On 31 May, Foodthink invites Professor Lü Chensheng, author of The Vanishing Bees, to DT51 RDV Bookshop in Beijing to discuss the ecological and health risks of neonicotinoid insecticides, from seed to table.
March oilseed rape season: after drones sprayed pesticides, bee colonies in many areas were “wiped out” – beekeepers received no notice. Agricultural ecology practitioner Li Chunliang and pollination conservation scholar Zou Yi on spraying vs beekeeping: who files, who gives way, who pays for ¥700 billion of pollination services.
Harvard professor Chensheng Lu, apiarist Kenneth Wallholl and toxicologist Richard Callahan confirmed through a fifteen-hive field experiment: sustained low-dose ingestion of neonicotinoid insecticides from seed coating damages bees’ mitochondria, causing entire colonies to leave their hives with no corpse in sight.
In the small fishing villages of Satun and Trang in southern Thailand, fishers walk into mangroves for crabs and shellfish, run bamboo-raft tours in national parks, and co-run a restaurant and chilli paste workshop—turning the sea they fought for into a family livelihood.
In Andaman Sea mangrove villages, Muslim fishers, working with NGOs, have established community-managed protected areas—repairing seagrass beds destroyed by channel dredging, fighting for dugongs’ food, and shaking their heads at carbon-sink projects fencing off mangroves.
From Trang to Satun Province, fishers’ associations and grassroots NGOs build community-protected areas—countering trawls, patrolling, and advocating for fisheries legislation to balance conservation and livelihoods—then plot responses once the fine-mesh provision is approved.
The “plantationocene” logic clears land through large-scale monoculture and severs people from ecology. From colonial tea estates to the Green Revolution, rural communities and ecosystems bear the cost. The Qimin Yaoshu’s mixed cropping and the decentralised Ming–Qing tea industry point to an agriculture of care, not control.
From Beijing to Dali, Xi’an and Shanghai, across more than a dozen ecological farms: barnyard grass sways free in the rice, weeds guard the soft topsoil beneath the roses, yet Canadian goldenrod still demands a blade — in the same fields, why is the bond between people and grass so different?
With Atlantic salmon return-migration survival at just 3% – down from 50% – fewer than 2 million remain wild while some 400 million are penned off Norway’s coast. In Eating to Extinction, BBC journalist Dan Saladino charts the fish’s homeward journey from river to sea and its endangered plight.
Over three months at Xiqing Farm in Zhangziying Town, Daxing, Beijing, Tianyi saw how weeds retain moisture, ants herd aphids, and a water-starved sweet pepper turns to flowering and seeding — the living logic of land and crops behind repetitive labour.