The final Friday of the month means it’s time for We Are the World Blogest, a day for promoting positive news. It delights me to participate as an agent of pronoia highlighting feel-good news stories for us all to celebrate.
Co-hosting the project this month are: Shilpa Garg, Inderpreet Kaur Uppal, Peter Nena, Andrea Michaels. Damyanti Biswas. Do check out their posts, along with everyone else participating, and feel free to join us here.
I have a great love for both elephants and bees, and with both suffering hardships and challenges, I was most curious when I discovered this initiative: The Elephants and Bees Research Project. It’s one of Save the Elephants’ innovative programs “designed to explore the natural world for solutions to human-elephant conflict.”
Read more about the project here, and perhaps you’ll be inspired to poke around the Save the Elephants site more and see what else they’re up to.
Admittedly this is a complex problem. While elephants are primarily endangered by the unconscionable poaching activities to harvest their ivory, they are greatly suffering additionally by loss of habitat. As areas once part of elephant migratory routes are developed and inhabited by humans, elephant-human conflict becomes a real issue, Innovative cooperative solutions must be found. Fencing off farm and development areas with bee fences which discourage the elephants from crossing AND keeping key migration corridors open and clear of development is definitely more in the win-win column.
Additionally the presence of bees for the farmers can help in establishing more sustainable and environmentally-friendly practices as well. The bees can help in crop pollination; the opportunity to establish farming practices that do not rely on toxic pesticides is clearly advantageous in maintaining the health of the bees; and honey harvested from the hives provides additional income.
Every opportunity we have to be of assistance to elephants and bees instead of a source of endangerment is a step in the right direction, and I hope we continue to search for and find practices that are worth celebrating.
All of life is complex and interwoven. Never simple answers but we do our best
All life is indeed complex and interwoven Beth. And while it is my deepest wish that we do in fact do our best, I think there is very clear evidence that most often we don’t. But we must try; we must do our best to protect the vulnerable and disenfranchised; and we must advocate for, support, and celebrate those who are brilliantly making a difference. That’s why I love the idea of #WATWB so much – it’s such an opportunity to be inspired into showing up as the best versions of ourselves.
Great post Deborah thank you! Here in SA we have many anti poaching organisations fighting for the mighty elephants and rhinos lives and their ivory. Likewise with bees and the realization of their necessity in the food chain –
It’s good to have these issues being carefully and widely addressed, and hopefully with increasingly great success.
Hi Deborah – I was listening to a bee challenge in South Africa … where some bees are adapting to changing conditions and challenging honey bees. I wrote about an elephant and bee project in Kenya – Lucy, a professor at Oxford came and gave us a talk on the project they were co-ordinating … it was in October 2015. They are so essential to life .. both the wonderful elephant and the humble bee – so excellent to read this post … cheers Hilary
The bee challenge is definitely a complicated issue, and the issue of Africanized bees challenging the more docile bees here in the United States and elsewhere really is a serious problem we yet haven’t sorted out.
I’ll will most certainly be scoping out your archives and looking for your post Hilary – you always have such wonderful things to explore.
Hi, Deborah – Thank you for this positive and informative post. This article is a great reminder that we CAN come up with solutions, despite the complexity of the problem. We should never stop trying.
Absolutely Donna! I always find it especially exciting when creative genius solutions are low tech making them widely accessible, but low tech or high, it’s thrilling to celebrate successes. May we always be encouraged to try!
Hari OM
Just last evening on a magazine programme here, there was a Scottish filmmaker talking about his latest project which is about following elephants everywhere in Africa to assess whether there really are only 350,000 left on the continent. In 1900 the numbers were around two million.
http://redrockentertainment.com/Brochures/Walk%20with%20the%20Elephants_Final_version2.pdf
Some fabulous info and images in that brochure. YAM xx
Thank you Yamini – I greatly appreciate this referral and look forward to reading it carefully.
This is a great project that is the need of the hour. That they are find alternatives for a complex problem is awe-inspiring. Thanks for sharing this informative and positive story, Deborah!
It really is inspiring isn’t it Shilpa? I’m so glad #WATWB exists as a container for us all to share these clever, feel-good, brilliant things that are occurring on our planet. Thanks for your part in co-hosting, and thanks for stopping by.
I love positive news; we never seem to get much of it these days. I’ve had to go searching for it at times. People doing good and making a difference make me more optimistic about the future.
Positive news really is a good thing in so many ways, and I think it’s particularly important that we’re consciously embracing and celebrating it. We absolutely need to break the hypnotizing mind-numbing control of mainstream new cycles that insists there is only wrong in the world and we must be hypervigilantly fearful at all times and embrace separation consciousness as the ultimate protection.
We certainly need to be advocating for and engaging in productive change in our world, but I absolutely believe we also need to be acknowledge our responsibility of what we’re adding into the world. Is it positive or is it negative. Our choice. Always.
This is a wonderfully innovative project and I’m glad to read about it here. I’ve always loved and admired elephants for their intelligence and family kindness, and I’m now starting to learn a lot more about the fascinating life of bees. My husband is getting ready to retrieve a hive in the walls of our church and we are making a space for them in our backyard. Life is full of interesting possibilities.
How exciting you’ll be making space for the bees JoAnna! I’ve never seen a hive relocation – I imagine it’s quite amazing.
Goodness. I wouldn’t have thought of the wellbeing of such huge creatures and such tiny ones being so immediately intertwined, but of course they are. What an interesting project.
The whole thing is pretty awesome isn’t it Kathleen?!
What a great initiative. I love both elephants and bees but I never thought of how a project could help both at the same time, this is great.
I confess it makes my heart very happy as well Tizzy.
great stuff – such a joy to discover the inate creative solutions happening in all parts of the globe…a little big story
It is isn’t it Sandra? I always feel like I’m traveling the world during #WATWB – world-wide goodness to celebrate.
A very smart and original solution to several problems, a real win-win. 🙂
Those are the very best solutions aren’t they Deborah?!
Elephants and bees are so different, yet they remind me that we’re all connected somehow. Seems like there should be a children’s cartoon on TV that features “Ellie” and “Buzzy”– best friends to the end.
Genius idea Ally – I could definitely get behind the adventures of “Ellie and Buzzy.”
I love the connection between elephants and bees but then is not the whole world interconnected? Thanks for sharing this story.
Indeed, I totally agree – everything IS connected. And it’s always fun when we can consciously see and celebrate these connections. Thanks for stopping by and for your part in #WATWB.