Seeing like a bee: tracing the urban pollinator commons

Keywords: urban ecology, commons, urban commons, pollinators
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Here I develop a theory of the urban pollinator commons, focusing in particular on how wild bees use urban green space. The scientific literature on urban wild bees has grown tremendously over the past decade. Much of the research has coalesced around the idea that, in a world marked by habitat fragmentation and loss, cities can be “refuges” for wild pollinators (Hall et al. 2016). I conduct a spatial analysis of wild bee ranges in selected U.S. cities, demonstrating that a pollinator commons exists as a kind of layer floating over the urban landscape. Wild bees, I argue, constitute a “latent commons” (Tsing 2015) that exists in the mostly unseen-by-humans margins of the city. It is a commons that emerges on its own — yet humans can create better conditions for its emergence. A robust urban pollinator commons is necessary in at least three realms. First, urban pollinators are a critical component of urban agriculture and urban food justice efforts (Zhao et al. 2019). Second, in pollinating native plant species, they play a key role in mitigating the flooding induced by climate change, and therefore must be part of urban climate justice efforts (Newell & Romanski 2020). Third, this proliferation of tiny beings provides humans the opportunity to notice wildness all around them — with implications for citizen science efforts, as well as efforts to disentangle from the “attention economy” (Odell 2019) and begin to become “indigenous to place” (Kimmerer 2015).