While thousands of fires roar and crackle through the Amazon rainforest, Brazil faces a quieter tragedy playing out in farm country: the silence of empty hives. Earlier this year, beekeepers reported losing over 500m honeybees in only three months. The speed and scale of the die-offs recall colony collapse disorder, a malady that began decimating bees across North America and Europe in 2006. But the symptoms are tellingly different. Where colony collapse caused worker bees to abandon their hives and disappear, the bees in Brazil are dropping dead on the spot. And where scientists blamed colony collapse on a combination of factors, the evidence in Brazil points to one overarching cause: pesticides.

The parallels between Brazil’s Amazon crisis and its bee die-offs are many. Just as the relaxation of forestry rules has led to more fires, so have loosened pesticide restrictions exposed more bees to lethal doses. Nearly 300 new products have been fast-tracked for approval since the beginning of the year, including known bee-killers banned or strictly regulated in other countries. And just as burning a rainforest impacts a lot more than trees, so does the loss of bees stretch far past the walls of the hive.

Depending on how you parse the numbers, bee-pollinated crops account for as much as a third of the food in the human diet. Yields of everything from canola to soybeans drop in their absence, while fruits and nuts like blueberries and almonds depend upon them entirely. Beyond agriculture, scientists can only guess at the scale of the problem, but the situation begs a troubling question. If colonies nurtured and tended by professional beekeepers are dying, then what is the fate of bees in the wild?

When we think of bees, or minds turn immediately to the one species we know best – the domestic honeybee. Their hives have been a buzzing part of our farms for at least 4,000 years, longer than such familiar crops as apples, oats, peas, and coffee. But honeybees are just the tip of the iceberg. Our landscapes abound with wild bees too – diggers, miners, masons, wool-carders, leafcutters, bumblebees, and more. Estimates put the total number of bee species above 20,000, more than all the world’s birds and mammals combined. Many of them are also essential pollinators, of crops as well as the native plants at the heart of ecosystems from tropical forests to mountain meadows. And while most wild bees have never been studied in detail, we know they’re vulnerable to the same chemical threats as honeybees. So whenever domestic hives start failing, it signals a much broader problem in nature.

The challenges facing Brazil’s bees, as well as its forests, boil down in part to bad policy. But that doesn’t let anyone off the hook, because in a democracy government policy amounts to an expression of collective will. And Brazil is hardly the only democratic country where environmental protections are wavering. Recent moves in the United States have shrunk wilderness areas and weakened the Endangered Species Act, not to mention promoting the use of pesticides in National Wildlife Refuges and re-approving sulfoxaflor, a product banned in 2015 specifically for its toxicity to bees.

Yes, we should demand better from our leaders, but we should also demand better from ourselves – at the ballot box and beyond. Buried in recent news coverage on Brazil is a remarkable uptick in the demand for organic foods, reflecting a global trend expected to double sales and production in less than five years. It’s a reminder that how we buy food directly impacts the way that we grow it, and organic methods – even if interspersed with conventional fields – support a far greater diversity of pollinators. But to help bees more directly (or when organics are unaffordable), it’s possible to take steps even closer to home through the simple act of planting flowers. Pesticide-free sources of nectar and pollen can increase bee abundance in any habitat, from urban window boxes to city parks, backyard gardens, and even roadside verges. And since well-fed bees are more resilient to other threats, flowers can even be a hedge against pesticides.

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring gave the environmental movement its most enduring metaphor, a world without birdsong. But she also warned of blossoms without the drone of bees, and there are landscapes where that vision is already becoming too close to the truth. The good news is that bee declines, like deforestation, are preventable tragedies. The first step is taking notice. Now it’s time for action.