
The Silence of the Bugs - cardamomo
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/26/opinion/sunday/insects-bugs-naturalists-scientists.html
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spodek
What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and
markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough
time, can become global problems?

Pesticides and population growth expanding into more and more territory helped
a lot of human problems in the past, but created new problems. Expanding into
new territory escaped problems of poisoning, desertifying, or overfilling the
land . . . until we populated the whole planet and the environment reached
toxic levels of pollution.

You might say the environment isn't yet toxic to us (though some places are),
but it appears so for some essential symbiotic life. If experts in the field
don't know what's happening, then people who estimate carrying capacities for
the planet don't either, raising the error bars downward for their estimation.

Systems perspectives predict outcomes like this and suggest systemic
solutions, not technology or market solutions alone (though they are
important), which are likely exacerbating them. A key leverage point I see are
they system's beliefs and goals. They're hard to change, but such changes have
happened before.

~~~
closeparen
>technology and markets

While I agree in general, in this particular case, technology and markets
today are trying to get more people onto less land and in arrangements that
require less energy. Current public policy is holding it back.

~~~
quadrangle
Put the blame where it belongs. Public policy is being held back by powerful
interests who profit from the status quo.

~~~
closeparen
“Powerful interests” in this case is grassroots community organizers
protecting their homes from unwanted change by pushing back against global
capital.

~~~
quadrangle
While there's definitely a status-quo bias among myopic community folks,
there's also totally deserved distrust of global capital. Global capital does
_not_ have the public interest as top priority and _certainly_ isn't focused
on sustainability and decades-long time-scales.

Global capital is overall profit-prioritizing, externalizes tons of costs,
invests _massively_ in lobbying governments for their interests, and focuses
on relatively short-term growth figures.

It sounds like you are suggesting that if only grassroots push-back would go
away, global capital is generally solving ecological problems. I hope that
completely backwards view isn't what you're actually suggesting.

Maybe you are talking about knee-jerk anti-density, anti-development stuff?
While that NIMBYism is a real problem, and there are real developers working
in the right direction, we still have far more global capital and power behind
fossil-fuel companies and pesticide manufacturers etc. than behind
sustainable-development tech. Despite all the push for electric vehicles, car
companies are pushing way-oversized usually-single-occupant vehicles (SUV's
and pickup-trucks-that-people-use-just-for-commuting and such) as much as
ever, and lobby for all the unsustainable public infrastructure for them…

At any rate, the org doing the best at combating both the unsustainable and
corrupt capital growth-focused nonsense _and_ the counter-productive NIMBYism
is [https://www.strongtowns.org](https://www.strongtowns.org) (not sure what
the best equivalent is for issues around pesticides and healthy biodiversity).

~~~
closeparen
>global capital is generally solving ecological problems

Global capital is generally responding to consumer preferences, which in the
context of housing means high-density structures in walkable and transit-
connected areas, which are specifically good. Consumers also have lots of un-
ecological preferences, like large vehicles, cheap meat, etc. which are not.

>unsustainable public infrastructure

Car infrastructure is problematic in many ways, but "unsustainable" is the
wrong word. We're sustaining it just fine, unlike its alternatives.
Empirically, our most important transit systems are incapable of maintaining
previously-achieved levels of service for any amount of money, and the costs
of implementing new service are escalating for reasons we don't understand
such that even minor subway buildout is becoming an existential challenge to
the resources of our richest and fastest-growing cities. Give it 30 years, and
it's not clear that the collective productivity of all humanity will exceed
the cost of a mile of New York City subway track. _That 's_ unsustainable. The
environmental-friendliness axis is orthogonal.

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joe_the_user
_" This alarming discovery (decline in insect population over time), made by
mostly amateur naturalists who make up the volunteer-run Entomological Society
Krefeld, raised an obvious question: Was this happening elsewhere?
Unfortunately, that question is hard to answer because of another problem: a
global decline of field naturalists who study these phenomena."_

\-- This reminds me of similar to the decline of in-the-field reporters. The
concept of an advanced society that seems to be shedding "situational
awareness" in a variety of areas is disturbing.

~~~
on_and_off
It is very frightening that as a society, we are mostly unable to plan against
the tragedy of the commons, especially for global scale problems.

~~~
joe_the_user
While we're certainly seeing the rather horrible destruction of human kind's
common heritage, I don't the "tragedy of the commons" model/metaphor [1 ]is at
all adequate for describing this situation, which is driven by uniquely
powerful and influential forces within our society rather than mere atomistic
uncaring of the great masses (which is a factor but not the "driving factor").

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons)

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sgt101
I'm pretty convinced that this is due to drainage. Over the last 30 years
ditches have been cluveted and ponds drained on all farms, irrigation is now
an art - very tightly managed - and farmers round here have dug deep
reservoirs to run it. Hedgerows and roads used to have long swampy bits that
were ideal for insect breeding, but that's all gone. Farmers here now farm
arable or intensive pig/chicken. The mixed economy farms are gone - and with
them the small ponds and wallows that were common.

I've got two ponds in my garden, they are a source of head shaking from keen
urban gardeners because they are shallow, muddy and a bit smelly - but they
team with life and now, in the summer, the air is thick with insects.

~~~
ams6110
For the past several decades there has also been a concerted effort to
eliminate standing water almost anywhere practicable, in order to reduce
mosquito breeding.

~~~
sgt101
Good point. In Africa and southern Europe this makes sense, but in Germany and
the UK and Northern France... not so much.

But clearly this is an effective way of reducing insect life.

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tptacek
This is a weird article, because from what I remember of reading the study (or
a contemporaneous related one) during another bug thread, the main culprit for
loss of insect biomass in Germany seemed to have been habitat loss ---
particularly the loss of hedgerows and expansions of fields and other
featureless lots. Yet habitat loss appears nowhere in this article, and
pesticides --- which might be a marginal cause --- are highlighted.

~~~
ilkan
The author's field of study is lake habitats worldwide. They are also showing
changes in the life inside the water. The author suggests the changes inside
existing lakes, reduction in insect life around lakes, and general loss of
insect life have a common cause.

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jly
Wildlife conservation for most people generally focuses on large animals we
can more relate to, particularly other mammals. Humans generally regard
insects and many other invertebrates in their urban environments as pests, or
something to fear. It's no surprise that an invertebrate armageddon is
occurring with so little fanfare, outside of problems with one economically
important species of bee.

The largest clearly-identified issues leading to these declines are loss of
habitat and pesticides, both urban and agricultural. There are simple things
anyone can do to help. This organization in the US has a lot of great
information:
[https://xerces.org/bringbackthepollinators/](https://xerces.org/bringbackthepollinators/)

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simopaa
What could tech do to make solving this problem easier? I stumbled on
iNaturalist [1], a crowd-sourced platform for doing species identifications
that is also (at least partly) open source [2]. What other tools could we
either utilize more efficiently of create if they don't yet exist?

[1] [https://www.inaturalist.org/](https://www.inaturalist.org/) [2]
[https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist](https://github.com/inaturalist/inaturalist)

~~~
briga
I'm not sure species identification is the issue here. It doesn't matter if
100 species are at risk or 100,000, I think most people still aren't too
concerned about the environment.

Maybe for anything to get done there has to be some immediate economic benefit
to the person doing the preservation. But at this point I'm not sure what that
would be, or who would fund it.

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nbsd4life
One of the things I noticed moving to the city is that windows don't have
screens, because there's almost no bugs to keep out.

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carapace
The XKCD "Land Mammals" ([https://xkcd.com/1338/](https://xkcd.com/1338/)) is
an infographic that shows that humans and our livestock outweigh all other
land mammals by a huge margin. We have been turning oil and wild biomass into
humans and food animals. (We're also stripping the oceans of fish.)

~~~
quadrangle
Well, the crazy part will be when we really embrace eating insects (there's NO
good reason not to). Then, we won't see increase in biodiversity, but we'll
see industrially-farmed grasshoppers and crickets show up on a much more
massive scale. And for all the other issues, it will be supremely better than
cattle.

