Quick Look
- A thorough and compelling examination of the current bee crisis -- a hot button ecological issue
- Kornberger uses bees as a vehicle to explore wider social and ecological issues and to challenge the established scientific world view
- Demonstrates how the worldwide threat of the bee crisis can become a global opportunity for building a better world
This thought-provoking treatise explores the lack of joined-up thinking in our society, through the lens of the bee crisis and encourages us to think about how, through our own choices, we can build a more sustainable world.
Description
In a world all too familiar with environmental disasters, Horst Kornberger argues that the bee crisis is a more significant problem than deforestation, pollution and global warming put together, as it points to the causes behind all these.
Global Hive is a rallying cry for a new understanding of world ecology. More than a study of bees, this book offers both an entirely new way of thinking about the bee crisis and its causes, and a way to use the crisis to explore wider social and ecological issues.
Kornberger challenges the dominant scientific worldview that reduces everything to minute detail and fails to see the larger holistic picture. He argues that we urgently need to start thinking about ecology in a different way -- by developing a new science which draws on empathy and imagination -- if we want to mend our relationship with the natural world. From this perspective, the worldwide threat of the bee crisis becomes a starting point for global change.
Global Hive is a thought-provoking treatise on what colony collapse teaches us about our society, our choices and how we can build a more sustainable world.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1 From Beuys to Bees
2 Honey Hunt
3 Domestication and What it Means
4 The Bee in All Bees
5 The Caged Queen
6 Enter: Varroa Destructor
7 Mites and Their Mission
8 Microscope and Mind
9 Mating Machinery
10 The Logic of Destruction
11 Macroscope
12 Goethe: The Apprentice of Nature
13 Compassionate Ecology
14 From Conscience to Compassion
15 Global Empathy
16 Beehive Metaphors
17 Bee Frames and Mind Frames
18 The Choreography of Care
19 Swarming Paradigms
20 Compassion Collapse Disorder
21 Imaginal Literacy
22 Global Hive
23 Ecolibrium
24 The Honey Doctrine
Afterword
Endnotes
Bibliography
About the Author
Reviews
'A wonderfully written book bringing together two aspects of our humanity: Bee-Culture and development of consciousness.
Even though Kornberger is not a bee-keeper, his book is very well researched and brings to light other largely unknown aspects of the matter. He is an inspiring interdisciplinary artist, international lecturer, author and researcher into paradigm-shift.
Global Hive is highly recommended for anyone wanting to understand the current human crisis deeply; for anyone wanting to take a very different but equally enlightening interest in honey-bees; and especially those wanting to connect the two. 'Compassionate ecology' comes to expression in many forms of current spiritually-inspired, Goethean and alternative bee-husbandry to which this book is an outstanding contribution.'
-- Star and Furrow
'The essential message of this eloquent book identifies our mindset as the root of the problems we are creating. How do we look at and understand the world? [...]
This is a brilliant and penetrating study of the impact of our manipulative and emotionally impoverished Western mindset -- homo scientificus-economicus - and an urgent call to swarm our paradigms, pollinate the global mind and weave a new and compassionate eco-sphere of meaning.'
-- The Paradigm Explorer
'If I was limited to recommend just one book to a new beekeeper, an experienced beekeeper or somebody who loves nature and wants to know more about the extraordinary honeybee, it would be Global Hive by Horst Kornberger... This book is full of hope, and the source of the hope is the exceptional honeybee and the relationships they share with each other and nature. Horst urges us to understand and preserve the bee, so that we might start the process of turning around this ailing planet, and so create a global hive.
Looking back, I can say it fundamentally changed my relationship to bees and my general consciousness of all other relationships. I feel truly inspired by bees, not for their honey but for what we can learn from them. I cannot recommend this book enough.'
-- Jonathan Powell, Natural Beekeeping Trust
Author
Horst Kornberger was born in Austria in 1959. He is a poet, artist, writer and lecturer. He has taught at the Rudolf Steiner College in California and now lives in Western Australia. He is the founder of the School of Integral Art where he pioneers creative, biographical and story writing. He is the author of The Power of Stories: Nurturing Children's Imagination and Consciousness.
