
Insect Apocalypse German Bug Watchers Sound Alarm - TakakiTohno
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-insect-apocalypse-german-bug-watchers.html
======
vages
I wish that articles like these could end with at least some point of action
that I could take to improve the situation. If the public should act, give
them something actionable: Calling their local council, joining an
organization, not cutting your lawn, whatever.

As anyone's who's been trained in crowd control during emergencies knows, you
don't just sound alarm without at the same time telling people what to do.
Journalists should take at least some kind of the same responsibility.
Otherwise, people will either panic or stop listening.

~~~
sametmax
Just because you can report a problem doesn't mean you have a solution. That
doesn't mean the problem is not worth reporting.

I haven't seen panic. People can't stop listening since they haven't even
started. Most people don't know about this, don't care, or can't see the big
picture.

But repeating works.

We know it works, because that's how TV ads work.

So I'm all OK with repeating that again, and again.

People getting tired of it ? Meh, they still watch TV after the 1876th coca
cola ad. And then they go buy soda.

I'll take the chance of repeating a wholesome message.

~~~
lugg
It's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I
stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way
things are and gets ahead because of it?

What we need is a mass awakening. We need everyone to care at the same time to
see anything change.

We won't act unless we have role models acting before our very eyes. We won't
act untile there is a problem directly in front of us. Until that time you may
count on the status quo continuuing.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's more complicated than this. I listened, I cared, for years. Then I
> stopped. How can I continue caring when everyone around me exploits the way
> things are and gets ahead because of it?_

Through the magic of principles? Life should not be about getting ahead, but
about doing what's right.

~~~
brighton36
What is right? How can a person know? I don't think that principles are much
more than oral tradition. And many of us don't have that in the modern world.

~~~
coldtea
> _What is right? How can a person know?_

We watch, we experience, we learn, we read, we ask around, we interact.

Same as with any other thing. If I stole your wallet you'd immediately knew it
wasn't right, wouldn't you?

> _I don 't think that principles are much more than oral tradition._

Well, I don't think oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on.
It implies historical experience, communal values, the test of time, and so
on.

It might not be perfect, but then again, it need not be.

~~~
brighton36
I would know it was theft. I would assume it was right relative to the goals
of the thief, albeit not myself, or the statutory codes. Right is a measure of
social validation, or ideological compliance. (Both of which are transmitted
via oral tradition)

I agree that oral tradition is not a good basis to base principles on, lol.
Welcome to my world.

------
splittingTimes
The German parliament had two interesting votes last week:

(1) Recoginze the ongoing climate catastrophe - propose measure to counter act
[1]

(2) Stop using coal power stations [2]

You can guess how the ruling parties voted. It makes me furious in the light
of recent devastating news (No permafrost in Candian arctic, melting Greenland
ice, hottest June in Germany since record keeping, Anchorage seeing
unprecedented temperatures...)

===

[1]
[https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...](https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=613)

[2]
[https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimm...](https://www.bundestag.de/parlament/plenum/abstimmung/abstimmung?id=612)

~~~
EGreg
What alarms me even more is that the insect apocalypse is MORE urgent than
climate change.

~~~
mikro2nd
And almost infinitely easier to stop. All we need to do is ban a relatively
small number of insecticides and insect populations will rebound in a very
small number of years.

~~~
choeger
You should probably write up your findings so you can gather a lot of research
money and fame. /S

If only things were that simple...

I am not sure if pesticide usage has increased in Western Europe since the
early ninetees. But I am certain that agriculture has been de-intensified as a
whole in the former GDR. And it's not an insect paradise here...

~~~
wazoox
In France in 2010, they signed some "green pact" promising to reduce the
quantity of pesticides by 30% before 2020. Reality check: pesticide use grew
by nearly 20% since this "pact".

~~~
splittingTimes
They play us like violins.

------
adrianN
Anybody can do a little bit to help insects. It ranges from planting a pot of
some flowers, to building an insect hotel, to switching to a more natural lawn
or talking to your city council to replace parts of the lawns in parks with
more insect friendly meadows.

However, I don't see how I as consumer can choose agricultural products that
are friendlier to insects. Organic agriculture also uses pesticides and
monocultures. Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea, but other than
that how can I judge the impact my food choices have on biodiversity?

~~~
ahje
> Reducing one's meat intake is always a good idea

Actually, areas used for grazing usually have more diversity, more flowers and
thereby more insects, compared to something like a similarly sized wheat
field.

~~~
esarbe
You can feed ten times as many people with the wheat that grows on a similarly
sized wheat field.

Or keep feeding just one person and turn the rest into a meadow with flowers,
bushes, hedges and trees.

Imagine that.

~~~
dTal
You can't, because "man cannot live off bread alone". Wheat lacks many basic
nutrients that meat contains. Calories are not fungible - you can live off
meat essentially indefinitely (especially if you eat the organ meat), but
you'll rapidly a nasty case of iron deficiency and scurvy if you try to live
off wheat.

I feel this fact is often omitted from naive assessments of food efficiency.
It's not nitpicking, it's a fundamental law - bioaccumulating reasonable
levels of nutrient density will _always_ take more energy that just building
up raw calories. Vegans need to eat fatty, nutrient-dense plants like nuts and
avocados to survive - these foods invariably have a much worse environmental
footprint to wheat. I'd be interested to see comparative estimates of the
impact of a "careless vegan" who eats exotic, problematic foods versus a
"conscientious meat eater", who only eats locally sourced pasture-raised
livestock.

~~~
esarbe
I'm very sorry to disagree, in my opinion this is nitpicking. Yes, you cannot
live from wheat alone, insofar you are correct. But that was not the point of
my reply.

The point of my reply - to flesh it out - was that you need only use about 10
percent of the area required for cattle if we instead consume these calories
directly. That doesn't have to be wheat, it can be peas, beans, nuts, beets,
potatoes, celery and on and on.

If you are concerned about nutrients, there's always chickens. Chickens are so
vastly more efficient when it comes to land use than cattle, it's not even
funny anymore. I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-
vertebrate protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

Thanks for your reply!

Edit: I'm not a vegan, by the way. Not even a vegetarian. I enjoy the taste of
meat and especially beef. But I'm convinced that the amount of resources we
spend on meat - especially on beef - cannot be justified by anyone in good
conscience.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
>> I hope that we soon have some reasonable supply chain of non-vertebrate
protein (i.e. insects) at an affordable price.

If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that they
will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating as much
beef as they please.

So I think that what you are proposing, in good will I have no doubt, is not a
solution to the problem of feeding many people healthy and nutritious food.
It's one more way to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the
population, by throwing them scraps.

At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces,
rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

~~~
esarbe
> If insetcs ever become a staple protein source, you can rest assured that
> they will be consumed by all the poor people. Rich people will keep eating
> as much beef as they please.

Yeah, so what? The rich have always done as they pleased. This will only
change when the revolution comes.

> [...] to disenfranchise and humiliate the majority of the population, by
> throwing them scraps.

Protein is protein. I happily eat heart and intestines and liver and brain and
tongue and whatever parts of an animal there are. Just as almost all my
ancestors (and yours, for that matter) did. As long as it's free of disease
and contaminants, I'm fine with that.

You have to understand that this picking of choosing of "better" or "worse"
food is only possible because of an incredible, unsustainable exploitation of
our natural habitat. We are killing our own biological support system. This
has to stop.

> At the same time, perfectly good food goes to waste because market forces,
> rather than any taboo about consuming certain types of food, demand it.

I don't propose we let any food go to waste. I propose we use more efficient
means to produce enough calories for everyone on this planet, so we can all
prosper without the predatory exploitation of the ecosystem that is required
nowadays.

That said; beef and mutton and pig is way too cheap. How about we actually
include all the externalized costs in the price and let the market work it
out?

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm sorry, I didn't understand your comment about my ancestors eating hearts
and livers etc. I am Greek and we don't consider offal to be inedible, quite
the contrary. For example, we make an absolutely heavely dish called kokoretsi
that consists of the heart, lungs, liver and spleen of a lamb wrapped up in
its long intestine. I've made a couple of them myself (although it's a bitch
to clean the intestines properly because they're full of shit). We make soups
from the same bits of the animal, and/or its stomachs, as well as a kind of
sausage with its organs stuffed into its intestine, and so on.

We also eat snails, in a red sauce with garlic and parsley (but not any kind
of insect).

All these are considered delicacies, to be enjoyed in special times (religious
feasts and the like), and with some good wine to accompany them, it goes
without saying.

Perhaps this is a reason why I see the matter differently than you do? My
people are used to the idea of it not being right to throw out anything when
we slaughter an animal to eat it. If (further) Westerners did the same, meat
consumption would significantly improve in efficiency.

I also don't understand your comment about "the revolution". What revolution
is that?

~~~
esarbe
The comment about ancestry was mainly intended for perspective.

For most of humanities time on earth, we didn't have the luxury to throw away
perfectly fine food. We'd eat offal and insects and everything that came our
way just to get by. People nowadays tend to forget that.

I quite enjoy snails, although usually with french-style herbal sauce. I also
like eating insects, although (I mentioned that before) they are much to
expensive.

And they'll have to get cheaper if we want to feed any significant number of
people with healthy protein. Because, let's be clear about that, we're not
going to do that with beef or mutton or pig. There's not enough land to go
around for that, if we want to keep any semblance of an intact ecosystem.
Anywhere on earth.

Feeding the whole planet with beef or mutton or pig would mean to strip down
every last acre of forest and turn it into pasture or giant monocultures for
feeding livestock. And that's not how ecosystems work.

All in all, I don't actually think that we see things that differently.

Have fun!

Edit: Ah, yes. The Revolution bit was a reference/joke with regards to "The
Rich". ;)

------
alobat72
I just know : my mom has a garden and in winter she used to feed the birds.
Since 2 or 3 years the birds are not stopping eating this food when spring
comes - my mom now feeds the birds all year. At the same time insect have
become noticeably fewer

~~~
sametmax
Your comment and this article are the first I noticed mentioning the birds as
a second indicator. It means the cascade has started. Somewhere else, it's
probably already acting as well: the soil, the plants, or stuff we don't know
about.

~~~
tuco86
I noticed last year and this year again when i drove ~800 km to a vacation.
10-20 years ago i had to wipe loads of sticky insect parts of my windshield.
Not necessary anymore. I'd guess back then my windshield whould have caught
~200 bugs/hour and now it's more like ~10. So my highly subjective statistic
says: insects are fucked and maybe so are we.

~~~
lightgreen
Maybe your modern car windshield glass is less sticky. Maybe your modern car
aerodynamics is better and insects just fly around.

The problem may or may not exist, but your subjective statistic tells nothing.

~~~
bmurphy1976
There's plenty of proof it's true if you bothered to look. Here's but one
example:

[https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are-
fire...](https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/why-are-fireflies-
disappearing)

[https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies-
disappearing.html](https://www.firefly.org/why-are-fireflies-
disappearing.html)

Something which I've also anecdotally noticed long before I researched it to
confirm it's not my imagination. You can see it in action at my cousin's farm.
Their prairie is a hive of activity and lights at night. The neighboring soy
farm is dead.

~~~
lightgreen
As I said, it might be true. I personally believe it's true.

But the argument about windshield proves nothing.

~~~
sametmax
If I say "don't open the door, there is a dangerous thing behind it, I saw
it". Will you open the door or trust anecdotal evidence ?

The thing is, we need balance between facebook mum faith and requesting
studies, numbers and white papers for every single little opinion.

------
paulintrognon
It's crazy how disconnected from nature we have become to not notice in our
everyday life an extinction event happening at this very moment.

~~~
lm28469
Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if some
people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

It's like when you have to do your homework but postpone it until the very
last moment. Your profs tell you to work, your parents too, even your friends,
and you know deep down that you're wrong, but you don't give a shit until you
get the grade and think "if only I ...".

First world countries won't wake up until it gets bad (famines, war and mass
immigration bad), until then it's just insects, birds and slightly warmer
climate, surely people have bigger problems in their daily lives ...

[https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-
ebd60d5acd4...](https://timeline.com/los-angeles-light-pollution-ebd60d5acd43)

~~~
qwsxyh
> Nature doesn't exists in the modern city, I wouldn't even be surprised if
> some people born after 2000 haven't seen stars in their entire life.

I live in London. The stars are still clearly visible here.

------
UglycupRawky
This one scares me. No one seems to be doing anything about it, and the
results could be massive.

------
meerita
In 1958 Mao Zedong ordered all the sparrows to be killed, as part of the
famous Four Pests Campaign (Chinese: 除四害), because they ate too much grain.
This caused one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Without
birds, the population of insects grew massively and ate most of the plants,
grains making one of the one of the causes of the Great Chinese Famine.

~~~
choeger
So... We should kill sparrows?

~~~
meerita
Maybe we should control the predators of the insect species who are
struggling.

------
Ensorceled
My large, extended family, notes this every year when we go to our family
reunions in Northern Ontario: each year, our cars have fewer bugs than the
previous year.

We've had the family reunion the same July weekend for 45 years now and our
cars and trucks used to be just plastered with insects. Now there may be none
at all.

------
m23khan
The older I get, the more guilty I feel of even squashing an ant in my home --
they are living forms like us and we should be treating them with respect and
give them space to thrive as well. And if this means setting up protected
reserves for insects and to ban certain types of chemicals then so be it.

~~~
futureastronaut
If it's an argentine ant and you're not in that part of the world, you should
eradicate with prejudice as they're an invasive species.

------
Kaiyou
Can someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? We used to go out of our
way to kill insects in past decades, presumably because we'd prefer them dead.
Now they are dying off and I'm not sure why I should be unhappy about this.

What are the bad consequences of this?

~~~
tpetry
Because these insects are eaten by other animals which are eaten by other
animals which are...

You get the point. The food chain can collapse and some animals are doing good
things for the environment.

~~~
kingkawn
Insects also are primary processors of rotting biomass. Without them we will
soon find that corpses last longer.

They are also the primary source of crop pollination. Without them much of our
food won’t be pollinated and reproduce well.

We need them.

~~~
DoingIsLearning
That's an interesting point.

Does that mean that projected times of death based on decomposition (As seen
on the pseudo scientific scenes in CSI) could actually be drifting over time
due to less decomposition agents?

Is their any data to back this hypothesis?

~~~
NikkiA
Anyone that tells you a time of death beyond about 20 hours is lying. And the
estimates below that are usually based on processes that haven't changed (loss
of body heat, chemical changes in blood, and bacterial processes in the gut).

~~~
DoingIsLearning
So CSI was actually a lie! On a serious note, TIL.

------
kieckerjan
Not to sound overly optimistic, but I can imagine that a trend like this is
less difficult to reverse than, say, climate change.

The scientific consensus about climate change seems to be that even if we can
muster the political courage and will and do our darndest, we may already have
passed the tipping point and will boil anyway.

As to the insect apocalypse: given a fighting chance, life has a way of
veering back. This is of course if viable numbers of populations survive and
keystone populations have not been extinguished. (Maybe this is just a
complicated way of stating that ecological systems work on other timescales
than the climate.)

~~~
interfixus
You are so right. Insects are mass breeders, and it's common for the numbers
of any given species to veer wildly from year to year. We may or may not be
seeing a serious setback for insects in general, but given a chance, they will
bounce back within a few short generations. And so will their predators,
albeit over a longer stretch of time. For what it's worth, nature seems
remarkably unperturbed up here a little north of Germany. Some counts up, some
counts down. Two years ago, we had mice everywhere, this year hardly any. But
then a recent infestation of butterflies, and the bats are doing
extraordinarily well this summer, as are the spiders apparently - hardly
indicative of any extreme dearth of insects.

------
choeger
The intriguing aspect is: This phenomenon is indeed observable everywhere
(windshields) yet there is no obvious reason. Pesticide use should have gone
down across all of Germany in the last 30 years. So should have general
pollution. Warmer weather should actually help insects. Large natural reserves
have been created (e.g., former military training grounds, depopulated areas
in rural Germany).

So either this is caused by an as of now unknown agent, or we see some form of
delayed effect.

~~~
jakobdabo
> unknown agent

The only thing that comes to my mind besides the climate change is the
increased EMF/RF radiation levels.

~~~
terminalhealth
Wouldn't it be easy to find location correlates if this was the case? Strong
EMF/RF radiation is rather spatially confined. If it was affecting insects, we
should expect negative results in sparsely populated areas.

------
agentultra
I'm doing everything I can in my own yard: growing vegetables without
pesticides/herbicides, growing wildflowers/natural fauna in the majority of
our gardens, etc.

And I'm growing sympathy for insects in my children! My daughter is obsessed
with ants and we're getting into my childhood hobby of farming ants.

Etymology is almost as cool as mycology. I love insects, arachnids, and all of
our crawly little friends!

------
zw123456
I thought it was ironic that an advertisement for exterminators came up in the
middle of the article. Another triumph for add algos ;)

------
fencepost
This is also easily observed by anyone old enough who drives in the suburbs or
rural areas, and it really jumped out at me a decade or more ago.

When's the last time you had to clean your windshield of a bunch of dead bugs
(or a few large ones)? I remember when every gas fill up also meant using both
the mesh sponge side and the squeegee side of a windshield washer, and you
knew which gas stations kept those buckets filled and had good squeegees. How
long since you used one of those to clean off a filthy windshield, or since
you noticed if a gas station has good ones?

On a somewhat related note, how long since you had to do the same for bird
droppings? And when you're parking at night or walking back to your car, do
you have any issues with walking through the huge clouds of bugs around the
lights or are there no longer any such clouds?

Edit: expanded and mobile corrections

~~~
andrekandre
i love in tokyo, and when i graduated school in 2011, i used to get bitten
every summer like mad by mosquitos, you could see bugs everywhere in the
spring and summer

for probably the past 5 years i haven’t been bit once, rarely see a mosquito
or other bugs... something very strange has has happened in the past 10 years

------
fallingfrog
Is there no pattern at all to the locations where the greatest decrease
happened? If it’s pesticides then the traps nearest an active field of crops
will show the greatest decrease. It doesn’t sound like they’re finding that.
If it was road deaths then it would be near the roads. If it’s temperature
then you would expect to see decreases in hot years, increases in cold years.
If crawling insects are affected differently than flying ones, that tells you
something. If it’s everywhere at once with no pattern whatsoever, well thats
just _baffling_. It would have to do with the composition of the air or maybe
the solar cycle or something else that affects everywhere at once.

------
haarts
I'm surprised to read no one seems to know what to do about this. There's a
simple thing you can do and that is buying organic produce. Sure, it still
uses some pesticides but not all and a lot less (at least in Europe, not sure
about the US).

------
FredrikMeyer
Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me.
Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In
German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the
title much easier to read.

~~~
CalRobert
It's the standard (albeit inconsistent and undefined) for headlines, though.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Title_case)

------
chiefalchemist
> "Since 1982, the traps we manufacture ourselves have been standardised and
> controlled, all of the same size and the same material, and they are
> collected at the same rate in 63 locations that are still identical,"
> explains Sorg.

Do I believe that something, likely humans, is doing damage to nature? Yes.

However, give the above, I have to ask: couldn't the argument be made that
collecting less samples is natural selection at work? That is, the insects
that aren't trapped - for whatever reason - will pass those traits on and so
on. The survivors breed more survivers. Those that are trapped and die, well
so does their DNA.

~~~
arrrg
That doesn’t really pass scrutiny. It’s not like they are mass collecting
insects and it’s not like someone else is using insect traps to mass trap
insects. As such there is practically no evolutionary pressure to adapt to not
being caught in insect traps.

Insect traps are a rare sight for any one insect.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I'm don't follow.

Let's take bug species Foo. We have two Foos. One has DNA trait Y the other
DNA trait Z. Zs are more prone to be trapped. Ys are less.

Over time Zs die off. And Ys prevail. Therefore, over time the traps will
capture less Foos.

You're (falsely?) thinking in terms of traditional evolution. But natural
selection is not the same thing. I'm suggesting that - at least in theory -
natural selection can be used to explain why they are catching less insects.

~~~
MayeulC
I read this as a direct attack, although the parent's argument is clear.

Let's say you trap 2 in 10k insects, which sounds high. If 50% of those
insects had a slight evolutionary advantage against traps (which sounds a
lot), that the two that did get caught didn't possess.

Great, they now have a 0.02% evolutionary advantage.

My point is: I assumed a lot of things, yet came up with a tiny advantage. I
don't think (didn't compute) this is going to do much difference in the short
term (although long term, it _could_ have a bigger effect). So yeah, as in
your argument, Zs die of, but very slowly, and there might be other greater
pressures fighting against this.

Assuming the rates of my post, I'd be curious to see how much time it would
take to achieve a meaningful difference in terms of population. (These catch
rates are very high, and insects tend to reproduce quickly, so I wouldn't be
surprised if it wasn't much).

------
SamPatt
"Unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down
the path of extinction in a few decades."

This is almost certainly false. The paper released earlier this year only
looked at other studies which reported insect populations in decline, a
methodology certain to find a problem.

------
vectorEQ
in my country right next to germany, within 'protected' natural areas, insect
life declined by as much as 85%. If you have a garden which is friendly to
insects you get swarmed as there are literally no other places to go.

people need to be aware of this and stop just paving their gardens. create a
nice home for some bugs :-) it will be good for your children and their
children. So no excuse not to put some flowers outside and keep at least a few
insects fed and happy.

------
emmelaich
This worries me _way_ more than warming itself.

------
carapace
Brain dump:

Reading V. Smil's "Energy and Civilization a History" has made me realize that
the Applied Ecology (Permaculture) epoch would be a fundamentally new form of
civilization.

Cf. Hemenway's lecture: "Permaculture can save Humanity and the Earth but not
Civilization"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nLKHYHmPbo)
It's about an hour. Here are some notes I took:

He reframes "sustainable" as the midpoint of a spectrum with "degenerative" on
one side and "regenerative" on the other and emphasizes regenerative systems.

He talks about the length of time we (humans) have been doing "culture" (group
activites, pottery, art, singing and music, etc.) and points out that it's
roughly a million (1,000,000) years-- and that agriculture has only been
happening for about ten thousand years, about 1% of that time.

    
    
        Five culture types based on food getting technology:
            Foraging
            Hunter-gatherer
            Agricultural (cities)
                Pastoral (Animal herding)
                Industrial
    

Then follows a great deal of the "dirt" on agriculture. Old hat to those who
know it, horrifying and challenging to those who don't. Hemenway sums it up,
"Agriculture... ...converts ecosystems into people."

(Oil => Food => People) x (Peak Oil) = Hoshit! i.e. we made people out of oil
for the last few generations and now we are running out of oil. Could be
trouble...

Holmgrin's scenarios:

\- Techno-fantasy (technology saves the day and we pack ourselves in like
sardines until something else gives, or spew forth and colonize the galaxy
until we reach the expansion limits of our space-drives... Technology doesn't
solve the problem, only postpones it.)

\- Green-tech stable - stabilize population (match growth and death rates) and
live within the Solar energy budget while regenerating the Earth.

\- Graceful decline - (growth rate less than death rate for awhile...) "Earth
Stewardship" "Permaculture" I don't know where the people are supposed to have
gone.

\- "Atlantis" \- i.e. doom. Personally I think this is the most likely, but
I'm okay with being proven wrong on that.

"Peak Wood" \- no kidding. Peak Oil seems to have happened before with wood
instead of oil, and could be responsible for bringing the Bronze Age to a
close. Wow.

Last but not least, Horticulture to the rescue! All the great things about
Permaculture and a Neo-Horticultural society.

The video is excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested
in these subjects. [https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-
vid...](https://fertilefuture.blogspot.com/2011/05/toby-hemenway-video.html)

\- - - -

OMG: Obvious ways that we are out of whack with Nature:

Glass windows kill millions of birds.

Windshields kill billions of insects.

Rain brings out earthworms that then die on the sidewalk.

Asphalt covers n% of the Earth and vulcanized rubber particles are continously
emitted into the ecosystem.

Plastic collecting in the Oceanic Gyres and beaches of the world, as well and
in the bellies of animals, and coating and fusing with rock.

Gas-burning, noise- and air-polluting leaf blowers that are inherently
wasteful (each item is typically blown about 2~5 times before arriving at
resting point. Compare to vacuum cleaner.)

In fact, all the pollution.

Lawns are everywhere. Intrinsically wasteful, deliberately stunted and
impoverished ecosystems, massive applications of chemicals.

Agriculture. Literally counter-productive: untouched ecosystems are orders of
magnitude more productive. Doing nothing is more productive than farming.

We wear shoes that insulate us from contact with the Earth (lit. grounding).
We do this because we have poured concrete all over everything.

Where the meat comes from...

And so on.

\- - - -

Part Yay: Humans are Nature's turbo-chargers!

We can increase the productivity of natural system by an order of magnitude
again over baseline untouched ecosystems. (Example: WPA built miles of massive
swales across the western states, and years later (with no maintainence) there
are plants and animals there where before there was desert. TODO: look this
up.)

(Cf. Yeoman's Keyline techniques. Draw water out onto ridges to gte more use
out of rainfall. [http://www.keyline.com.au/](http://www.keyline.com.au/) )

Broadly speaking we can corrugate terrain and systems to get more surface area
and interaction and create more niches and therefore more life. Recall that
life exists in the thermodynamic flow from the Sun (and yes, the oceanic heat
vents) to ultimately the rest of the sky, and that we are nowhere near the
physical limiting factors. It's relatively easy to add niches to an existing
garden. Especially if you're able to make modifications! I have a whole DVD
about Permaculture water harvesting where they bring in a backhoe to dig out a
new little lake and some canals! A one-time expenditure of fossil fuel to make
a vast change in the water/energy flows of a local system to ultimately
increase the ecological robustness and yield makes sense. And in theory,
locally grow alcohol fuel could be used to power land-shaping machines.

There is also a possibility to use Bucky Fuller-style Tensgresity (or merely
geodesic) structures to create "3D" gardens.

With Permaculture techniques you can revitalize salty desert in a few years
("Greening the Desert" Geoff Lawton) and there is plenty of desert. All of the
necessary factors are themselves organic and therefore capable of geometric
increase. We could green the deserts from Southern CA to Texas and accomodate
several hundred million people in an ecologically (climate proof!) way.

------
zmix
"He and an army of volunteers have over the years gathered as many as 80
million insects that are now floating in countless ethanol bottles."

Ah, that's where the insects went!

------
malicioususer11
who would have thought that ichthyology could be so sexy?? :3

------
patientplatypus
Dang it you guys, I posted this
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20339865))
_yesterday_. Things are getting so bad so rapidly...

