13 - To Bee or Not to Bee

Summary

Modernity defined the relationship between environment and the dominant form of the state that emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Through a discussion of the ‘rational beehive’, this chapter examines the changing fortunes of a long-recognized metaphorical state of nature as it was transformed by modern science. Bruno Latour and Ulrich Beck contend that the essence of modernity has been an artificial separation of nature and society. This unnatural separation, they argue, was formalized and perpetuated by emergent modern science in the seventeenth century. This new, revolutionary systematic approach to the natural world promoted science as rationality, which was free of subjectivity and ideology. Through science, it was argued, reason could rise above nature. Recent history has demonstrated the fallacy of this long-held belief in the separation of nature and society. Ecological crises, such as bee colony collapse disorder and climate change, demonstrate the inseparability of human and non-human. In Foucauldian terms, the inherent anthropomorphism of bio-power must be replaced by eco-governmentality (or ‘environmentality’). Eco-governmentality, as a critique or alternative to modern statecraft, has arisen from a crisis of trust, borne of a plurality of expertise in an age of burgeoning information.