While I mulled over various blog topics, including the essay I planned on honeybees, my husband sent me a link to an environmental article about pollinators and the recent scares regarding disappearing bees, Are the Bees Dying off Because They’re Too Busy? The article offers a slightly different answer to the puzzle than that of GM crops, but one every bit as indicative of our artificial modern food production methods. It surmises that bee colony exhaustion, due to overuse as pollinators on factory farms, is the cause of disappearing bees. Small beekeepers who let their bees live a more natural life cycle don’t seem to have the same problems as commercial beekeepers who lease hives to one large monoculture farm after another, almost year round.
That made a nice segue into another topic I’ve planned to write about, the importance of family stories. A few weeks ago I came across a brief memoir my mom wrote of her childhood in San Diego during the Depression. When food luxuries were tough for my grandmother to come by, she would sometimes visit her father’s ranch in Potrero, just this side of the border from Tecate. She’d bring home fresh eggs and honey, and presumably milk and butter, since he also kept dairy cows. The trip took a vehicle and gasoline that were often scarce, so there were times that those trips didn’t happen as often as she would’ve liked.
The honey came from my great-grandfather’s bees. My mom recorded no details of the process, but mentioned watching her grandfather extract honey from his hives. My grandmother wrote that at one time he had “90 stands of honey bees” in his apiary. No doubt the bees kept his orchard and garden well pollinated, as well as those of his neighbors. My great-grandfather was from the Danish island of Læsø, famous for its Northern brown bees, among other things. I don’t know whether he learned about beekeeping as a boy. I know he used to herd geese, and he left home at fourteen to sail the seas for ten years, made three trips around Cape Horn, and once almost got stranded in Antwerp. I also remember Grandma telling how he’d hitch a team to a wagon and make the trip from Potrero down to the shore in San Diego, two days there, and two days back. He’d load up with kelp to use as mulch in his garden after washing the salt out. I wouldn’t be surprised if he learned that use of kelp back on his island home.
What should’ve remained a pleasant excursion into my family’s past is blighted by recent news. The tiny community of Potrero, with its valley’s quiet agricultural history (Potrero is Spanish for “pasturing place”) was once home to Kumeyaay tribes, who subsisted on acorns and game from its oak woods, and carved metates into the nearby granite hills to grind meal. Potrero’s pastoral peace remained intact even when Pancho Villa’s rebellion took place just across the border. But the valley’s serenity may be about to change.
Blackwater USA wants to build an 824 acre training facility in Potrero, called Blackwater West. People in the community, the county, and the entire state who know of this plan are horrified.
There’s already fierce debate in Illinois regarding Blackwater North, an 80-acre facility there, as well as troubling reports of its response to wrongful death suits by families of its employees who fell in Iraq.
One has to wonder what the impact would be of such a facility, near environmentally fragile oak tree stands already threatened by Sudden Oak Death, and to the golden eagles that nest there. What about the fire hazards and the noise? The quiet little communities and single outlying residences near Potrero are some of the last true countryside settings left in San Diego County. Will they soon be shaken by the sound of weapons fire and helicopters resonating off nearby granite boulders?
Blackwater in Potrero is a bad idea.
I found a couple of videos about Blackwater at YouTube (warning, these are disturbing):
Blackwater, America’s Private Army
Here’s another video, Blackwater Invades Illinois, with Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army
