It is fascinating that for all of human history before the last few centuries, nearly everyone lived very local lives, but now we seamlessly adapt to great distances and great speeds at great cost.
Roads are a very good idea when there are but a few of them. Yheycarexs very bad idea when there are millions of them. It's all a scale phenomena and knowing when enough of something has been reached and it's time to stop. Our own human population is just the same. A billion of us is enough. Eight billion of us is very bad news for the planet.
We need to voluntarily reduce our numbers and re-wild as much of the planet as we can.
I doubt there's the will. I don't doubt that even if there were the will, we could put the horses of global heating back in the barn.
I think of this often too, Michael. Assuming we can't change behavior or reduce consumption in some other ways, scale is the problem. Population growth is slowing, though not quickly enough. And even as it slows, the "pronatalist" voices will grow louder because too few people can imagine an economy built around anything other than constant growth.
I agree. We're dealing with several problems simultaneously, not the least is good old fashioned nationalism and global rivalries that don't allow nation's to "fall behind." It's why I'm a bit of a misanthrope at times.
Brilliant article, thank you for writing. It reminded me of the opening chapter of Jason Hickel's "Less is More" whilst the point you make about our lack of knowledge of insects echoed George Monbiot's fear of our ignorance of soils in "Regenesis".
I wondered about the sentence "Roads kill more creatures than anything else we do". Surely animal agriculture is responsible for many times more deaths?
Thank you, Leo. I'm honored to be mentioned alongside Hickel and Monbiot. As for that line, I took it from the Road Ecology Center folks. I don't have the source in front of me, but I think it's a reliable truth about daily slaughter, as opposed to describing the long-term impact on populations rooted in habitat loss. The billions of birds, esp. migratory species, and countless microbes and insects lost due to Big Ag's influence on wetland loss and landscape toxicity probably outstrips the slaughter on the roads, but I can't speak to that comparison with any authority. But it's worth looking at a map and multiplying the carnage we see by every mile of pavement we don't see. Road ecology is one of the most underreported aspects of biodiversity threat and loss. Check out Ben Goldfarb's truly excellent new book, Crossings, to really get a sense of it.
I see it here in the UK daily, the roads are bordered with badger, fox, pheasant and deer carcasses. But I was thinking more of the billions of animals slaughtered annually in our food system, for our consumption. I will certainly have a read of Crossings. I'm sure Ben covers this but the French have what they call "Ecoducs" or "Eco-ponts", basically eco-bridges for wildlife to cross busy roads:
Right, sorry, I was focused on wild animals. That's a brutal numerical comparison I should find. Thank you for the reminder.
And yes, plenty of reference to ecoducts and other European crossings in Crossings, particularly the Netherlands, but I think just a passing reference to France.
Yes, it is an amazing transformation. I, too, remember the ubiquitous bug-spattered windsheild, and now. nothing. Thank you. I look forward to your posts. You write with such scope, science, and tenderness.
Thank you, Juliet. It's a grand topic with staggering implications, but like so many grand topics related to biodiversity it barely registers in the media. Thanks for paying attention.
One nitpick: Blaming so-called "invasive species" is an easy claim to make, and I'm well aware it's a common one in popular discourse, but it paints a broad stroke that needs more specificity to be meaningful. By far the biggest threats to insect biodiversity are habitat destruction, and the increasing use of pesticides over the last few decades. Unfortunately, herbicides are the most common method of eradicating "invasive plants," so in that way, boosting the "invasives" narrative promotes a "solution" that's part of the problem for insects. Which is not at all what you want to encourage, I know.
Now if by "invasive species" you mean domesticated livestock, farm crops and lawns, then I'm in agreement. Agriculture is the biggest cause of habitat destruction on the planet, acreage-wise. Deforestation is primarily driven by agriculture, much of it for feed for livestock. Livestock running rampant on rangelands, including public lands, is directly responsible for the destruction of plant life that insects are dependent on, and livestock have severely deleterious effects on riparian ecosystems. Plus, all of the water diversion for agriculture has terrible effects on water tables and riparian cycles, further endangering ecosystems and their insects. If lawns in the US were considered an irrigated crop, they would be the most irrigated crop in the nation. Pesticides are too often a part of keeping these symbols of privilege "weed free."
The majority of insects are generalists, and can adopt new plants as they are introduced. (Many of the insect "pests" for agriculture are, after all, native insects who have taken to the imports.) Likewise, insects introduced to new places are often able to sustain themselves on plants that are new to them. Nature is adaptable and constantly adapting. "Novel ecosystems"--which are mixes of native and exotic species--are increasingly being studied and appreciated as legitimate ecosystems, with interactions and functions like any other ecosystem. In urban areas, some insects are now *dependent* on introduced plant species. Removing such plants solely because of their place of geographical origin would now adversely affect such insects.
We should do everything that we can to protect insect habitat from all its threats. In my opinion, this means recognizing that sometimes this habitat is in novel ecosystems. We can also observe (as invasion biologists do) that the effects of most newcomers to ecosystems are neutral or beneficial, and only detrimental in the minority of cases.
Again, I appreciated the essay very much, and just wanted to add this bit of nuance on the one topic.
Thank you, Kollibri. I'm so glad you're out there pushing back on the invasives narrative. Certainly, humans, our livestock, our lawns, our chemicals and plastics, and our agriculture constitute the greatest invasive story in Earth history. And the plants, insects, and other animals following in our wake as we disrupt continents and oceans are merely living their lives as we've shaped them.
That said, the realities of "novel ecosystems" are nuanced on a good day and extraordinarily disruptive in general. Much of this is water under the bridge. There's little hope we can recalibrate many (or any) ecosystems to a pre-Anthropocene status. And as you say here some new arrivals play well with others, while many others are relatively benign. But it's hard watching the scale of destruction caused by the others. I'm watching hemlocks die around me here bc of hemlock wooly adelgids. Beech trees have a new threat sweeping through. I could go on.
The insect decline is not the best topic on which to defend the invasives narrative, certainly, but I think it's important we still talk about invasives, with the caveat that their presence is our fault, not theirs, and the understanding that management of these disrupted and unstable ecosystems will require generations of difficult decisions.
It's been decades since I've cleaned a winged corpse from the front grill of my car. It's been about that long since my friends and I rode our bikes in the wake of the mosquito-fogger trucks that cruised our neighborhoods, excited because in my part of Texas, we'd never seen fog and this seemed like a magical substitute ... what were they spraying? And why did no adult think to stop us from doing that? Beyond the human health impacts, we are certainly paying the price for that now in terms of ecosystem decline, although most of my Texan relatives are quite happy that there are fewer (if any) bugs to clean from their windshields and zap in their blue-light zapper. These are the folks who still get a biannual chemical "insect treatment" of their home, and are the ones that make me wonder if we'll ever be able to right this ship, because I imagine they represent a massive, unaware segment of our population. Anywho, glad you're spreading the good word. Awareness and change comes when you least expect it. :)
No (real) fog in TX? That never occurred to me. Here on the coast of Maine it's part of the atmospheric furniture. I remember the fogger coming around once in a while when I was a kid in MA, but my mother was wise enough to bring us in for a while. She figured if it was killing bugs it probably wasn't good for us. As for righting the ship, I know, there's such a large portion of folks not reading our Substacks... who live in the world created by entities and ideas that boil down the living world for the confections of consumption. I mean, we're in that world too, but we're peeking under the curtain at least. Awareness and change will largely come from policy and regulation up top and activism on the ground. But no one's going door to door about biodiversity, right? One of the greatest services we can provide the future would be to put the chemical industry on a very, very short leash called the precautionary principle. Why, for example, aren't execs from 3M and DuPont going to jail for PFAS crimes? But I digress. Thanks for the great comment.
As a small child, I saw numerous butterflies every day in the late '50s and early '60s. Now, living in the same house as back then, I see about as many butterflies all summer as I saw in a few days back then.
One of the drivers of insects' disappearance--and extinction, generally--is the human population explosion. There were 174 million Americans when I became enamored of butterflies as a small child, in 1958. Now there are 335 million in the major industrialized nation with the greatest per capita greenhouse emissions and resource use, nearly twice that first number. We are the worst place on the planet to put more people. The average immigrant's GH emissions rise threefold after arrival in the US.
Yet, the Census Bureau projects we will add around 80 billion over the next 40 years, or 20 billion (one NY State equivalent) per decade, 90% of this from immigration.
Population, yes, but also resource use. The noted formula I=PAT (impact = population, affluence, and technology) describes the basic process. And whatever you think about immigration, it's going to be a very complex part of the chaotic future ahead, driven by climate impacts of course but also by nations wrestling with population decline. That decline is a good thing, but the push-back on it will be intense.
I'm well familiar with I=PAT, as one of my favorite professors, John Holdren, was one of the two people who came up with that (as you undoubtedly know).
Well, it sounds like you're much better versed than I am, David. I don't know the backstory of the I=PAT formula well enough. I associate it with Paul Erlich, and just now read that he and Holdren worked on it together. Thanks for that.
As a side note, it is nice to look back on a favorite professor and think about the quality of their work and its influence on us, isn't it? Even for the slacker I was in college, I think fondly back on a few.
It certainly is! I had at least several who were wonderful. Holdren in particular grounded me in environmental science. I've been on the eclectic side in my writing (science, medicine, energy, environment, cars... and within each of those areas there are so many topics), but I'm guessing I wrote about ten articles where I got the grounding from him--and maybe more. It's hard to keep track of 45 years of writing.
I'm pretty sure I've spoken to Ehrlich on the phone--I can hear his voice. But I can't remember what I was writing that I called him. And the woman who has his place at Stanford, Gretchen Daily, tells me I put her on the map with my writing about her work (two articles). (She's worked on figuring out the value of ecosystem services.)
In my mind right now as I read this: why do we need to travel so much? And why do we need to get there faster?
We're hurrying to get somewhere, ignoring what we have where we are.
It is fascinating that for all of human history before the last few centuries, nearly everyone lived very local lives, but now we seamlessly adapt to great distances and great speeds at great cost.
Roads are a very good idea when there are but a few of them. Yheycarexs very bad idea when there are millions of them. It's all a scale phenomena and knowing when enough of something has been reached and it's time to stop. Our own human population is just the same. A billion of us is enough. Eight billion of us is very bad news for the planet.
We need to voluntarily reduce our numbers and re-wild as much of the planet as we can.
I doubt there's the will. I don't doubt that even if there were the will, we could put the horses of global heating back in the barn.
I think of this often too, Michael. Assuming we can't change behavior or reduce consumption in some other ways, scale is the problem. Population growth is slowing, though not quickly enough. And even as it slows, the "pronatalist" voices will grow louder because too few people can imagine an economy built around anything other than constant growth.
I agree. We're dealing with several problems simultaneously, not the least is good old fashioned nationalism and global rivalries that don't allow nation's to "fall behind." It's why I'm a bit of a misanthrope at times.
Brilliant article, thank you for writing. It reminded me of the opening chapter of Jason Hickel's "Less is More" whilst the point you make about our lack of knowledge of insects echoed George Monbiot's fear of our ignorance of soils in "Regenesis".
I wondered about the sentence "Roads kill more creatures than anything else we do". Surely animal agriculture is responsible for many times more deaths?
Thank you, Leo. I'm honored to be mentioned alongside Hickel and Monbiot. As for that line, I took it from the Road Ecology Center folks. I don't have the source in front of me, but I think it's a reliable truth about daily slaughter, as opposed to describing the long-term impact on populations rooted in habitat loss. The billions of birds, esp. migratory species, and countless microbes and insects lost due to Big Ag's influence on wetland loss and landscape toxicity probably outstrips the slaughter on the roads, but I can't speak to that comparison with any authority. But it's worth looking at a map and multiplying the carnage we see by every mile of pavement we don't see. Road ecology is one of the most underreported aspects of biodiversity threat and loss. Check out Ben Goldfarb's truly excellent new book, Crossings, to really get a sense of it.
I see it here in the UK daily, the roads are bordered with badger, fox, pheasant and deer carcasses. But I was thinking more of the billions of animals slaughtered annually in our food system, for our consumption. I will certainly have a read of Crossings. I'm sure Ben covers this but the French have what they call "Ecoducs" or "Eco-ponts", basically eco-bridges for wildlife to cross busy roads:
https://www.caminteresse.fr/environnement/cest-quoi-un-eco-pont-nouvelle-generation-11186727/
Right, sorry, I was focused on wild animals. That's a brutal numerical comparison I should find. Thank you for the reminder.
And yes, plenty of reference to ecoducts and other European crossings in Crossings, particularly the Netherlands, but I think just a passing reference to France.
Yes, it is an amazing transformation. I, too, remember the ubiquitous bug-spattered windsheild, and now. nothing. Thank you. I look forward to your posts. You write with such scope, science, and tenderness.
Thank you, Terry. You're too kind.
Really appreciate your critical thought here, and the balanced approach.
Thank you, Lisa.
This is a thought provoking, informative article about insect declines.
Thank you, Juliet. It's a grand topic with staggering implications, but like so many grand topics related to biodiversity it barely registers in the media. Thanks for paying attention.
Very good article, thanks for putting it out.
One nitpick: Blaming so-called "invasive species" is an easy claim to make, and I'm well aware it's a common one in popular discourse, but it paints a broad stroke that needs more specificity to be meaningful. By far the biggest threats to insect biodiversity are habitat destruction, and the increasing use of pesticides over the last few decades. Unfortunately, herbicides are the most common method of eradicating "invasive plants," so in that way, boosting the "invasives" narrative promotes a "solution" that's part of the problem for insects. Which is not at all what you want to encourage, I know.
Now if by "invasive species" you mean domesticated livestock, farm crops and lawns, then I'm in agreement. Agriculture is the biggest cause of habitat destruction on the planet, acreage-wise. Deforestation is primarily driven by agriculture, much of it for feed for livestock. Livestock running rampant on rangelands, including public lands, is directly responsible for the destruction of plant life that insects are dependent on, and livestock have severely deleterious effects on riparian ecosystems. Plus, all of the water diversion for agriculture has terrible effects on water tables and riparian cycles, further endangering ecosystems and their insects. If lawns in the US were considered an irrigated crop, they would be the most irrigated crop in the nation. Pesticides are too often a part of keeping these symbols of privilege "weed free."
The majority of insects are generalists, and can adopt new plants as they are introduced. (Many of the insect "pests" for agriculture are, after all, native insects who have taken to the imports.) Likewise, insects introduced to new places are often able to sustain themselves on plants that are new to them. Nature is adaptable and constantly adapting. "Novel ecosystems"--which are mixes of native and exotic species--are increasingly being studied and appreciated as legitimate ecosystems, with interactions and functions like any other ecosystem. In urban areas, some insects are now *dependent* on introduced plant species. Removing such plants solely because of their place of geographical origin would now adversely affect such insects.
We should do everything that we can to protect insect habitat from all its threats. In my opinion, this means recognizing that sometimes this habitat is in novel ecosystems. We can also observe (as invasion biologists do) that the effects of most newcomers to ecosystems are neutral or beneficial, and only detrimental in the minority of cases.
Again, I appreciated the essay very much, and just wanted to add this bit of nuance on the one topic.
Thank you, Kollibri. I'm so glad you're out there pushing back on the invasives narrative. Certainly, humans, our livestock, our lawns, our chemicals and plastics, and our agriculture constitute the greatest invasive story in Earth history. And the plants, insects, and other animals following in our wake as we disrupt continents and oceans are merely living their lives as we've shaped them.
That said, the realities of "novel ecosystems" are nuanced on a good day and extraordinarily disruptive in general. Much of this is water under the bridge. There's little hope we can recalibrate many (or any) ecosystems to a pre-Anthropocene status. And as you say here some new arrivals play well with others, while many others are relatively benign. But it's hard watching the scale of destruction caused by the others. I'm watching hemlocks die around me here bc of hemlock wooly adelgids. Beech trees have a new threat sweeping through. I could go on.
The insect decline is not the best topic on which to defend the invasives narrative, certainly, but I think it's important we still talk about invasives, with the caveat that their presence is our fault, not theirs, and the understanding that management of these disrupted and unstable ecosystems will require generations of difficult decisions.
It's been decades since I've cleaned a winged corpse from the front grill of my car. It's been about that long since my friends and I rode our bikes in the wake of the mosquito-fogger trucks that cruised our neighborhoods, excited because in my part of Texas, we'd never seen fog and this seemed like a magical substitute ... what were they spraying? And why did no adult think to stop us from doing that? Beyond the human health impacts, we are certainly paying the price for that now in terms of ecosystem decline, although most of my Texan relatives are quite happy that there are fewer (if any) bugs to clean from their windshields and zap in their blue-light zapper. These are the folks who still get a biannual chemical "insect treatment" of their home, and are the ones that make me wonder if we'll ever be able to right this ship, because I imagine they represent a massive, unaware segment of our population. Anywho, glad you're spreading the good word. Awareness and change comes when you least expect it. :)
No (real) fog in TX? That never occurred to me. Here on the coast of Maine it's part of the atmospheric furniture. I remember the fogger coming around once in a while when I was a kid in MA, but my mother was wise enough to bring us in for a while. She figured if it was killing bugs it probably wasn't good for us. As for righting the ship, I know, there's such a large portion of folks not reading our Substacks... who live in the world created by entities and ideas that boil down the living world for the confections of consumption. I mean, we're in that world too, but we're peeking under the curtain at least. Awareness and change will largely come from policy and regulation up top and activism on the ground. But no one's going door to door about biodiversity, right? One of the greatest services we can provide the future would be to put the chemical industry on a very, very short leash called the precautionary principle. Why, for example, aren't execs from 3M and DuPont going to jail for PFAS crimes? But I digress. Thanks for the great comment.
As a small child, I saw numerous butterflies every day in the late '50s and early '60s. Now, living in the same house as back then, I see about as many butterflies all summer as I saw in a few days back then.
One of the drivers of insects' disappearance--and extinction, generally--is the human population explosion. There were 174 million Americans when I became enamored of butterflies as a small child, in 1958. Now there are 335 million in the major industrialized nation with the greatest per capita greenhouse emissions and resource use, nearly twice that first number. We are the worst place on the planet to put more people. The average immigrant's GH emissions rise threefold after arrival in the US.
Yet, the Census Bureau projects we will add around 80 billion over the next 40 years, or 20 billion (one NY State equivalent) per decade, 90% of this from immigration.
Population, yes, but also resource use. The noted formula I=PAT (impact = population, affluence, and technology) describes the basic process. And whatever you think about immigration, it's going to be a very complex part of the chaotic future ahead, driven by climate impacts of course but also by nations wrestling with population decline. That decline is a good thing, but the push-back on it will be intense.
I'm well familiar with I=PAT, as one of my favorite professors, John Holdren, was one of the two people who came up with that (as you undoubtedly know).
Well, it sounds like you're much better versed than I am, David. I don't know the backstory of the I=PAT formula well enough. I associate it with Paul Erlich, and just now read that he and Holdren worked on it together. Thanks for that.
As a side note, it is nice to look back on a favorite professor and think about the quality of their work and its influence on us, isn't it? Even for the slacker I was in college, I think fondly back on a few.
It certainly is! I had at least several who were wonderful. Holdren in particular grounded me in environmental science. I've been on the eclectic side in my writing (science, medicine, energy, environment, cars... and within each of those areas there are so many topics), but I'm guessing I wrote about ten articles where I got the grounding from him--and maybe more. It's hard to keep track of 45 years of writing.
I'm pretty sure I've spoken to Ehrlich on the phone--I can hear his voice. But I can't remember what I was writing that I called him. And the woman who has his place at Stanford, Gretchen Daily, tells me I put her on the map with my writing about her work (two articles). (She's worked on figuring out the value of ecosystem services.)