I love a good steak as much as the next meat-eating American, and as far as fossil fuels go I see the possibility of a grand bargain between right-leaning motorheads and left-leaning worryworts to use as much gas as fast as possible and bring on that peak oil crisis that will drive us all back to Regency-era modes of transportation and land stewardship.

That said, there’s another perspective on the bees, which I don’t want to say a whole lot about now but which resonates with the talk Roger Scruton gave at the Tocqueville Forum last week on conservatism as conservation. Losing the manatee, say, to world pollution might be sad and a knock to biodiversity besides, but these vanishing bees are both a vital resource and, in most cases, peoples’ property.