get under the skin—how they sting or bite” (10). She is describing the use of animals in pedagogical rhetorical texts where animal examples enliven style’s effects. The squirrel in Schlitz’s story, for example, moves and speaks in a quick, scampering, unfocused way—except when it becomes hungry and food-obsessed—that reminds readers of the centrality of material and natural processes for any character. The squirrel’s style wakes up the reader to the change of seasons (winter is coming soon) and food collection processes that make the character. Here, pollinator writing participates in zoostylistics to bring not just words “under the skin,” but to bring related natural processes with them.
The process of pollination is a routine where placement of plants in a garden or the presence of insecticides can also alter the style of a pollinator. Hawhee describes how traditionally birds and insects are shown for style “in keeping with their material form and manner of moving, is a lighter, airier charm or delight” (59). The slow, patient, waiting style of speech the praying mantis presents is not airy, but fits with its movement and ways of hunting, while the hummingbird is airy and delightful in a wild and uncontrollable way. These creaturely differences in style can help awaken the reader not only to individual character or creaturely traits but also to the complementary roles the creatures are playing in the backyard ecosystem. Style itself is mixed and variable, creating its own metaphorical ecosystem in pollinator writing. Put another way, the reader experience is one of a mix of styles that animals can help make visceral. Style is something shared that goes beyond individual creatures to the mix of styles.
Pollinators are not primary in Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, but bees are part of vital shared process spaces and are associated with the wisest and most stable characters in the story. God’s Gardeners are the eco-Christian religious sect whose resistance to the corporate genetic-engineering-centered dominant culture is the basis for the story. Among their other mushroom-growing and natural-fiber-wearing practices, they keep bees. Following ancient legend, Pilar and then Toby (the keepers of the bees) always have to share any major news with the bees to keep them informed and calm. When Pilar dies and passes the beekeeping role to Toby, her first task is to tell them of Pilar’s death (180). The bees in Atwood are “messengers between this world and the other worlds. . . Between the living and the dead. They carried the Word made air” (180). The bees tie together plant life, animal life, spiritual life, the past (dead), and the future (new growth). These bees “could tell grief from fear” on Toby “because they didn’t sting” (181). Their awareness of human feelings and need for news is contrasted with the sense that the bees were primarily concerned with their own business. The bees’ concerns may be human ones, but are human concerns of consequence to the bees? Atwood’s pollinators, like Shakespeare’s, serve as a nature-culture bridge. They are the hyphen or slash between those terms, or they remove the space to help make natureculture. They combine an insect otherness with human-like metaphorical identities, playing out that tension in human-pollinator relations that start to include processes of mourning or deciding, not just pollinating. It isn’t just creatures that are linked, processes are interwoven as well, and a postcreature approach finds roles creatures play across a variety of processes—including pollination.
A good friend who taught my children where to look for monarch chrysalises on milkweed gave us tickets to a “Save Our Pollinators” benefit concert and brunch in Woodstock, New York. It was hosted by Catskill Mountainkeeper and featured the premiere of a short film called “Save the Pollinators” about solitary bees and actions to protect them, particularly in upstate New York. It was Woodstock, so a concert followed, and even a good voice from the lead singer felt a bit much as the volume overwhelmed conversation on a summer morning. No honey was featured at the event, but the activities of solitary bees were.
Eighty-five percent of bee species are solitary (Batra 120). The solitary bee counters the stereotype of the communal, working bee. While the hive is ripe with social and labor metaphors, when you move past the honeybee, other possibilities arise. Native bees often specialize in particular plants that they evolved alongside. Some even take the names of plants, such as the blueberry bee and the sunflower bee. They often don’t like to travel and bring introversion back into the bee world. No dances to show other bees where the best nectar is, and they often live in small holes in the ground or in hollow reeds. In urban and suburban areas, they need both bits of ignored soil to live in and plenty of pockets of native flowers to feed on. These pollinators advocate for a lower key lifestyle and a messy mix of habitat. This version of a pollinator lives in the in-between spaces, less in organized groups and more as a behind-the-scenes contractor. As non-honey-makers, they don’t have the artisan or factory connotations available with honeybees, and perhaps better fit the implications of butterflies and pollinating birds. But the secondary effects of all these pollinators are beneficial to many plants and animals alike. Environmental concerns aren’t issue number one. The angle is for a creature’s work, art, self-care, and general way of living to provide secondary benefits to the habitats and living things in the surrounding ecosystem. It’s a moral to the pollinator story. Pollinator literature or writing can treat the process of pollination as a plot of sorts, bringing creatures, entities, and their other activities together.
For writing theorists Sidney Dobrin and Christian Weisser, there is no nature that is not shaped, regulated, or interwoven with text (2-3). They want “ecocompositionists” to be “intellectual travelers who explore new territories in an effort to change themselves, taking nothing but experiences and knowledge, preserving the integrity and resources of the space traveled (5). Like ethical hikers, they should leave no trace, but this elides the inevitability of having an effect, changing (for better or worse or both) the space gone to. The linkage is too strong to not have an impact. They define ecocomposition as “the study of relationships between environments (and by that we mean, natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse” (6). This is an important move for writing and ecology—a distinct pairing. Pollinator writing considers this connection as environments take part in writing or discourse. Gries prioritizes locale and experiential affect as well in arguing that the job of new materialist ontobiography is “discovering and processing the affective-persuasive experiences that emerge, . . . not to ignore or suppress such intensities, but rather to try to tap into that pervasive affectability and responsivity that emanates through life’s unfolding relations in order to better understand the rhetorical experience of becoming-with-other” (313). Those others are not just creatures but are places and needs and processes too.
Pollinators can be both a warning (about ecological health) and something warned against (bee stings). A faculty member at the school I work at recently sent an email warning against leaving windows open in classrooms because of the possibility of bees getting in combined with allergic students. Just like people are valuable and important and should be cared for, but that one driver (for example) is terrible, so with some pollinators as groups and individuals. Save the pollinators on campus with our pollinator plan and meadows, but don’t let them in the classrooms where goals mix. The bee’s goal of finding new food sources and the educational goals of the classroom (and human safety) are understood as activities in conflict when they meet in the same space. It isn’t the creature that is the issue, it is opposing processes to meet different desires.
My university also recently developed a pollinator habitat plan, which prioritizes animals (bees, primarily), but functionally spends more time on the process of pollination, habitat, and plant life. The thirty-one-page document, based initially on a student research project, sets out principles and practices for the school in using small parcels of campus as pollinator habitat. Nonfiction pollinator literature such as this matters, like Lunde’s work, for pollinator literature, especially to a rhetoric scholar like me. The nonfiction genres function more in terms of guiding humans directly in helping pollinators; the aesthetics are secondary and in the landscape. Ultimately, it does advocate for a pro-pollinator aesthetic, even if indirectly. This aesthetic connects to the solitary bee homes created by a local professor and artist. The literature and environment are tied together through aesthetics, and pollinator literature is all about habitat.
The campus plan is full of information about pollinators and pollination, but then specifically calls for the creation of “year-round habitat for pollinators and native plants” as opposed to “turf-grass,” for “bird, bee, and butterfly corridors” with “forage and shelter,” and for the elimination of herbicide use in some locations (Wyeth 11). Along with educational goals, these habitat plans specifically lead to a designed series of meadows to be developed on campus. Most conveniently, the plan lists numerous trees, shrubs, and perennial flowers that are native and pollinator friendly. My family, who live fairly near the campus, has been stealing plant ideas from the plan for our yard, plus using the plan to learn about how to manage a small meadow section with mowing every one to two years to prevent the land from turning into forest, but still disturbing it as little as possible.
My campus community’s non-fiction pollinator writing borders on the how-to genre or makes its motivational argument through providing enough how-to to make action possible. While the first third of the document is about pollinators directly, primarily bees, the latter two-thirds directly address plant life as the subject. The context is the message; the habitat makes the pollinator. And, in this case, the pollinator makes the campus—or at least makes a small part of the campus identity. In the efforts to get recognized as an official “Bee Campus USA” site, the school makes its identity more multi-species. Is this partially using bees for marketing? Of course. There’s a lovely little seal to post on websites with cartoon (bumble?) bees approaching white and yellow flowers. But it also shows a willingness for human institutions to identify with insects. Education takes place in a habitat, and what creatures are welcomed in that habitat matters. The food-based human-friendly aspect of pollinators can make them gateway species for including other creatures. The cute depiction of bees on the Bee Campus USA seal de-emphasizes the sting (no stinger is visible) and promotes a notion of community. Throughout this habitat work, the writing itself is part of the process of pollination, as words alter the plant possibilities.
Combining creatures can become more intense and material when one is eating another and looking for symbolic connection at the same time. My personal experiences eating bugs are mostly limited to those that enter my mouth while I’m cycling and a taste of fried cricket in what seemed like a titillating risk at that moment. from a U.S.-centric cultural perspective. But Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses employs pollinators, specifically butterflies, in a mix of roles and leading a pilgrimage. The butterflies are both natural and spiritual, as is the pollination in the story. They follow the orphan pilgrimage leader Ayesha, serving as both food and clothing for her, flying willingly into her mouth to be consumed (225). She is what they are drawn to, fluttering around her spiritual nectar, but she also eats them directly, taking steps out of the process by which humans gain food from butterfly pollination work.
The butterfly is a function of pollination and migration. The miracle of the butterflies helps convince the villagers in Titlipur to follow Ayesha on foot to Mecca, including potentially walking through a promised parting of the Arabian Sea. These butterflies do no apparent pollinating work. They are too beautiful and too magical for standard ecological actions perhaps. Or maybe they pollinate many plants along the journey, bringing extra growth along their pilgrimage path. The butterflies primarily guide travelers in a spiritual ecosystem of total devotion and purity. The butterflies encourage a fundamentalist faith, even swarming to take the shape of the archangel Gibreel (516), whose messages Ayesha delivers to the pilgrims.
The butterflies are beyond nature as miracle and winged angel, guiding lost pilgrims back to Ayesha and ultimately diving into the sea to provoke the final act of faith—walking fully into the waves. But they are a natural food and clothing for Ayesha, the most spiritual part of nature perhaps. Their purity of purpose and devotion seems less like the mixing of pollination but perhaps leads the pilgrims to a pure and holy fruitfulness (and possible drowning). Is entering Ayesha’s mouth a sort of pollination of her message? They do lead a migration as a migratory species, even dying along the way as with butterfly migrations that take several generations to get to the endpoint. The metaphorical possibilities are nearly endless but bringing material flowers to fruit less so. Ayesha and the butterflies can function as one thing serving a role together. The religious cross-pollination that happens in Ayesha is part of the migration or pilgrimage. Migration, like pollination, is a process to be considered as an action itself, rather than strictly as something beings do.
Sarah Gordon’s essay on insect eating doesn’t mention Rushdie or Ayesha and the butterflies but notes the “spectacle” of insects as an “other food” (345). For Gordon, “exhibition and spectacle form the basis of entomological entertainment” (348), and she emphasizes physical responses the audience has to visions of entomophagy (insect eating). The “repulsive” and “exotic” together are part of the audience draw. With Rushdie, Ayesha’s eating of butterflies has an element of repulsion, but is more exoticism, and goes beyond entertainment for her followers into an argument for her spiritual purity and power by means of entomophagy. Eating bugs is persuasive; it shows you’re serious. Insect eating may change notions of consumption and consumer identity (Gordon 360), and for Ayesha it can give her the spiritual connotations of the insect consumed.
Consuming pollinator literature involves a possible shift in attitudes and identities around production as well. Identities travel from the basic connection of humans and pollinators working together to pollination itself working with numerous creatures (including butterflies and prophets) to produce new growth and food and identities based on co-participation. The plant guide writer and the gardener and the wind and the beetle can be understood through their roles with pollination—or any other ecosystem role.
During a recent summer, I spent a bit of my time not painting like that summer as a teen, but rather helping my daughters work on their Girl Scout pollinator patches. The patch itself is a series of yellow bee-cell hexagrams with different fruits in each hexagram. Those cells half-cover an idyllic garden scene and the patches get sown on my daughters’ blue Daisy vest and green Junior vest. The pollinator patch, like a number of other environmentally-oriented goals at least for Girl Scouts in the northeast US, are currently sponsored by a dairy based in upstate New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
To earn a pollinator patch, the young Girl Scout has to work through activities based on four questions:
1. “What do pollinators do?
2. Why are pollinators important?
3. Why are pollinator populations in decline?
4. How can we help protect pollinators?”
(“Pollinator Patch” 5).
The consensus favorite part of the education materials was the list of flower preferences for everything from bees and moths to beetles, flies, and bats. Color and shape matter based on the sight capabilities of the animal, how it accesses the flower (climbing in, hovering, landing), and the mechanics of the tongue and mouth in gathering nectar. Butterflies need to land, flies have short tongues, and bees don’t see our red (“Pollinator Patch” 17). Color relationships use creatures for pollination and reproducing color, but the creature to plant or other creature relationships can be secondary to the production and perception of color, followed by movements based on color that lead to pollination.
Color can be about attraction and beauty too. Beauty makes us want to reproduce it, often through art, argues Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just (1-2). Does the butterfly know it is reproducing the flower it finds beautiful or useful, and is there a difference between beauty and use in an attractive flower that provides food. This isn’t beauty in form only in a Kantian sense, but beauty that allows pleasure and even calories. Scarry writes about a change in what she finds beautiful, moving from not appreciating palms to becoming enchanted by them, through art in her case (16). The butterfly a person already finds beautiful can teach the beauty of the milkweed it needs, and the field of multi-colored yarrow might teach the beauty of the less appreciated beetle (to human audiences) that pollinates it. But beauty itself may also be less about what a creature likes and more simply a functional element in a process like pollination.
In Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, monarch butterflies are the beautiful star and crisis of the show. Instead of wintering in their usual grounds in Mexico, a large group of the pollinators settle on the property of a financially strapped family in Tennessee. The change in migration patterns is connected to climate change (147), but the more immediate threat (and so many threats feel more immediate than climate change in the heat of the moment) is that one owner of the property wants to clear cut the trees the monarchs have taken over in order to pay the mortgage. In the story, the aesthetic and tourist appeal of the butterflies helps prevent clearcutting, which then reduces the likelihood of mudslides and flooding (137-38). The monarchs themselves are doing little work as pollinators in the story. They function as a local and surprising natural beauty that elides the sense of distance between rural poverty and global warming. Kingsolver’s protagonist, Dellarobia? Explains how there are “teams of ideas” and that the environment was assigned to the other team—the liberal, well-off, globalist city-dwellers, not the rural, the poor, or conservative (321-22).
Regardless of actual impact or importance to a community, “allegiance” to the team is what determines truth and priorities (Kingsolver 261). The monarchs may go about their pollinating work, including with trees, preventing further soil deterioration, but the side effect of their visual appeal to humans is what matters. Maybe you just have to be good-looking, but those good looks need to be local too. The altered migration of the butterflies makes their needs, which Ovid the scientist character teaches about to any community member willing to listen, something that is part of this rural Tennessee community’s team. Sometimes locality can overcome other identity factors. The insect, the pollinator can sometimes be part of a human us. The monarchs in Flight Behavior aren’t laborers like bees. En masse, they are an emotional force that just starts to break down the liberal and conservative “teams” on environmental concerns. Their lack of activity other than changing migration patterns is a quietly massive response to climate change in the story, and lets the butterflies serve as a kind of surprise factor in communicating the connectedness of environmental crises. In Flight Behavior, the pollinator labor is silent symbolic work, catalyzing the people into all sorts of conflicts and decisions. Pollination itself is left behind and replaced with processes like climate change, which would then disrupt and alter many ecosystems and their services.
One patch, one connecting point in our attempt at a pollinator garden is in the front lawn. A nice-sized patch of grass died, and my daughters helped turn over the soil, clear out some remaining plants, and sow seeds. The lawn itself is really more of a grass, clover, dandelion, and other plant combination—not out of any special resistance to socially normalized but shockingly wasteful lawn monoculture, but primarily out of lack of interest despite the best efforts of big box hardware store advertising to tie manhood neighborliness to killing native plant varieties in favor of golf course fairway lawns.
Protecting pollinators is important and is one of many current environmental causes, but in many ways the pollinators are not the real concern. What most people seem interested in is protecting pollination itself. The labor our nonhuman colleagues do has significant value, not just for capital, but for food and ecosystems too. Discussions about the rights or protection of different creatures or entities (like rivers) may need to move toward protecting processes and activities and roles as much as species. Preserving pollination takes plants, multiple animal species, habitats, and food systems (for example) as players in a series of connected actions rather than as individual items. Protecting, or, following the pollinators, adding ecological benefits to processes can shift the language of individual rights to work on necessary cycles, and might further prioritize processes with connected beings as a valuable way to think about ecological and ethical and even human relationships.
In this way, moving toward a postcreature approach with the protection of processes and roles may be beneficial for individual creatures as well. The idea of pollinator writing as a genre encourages experiments in both creative and critical writing where not just creatures or even places, but ecosystem services and natureculture processes become central forces and agents. Connected leaps in writing from one process to another, perhaps from pollination to urban planning to drafting to erosion can demonstrate the interlacing of these processes from personal to geological scales.
Writing itself may be understood as an ecosystem service as it alters experiences within an ecosystem or impacts land use policies. The most important part of the writing process is perhaps not in the arguments about how people write but rather in how someone seeking to influence, express themselves, make a living, or gain tenure (like a bee seeking food) ends up utilizing writing as a process to effect other natural processes. The question is how the writer as a creature participates in many other processes, and how those might let one even think about writers in new ways. I might try to house bees now instead of fleeing or throwing paint at them, but pollinator writing turns process into the continued product that matters, and my actions or writing are just part of the larger pollination possibilities.
Matthew Newcomb earned his PhD in English (with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Composition) from Pennsylvania State University. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of English at SUNY New Paltz where he directed the Composition Program for ten years. His publications on argument, affect, environment, sports rhetoric, and composition theory have appeared in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, JAC, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, enculturation, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, and elsewhere. His book, Religion, Narrative, and the Environmental Humanities: Bridging the Rhetoric Gap came out in early 2023 (Routledge).
Atwood, Margaret. The Year of the Flood. Random House, 2009.
Batra, Suzanne W. T. “Solitary Bees.” Scientific American vol. 250, no. 2, Feb. 1984, pp. 120-27, JSTOR.
Brown, Eric C. “Introduction: Reading the Insect.” In Insect Poetics. edited by Eric C. Brown, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. ix-xxiii.
Cabot Creamery Co-operative and Kids Gardening. “Pollinator Patch.” Educational materials, 2019.
Chen, Jun, Su-Min Guan, Wei Sun, and Han Fu. “Melittin, the Major Pain-Producing Substance of Bee Venom.” Neuroscience Bulletin vol. 32, no. 3, June 2016, pp. 265-72. https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12264-016-0024-y
Cooper, Marilyn. The Animal that Writes: Toward a Posthuman Composition. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.
Dobrin, Sidney I. and Christian R. Weisser Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition. SUNY Press, 2002.
Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. xv-xxxvii.
Gordon, Sarah. “Entomophagy: Representations of Insect Eating in Literature and Mass Media.” In Insect Poetics. Edited by Eric C. Brown, University of Minnesota Press, 2006, pp. 342-62.
Gries, Laurie E. “New Materialist Ontobiography: A Critical-Creative Approach for Coping and Caring in the Chthulucene.” College English vol. 82, no. 3, Jan. 2020, pp. 301-25.
Grinnell, Richard. “Shakespeare’s Keeping of Bees.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment vol. 23, no. 4, Nov. 2016, pp. 835–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isw069
Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Hawhee, Debra. Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw: Animals, Language, Sensation. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Kingsolver, Barbara. Flight Behavior. Harper Collins, 2012.
Lunde, Maja. The History of Bees. Touchstone, 2015.
Mayo Clinic. “Bee Sting.” Accessed February 19, 2020. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-
conditions/bee-stings/symptoms-causes/syc-20353869
Nealon, Jeff. Plant Theory: Biopower & Vegetable Life. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Pearson, Gwen. “You’re Worrying About the Wrong Bees.” Wired, April 29, 2015. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/youre-worrying-wrong-bees/
Rushdie, Salman. Satanic Verses. Henry Holt & Co., 1988.
Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton University Press, 2001.
Schlitz, Laura Amy. The Night Fairy. Candlewick Press, 2010.
Wilson-Rich, Noah. The Bee: A Natural History. Princeton University Press, 2018.
Wyeth, Laura. Campus Pollinator Habitat Plan. SUNY New Paltz, 2019.