Alumni Action Alert: Why we still need to save the bees

Many alumni asked us over the years for more opportunities to get engaged in important issues. Now we send an Alumni Action Alert each month on a particular issue or campaign The Public Interest Network is working on, along with some actions that you can take to help protect the environment, public health or the public interest.

Quick action: Sign this petition calling on Amazon.com to stop selling bee-killing pesticides.

More details: You have likely heard that millions of bees are dying, with nearly one in four native bee species in North America and Hawaii imperiled, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Beekeepers lost 44% of their managed honey bee colonies between April 2019 and April 2020, with record summer losses; the previous year saw the highest winter loss on record. Scientists point to several causes for bee die-offs, including bee-killing pesticides, the loss of good habitat, disease and climate change.

Many of you have worked on this campaign either in the field or programmatically, or as part of the larger coalition effort, since Environment America and state groups started working on it six years ago. Unfortunately the problem hasn’t gone away, and there are real consequences for the natural world -- and for our food supply -- if we don’t do more to fix it.

Current and former Public Interest Network staff have played an important role in many successful actions to help save the bees, from pushing Home Depot and Lowe’s to stop selling plants treated with neonicotinoids (“neonics,” a class of bee-killing pesticides) to the states of Maryland, Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts (and maybe Maine, knock on wood) banning the retail sale of these harmful chemicals. Environment Texas successfully called on the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to stop using neonics in state parks. And just this past December, Environment America helped convince Congress to include bee-friendly language in the final 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, ensuring that the U.S. military takes action to protect pollinators on the 11 million acres of land it administers.

These accomplishments have come in no small part due to the Save the Bees campaign’s citizen engagement and public education efforts. Over the past six years, Environment America and state group supporters have sent more than 1 million emails to local, state and federal policy makers urging them to take action to protect bees. Summer canvassers have gone door-to-door in neighborhoods across America, talking to people, getting petitions signed and putting information about the problem in the hands of everyday people.

Ultimately, the goal of the Save the Bees campaign is to give these creatures a chance by protecting safe havens for bees, encouraging more pollinator-friendly plants and reducing our society’s reliance on neonics and other harmful and unnecessary pesticides. The strategy is to help bees right now by calling on major stores and brands to stop selling bee-killing pesticides, all the while building momentum for action at the federal level. This summer, the campaign will apply the momentum from all the victories so far to internet retail giant Amazon.com and organize consumers to make the case to the company that neonics harm the planet -- and the Amazon brand and reputation.

This season, we’re especially excited that the Save the Bees campaign is what we will be working on to relaunch the Fund’s canvass field operations, which had been closed since early on in the pandemic.

Ultimately, we need to choose the preservation of all wildlife, including bees, over the short-term convenience of pesticide use, whether it’s on America’s farms, or in gardens and lawns. To get there, we’ll need to win enough hearts and minds to this point of view that protecting nature is essential and worthy of our time and attention. That’s one more reason why Environment America's work to raise awareness and get people involved matters so much right now.

Actions you can take:

1. Sign this petition calling on Amazon to stop selling bee-killing pesticides.

2. Write a letter to the editor (LTE) of your local paper. In case you need a refresher here’s a how-to on LTE writing on page 51 of the Student PIRG’s Activist Toolkit. And if your LTE gets published, please be sure to let us know!

3. If you’d like to get involved volunteering on a more regular basis on this or another Environment America campaign, just let us know and we’ll get you hooked up.