Land and milk and honey

collage by nicholas b jacobsen

“He gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey”
- Deuteronomy 26:9 

~44,000-year-old Indonesian cave-paintings of cows
~15,000-year-old Spanish cave-paintings of bees. 
~7,000-year-old fermented Mesopotamian milk and Chinese honey 
~4,000-year-old hieroglyphs of dairying and apiculture in Egypt. 
~21 “milk and honey” 's in the Old Testament
and 2 “golden calves”s

Human interdependence with honeybees and cows is very old.  Just not in this land.* 
(*Maya do have a beekeeping practice with Indigenous stingless that's at least 2000 years old  bees.)

“The honeybee is not a native of our continent. The bees have [gone] a little in advance of white settlers. Indians call them ‘white man's fly,’ and consider their approach as indicating the approach of settlements of whites.”
- Thomas Jefferson

Colonists imported honeybees and cows were into the colonies in 1622 and 1624, respectively. Euro-bees went feral and migrated inland pollinating Euro-grasses which Euro-cows then fed on. European-settlers imported their multi-species relationships to this land which devastated the indigenous ecologies and Indigenous life ways. In addition to military and biological warfare, settlers also practiced the "destroy and replace" logic of settler colonialism ecologically. 

Through colonization, the Holstein cow (most common dairy cow) and the European honeybee are now on every continent expect Antarctica.

Deseret Dollars, collage by nicholas b jacobsen

The first Mormons settlers imported 13 bee hives, 887 cows, and many seeds into Indigenous lands intent to make this “wilderness blossom” into a land of milk and honey.

Like the Mormon population, the cow population exponentially grew in the early decades of invasion. By 1850 Utah had ~12,000 cattle. Forty years later, ~280,000 cattle helped colonize this land.  Today there are over 1 million cows in so-called Utah, with ~ a million of acres of land covered by monoculture cattle-feed crops, limiting land for biodiversity.

Symbolically, the beehive also spread over the land. It’s all over church and state owned stuff as when Mormons were forced to name the lands they’d stolen “Utah” instead of “Deseret,” a Book of Mormon word for “honeybee,” they kept the Beehive, a symbol of their secularized Kingdom of God.

collage of beehives from Utah / Mormon / Deseret culture

We treated this land like we imagined it: pure, virgin, untouched, empty. (The first step is to white-out.) Then we/they imported plants and animals and the symbolic meanings we/they attach to them.

We destroyed Indigenous peoples,  plants and animals,  and their interdependent ecologies  and manifest destinied  an industrialized monoculture in our Land of Milk and Honey.

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collage by nicholas b jacobsen

There are ~20,000 bee species in the world. 
~4,000 of them are native to the so-called U.S. 
~10% of these bees have yet to be described.
~1,100 species are native to so-called Utah.
~1 in 6 bee species is endangered.

No cattle are Indigenous to this land.

Native bees pollinate ~80% of the world’s flowering plants . Many of those plants evolved a specialized relationship with a specific bee species. The tiny “Perdita meconis” is one for a native white poppy which grows only in the gypsum-rich soils in Nuwu lands (Wash Co., UT). 
After millenia of interdependence, both are endangered after a few decades of mining, off-roading, urban development, and bee keeping. 

Euro honeybees escape their hives and go feral. Feral bees, as generalist, out-compete native pollinators, especially Indigenous specialists. Native plants, without their bees, die off. 

Native bees pollinate about 80% of the world's flowering plants.

About one-third of our food is dependent on trucking honeybees to pollinate monocultures, like almond, cherry, apple, raspberry, or avocado orchards (worth ~$3 billion in services) which increasingly spreads feral honeybee populations across the land.

Ongoing domestication of this bee and cow (to increase the milk and honey we get from them) has had negative impacts on their lives, too. Modern dairying is a quotidian horror and our pesticide use created a Colony Collapse Disorder epidemic

Simultaneously, the global number of beehives has doubled since 1960 and cows occupy  about 60% of the biomass of mammals (humans, 36%. wild mammals, 4%). And about 23% of native bees here have died off due to habitat loss and pesticide use (amid a 75% global decline in insects).

Indigenous Peoples as only 5% of the world's human population protect 80% of the planet's remaining biodiversity on about 25% of the land. 

Human relations with cattle in the arid west is a source of Indigenous genocide, catalyst for the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the leading cause of species endangerment and environmental devastation and directly responsible for the ongoing massacre of wolves, bear, coyotes, foxes, snakes and on and on and on

In our pursuit of happiness, as we attempt(ed) to white-out multiplicities of Indigenous lives to build our Land of Milk and Honey on stolen lands. We spread our milk and honey all over the world creating extinction-level biodiversity imbalances, while erasing interconnected cultural, linguistic, and ecological diversity / relationships.