The actor and activist wants you to help save the bees.
Angelina Jolie Shows Us the Art of Beekeeping
For those who have successfully weaned themselves off the steady tap of social media, some big news: Angelina Jolie joined Instagram last weekend and has amassed more than 10 million followers in as much time. With just three live posts, the actor and filmmaker’s page does not appear to be a destination for #OOTDs or red carpet recaps. Instead Jolie has positioned her early relationship with the photo-sharing platform as a place to raise awareness around the causes she has devoted herself to over the years, her role as a special envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees chief among them, especially as the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan continues. But we’re going to bet she uses her considerable influence to highlight other international issues, too—like, say, what we can all do to help preserve our friendly neighborhood pollinator populations.
“You really start to learn what we would lose with 30 percent of the honeybees disappearing,” Jolie tells Vogue, on location at l’Observatoire Français d’Apidologie (OFA) in the Sainte-Baume mountains outside of Marseille. As a Guerlain brand ambassador, Jolie was recently in the South of France to preside over the inaugural graduation of the French beauty brand’s Women for Bees initiative, an ambitious program in collaboration with OFA and UNESCO that aims to train 50 women beekeepers from different biospheres over five years. Launched in June, the goal is to repopulate 125 million bees by 2025.
“I wasn’t a young environmentalist; I’m more a humanist,” says Jolie, who has spent many years witnessing the devastating effects displacement can have on people. “But it always leads back to the environment,” she adds. Her hope? That programs like this will inspire others globally, encouraging all of us to do our part to help restore the bee population, which is responsible for one-third of our food supply—whether that means training as a beekeeper; planting bee-friendly plants and flowers around our homes; or just raising awareness about this very real issue, online or IRL.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Celia Ellenberg
