Last weekend I spent a few minutes thinking enviously of all of you chowing down at Slow Food Nation. Then I got up and went outside to watch my bees.

Okay — they’re not really “my” bees, although they do drop by frequently for a bite to eat. In fact, they’re invited guests: welcome to dine any time on the butterfly bushes and lantana — micro-habitats for nectar lovers that I’ve nurtured this summer in front of my Brooklyn building.

It is probably not news to Slow Food Nation readers that in the United States, a still poorly-understood phenomenon called “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) has wiped out millions of commercial bee colonies in the past few years. Even worse, CCD comes after about thirty years of steep declines in feral honeybee populations. Bees have been vanishing in Brazil, India, and a host of European countries as well. Is CCD due to pesticides? Habitat loss? Climate disruption? Depletion of genetic diversity? Infiltration of hives by damaging mites? Clues suggest that some or all of these factors and others, alone and in combo, directly and indirectly, are responsible directly and indirectly for wiping out vast populations of bees.

If you are a foodie — slow, fast, or some speed in between — you have a stake in the fate of the bees, because these little pollinators are fundamental to the propagation of about one third of U.S. crops. So their disappearance is potentially a flat-out disaster for our food supply, whether it’s grown industrially or on a family farm.

As a city dweller, I’m typically encouraged to vote my values with my dollars — buy organic, buy local, buy artisan — and leave the wildlife preservation to the professionals working well and far away from my sinful urban center. And yet, it’s accelerating urbanization that accounts for a lot of the habitat lost to bees — and butterflies as well — meaning that even city dwellers can do a lot more for bees than just spinning our cogs in the consumer machine.

Feeling generalized alarm as I read one disturbing report after another about CCD, last fall I began researching how to create welcoming and nutritious gardens for nectar-lovers. Then I began strategizing my campaign to seize control of the four big planters in front of my Brooklyn building — the only home gardening space available to me. While I discussed internally how best to convince my neighbors to support the project, I also fought the peculiar complacency that comes with being an environmental journalist: knowing too well just how big problems like climate change, or disappearing animal habitat, need big solutions: laws and mandates and such. I was aware of just how small my scope as an individual was (outside of my writing assignments, at least) to made a dent in solving them.

Fortunately, this inertia was jostled by an essay in an April issue of The New York Times Magazine, by Michael “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” Pollan, who wrote in part:

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing — something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking — passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists — that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It’s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.