The grips of our knowledge systems have tightened with time—gradually severing our connection to the world. Breaking free from today’s dominant paradigms have become as unimaginable as Ursula K. Le Guin’s assertion of the once “divine right of kings.” These paradigms present themselves as truths. They pose as scripture, writing their way into our lives with as much permanence as our ancestors. They offer us foggy origin stories that obscure our deep intertwinement with the biosphere, reducing our legacies and lineages to the narratives of the valiant and the victorious. They urge us to thank empires, technologies, and militaries for securing our borders and providing us with our contemporary conditions of prosperity and privilege. Yet, to view ourselves solely through the lens of empire, domination, and warfare is a chilling distortion.
Our bodies, in their quiet rejection of these stories, communicate a different truth—one rooted from seeds within the Earth itself.
Colombian-American anthropologist Arturo Escobar’s exploration of the entangled lives of humans and more-than-humans helps us recognize the greatest crises of modernity: those that emerge from social structures that continually separate us from the natural world. In a similar vein, renowned scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis deepens this insight. Lovelock suggests that Earth is a self-regulating system, where living organisms and their environments form intricate feedback loops to maintain the conditions necessary for life. The Earth’s stability, he argues, cannot be understood through conventional scientific models but must be seen as the result of this biospheric self-regulation. These ideas laid the groundwork for Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature, which challenges us to move beyond modernist binaries and embrace perspectives that recognize the agency of nonhuman entities. This shift was echoed by late-twentieth-century ecological anthropologists, who examined the often contradictory ways in which human societies engaged with the nonhuman world—often relegating it to the periphery of sentience.
Adding yet another layer to this discourse, Jake Kosek’s Ecologies of Empire examines the ways in which ecological practices—specifically those related to honeybees—have been co-opted into the machinery of empire. Kosek traces the bee’s journey through the military-industrial complex, revealing how these creatures, long symbols of industriousness and social order, have been re-engineered as tools of warfare. In a striking example, honeybees were enlisted to map plutonium in the landscapes surrounding the Los Alamos National Laboratory, transforming them from symbols of agricultural harmony to military assets. This exploitation goes beyond labor; the bees are turned into sensory prostheses, embodying human political and military interests.
As their behaviors and social structures are reconfigured to serve modern warfare, bees become increasingly “human”—or at least human-instrumentalized.
The honeybee is a creature that humans have long felt a deep affinity for, much like dolphins or elephants. We instinctively protect them, admiring their delicate work in pollination. Yet when I encountered Kosek’s research, I found myself victimizing the bees. “Not our innocent honeybees,” I thought, as though they were exempt from the corruptions that shape the world we inhabit. In that moment, I realized that I still subconsciously viewed them as more “natural” than myself, as though their relationship with the Earth was somehow purer.
This perception reveals a profound truth: the bee serves as a powerful metaphor for the entanglement of ecology and empire, and for the ways human practices are reshaping not just the natural world but the very meaning of what it means to be human, nonhuman, and part of the biosphere. Perhaps, then, we should reconsider our stance in the world. What if we stopped seeing ourselves solely as the objects of corruption, victims of the systems that degrade both the environment and our bodies? Our bodies, like those of the honeybees, are as earthly as the trees and oceans, more intimately connected to the natural world than to the stories of empire we have inherited.
We are older than these stories, and in time, we may well outlive them.
Rather than merely critiquing the power structures that fuel environmental destruction, we must also attend to the ways these structures materialize in the lives of bees, plants, forests, and ourselves. By doing so, we begin to understand how to care for the living world—not as passive recipients of human intervention, but as active participants in the ongoing, often fraught, process of life on Earth. It is only through this recognition that we can hope to break free from the constraints of our dominant paradigms and reimagine a future in which humans and more-than-humans coexist in ways that honor their shared agency, resilience, and interdependence.
