It’s fat and sassy bee season in Colorado! The wildflowers in the Rockies are unfurling and flaunting their sweetness, and the region’s pollinators are gorging themselves on nectar and pollen. Just take a look at this beautiful Hunt bumblebee (bombus huntii), spotted on her spring sip-fest in Golden.
It’s Pollinator Week across North America and we have a ‘thing’ for pollinators at the Salazar Center. Did you know that pollinators—including bees, bats, and butterflies—provide one out of three bites of the food we eat? Or that 90 percent of wild plants and 75 percent of leading global crops depend on animal pollination? Pollinators are a keystone species, which means many other species would be hard-pressed to survive without them, including us! For example, pollinators ensure full crop harvests and produce nearly $20 billion worth of products annually. They are instrumental in seed production for the thousands of species of flowering plants growing within forests, prairies, wetlands, farmland, and cities. Pollinators also are climate heros. By nesting underground, particularly in arid regions, they provide soil aeration and water retention. By fertilizing native plants, they support root systems that hold the soil in place and habitats for multiple species that maintain soil variability and nutrient richness. In effect, they sustain entire ecosystems that can help protect us from climate impacts. As small as they are, pollinators play a gigantic role in making sure we have a sustainable food supply and healthy, climate-resilient landscapes, even in cities.
You could say that the superpower of pollinators is cross-sector collaboration.
I was recently reminded that collaboration is a human superpower too. As a roundtable moderator at the National Civic League’s All-America City Awards in Denver, I was inspired and energized by the stories of multiple cities across the U.S. that are employing collaboration and civic engagement to improve the lives of their citizens. United in place and with a will to solve problems, city employees, council members, police officers, fire fighters, business leaders, teachers, students, and nonprofits are working together to achieve economic vitality, public safety, food security, and climate resilience. These problem-solvers have no time for silos, hierarchies, or polarization. Instead, what I heard, and what gave me hope for our future, is that through the shared process of defining and achieving their goals, each city became a real community. The simple act of participation—much like pollination—unleashes creativity, an awareness of belonging, powerful solutions, and the magic of life in association.
At the Salazar Center, we work to build spaces to ignite such collaboration. For example, our Plants for Parks, Pollinators and People project is co-creating research with the City of Denver, the Mola Lab at Colorado State University, and low-income communities to determine how and where to increase and connect pollinator habitats in a way that works for Denver citizens, increases their access to nature, and improves the City’s climate resiliency. Our Peregrine Accelerator for Conservation Impact champions and invests in ideas and partnerships in important bioregions across North America that can lead to outsized conservation outcomes benefitting benefit people and nature—including bats, agave, and rural ejidatarios in Mexico —and that brings innovators together to build power and accelerate change.
Nature is a grand, majestic endeavor that depends on successful, lasting collaboration among its many species, including the human species. Let’s take a clue from the humble bumblebee and collaborate like a pollinator.