Nature-Inspired Solutions to Disease Problems

Pollinators and Us

Pollinators are vital and valuable members of our ecological communities, both at the local and global scales. Pollinators impact our health as humans in a variety of ways, including environmental quality, food access, or medicinal products and research. This diagram is a helpful visual to see the ways that pollinator health and human health interact.²⁷

Figure 4. This diagram shows links between pollinator health and human health.

Both human health and pollinator health are dependent on plants, products, green spaces or landscapes, and clean water, air, and food. Current research shows that globally pollinators have experienced loss of habitat, chemical misuse, negative impacts from introduced or invasive species, and diseases or parasites.²⁸

From an anthropomorphic perspective, pollinators impact overall environmental quality, which includes access to nutrition and access to products from plants like medicine. Pollinator impact extends to prevention of disease as well in relation to medicinal research on plants. There is also research that continues to be done on the positive psychological effects resulting from access to nature or green spaces.

With all the health that hangs in the balance, it saddens me to share that many pollinators are considered federally “listed species” in the United States, meaning that data shows these some of these organisms are beginning to disappear in their natural environments. In the past ten years alone, the United States has lost more than 50% of its managed honeybee colonies due to disease like Colony Collapse Disorder or due to impacts from pesticides and monoculture farming. Land use is a big driver of habitat loss and lack of forage space for pollinators like bees. Pollinators need foraging habitats with diverse plants that provide nectar. Activities like farming, housing development, and road construction can fragment pollinator habitats, breaking apart foraging spaces from where a pollinator lives. Pollinators are most healthy when they have access to a nearby range of food and access to clean, shallow water. I can’t say that we are purposefully doing either of those things in our school green spaces right now. If human activities can disrupt natural systems, then we can also use our actions to restore them. When I think about caring for pollinators in cities like Richmond, I recognize we will have to transform our local landscape for a healthy pollination system. Though my school has taken steps in the right direction, we really haven’t included nature’s voice in our “greening.” Urban development and its large-scale transformations of landscapes are responsible for high rate of species’ extinction, particularly extensive and persistent losses of native species.²⁹

Climate change could lead to even more negative effects on pollinators than those that we already have evidence of. There is risk of pollination-systems collapse if native pollinators are not integrated more into agricultural systems. A loss of pollinators, or lack of their diversity, could mean the loss of the co-evolved plants that depend on them as well as the loss of general plants that require animal or insect support for reproduction.³⁰ Loss of pollinator and plant diversity should be a grave ecological concern, but it certainly isn’t something I’ve ever really considered discussing in my classroom. Now my mind is changed.

Some global communities like the European Union are investing significant funding into the status of their pollinators, though it cannot be said that they United States has done the same at this time. We can act at the local level though! And it is through this lens that I present this unit to my kindergartners. It’s a party! We can’t be all doom and gloom.